Conversations with Allan Wolper

Joanna Wolper, an Emmy Award winning writer and documentary filmmaker, has uncovered the true identity of Santa Claus. She writes about her discovery in a children's book called The Man Who Could Be Santa, based on a true family adventure. Joanna Wolper's book has a web site, at www.themanwhocouldbesanta.com, featuring the real children in the story. Original music written and performed by Gabrielle Gewritz. Click above to hear the entire podcast.

In 1973, Arthur Browne became a copy boy at the Daily News. Now 44 years later he is the Editor-in-Chief and Publisher of New York City’s home town newspaper. In the past four decades, Browne has covered the city’s most compelling stories…as a reporter, a columnist, editorial page editor and editor, investigative editor, managing editor, editor-in-chief and now as publisher. Politico calls Browne the “tortured heart and soul” of the newspaper. In 2007, he won a Pulitzer Prize for editorials that exposed the devastating health problems resulting from the 9/11 attack on The World Trade Center. His books, I Koch , on the late New York City mayor Edward I. Koch and One Righteous Man: Samuel Battle and the Shattering of the Color Line in New York , are must reads for anyone interested in the Big Apple’s life and history. Click above to hear the entire Conversations with Allan Wolper podcast.

Bill and Hillary Clinton celebrated their birthdays there. Former New York Yankee baseball great Bernie Williams often stops by and bestselling author James Paterson made Jimmy Parker and Red Hat on the Hudson characters in his books. Former film producers, Jimmy Parker, and his wife, Mary Beth Dooley used their cinematic background to create one of the most visually exciting restaurants on the East Coast, one that sits right alongside the Hudson River in Irvington, New York. The New York Times, describing the restaurant in a review, says Red Hat “has a lot of food you want to eat,” suggesting diners “do an early Saturday dinner, have the delicious seared swordfish and a sparkling wine cocktail called the Royale, maybe a slice of Islamorada-worthy Key lime pie, and wonder if the fisherman 100 yards down the river is catching anything interesting.” During the warm spring and summer months, jazz bassist, legendary Bill Crow, performs there. Just a few hours at Red Hat makes you feel like

Helen Benedict is a professor in The Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, a writer, and a journalist, whose work has won the attention and admiration of both the Pentagon and the White House. Professor Benedict’s book, The Lonely Soldier: The Private Life of Women in the Military, paints a vivid, startling, picture of cover-ups and conflicts by military officers trying to bury or ignore serious sexual attacks of female officers. In her November 14, 2014 interview on Conversations with Allan Wolper, she acknowledged some reforms were made. For example, victims no longer have to report assaults to their immediate officers, some of whom were the actual rapists themselves. The victims can now file their charges through senior officers. But the only way to for victims to receive justice, according to Professor Benedict, is to transfer the assault cases to non-military tribunals. “Otherwise the idea of military justice would just be an oxymoron,” she said. Click above to

For 25 years, Layla Fanucci, taught music at St. Helena Catholic School in California. But her life turned around when she bought paint and an art board at a Ben Franklin arts and crafts store. Today, Layla, who never took an art class, has had her cityscapes shown at galleries and museums in Paris, Morocco, San Francisco, and New York City. “It all happened by accident,” she said in a May, 2012 interview on Conversations with Allan Wolper. “I wanted a piece of art that was big and bold, had a lot of color and made a kind of strong statement. I went to Ben Franklin, got an art board, threw paint on it, had it framed, put it on the wall and that was my first painting.” She called her six foot high, five foot wide work “Explosion,” and sold it to a local Episcopalian priest for $800. He got quite a bargain. Her huge, sprawling art canvases now go for up to $100,000. Of note, Layla and her husband, Robert, make award winning wines under the Charter Oak label. They use a technique taught

Lisa Bloom is an activist civil rights attorney who has won a national reputation by representing clients whose cases are on the cutting edge of woman’s issues. She appears on The Today Show, MSNBC, The Situation Room, and was a former host of Lisa Bloom Open Court on Court TV. She says she received her early training at home listening to her mother, Gloria Allred, a celebrity attorney who is often involved controversial cases involving woman’s issues. Lisa Bloom believes lawyers sometimes need to use the media to advance their client’s rights. “Most of us are taught in law school never to talk to the media when involved in a case, that, that’s the end, period,” she said in December 2012 interview on Conversations with Allan Wolper. “But that’s not really practical in today’s environment in high profile situations.” Click above to hear the entire podcast.

