Portland’s model couple

Here’s a unique insight into the inner life of progressive Portland from the local freebie:

If there had been a cultural dictionary of Portland during the 1980s, the definition of “Progressives” would have been Steve and Marcia Moskowitz.

He was a brainy Reedie lawyer who left the city attorney’s office to become a top aide to mayor Bud Clark. She was a spunky blue-collar Chicagoan who worked as a city planner. They went to potlucks hosted by the New Jewish Agenda and volunteered for left-leaning causes–hippies who became yuppies without selling out.

In 1992, however, the couple split up. Later that year, Steve began seeing another woman–and Marcia snapped. On Oct. 17, she drove to his Northwest apartment, knocked on his door, pulled out a .22 caliber pistol, and fired four shots into his chest, stomach and groin. Then she knelt over him and fired three more.

“That’s what happens when you shoot a gun,” she told him. He went to the emergency room. She went to jail.

Fourteen years later, Steve has a new calling. He’s now a rabbi at Temple Israel in Long Beach, Calif. He’s also got a new wife, Ana, whom he met at Congregation Beth Israel in Portland. Contacted by WW, he said he still follows local politics but was not eager to discuss the shooting.

Marcia served 18 months behind bars. She, too, has remarried (to Gary Suttenberg, a college friend of her ex-husband’s). After working as union organizer for several years, she is now executive director of the Portland Women’s Crisis Line–a job where, she says, her background is an asset, rather than a liability.

“I tell clients, ‘Right now you may feel like you’ve hit the bottom,'” she says. “‘But you will come up.'”

Marcia’s really in the right line of work, isn’t she?