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Noah sits down at the courtyard cafe in the National Portrait Gallery to chat about the beauty of local synagogues, calling versus texting, what an architect actually does day-to-day, being a rabbi’s kid, and his neighbor Paul!
Samuel: What brought you to the DMV?
Noah: A prospective job offer. During the pandemic, I was in Colorado, working at a hospital in construction administration. I wanted to come back to the East Coast, and my buddy’s company had a contract with the White House. I spoke to my friend’s manager, and he wanted me to be an architect at the President’s Park. But, by the time I got here, the position was filled. I decided to stay and find some creative avenues – now I work mainly as a government contractor, but also a little bit for myself.
Samuel: What’s kept you here, even after the job fell through?
Noah: The relationships I’ve built. I have some good clients, so I’m enjoying my work. And it’s an interesting area – I lived in New York for most of my 20s, lived in Philly for a long time, and they’re both amazing places. Here, everyone is super intelligent and just playing on a different level. It keeps me on my toes and I learn every day.
Samuel: How do you think of those three cities in relationship with one another? What’s the Venn diagram there?
Noah: There’s a lot of really good food, diverse options, here as well as Philly and New York. DC feels more expensive than even New York; we don’t have financial diversity like New York does. It’s also the South – people here hold the door open more than in Philly and New York, and you get a lot of “sirs.” I noticed that when I moved here and it actually made me, like, uncomfortable for a little bit. I’m looking behind me. Sometimes you forget that you’re an adult, you’re in your 30s, but you still think like a young person.
Samuel: What’s your Jewish community here?
Noah: I’ve tried a bunch of different synagogues in Northern Virginia. I’ll go for a Friday night service; everything’s pretty small, and I’m usually one of the younger people there. I’ve been to my friend’s synagogue in Bethesda for the Sabbath – that was pretty cool. All the synagogues here are pretty beautiful. I went to Temple Beth Ami in northeast Philly and it was just a big rectangular box with no ornamentation. Very simple. Here, the synagogues are gorgeous…but I haven’t found the synagogue that I like the most.
Samuel: What would the signal be where you say: This is the one?
Noah: A good rabbi. A solid, wise, older rabbi. A lot of the synagogues, there’s a whole army of rabbis, and they’re all super out there and liberal, which is cool, you know. But I grew up Conservative and the way you sing the prayers…it just doesn’t feel like home yet.
Samuel: Your father was a rabbi. How has that influenced you over the years?
Noah: Yeah, my dad was the rabbi growing up, and he was a Holocaust survivor. He had this compassion for everybody that I don’t see in a lot of synagogues. My friends’ synagogues that I’d go to, they talk about American Jewry, they talk about Israel – we had, and they have, the American flag on one side of the bimah and the Israeli flag on the other – but my dad wouldn’t talk just about Israel. He’d talk about the meth epidemic in northeast Philly, and how to bring that to light. That’s a huge Jewish thing: bringing light to the dark world. It helps. It’s tikkun olam. We’d talk about the meth epidemic, and Darfur, and Sierra Leone. You talk about suffering in the world. I would really want to know what my father would think about our current situation.
Samuel: What else is alive for you Jewishly right now?
Noah: I’m going to a Yom HaShoah [Editor’s note: Holocaust Remembrance Day, which fell in late April this year] lecture tonight at Sixth & I – what a cool building. What else? I was back in Philly meeting friends, and my friend’s wife – who I’m also friends with – her friend went to my Jewish day camp back in the day. So the other day, she tells me that her friend wants to set me up with somebody, and I’m like: Oh, cool. So, dating. That’s something Jewish. I’ll give her a call later today.
Samuel: Are you a call person over texting?
Noah: I prefer a phone call, but you have to realize that people have things to do. Someone’s still in the office…a phone call, especially if you don’t know the number? There’s so many robocalls these days. It’s maybe better to just send a text and say: So-and-so gave me your contact info. Do you want to talk on the phone later and meet?
I don’t know. That might actually work. I’m going to write that down.
Samuel: What is the day-to-day of working as an architect?
Noah: It’s very different, day-to-day. Just like in a building – there’s doors, there’s roofs, there’s basements. You can’t do everything every day, so a lot of my job revolves around project management. I could be coordinating with engineers, discussing options with clients, drawing technical details. It varies, and I like the variety. I like to work at different scales. I’ve worked in community planning, furniture design, houses, apartments, commercial buildings, government facilities. Variety is the spice of life.
Samuel: What sticks with you as you walk around with all this architectural context?
Noah: Some things, you don’t notice if you don’t speak the language, right? When you speak another language, it’s like you’re possessing another soul. I read that in a guidebook once. It stuck with me. When you see shutters on a house in the suburbs, no one’s shutting the shutters when there’s a storm. You probably can’t even shut them, they don’t overlap, they’re undersized. They’re just there as an aesthetic, like a vestigial building element. The way we build in the last 120, 150 years is significantly different from how humans built in the [previous] 1000s of years.
Samuel: A few quick ones to close. What’s something you’re feeling proud about?
Noah: I wrote the first draft of a children’s book. I used to work with kids in Philly doing afterschool care. There was a Jewish family and a Palestinian family, and they’d play together. I wrote a story loosely based off them, acknowledging the similarities and appreciating the differences. I’m trying to rewrite it. I want to make it rhyme.
Samuel: What’s something you’re bad at?
Noah: Becoming rich off being an architect. And time management.
Samuel: You’re inviting three people to Shabbat dinner. Who are you bringing?
Noah: I need to invite my neighbor, Paul. He lives alone. He works weird hours. He’d appreciate a homecooked meal. Snoop Dogg. He’s just an American treasure. Who else? I don’t know, do you want to come to Shabbos dinner?
Samuel: Sure! Last one. Finish the sentence: When Jews of the DMV gather…
Noah: I want to find out!
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