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I. J. WEINSTOCK

"From the ecstasy of sacred sex and soulmate love,

to the agony of grief and the miracle of signs from the Afterlife,

I testify to the wonders I’ve experienced."

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I’m the son of Holocaust survivors and grew up in New York and New Jersey. In high school I performed in musicals and became a football "hero" winning the Homecoming Day game with a 65-yard TD.

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I’ve enjoyed a varied career in the arts—acting on stage, appearing in films, and even doing performance art on the streets of New York. While producing television in Los Angeles, I created a new cable network, The Game Channel, the precursor to GSN (the Game Show Network). I’ve also written several books.

           

Years ago, with my first wife, Daphna, I co-authored a groundbreaking book about women.  BREASTS: Women Speak About Their Breasts and Their Lives (Simon & Schuster) was hailed by the Washington Post as “an important contribution” and the subject of an entire Donahue Show (the Oprah of its time).

           

In my recent memoir, JOYride: How My Late Wife Loved Me Back to Life, I described my year of grieving after the death of my 2nd wife, Joy. A remarkable thing happened—she began communicating with me from the Afterlife and led me on an incredible journey to heal my grief. Ultimately, like the final scene in the movie, Ghost, she found someone—a willing medium—through whom she literally loved me back to life. Had I not experienced it myself, I wouldn’t have believed it possible.

           

Those sacred, sexual, supernatural encounters, which I call the Rites of Joy, occurred ten times during that year and helped heal my inconsolable grief. During these other-worldly sexual initiations, I was shown some of the secrets of human sexuality.

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Inspired by my extraordinary experience, I've written several books about how to heal from the loss of a loved one. I've presented workshops at bereavement conferences around the country and volunteer every summer at a bereavement camp for children who've lost a parent or sibling, Camp Erin NYC.

 

My recent books include:

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  • ULTRA BOWL, a time-travel fable about football, robots, and the dangers of our Digital Age.

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I. J. Weinstock

"Somewhere Under the Rainbow"

The Life Lesson I Learned on the Football Field...

 

During the summer of my sophomore year in high school, I came down with mono. In the fall, I tried out and made the varsity football team.

 

At the time, I didn’t know it would be months before I fully recovered. Though I attended school, I wasn’t feeling well enough to play. After a couple of weeks I had to quit the team.

 

Quitting was unacceptable to the coaches. The next summer, fully recovered, I trained every day in a park in preparation for football tryouts. I vowed I’d be in the starting lineup on opening day. I’ll never forget the day a coach saw me and asked what I was doing. “Getting ready for football season,” I told him. His response—“You’re wasting your time.”

 

I showed up for tryouts, but was shunned. Though a senior, I was given freshman uniforms and ostracized in every possible way. No matter how hard I worked, I was ignored and, at most, assigned to carry equipment for the team.

 

After several weeks of being invisible on the field (not being picked for teams or drills) and being abused like Richard Gere in the movie “An Officer and a Gentleman,” my quest seemed an exercise in futility. I was ready to quit. Again.

 

Dejected, I was sitting alone in the locker room after practice when one of the coaches came over and whispered, “Keep it up.” I did and began to be picked for drills. I was on fire! On opening day I started on the first string varsity football team as a wide receiver and defensive cornerback.

 

To cap off my high school comeback fairy tale, on a crisp Saturday afternoon in October, I won the Homecoming Day game with a 66-yard touchdown.

 

When the town newspaper ran a front-page story with my picture, I began to think I could do anything I set my heart on.

Acting in the movie "Delta Force" with Chuck Norris and Lee Marvin

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