Otto Petersen, a ventriloquist who was the flesh-and-blood half of Otto and George, a comedy team renowned for vulgarity so stunning as to make Rabelais look like a church picnic, died on Sunday at his home in Keyport, N.J. He was 53.
Mr. Petersen died in his sleep, his longtime companion, Tricia Conte, said. He had been hospitalized last year for bacterial meningitis; whether the illness played a role in his death is unknown, she said.
With George Dudley, his wooden companion of four decades, Mr. Petersen was a frequent guest on “The Opie & Anthony Show” and “The Howard Stern Show,” both on SiriusXM satellite radio. On television, he was seen on “Late Show With David Letterman” and elsewhere.
Popular with audiences and widely admired by other comics, Mr. Petersen was often described as soft-spoken in private life. But he was no match, he often said, for the strong-willed, forked-tongue George, whose caustic, profanity-laced outbursts rained down on a spate of targets, not least of all Mr. Petersen himself.
Photo
Mr. Petersen and his dummy entertained the lunchtime crowd on the steps of the New York Public Library in 1980.CreditPaul Hosefros/The New York Times
No subject was sacred, and George’s myriad observations could range over matters sexual, scatological, urological, gastroenterological, racial, bestial, theological and homicidal. None will be quoted here.
Mr. Petersen’s act was so scurrilous that it once proved too much for a historically thick-skinned crowd.
“They were told they had managed to offend the audience at the annual adult-film awards — the porno-world equivalent to the Academy Awards — in Las Vegas,” The Montreal Gazette reported in 2010. “Otto and George had twice served as hosts, but weren’t asked back by the insulted and suddenly squeamish organizers.”
Performing on network TV, Mr. Petersen served up an only somewhat bowdlerized version of his live show.
“I’m doing an act,” he told The Gazette in the same article. “I don’t mean everything I say. Jack Nicholson was in ‘The Shining’ and chased people around with an ax for two hours. It doesn’t mean he’s an ax murderer.”
Otto Sol Petersen was seduced by a dummy as a child. The son of a Danish father and a Jewish American mother, he was born in Brooklyn on July 29, 1960, and reared on Staten Island. Growing up, he fell under the televised spell of the mild-mannered ventriloquist Paul Winchell and his milder-mannered dummy Jerry Mahoney.
Otto bought his first George for $350 from a Times Square magic shop in 1974 and spent his teenage years honing his craft on city street corners, on the Staten Island Ferry and in Central Park, where an admiring John Lennon once gave him two dollars.
“He came up and said, ‘$1.50 is for your puppet, and the rest of it’s for you, since he was funnier,’ ” Mr. Petersen later recalled.
In the late ’70s, when Mr. Petersen began seeking club dates, he ran up against an obstacle: the pervasive disdain in which ventriloquists were held. He realized, he said, that in order to work at all, he would have to “work blue.”
“Clubs need to inform people that this is going to be a filthy night of comedy,” Mr. Petersen told The Bergen Record in 2010. “I was playing a place in Rhode Island recently, and there were grandmothers and conservative-looking women in the crowd. They had no idea that they were going to see a brutal show. They thought they were going to see Bob Hope.”
He added, with breathtaking understatement, “I’m no Bob Hope.”
Besides Ms. Conte, Mr. Petersen’s survivors include his mother, Sylvia; a sister, Lona Palmieri; and a brother, Tom.
With George, he was featured in “The Aristocrats,” the 2005 documentary about a joke so utterly profane that even Mr. Petersen appeared to have difficulty telling it on camera.
Ron Pundak, a Key Israeli in Oslo Accords, Dies at 59
Photo
Ron Pundak at a conference at Tel Aviv University in January. “Ron was a hero of peace,” the Israeli justice minister said.CreditGideon Markowicz/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
JERUSALEM — Ron Pundak, an Israeli academic who took part in secret talks with Palestinian officials that led to the Oslo peace accords of the 1990s and who remained an ardent advocate for peace even after relations between the sides unraveled, died on Friday in Tel Aviv. He was 59.
