Joel Rifkin - Early Life

Early Life

Rifkin's birth mother was a 20-year-old college student, birth father a 24-year old college student and army veteran. He was adopted by Benjamin Rifkin, who was of Russian Jewish descent, and his wife, Jeanne (Granelles), of Spanish descent, who converted to Judaism when she married. The Rifkin family did not have a synagogue affiliation; Joel considered himself to be an agnostic, having never had a bar mitzvah. The Rifkins adopted Joel on February 14, 1959, when he was three weeks old. The couple adopted another child, a daughter, three years later. As a young boy, he was a member of the Cub Scouts. In 1965, the family settled in East Meadow, New York, where Rifkin would spend most of his remaining years. A shy, awkward child, he was a target for bullies. He attended religious classes at the Sholem Aleichem Folk School. While at the school, he learned a little bit of the Yiddish language. He had an I.Q. assessed at 128, but struggled academically in school due to severe dyslexia. At East Meadow, he joined the track team as a cross country competitor. A congenital foot condition caused him to waddle when he ran. Fellow track team members would joke that it made him look like a duck. After graduating from East Meadow High School, Rifkin, who was particularly interested in horticulture and photojournalism, made several attempts at community college and attended the State University of New York at Brockport, where he majored in political science. While enrolled at the college, he worked for a time as a photographer on the school's newspaper, The Stylus. He also attended classes at Nassau Community College, where he only completed one course. During his freshman year at college, he was arrested for shoplifting a bottle of Kikkoman soy sauce, a charge that he pled down to disorderly conduct and for which he paid a $15 fine. While he was in college, he wrote a quasi-autobiographical book, The Frosh, which depicted the feelings and adventures of a college freshman that parallelled his own. He worked as a merchant at several flea markets, a clerk in the records department in Times Square Stores, a camera repairman at Olympus Corporation, a clerk at a flower shop, and as an order-picker and tape manager at Record World headquarters in New York City. One of his landscaping clients in Roslyn Harbor was Sophia Casey, the widow of William Casey, the former Chief of the CIA under President Ronald Reagan. Rifkin started to show a profound interest in horticulture and, with the help of Owen Smith, the president of the Aboretum and the son-in-law of former CIA chief William Casey, started an internship at the Planting Fields Arboretum State Historic Park in Oyster Bay. At the park, Joel was assigned as a groundsman to tend the miniature pines in the Dwarf Conifer garden. At the time of his arrest, he was working as a horticulturist as a temp for Dunhill Temporary Services and had also been a self-employed landscaper for four years, considering himself to be a horticulturist.