Sam Schwartz is known worldwide as Gridlock Sam, a nickname the media gave him for his role in drawing up ways to navigate the congested corners of New York City. He designed the traffic patterns around the Barclay Center in Brooklyn the streets around The World Trade Center, and engineered traffic circles in Aruba. Schwartz started his life in traffic as a cab driver in Brooklyn, dodging the other yellow cabs before landing a job in city government, eventually becoming New York City’s traffic commissioner. At first he thought he would become a physicist like his brother, but realized that he would never be happy or make much of a life for himself in laboratories. “I liked parties, I liked girls, I was a city kid,” he said in a February, 2015 interview on Conversations with Allan Wolper. But he liked math, science and uban life, which led him to city government, and these days to a column in the Daily News in New York City, covering traffic.

Choclatt Jared and his band have played their bucket drums on The Grammy Awards, on The Tonight Show with Jay Leno, the Late Show with David Letterman, on Saturday Night Live, and in movies with Mel Gibson and Sharon Stone. Later this year he will appear in the movie, Breaking Brooklyn, with Lou Gossett, Jr. A self-taught musician who honed his skills on the streets of Harlem, he was one the creators of four- time Tony Award winning Bring in da Noise, Bring in da Funk. He jump started his musical life at 14 years of age, in 1990, at the height of the crack epidemic, working his magic on streets located near subway lines. “We would get our buckets from crack heads,” he said in a May 2014 interview on Conversations with Allan Wolper. “We would pay them $3 a bucket. They would get them from dumpsters, construction sites and restaurants.”

Dr. Vanessa Neumann has won an international reputation for tracking the movement of terrorists and drug dealers, from Colombia to Southeast Asia. In December, St. Martin’s Press will publish her new investigative book, titled, “Blood Profits: How American Consumers Unwittingly Fund Terrorists.” Born in the cauldron of Venezuela, South America, she has roamed the world seeking information and sources for the US State Department, the Pentagon, the United Nations, Interpol and numerous Fortune 500 companies. “I always had a concern about right and wrong and the relationship between government and individuals,” she said in a Dec. 2014 interview with Conversations with Allan Wolper. Click above to hear the Conversations with Allan Wolper interview with Dr. Vanessa Neumann.

Victoria F. Pratt, the first judge of Dominican ancestry to become a municipal judge in Newark, New Jersey, has won an international following for her campaign to reform the city’s criminal justice system. The chief municipal judge presides over a cutting edge program called Community Solutions that offers defendants in minor criminal cases a chance to avoid jail time by obeying specific rules of behavior. A top New York City judicial official has called her a warrior to improve criminal justice. Why did she want to go to law school? “I wanted to change the world,” she said in a March, 2015 interview on Conversations with Allan Wolper.

“Don’t Laugh At Me" “Don’t Call Me Names" “Don’t Get Your Pleasure from my pain" “In God’s eyes we’re all the same" Grammy award nominee Steve Seskin co-wrote the anti-bullying anthem, Don’t Laugh at Me, with his friend, Allen Shamblin, a song that was recorded by Peter, Paul and Mary. It inspired the creation of Operation Respect, a foundation that encourages children to get along with each other. “Kids as young as first and second grade are hurting and already experiencing ridicule by people who pick on them and call them names and they don’t have the ability to throw it over their shoulders,” Seskin says. “They develop a phobia and are afraid to go to school.” Harvey Rich and his daughter, Darrian, who perform on this program, sing the song and interact with children at various community groups and schools in the New Jersey area.

Lacey Schwartz is a woman whose personal and professional journey of race and religion has won attention across the country. She grew up white and Jewish in predominantly white, Woodstock, New York only to learn after entering Georgetown University that her biological father was Rodney Parker, an African-American friend of her mother. Parker, a legendary New York City college basketball scout was featured in a bestselling basketball book, Heaven is a Playground, by Chicago Sun-Times sports columnist Rick Telander. Lacey Schwartz wrote, produced, and directed a one hour documentary, Little White Lie, that tells her fascinating story. “I started making this film when I was in my mid-twenties, when I was living in what I considered a racial closet,” she said in a March 2015 interview on Conversations with Allan Wolper. “I was out in the world identifying with being black but I was still going home to my white Jewish family and identifying myself as white. I realized at that point that I

Kathleen Jordan, a Los Angeles television writer and producer, completed the unfinished memoir of her late father, Hamilton Jordan, who died of brain cancer . He was the chief of staff of former President Jimmy Carter. She reads an excerpt from the manuscript in which her father, who was brought up a Baptist in the segregated south was stunned to learn at his grandmother’s funeral that she was Jewish, making him Jewish as well. The book, Boy From Georgia: Coming of Age In The Segregated South, was published by the University of Georgia, Hamilton Jordan’s alma mater. The paperback will be out in September, 2017. “It needed to happen,” Kathleen said, explaining why she completed her father’s memoir. “It was an unclosed chapter in my dad’s life. It didn’t feel right that it hadn’t been finished.” Click above to hear the entire podcast from April 24, 2014.

