Monday, September 3, 2018

Identical Strangers

Three Identical Strangers - 2018 documentary.
The three brothers were born to a single mother in 1961. At the direction of a Jewish adoption agency and psychiatrists Viola Bernard and Peter B. Neubauer, the infant triplets were intentionally placed with families of different economic levels — one blue-collar, one middle-class, and one upper-class — which had each adopted a baby girl from the same agency two years earlier.
Identical Strangers: A Memoir of Twins Separated and Reunited - a 2008 book about identical twins, separated as infants, in part, to participate in a "nature versus nurture" twin study.
Viola Bernard, a renowned New York City psychiatrist, had persuaded Louise Wise Services, the adoption agency, to send twins to different homes, without telling the respective adoptive parents that the children would be separated. Then, researchers sponsored by the Jewish Board of Family and Children's Services secretly compared their progress.

Documentary outs secret twin study, but mystery remains:
Josefowitz moved to Switzerland in 1965 and fell out of touch with the twin study, which was never published, purportedly, in part, to protect the identities of the subjects. After Neubauer died in 2008, all the materials were placed at Yale University under the guardianship of the Jewish Board of Family and Children’s Services, which had helped establish his Child Development Center. The papers were to be sealed until 2065, presumably when the participants, born in the early 1960s, would no longer be living.

see also Nature Versus Nurture: The heartbreaking experiment of triplets separated at birth

Enter Haaretz: Movie Review: Does ‘Three Identical Strangers’ Play Fair?
The long-lost brothers immediately bond and entertain audiences with stories of all they have in common: They smoke the same cigarettes, all became wrestlers, each has the same taste in women (whatever that means). Two of the brothers, now in their mid-50s, appear on camera to describe, in honest and moving terms, their whirlwind reunion and the ensuing media frenzy.

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