Michigan Women's Forum: 'Jewishness' unites essays in Carol Leifer's award-winning book

Like many authors, Carol Leifer set out to write a book after a series of significant life changes.
Her marriage broke up.
She met a woman and fell in love.
She turned 50.
Her father died.
And believe it or not, her best-selling essay collection, If You Life About Your Age, the Terrorists Win: Reflections on Looking in the Mirror, combines all of those experiences, and then some. The book has earned praise from fellow comedians Bill Maher, Ellen Degeneres and former boyfriend Jerry Seinfeld, among many others, and has been endorsed by the Jewish Book Council.
"I think the thing that unites it all is my Jewishness," she told a packed house Thursday evening at the 58th Annual Jewish Book Fair, held at the Jewish Community Center in West Bloomfield.
Leifer admits that neither she nor her partner were particularly observant; neither had been bat mitzvahed, so they decided to go through the Jewish rite of passage together. "We felt the need for some fountain pens at that age," she joked.
The couple adopted a little boy from Guatemala and live with him and their seven rescue dogs in California. Leifer appears very comfortable with a life that was initially difficult to explain to her parents. In fact, she said, coming out was much harder on her than it was on them. "I asked my father, 'Aren't you disappointed in me?'," she recalled. "He said, 'Disappointed? I'll tell you when I was disappointed, it was when you married that shagitz (non-Jewish man)."

Leifer spoke with great warmth and love for her parents, and especially her father, Seymour, whose passing she struggles to accept. Her mother, she said, is doing well and will soon celebrate her 90th birthday. While Anna Leifer isn't necessarily crazy about being included in her daughter's comedy routine, the book's first essay, "But this one's eating my popcorn," speaks to her father's natural sense of humor. An optometrist all his life, he never realized his dream of becoming a comedian or comedy writer.
Leifer has more than made up for that with her success. She has written for teleivision - Seinfeld, Alright Already, and The Larry Sanders Show, among others - and is a writer and co-executive producer for Rules of Engagement. She's scheduled to appear on Donald Trump's infamous cut-throat reality show, Celebrity Apprentice, but remained tight-lipped about it.
"I signed a confidentiality agreement," she said, describing harsh penalties for revealing any information about the outcome. "I can't tell you, so you're just going to have to tune in. It's really interesting, I'll tell you that." The show airs in March.

Leifer was outspoken about the paucity of female writers working on late-night comedy shows, a reality exposed in a recent Vanity Fair article. "It's really up to the host," she said. "I think they need to feel a responsibility to hire women, because women write different jokes."

She described an episode she wrote for Seinfeld that included a "skinny mirror." While most men would have no idea what she was talking about, every woman understands, she said.
Leifer has always looked at herself as part of a minority as a woman in comedy. When she started in the 1970s, she said, the sexism was blatant and women were marginalized even more than they are today. Still, she got plenty of work.
"That was really an asset for me," she said. "I think you should embrace your difference."