Allan Benjamin Goldstein

Goldstein, the older sibling and guardian of a survivor of the notorious Willowbrook State School, explores with his personal experience writing the social barriers impeding an inclusive society. Their memoir, Fred and Me, a Willowbrook Survivor's Story, shows their individual development as they rediscover one another. Allan teaches experiential Disability Studies at the NYU-Tandon School of Engineering, featured in Bing Wang's award winning documentary The Ability Exchange. He has received the NYU-Tandon 2012 Jacobs Excellence in Education Teaching Award, the 2016-17 NYU Martin Luther King, Jr. Award and the 2018-19 NYU Distinguished Teaching award. Tamsen Fadal of WPIX featured him as a Changemaker and the Chronicle of Higher Education included him on its inaugural list of teaching innovators. Allan and his wife are avid open water swimmers.

I didn't write this book because I was a good brother.

I wrote it because for most of Fred's life, I wasn't.

Fred spent his childhood and adolescence at Willowbrook State School while I grew up at home. We shared parents, a last name, and almost nothing else. When our mother died, then our father, I inherited a brother I barely knew — a man who walked differently, spoke differently, and had lived a life I couldn't begin to imagine.

What I discovered, slowly and sometimes painfully, was that Fred had been there all along — funny, perceptive, generous, and fully human in every way that the world had refused to see.

Fred and Me is the story of how two strangers became brothers. It is also the story of Willowbrook — what it did to the people inside it, and what it says about how we treat those we decide are "other."

I am a Disability Studies educator at NYU teaching students to see the person before the diagnosis, the human being before the label. Fred taught me that first.

He passed away in May 2024 at the age of 71. He never stopped teaching me.

If this book does one thing, I hope it is this: the next time you pass someone who moves differently, speaks differently, or looks different from what you expect — I hope you wonder about their story. Because they have one. And it matters.

— Allan Goldstein

Senior Lecturer, NYU Tandon School of Engineering

Author, Fred and Me: A Willowbrook Survivor's Story