Like the best magic tricks, my favorite work centers around interactive things that involve the audience. I highly agree with Andy Warhol. “Art is anything you can get away with.”

My career began on Madison Avenue, at DDB’s first installment of LaunchPad, where I wrote and produced my first big campaign for Tropicana, “The good part of NY mornings.”

Throughout my career I’ve jumped on and off the freelance saddle, trotting through agencies like Droga5, Wieden+Kennedy, Deutsch LA, R/GA, VML and more.

Outside of advertising, I just finished writing a coming-of-age novel about the enigmatic and ambitious Meir Feldstein, a young man whose Orthodox Jewish parents reject him after he comes out as gay. They are led to believe his unspeakable childhood trauma is to blame, and they encourage him to attend a program which promises to cure him of his homosexuality. Obsessed with sleight of hand illusions as a child, Meir has little patience for that which cannot be explained. But desperate for his parents’ approval, he suspends his disbelief and participates in private and group therapy sessions in addition to a weekend retreat on a campsite aimed to rid himself of his same-sex desires. While in the program, he discovers a support group for Jewish queer youth. Drawing on the lessons he learned from his adolescence in manipulation, misdirection, deception, and persuasion, he at last finds the conviction to quit the program, which later is sued for fraud and ordered to close. After fighting for his parents’ acceptance, he begins to understand the work will be in learning to accept them instead. The transformation he goes through is not from gay to straight but from allowing others to define his story to defining his own. The novel pulls back the curtain giving readers a peek into the secretive world of conversion therapy while revealing fascinating details about the art of magic.