Annette Gordon-Reed is a Harvard Law and History professor who has won national acclaim for her biographies on Thomas Jefferson. Her 2008 book, The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family: explores the relationship between Jefferson and Sally Hemings, a slave on his plantation, with whom he had seven children. Her book won a Pulitzer Prize and the National Book award. Ms. Reed, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for history, said one of her goals in writing about Jefferson was to prove that black authors could write about white politicians as well as white writers. Click above to hear the Allan Wolper's 2011 Conversations interview with Annette Gordon-Reed.

Willie Reale is the Co-Executive producer of Billions , the Showtime hit series on Wall Street chicanery, and the former supervising producer of Blue Blood s, the CBS cops drama. He won an Academy Award nomination for writing the lyrics to the movie, Dream Girls. Reale’s 52nd Street Project that created theater projects for inner city children won him a MacArthur Fellowship.

V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai received a United States Copyright in 1978 crediting him with being The Inventor of EMAIL, a title he earned as a 14-year-old research scholar at the University of Medicine and Dentistry in Newark, New Jersey. He said he received a copyright certificate on August 30, 1982 , rather than a patent, because patents were not awarded to software discoveries at the time. However, he says he has been forced to defend his creation in a series of high profile court cases and high octane public media debates, that stems from jealous competitors and journalists who don’t respect him because he is an Indian-born dark skinned scientist. Ayyardurai, who was born in India, migrated to the United States when he was seven, was raised in New Jersey, graduated from Livingston High School in Livingston, New Jersey, when he was 14 and went on to earn four separate degrees at MIT. His ownership of the EMAIL copyright remained buried in federal archives until 2012 when The Smithsonian

Roger Sherman has produced a documentary that makes an extraordinary journey through Israeli kitchens, restaurants and vineyards. The movie, In Search of Israeli Cuisine , explores the ancient and modern farming and cooking techniques created by the polyglot of people who migrated to Israel. Sherman says he found a wealth of tasty treasures in Israel: “I always wanted to go to France, and never considered going to Israel. I was dragged there on a food press trip. I never considered going to Israel. I got there and experienced something I have never experienced before. I think the hottest food scene in the world.” The film will open March 24 at the Lincoln Plaza Cinema in New York and in theaters around the country. Sherman has won two Academy Award nominations, a Peabody Award and a National Emmy: “A couple of times I was ready to give the whole thing up. It was difficult to raise money. We had a fundraiser with a lot of experience and I broke the very first rule of documentary

Author Wil Haygood believes that Hollywood is finally becoming emancipated. Haygood had accused the Academy Awards in 2014 of being “culturally biased” against African American actors and filmmakers when it declined to give a single nomination to the critically praised ,The Butler, the story based on the life of Eugene Allen, a black butler in the White House who served eight presidents. Haygood wrote the Washington Post profile of Allen that inspired the movie, was an associate producer of the film, and wrote The Butler: A Witness to History, a New York Times best seller that accompanied the production. But this year the Academy awarded three nominations to films with black themes and six nominations to black actors, led by Denzel Washington and Ruth Negga, along with four nominations to black directors of documentaries. “I think that Butler emancipated Hollywood, and helped get recognition to the talent out there of people of color,” Haygood said in an interview. “The doors are

Nancy Schiliro lost her eye as result of a mortar explosion in Iraq when she was a Lance Corporal in the U-S Marine Corps. At that time, she was not married and returned home to New York battered and depressed. The Wounded Warrior Organization gave her the will to fight her way back. Now she is helping other injured veterans return to a normal life. She is currently a Wounded Warrior Outreach Specialist and an inspiration to all Americans. Since this Conversations with Allan Wolper Associated Press Award-winning program aired nearly five years ago, Nancy married Richard Beetstra. Nancy Schiliro Beetstra is also the mother of a five-month old baby, Arabella Jayne. Click above to hear the original program. Original Air Date: 2-22-2012

Joanna Wolper is the latest guest on the podcast Conversations with Allan Wolper. The award winning writer and documentary filmmaker, has uncovered the true identity of Santa Claus. She writes about her discovery in a children's book called "The Man Who Could Be Santa," based on a true family adventure. Her book has a web site, at www.themanwhocouldbesanta.com featuring the real children in the story. Original music written and performed by Gabrielle Gewritz. Hear the podcast right now!