I was born and raised in New York City, my mother and father both refugees from Hitler’s Germany. The Nazi catastrophe including the Holocaust significantly overshadowed my childhood.
Motivated to help others, I decided I wanted to go into medicine. The New York Times reported on my work as a Chaplain Aide, comforting chronically ill patients at Bellevue Hospital.
One constant in my life is a passionate interest in the cinematic arts. Between my undergraduate education and medical school, I was a script reader for Warner Brothers Studio. I subsequently worked with director Alan Pakula as a story editor on Klute starring Jane Fonda and Donald Sutherland.
After becoming a psychiatrist, I conducted ground-breaking research on brain imaging of psychopaths. The associated paper, frequently cited, was published in the journal Biological Psychiatry. The New Yorker magazine wrote about my scientific work.
At the New School for Social Research, I taught a popular course on psychopaths in movies. And I was a long-time contributor of book and movie reviews for The Journal for the Study of Antisemitism.
My decade-long struggle for restitution for a major center-city Berlin property that the Nazis stole from my family – the central topic of my upcoming memoir – attracted media attention in Germany and the United States and additionally has been featured in international museum exhibits.
My blog – Joanne Intrator’s New York – Berlin Bridge – regularly features interviews with prominent writers and other figures. Included among them have been best-selling novelist Caroline Leavitt, National Jewish Book Awards winner Deborah E. Lipstadt, Berlin star chef Tim Raue, architect Peter Eisenman and best-selling author Joseph Kanon.
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