Joanna Braun Levine and Yigit Bora Bozkurt were married Sept. 15 at Wave Hill in the Bronx. Gregg M. Rubin, a friend of the couple who became a Universal Life minister for this event, officiated, with Gloria Steinem, the writer and activist and a friend of the bride’s family, leading a ceremony that incorporated Jewish and Turkish wedding traditions.
The bride, 32, will take her husband’s name. She is a senior strategist at Agenda, a creative consultancy in Manhattan. She graduated from Emory University.
She is the daughter of Suzanne Braun Levine and Robert F. Levine of Manhattan. The bride’s father retired as a founding partner in Levine, Plotkin & Menin, a Manhattan law firm, and was also a literary agent. Her mother, a writer, was the editor of Ms. magazine from 1972-89, and is the author of “Inventing the Rest of Our Lives” (Viking, 2004) and other books.
The groom, 34, goes by Bora. He is an associate in the Manhattan office of Latham & Watkins, the Los Angeles law firm. He graduated from Yale, received a law degree summa cum laude from the University of Pennsylvania and received a Master of Laws in taxation, with distinction, from Georgetown.
He is a son of Kudret Yildiz Bozkurt and Ibrahim Orhan Bozkurt of Istanbul. The groom’s mother retired as a private Turkish language and social sciences teacher for primary and middle school students. His father, a civil engineer, is an owner of Bozkurt Insaat, a commercial construction company in Istanbul.
The couple met in 2015 in Manhattan, after a mutual friend, who had decided that they would make a good couple, sent each of them a text introduction with three facts about the other.
“He’d been thinking about this a long time, apparently,” Mr. Bozkurt said. “He told me that she is a Sherlockian, and she loves volleyball and spent a year in Argentina, and that the two of us would get along well.”
Ms. Levine recalls only that she was told Mr. Bozkurt had two nephews he was close with and that he is a tax lawyer. “We pretty quickly made a date and then went out,” she said. But not before Mr. Bozkurt did a little Sherlock Holmes homework by reading one of the original stories by Arthur Conan Doyle.
“In advance, he read one of the stories from the canon, which I thought was really sweet,” Ms. Levine said.
On their first date, they hit it off.
“We were ordering glass after glass of wine, and found ourselves doing karaoke,” she said. “He wasn’t scared away by me singing ’90s music at him.”
“I just loved that he was so funny, he seemed very interested in what I had to say, he would ask questions and really thought to understand my point of view,” she said. “He makes dating him so easy, because he is so open and fun and colorful and bright and he cares and is open to new ideas and points of view. He’s just great.”
Mr. Bozkurt was similarly impressed. “I really liked that she was up for anything,” he said. “I like that she is very cultured, she reads a lot and also she’s not intimidated by, or opposed to, but is very interested in learning about another culture and meeting someone from another culture.”
So on their second date, he took her out for a taste of his background.
“She was interested in Turkish culture, so I taught her backgammon,” he said. “I’m sure Greek people claim it’s theirs, but I like to believe it’s ours.”
On the third date, he said, the two shared their first kiss, and “it became more of a romantic connection.”
“Though,” he added, “the rumor goes that I touched her leg on the second date.”