His death, after a long period with cancer, was confirmed by his daughter, May Pundak.
“There are war heroes. Ron was a hero of peace,” Tzipi Livni, Israel’s justice minister and the government’s chief negotiator with the Palestinians, said in a statement on Friday.
Mr. Pundak, whose older brother, Uri, was killed in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, was the general director of the Peres Center for Peace, a nongovernmental organization focused on improving relations between Israelis and Palestinians, from 2001 to 2012.
He was a little-known Middle East historian and policy researcher when he was drawn into the peace process.
In the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War and the Madrid peace conference of 1991, Israelis and Palestinians were engaged in formal but fruitless negotiations, hampered by the fact that Israeli law prohibited the country’s officials from any contact with the Palestine Liberation Organization, the umbrella group led by Yasir Arafat that was widely considered the sole legitimate representative of the Palestinian people.
In late 1992, Terje Roed-Larsen, a Norwegian diplomat, helped arrange meetings in London between Yair Hirschfeld, a founder of a policy institute in Tel Aviv, the Economic Cooperation Foundation, and Ahmed Qurei of the P.L.O. When the talks moved to Oslo, Mr. Hirschfeld brought in Mr. Pundak, who was the executive director of the Economic Cooperation Foundation, and Mr. Qurei brought associates of his own.
Mr. Hirschfeld and Mr. Pundak drafted a six-page document of understanding with the Palestinians, according to a memoir, “The Missing Peace,” by Dennis Ross, a longtime United States envoy to the peace process.
Top Israeli officials had given their approval to pursue the discussions. By May 1993 Israel decided to make the clandestine talks official, sending Uri Savir, the director general of the Foreign Ministry, to participate. That led to the signing of a Declaration of Principles on Palestinian self-government in Israeli-occupied Gaza and the West Bank between Israel and the P.L.O. on the White House lawn in September 1993.
Recalling the first meeting in Oslo, Mr. Pundak wrote in the newspaper Haaretz last year that, “Even in our wildest dreams we did not imagine that this meeting might lead to a process that would eventually culminate in the signing of a Declaration of Principles.”
That and subsequent interim agreements led to the establishment of the Palestinian Authority and were supposed to pave the way to a permanent peace treaty. Instead, negotiations in 2000 dissolved into a second Palestinian uprising and an Israeli military clampdown. Subsequent rounds of negotiations have failed to deliver an agreement.
Born in Tel Aviv, Mr. Pundak studied the history of the Middle East at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and earned a Ph.D. from the University of London. He worked as a journalist at Haaretz for about a year.
Besides his daughter, he is survived by his wife, Tula; a son, Aram; a sister, Michal; and his parents, Herbert and Sussi Pundak.
Mr. Pundak remained at the forefront of peace efforts, helping to negotiate the Beilin-Abu Mazen plan of 1995, a draft proposal for a final status agreement written by Yossi Beilin, an Israeli deputy foreign minister, and Mahmoud Abbas (also known as Abu Mazen), who succeeded Mr. Arafat. He also helped with the Geneva Initiative, a model for a final agreement, published in 2003.
In a September 2013 article in Haaretz, which marked the two decades since the White House signing, Mr. Pundak offered his analysis of what went wrong with the peace process and how it might be fixed.
He blamed Yitzhak Rabin, a former prime minister of Israel; Shimon Peres, the country’s current president; and Mr. Arafat for much of the failure. The Israeli leaders, he said, had failed to offer a clear vision of the future for the Israeli or Palestinian public, while Mr. Arafat engaged in doublespeak and, from early on, turned a blind eye to terrorism against Israelis.
Seeing no chance that the current leadership would agree on a permanent peace deal, Mr. Pundak suggested another interim agreement backed by an American-proposed United Nations Security Council resolution that would enshrine the principles of a final accord.
“In my view,” he wrote, “the political process, as well as peace itself, were only intermediate objectives. The ultimate goal was, and still is, to conclude the process of establishing the State of Israel that began on November 29, 1947, with the U.N. resolution that called for partition of the Land of Israel/Palestine.”
