Category: Culture

​​​​When Abby Chava Stein, 33, stepped away from her ultra-Orthodox upbringing, she wasn’t just leaving behind her way of life and her family — she was stepping into her authentic self. Now, the first openly transgender female rabbi from a Hasidic background takes center stage in “Becoming Eve,” a new play adapted from Stein’s 2019 […]

Sheila Dardashti has spent her lifetime making music — but until recently had never written any of her own. Raised in Queens by Jewish lovers of folk music, Dardashti studied classical guitar in high school. As a young woman, she toured as half of an international folk music duo with her husband, Farid Dardashti, who had […]

For much of the 20th century, the world of classical conducting was dominated by two figures: Herbert von Karajan and Leonard Bernstein, who fiercely competed with each other throughout their prolific and illustrious careers.  The first was Austrian, a stickler for exactitude who was, for a time, a member of the Nazi Party. The second […]

In 1941, a group of intellectual Jews confined to the Vilna ghetto — writers, scholars, poets and the like — were forced by the Nazis to plunder their own people’s treasured works for a Nazi propaganda museum, the Institute for Research on the Jewish Question. These intellectuals, including the poet Abraham Sutzkever and the writer […]