For me, Jersey represents going through what you can go through and still surviving. That's the cool thing about people from the Tri-State area. We're fighters. We're survivors, and we're edgier than anyone else on Earth.
From 1983 to 2000, William Goren stole more than $30 million from investors on Long Island and in Queens. His favorite targets were widows and retired couples, like Helga and Simon Novack, Holocaust survivors who gave Mr. Goren their life savings.
I do a lot of research. For 'I Am Legend', I did a lot of research about survivors. If everybody is dead around you, how you can keep surviving. I went to the bookstore and found psychiatry books about survivors from the Holocaust.
Trauma creates one of four types of people: victims, rescuers, or perps - and if you're really lucky and really strong and very willing and brave, survivors.
The building in the Bronx where I grew up was filled with mostly Holocaust survivors. My two best friends' parents both survived the camps. Everyone in my grandparents' building had tattoos. I'd go shopping with my grandparents, and the butcher, the baker, everybody in the whole neighborhood had tattoos.
We worked with David Thibodeau, who wrote a book about Waco, on which the series is based. He's one of the nine survivors.
There are a lot of recent pics of me rocking silk strings of beads. They're made by survivors of the sex trade in Cambodia who were rescued by one of the organizations I support.
Different victims, different survivors of different crimes will choose to pursue different paths. And hopefully, over time, we can collectively transform our culture into one that prioritizes healing and prevention instead of simply focusing on punishment.
My grandparents, like many genocide survivors, took most of their stories to their graves.
I went to Israel for two months in 1970 and worked on a kibbutz. It affected me on levels that I hadn't anticipated, working on a daily basis with people who were actual survivors of the Holocaust.
