Luke Ford

Published August 15, 1999:

Dr. Jeannie Chi Yong Suk, a daughter of Song Nam Suk and Dr. Chang Ho Suk of Great Neck, N.Y., is to be married this afternoon to Dr. Noah Raam Feldman, a son of Dr. Penny H. Feldman and Dr. Roy E. Feldman of Cambridge, Mass. Harold Hongju Koh, an Assistant Secretary of State, is to preside at the ceremony in the Harvard Club in Manhattan

Dr. Suk, 26, was until June a visiting lecturer on cultural exchange and interaction in literature at Yale College in New Haven, and an affiliate scholar at the Columbia University Center for Psychoanalytic Training and Research in Manhattan.

In September, she will become a law student at Harvard University. She graduated from Yale and received a doctorate in philosophy in modern languages from Oxford University, where she was a Marshall scholar. She is keeping her name.

Her father is a gastroenterologist in Flushing, Queens. Her mother manages the practice and is a director of the Flushing branch of the Y.W.C.A.

Dr. Feldman, 29, was a clerk for Justice David H. Souter of the United States Supreme Court in Washington until last month. He is now a junior fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows in Cambridge, where he is conducting research on legal theory and history. He graduated from Harvard and received a doctorate in Islamic thought from Oxford, where he was a Rhodes scholar. He also holds a law degree from Yale.

His mother is a vice president of the Visiting Nurse Service of New York and the director of its Center for Home Care Policy and Research. His father is the president of Behavior Analysis Inc., a social policy consulting company in Cambridge.

After checking out Jeannie Suk’s faculty page on the Harvard law website, I now understand why Noah married out. His wife is beautiful (Koreans are a beautiful people, far better looking on average than the Japanese) and brilliant.

Prior to joining the Harvard Law School faculty in 2006, Jeannie Suk served as a law clerk to Judge Harry T. Edwards on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, and to Justice David H. Souter on the Supreme Court of the United States. She was an Assistant District Attorney in the Manhattan District Attorneys Office and an Alexander Fellow at New York University School of Law. She received a B.A. in literature from Yale, and a doctorate in literature from Oxford, where she was a Marshall Scholar. Professor Suk is a 2002 graduate of Harvard Law School, where she studied as a Paul and Daisy Soros Fellow and was the Articles, Commentaries, and Book Reviews Chair of the Harvard Law Review. Her areas of scholarly interest include criminal law and procedure, family law, copyright, legal theory, and literary theory.

Rabbi Gadol writes Luke:

As you know, I am a traditionally liberal Upper West Side Jew who donates money to fight for civil rights and abortion rights, but I must admit to being troubled by the these increasingly prevalent Jewish man/Asian woman couplings. The problem is that however "hot" Korean women may be in the eyes of Jewish men (and they are), Korean men simply are not viewed in similarly lusty terms by Jewish women. So we have a situation in which Jewish men are rejecting Jewish women, leaving a net loss of potential mates both for unpaired Korean men and Jewish women. For similar reasons, I am troubled by matings of Black men to White women. These may be good for black men and the white women who desire them, but how do they possibly benefit the forgotten black woman? They don’t. On the other hand, Koreans tend to do quite well on the SAT and IQ tests; they are like secular Jews, but without the baggage of the ghetto, so it must be admitted that Jewish men could do worse. But, again, what about the Jewish woman? Is she expected to form lesbian relationships with the equally forgotten Black woman, or to make do with a cat?