Rivka Haut, a prominent champion of Orthodox Jewish women fighting for divorce in rabbinical courts and seeking to pray together as a group, died on March 30 in the Bronx. She was 71.
The cause was cancer, her daughter Sheryl Haut said.
In 1980, when she was living in Brooklyn, Ms. Haut organized one of the first public protests in the United States concerning Orthodox divorce, outside a building owned by a man who had refused to give his wife a document known as a get, which is needed for traditional Jewish divorces. Under Orthodox law, only the husband has the power to grant a divorce.
Though Ms. Haut, a teacher and author on Jewish topics, did not question that tradition, she fought to make it easier for Orthodox women to obtain a get through rabbinical courts, where they are known as agunot (pronounced aw-goo-NOTE), Hebrew for “chained women.”
“She took a personal interest in these women and she never even considered turning anybody away,” said Blu Greenberg, the founder of the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance. Ms. Haut would take calls day and night for decades, helping hundreds of women navigate the often dizzying religious procedures to receive a divorce.
“In many ways she was my conscience and in many ways the conscience of the community,” said Rabbi Dov Linzer, the dean of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School, who leads a daily Talmud study group in which Ms. Haut participated for several years. “She would say to rabbis all over, ‘You’re not doing enough to help these women, and you could be doing more.’ ”
Her aim, he said, was to help women “who were suffering.” It was not, however, to challenge Orthodox Judaism as a political activist, her daughter said.
“Eventually people started to call her a feminist, but she had a pretty traditional role at home,” Sheryl Haut said. “For her it wasn’t about equality between men and women, but about women’s dignity and voice.”
In the late 1970s, Ms. Haut also helped organize, in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn, one of the first Orthodox women’s prayer groups, with women reading from the Torah scrolls, an activity long reserved for men.
In 1988, while on a flight to Jerusalem for a women’s conference with the American Jewish Congress, she decided to convene the first all-female prayer service with a Torah scroll at the Western Wall, considered one of Judaism’s holiest sites. There, women in the group, wearing prayer shawls, publicly led prayers and read from the Torah.
Their actions drew immediate protests from ultra-Orthodox religious leaders. The demonstration, however, caught the attention of Orthodox women worldwide, and a movement grew under the name Women of the Wall. A group has continued to meet at the site monthly despite continued cries of protest in Israel. Last May, thousands of Orthodox Jews, including women and girls, tried to block members of the group from praying at the wall.
“We did not know — how could we? — that we were beginning a new chapter in the history of Jewish women and prayer, yet we felt the momentous nature of our act,” Ms. Haut wrote in “Women of the Wall: Claiming Sacred Ground at Judaism’s Holy Site” (2002), an anthology of essays she edited with Phyllis Chesler. “It was an extraordinary experience for me, combining both public and private prayer at that sacred site.”
Ms. Haut was born Renee Rivka Makowsky in Brooklyn on May 13, 1942, the eldest daughter of Teddy and Esta Makowsky. She attended high school at the Yeshiva of Flatbush.
After graduating from Brooklyn College with a degree in English, Ms. Haut received a master’s in Talmud at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, a Conservative Jewish institution, in part because no Orthodox seminaries offered advanced study programs for women, said Tamara Weissman, Ms. Haut’s younger daughter.
She later taught courses at Yeshivat Chovevei Torah and the Academy for Jewish Religion. She dropped her given English name when she became more involved in advocating on behalf of agunot in the early 1980s.
Besides her daughters, Ms. Haut is survived by a sister, Arlene Talerman, and six grandchildren.
Ms. Haut moved to the Riverdale section of the Bronx after the death in 2001 of her husband, Rabbi Irwin Haut, who was also a lawyer and the author of a book about the agunot.
She was a co-author of several books on Jewish topics. In one, a prayer book titled “Shaarei Simcha: Gates of Joy,” she and Adena Berkowitz included traditional Jewish blessings but also liturgy written by them — the first by Orthodox women to be published in modern times.
