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All the Obama Weddings

Huppah Dreams

by
Marc Tracy
January 03, 2012
Lesser, Silber, and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.(White House Correspondents)
Lesser, Silber, and former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown.(White House Correspondents)

At the beginning of each week, we choose the most interestingly Jewish announcement from that Sunday’s New York Times Weddings/Celebrations section. This week, it’s that of Alison Silber and Eric Lesser, who were married on New Year’s Eve. Silber is a lawyer; Lesser is in law school, before which he worked in the Obama administration as a personal assistant to President Obama’s political guru, David Axelrod.

Here is where the Spider-sense goes off. For wasn’t Lesser one of the “Obama 20-somethings” profiled in that New York Times Magazine article a couple years ago? Indeed, he was. (He led his group house’s weekly Shabbat dinners.) In a certain cohort, this piece was much discussed. And the most-discussed sentences—the lines that seemed to confirm the whole conceit, and to condense the ways in which the hectic life of young overachieving Millennials working for America’s most multitasking presidency force all points to converge—was this parenthetical from author Ashley Parker: “(Disclosure: Lesser is dating one of my housemates. They met while I was reporting this story and began seeing each other shortly thereafter.)” The story was published in April 2010; Silber and Lesser’s engagement, after “dating for two years,” was reported in April 2011, so this is indeed them (you call it creepy, I call it reporting). What is there to say? If Kennedy had Camelot, Obama’s got The West Wing. Mazel tov to the happy couple!

Marc Tracy is a staff writer at The New Republic, and was previously a staff writer at Tablet. He tweets @marcatracy.