Mark Oppenheimer

Memoir by a high school and occasional college debater. After starting with prank telephone calls and other hijinks that would’ve gotten a poorer, darker kid sent to juvenile detention if not jail (he wrote a letter pretending to be another kid, accusing her father of abusing her), Oppenheimer got scared and ultimately ended up in debate, which gave him the opportunity to play with the words and rhetoric he so loved. I was hoping for a memoir of my kind of debate (policy), but Oppenheimer show more did parliamentary and thus looked down on policy debaters as we did on his kind. His descriptions of skating by on the most tenuous of knowledge of current events didn’t mesh with my recollections of spending hours each day on research. But chacun a son gout, I guess. show less

Deeply knowing, highly entertaining, and just a little bit irreverent, this unputdownable encyclopedia of all things Jewish and Jew-ish covers culture, religion, history, habits, language, and more.

Mark Oppenheimer learned to talk at a very young age, no doubt because he was raised in a family that valued language. However, Mark carried it to such an extreme, that when he was two, his mother would call his father and beg him to come home. "I can't take it any more--he just won't stop talking!" When he was 12 years old and just enrolled at a new private school, he finally found an outlet for his verbosity--and his love of oratory. His new school had a debate team! As a nervous 7th show more grader, he bravely tried out for his school's debate team, and won a spot. From then his career as a high school debater skyrocketed! At the end of ninth grade, Mark was invited to represent his school at an international championship held in England.

Intertwined with his stories of debate are tales of friends and girlfriends, enemies and heartbreak. Mark's successes on the debate circuit continued through high school, and helped him to be accepted to Yale, the college of his dreams (in large part because of its fine debate team). He almost did not believe it when he did not make the team his freshman year! Didn't they know who he was? show less

The author's intent is to look at the effect of the 1960's counter-culture on mainstream religion in the United States. Unfortunately, his research is rather shallow, and he is prevented from seeing important things by his own definitions. If this book is your first investigation of this topic, do not leave it here.