“To be involved with writing prayers and creating rituals gave her joy,” Ms. Weissman said.
This story is included with an NYT Now subscription. Learn More »
James R. Schlesinger, a tough Cold War strategist who served as secretary of defense under Presidents Richard M. Nixon and Gerald R. Ford and became the nation’s first secretary of energy under President Jimmy Carter, died on Thursday in Baltimore. He was 85.
His death, at the Johns Hopkins Bayview Medical Center, was confirmed by his daughter Ann Schlesinger, who said the cause was complications of pneumonia. He lived in Arlington, Va.
A brilliant, often abrasive Harvard-educated economist, Mr. Schlesinger went to Washington in 1969 as an obscure White House budget official. Over the next decade he became chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, director of Central Intelligence, a cabinet officer for three presidents (two of whom fired him), a thorn to congressional leaders and a controversial national public figure.
His tenure at the Pentagon was little more than two years, from 1973 to 1975, but it was a time of turmoil and transition. Soviet nuclear power was rising menacingly. The war in Vietnam was in its final throes, and United States military prestige and morale had sunk to new lows. Congress was wielding an ax on a $90 billion defense budget. And the Watergate scandal was enveloping the White House.
Photo
James R. Schlesinger in 2004.CreditStephen Jaffe/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
In the days leading up to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974, Mr. Schlesinger, as he confirmed years later, became so worried that Nixon was unstable that he instructed the military not to react to White House orders, particularly on nuclear arms, unless cleared by him or Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger. He also drew up plans to deploy troops in Washington in the event of any problems with a peaceful presidential succession.
Mr. Schlesinger, a Republican with impressive national security and nuclear power credentials, took a hard line with Congress, and the Kremlin, demanding increased budgets for defense and insisting that America’s security depended on nuclear and conventional arsenals at least as effective as the Soviet Union’s.
With Europe as a potential focal point for war, he urged stronger North Atlantic Treaty Organization forces to counter Soviet allies in the Warsaw Pact. His nuclear strategy envisioned retaliatory strikes on Soviet military targets, but not population centers, to limit the chances of what he called “uncontrolled escalation” and mutual “assured destruction.”
Beyond strategic theories, he dealt with a series of crises, including the 1973 Middle East war, when Arab nations attacked Israel, prompting an American airlift of matériel to Israel; an invasion of Cyprus by Turkish forces, leading to an arms embargo of Turkey, a NATO partner; and the Mayaguez episode,in which Cambodian forces seized an unarmed American freighter, prompting rescue and retaliation operations that saved 39 freighter crewmen but cost the lives of 41 American servicemen.
After succeeding Nixon, Ford, for stability, retained the cabinet, including Mr. Schlesinger. But the president and Mr. Schlesinger were soon at loggerheads. Ford favored “leniency” for 50,000 draft evaders after the Vietnam War. Mr. Schlesinger, like Nixon, had opposed amnesty. Unlike Mr. Schlesinger, Ford was willing to compromise on defense budgets, and he recoiled at Mr. Schlesinger’s harsh criticisms of congressional leaders. These were not grave policy disputes, but the two were personally incompatible.
“There was a tension,” Mr. Ford acknowledged later.
Mr. Schlesinger’s blunt talk and uncompromising ways seemed insubordinate to Ford, and struck many White House officials as arrogant and patronizing. Besides his prickly relations with the president, Mr. Schlesinger differed with Mr. Kissinger over nuclear strategy, aid to Israel and other issues. In November 1975, after 28 months in office, he was dismissed.
While often criticized by political opponents and in the press, Mr. Schlesinger was viewed by many historians as an able defense secretary who modernized weapons systems and maintained America’s military stature against rising Soviet competition.
In his 1976 presidential campaign, Mr. Carter consulted Mr. Schlesinger and was impressed. Taking the White House in 1977, Mr. Carter named him his energy adviser and, after the Energy Department was created in a merger of 50 agencies, appointed him its first secretary. The only Republican in the Carter cabinet, he was in charge of 20,000 employees and a $10 billion budget.
