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The last season of The Amazing Race featured the show’s first deaf player, who made it all the way to the final leg. Among this season’s teams will be one with a contestant who has Asperger’s syndrome. Zev Glassenberg (pictured left in photo), 26, will journey through eight countries in 21 days for a chance at $1 million — a challenge Glassenberg is looking forward to.
“It’s one of my favorite shows and I thought it would be a really, really cool experience,” he tells DisabilityScoop.com. “It’s basically a scavenger hunt around the world and I like to do scavenger hunts, so why not do one around the world?”
His partner will be his longtime friend Justin Kanew, 30, who he says will be there to help him with the aspects of travel that might prove most trying for him. Aspergers, an autism-spectrum disorder, is a condition in which people have extreme difficulties understanding or participating in social interactions.
“He’s one of my very, very good friends,” Glassenberg said. “We met at a sports camp in Massachusetts in 2003 where we taught football together. We’re pretty much alike. He’s a little bit older than I am but we both have the same common interests — sports and hanging out and just having a good time.”
Glassenberg says he’d wanted to apply for the show for the last seven seasons and does not think having Asperger’s syndrome should hurt his chances at the $1 million prize. “I’ve had [Asperger's] since I was 11. It really doesn’t mean much to my life,” he says. “It’s just something I do and I guess I live with it. I don’t really spend too much of my life on that — it’s just something that’s there.”
Although he admits the social aspects of traveling the world on a reality show competition are “little overwhelming,” the same could be said for any of the teams.
“I thought we had as good a shot as anybody to win the race,” Glassenberg says. “I just wanted to go and be myself and do my thing.”
Beth Haller, Ph.D., is Co-Director of the Global Alliance for Disability in Media and Entertainment (www.gadim.org). A former print journalist, she is a member of the Advisory Board for the National Center on Disability and Journalism (https://ncdj.org/). Haller is Professor Emerita in the Department of Mass Communication at Towson University in Maryland, USA. Haller is co-editor of the 2020 "Routledge Companion to Disability and Media" (with Gerard Goggin of University of Sydney & Katie Ellis of Curtin University, Australia). She is author of "Representing Disability in an Ableist World: Essays on Mass Media" (Advocado Press, 2010) and the author/editor of Byline of Hope: Collected Newspaper and Magazine Writing of Helen Keller (Advocado Press, 2015). She has been researching disability representation in mass media for 30+ years. She is adjunct faculty in the Disability Studies programs at the City University of New York (CUNY) and the University of Texas-Arlington.
From People Magazine:
