Ron Kuby - Personal Life

Personal Life

After his parents divorced when he was five years old, Kuby lived with his mother. At thirteen, he joined the Jewish Defense League under the influence of his father, who was a follower of Meir David Kahane.

In junior high school, Kuby says he was nearly expelled for publishing an underground newspaper critical of the school administration. He left junior high school in ninth grade and emigrated to Israel in 1971. He became disenchanted with the anti-Arab racism he found there, and was deported five months later. He returned to Cleveland and lived in a commune for the next several years. He briefly attended an accredited alternative high school, graduating in 1973. He attended Cleveland State University for one year. ".

Kuby dropped out of college in 1974, and moved to St. Croix, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, where he worked on a tugboat and developed an interest in West Indian ethnobotany and medicinal plants. He moved briefly to Maine, then to Kansas in 1975 where he completed his degrees in cultural anthropology and history at the University of Kansas. Kuby was a free-speech and anti-apartheid activist while at KU. Kuby graduated with highest distinction, had a 4.0 average, and conducted and published original fieldwork, including the 1979 "Folk medicine on St. Croix: an ethnobotanical study", after returning to St. Croix several times.

Kuby earned his Juris Doctor from Cornell Law School in 1983. His grades entitled him to a position on the prestigious Cornell Law Review but Kuby turned down the invitation. He graduated as one of the top students in his class.

In addition to providing legal counsel to David Hampton, a petty con artist who made headlines for his brazen claims, Kuby struck up a personal friendship with him that later continued.

On January 23, 2006, Kuby married Marilyn Vasta, his life partner since 1986, remarking that the date was chosen because it was the 20th anniversary of their first date.