Mr. Schlesinger, an outspoken advocate of nuclear power, shared with Mr. Carter a belief that fossil fuels were destined for exhaustion, and warned that Arab oil supplies were unreliable. As oil prices rose and acute shortages and long lines at gasoline pumps formed, he and Mr. Carter endorsed conservation, tax incentives and synthetic fuels. The crisis passed, but not the energy problems.
Photo
Mr. Schlesinger at his swearing-in as secretary of energy under President Jimmy Carter in 1977. His wife, Rachel, is at right.CreditBob Daugherty/Associated Press
While he helped establish the new department and developed proposals intended to alter life in a nation addicted to enormous energy consumption, Mr. Schlesinger’s performance was widely criticized. Congressional opposition contributed to his departure in a 1979 cabinet shake-up by President Carter.
“In that administration, for some strange reason, I was the voice of experience, or the only voice of experience,” Mr. Schlesinger said years later for an oral history project. “I’m not sure whether that was a good thing or a bad thing. It was a mixed virtue, because that meant that in some sense I shared the contamination of the past and therefore my views, while they were interesting, and useful, had to be viewed with suspicion because they were views from the pre-1976 past.”
Mr. Schlesinger resumed writing and speaking, served on commissions and advisory panels, testified before Congress and became a businessman and a perennial consultant to presidents. He led inquiries into the safekeeping of nuclear weapons, the abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq, prisoner interrogations at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and other issues.
“There was sadism on the night shift at Abu Ghraib, sadism that was certainly not authorized,” he said in announcing the findings of Abu Ghraib inquiry in 2004. “It was kind of ‘Animal House’ on the night shift.”
James Rodney Schlesinger was born in New York City on Feb. 15, 1929, the son of Julius and Rhea Schlesinger, immigrants from Austria and Russia respectively. He was raised in a Jewish household but became a Lutheran as an adult. He attended Horace Mann School in the Bronx and Harvard, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in 1950, a master’s in 1952 and a doctorate in 1956, all in economics.
In 1954 he married Rachel Mellinger, a Radcliffe student. Mrs. Schlesinger died in 1995. Mr. Schlesinger is survived by his sons Charles, William, Thomas and James Jr.; his daughters, Cora, Ann, Emily and Clara; and 11 grandchildren.
From 1955 to 1963, Mr. Schlesinger taught economics at the University of Virginia. His 1960 book, “The Political Economy of National Security,” drew attention at the RAND Corporation, which hired him in 1963. He became director of strategic studies there in 1967.
Mr. Schlesinger joined the Nixon administration in 1969 as assistant director of the Bureau of the Budget, and drew the president’s attention by challenging a Pentagon weapons proposal in his presence.
In 1971, Nixon named him chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, formed after World War II to promote nuclear energy. Over time, critics said, the commission fell under the industry’s sway. Mr. Schlesinger favored atomic power, but said it raised legitimate environmental concerns. He ordered overhauls, including a new division of environmental and safety affairs, and set the commission on a course to “serve the public interest.”
In February 1973, Mr. Schlesinger was named director of Central Intelligence, succeeding Richard Helms, who had been fired by Nixon for refusing to block the Watergate investigation. His five-month C.I.A. tenure was stormy. He was appalled to learn that agents prohibited from spying on Americans had carried out domestic break-ins for the White House. He purged 1,000 of 17,000 employees and ordered a sweeping investigation into past operations.
That investigation eventually turned up evidence of widespread illegality. (The findings were not made public until 2007, and then were heavily censored.) But the inquiry had barely begun when, in July 1973, Nixon chose Mr. Schlesinger for the Pentagon job, replacing Elliot Richardson, who became attorney general.
In recent years he was a trustee of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington research organization, and chairman of the Mitre Corporation. He wrote no autobiography, but synthesized much of his experience in a 1989 book, “America at Century’s End.”
