Vox Tablet

Examining Life After a Crash

Two decades after a car accident in Jerusalem broke Joshua Prager’s neck, he looks at how it changed him

June 3, 2013
(Photoillustration Tablet Magazine; original photos xor74/Flickr and Shutterstock)
(Photoillustration Tablet Magazine; original photos xor74/Flickr and Shutterstock)

Joshua Prager is a reporter best known for tracking down elusive characters whose lives were altered in an instant—people like Tehran-based photographer Jahangir Razmi, the only anonymous winner of a Pulitzer Prize, and Albert Clark, who was unexpectedly bequeathed the royalties of the wildly popular children’s books Goodnight, Moon, Runaway Bunny, and other titles by Margaret Wise Brown. Now Prager has written Half-Life, the story of how his own life changed in an instant. When he was 19 and spending the year studying at a yeshiva in Israel, he was a passenger on a minibus headed to Jerusalem that was struck by a speeding truck. Prager’s neck was broken, and he nearly died.

Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry talks with Prager about how the accident altered the course he’d thought his life would follow, how his disability makes people trust him and confide long-held secrets, and about his belief that physical injury, even one as devastating as his, is easier to overcome than the invisible suffering most people carry around within them. [Running time: 29:01.]

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Vox Tablet is Tablet Magazine’s weekly podcast, hosted by Sara Ivry and produced by Julie Subrin. You can listen to individual episodes here or subscribe on iTunes.

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