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A groundbreaking ex-Hasidic memoir is now an opera
(New York Jewish Week) — As a Hasidic mom raising a family in Houston, Leah Lax had seven children ages 9 and under — including an infant, and a toddler with health issues, born just 11 months apart. When she found herself unexpectedly pregnant again, she realized she needed to have an abortion.
That scene — and the ensuing conflict with her husband, who viewed abortion as murder — is an emotional climax in “Uncovered: A Chamber Opera in One Act,” which is based on Lax’s acclaimed memoir, “Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home.” When the book was published in 2015, the New York Jewish Week called it “the first ex-Hasidic gay memoir.”
Produced by City Lyric Opera, it opens Wednesday at Manhattan’s HERE Arts Center, and runs through Saturday night.
Raised in a secular Jewish family, Lax connected with the Chabad Hasidic movement at age 16 and married a grad student when she was 19. Today, Lax, 66, still lives in Houston, but with her wife, with whom she has been partnered for 17 years. Her children — some of whom have remained religious and some who have not — are spread around the country. Lax has 13 grandchildren “and counting,” she says with audible delight.
Lax wrote the libretto for “Uncovered,” as she has for other operas; the music was composed by Lori Laitman. Lax’s next book, “Not From Here,” is based on a libretto she wrote for Houston Grand Opera for which she spent a year interviewing dozens of refugees and immigrants in the Texas city. It is slated for publication in summer 2023 by Pegasus Press. Interviewing those people led Lax to realize that she felt like an immigrant to her own life, she said.
Lax and I have known each other since I reviewed the book “Uncovered” shortly after publication.
This interview was lightly edited for length and clarity.
New York Jewish Week: What did your eighth pregnancy represent?
Leah Lax: It was the wakeup call of my life. Before that I was inured to everything except following what I was expected to do. Before that my body didn’t belong to me. It belonged to God, and what is God? Halacha [Jewish law] is the voice of God.
Then I realized that this pregnancy could kill me. My body was telling me something that nobody else was hearing, and I realized that I am the authority of my body. I decided to get an abortion. When I told my husband it sparked a huge crisis. He said “If you do, I will divorce you.” To soothe him, I said let’s ask a rav [a rabbi]. I knew I would do it anyway, but if a rav said yes I wouldn’t be out on the street or lose my children [in a divorce]. The rav spoke to my doctor, who said he thought I was at risk. The rav came back and said, “You have to do this thing and do not speak of it to anyone.” Today Christian values have taken over the abortion issue and it really is stomping on our freedom of religion. [Most Jewish sources do not consider that life begins at conception, and Jewish tradition allows room to prioritize the life of the mother when there is a danger to her physical or emotional health.]
I had the abortion, but it came between my husband and me. He grieved and would not speak of it. I was alone with my secret. But I was awake. I changed. That’s when I started writing. It set off a process that led me out the door.
You stayed in Houston, where you raised your family. What was it like to come out as gay and non-religious there?
I was having an affair with a woman. The whole community figured it out and erupted in gossip. I was followed. There’s a confrontation scene in the opera about it. I crossed town to be with my lover and didn’t come out formally until I moved out of the house and left the community. The community shunned me to the point where I began grocery shopping on Saturdays to avoid people. I had been the first- and third-grade teacher at their Chabad day school, and I lost those relationships. Now I’ve reconciled with many of them.
What impact did the publication of “Uncovered” have?
It caused tension with some of my religious kids. They were OK with our differences as long as it was private. Putting it in print, that radical freedom of speech was a departure for them. I really seek to heal that — we have, to some extent. Being an artist is an act of radical free speech. Artists are dangerous people. If I had it to do over again, I would talk it through with my children in advance. I didn’t know to prepare them for it, and I don’t know if it would have helped.
Writing it, I had to delve into memories and keep renewing that story. I became a person living both my past and present. It moved me forward. It led into the next project, “Not From Here: The Song of America,” this awareness of the past and how it forms us.
What do you want viewers to take away from “Uncovered” the opera?
I want my work to break down religious walls. I want people to find through this work that these issues that are looked as abstract by movements are personal and individual, whether it’s abortion, sexuality or religious choice. It is within us, or between us and God.
“Uncovered” runs at the HERE Arts Center, 145 Sixth Ave. Wednesday-Friday, Nov. 16-18, 8:30 p.m.; Saturday, Nov. 19, 4:00 p.m.; Saturday, Nov. 19, 8:30 p.m. $35. Get ticket information here.
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The post A groundbreaking ex-Hasidic memoir is now an opera appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Nobel Laureate Mohammadi in Iran Hospital After ‘Cardiac Crisis,’ Foundation Says
A picture of Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi on the wall of the Grand Hotel in central Oslo before the Nobel banquet, in connection with the awarding of the Nobel Peace Prize 2023, in Oslo, Norway December 10, 2023. Photo: NTB/Javad Parsa via REUTERS/File Photo
Nobel Peace Prize winner Narges Mohammadi was in an unstable condition in an Iranian hospital on Saturday after she was taken there from prison following a catastrophic deterioration of her health, a foundation run by her family said.
The secretary of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, which awarded Mohammadi the 2023 prize, had expressed concern on Thursday that the condition of the Iranian human rights activist was worsening after she had suffered a heart attack in prison.
Mohammadi, in her 50s, won the prize while in prison for her campaign to advance women’s rights and abolish the death penalty in Iran.
The Narges Mohammadi Foundation said in a statement on its website on Friday that she had been “urgently transferred to a hospital in Zanjan today following a catastrophic deterioration of her health, including two episodes of complete loss of consciousness and a severe cardiac crisis.”
This transfer was an “unavoidable necessity after prison doctors determined her condition could not be managed on-site,” it said.
In an update on Saturday, the foundation said she remained in an unstable condition receiving oxygen. It called for her to be transferred to a hospital in Tehran for tests and specialized treatment.
Reuters could not independently confirm her condition.
Mohammadi was sentenced to a new prison term of 7-1/2 years, the foundation said in February, weeks before the US and Israel launched their war against Iran. The Nobel committee at the time called on Tehran to free her immediately.
She was arrested in December after denouncing the death of a lawyer, Khosrow Alikordi; prosecutor Hasan Hematifar told reporters then she had made provocative remarks at Alikordi’s memorial ceremony.
On Friday morning, Mohammadi fainted after days of dangerously high blood pressure and severe nausea, the foundation said. After multiple bouts of vomiting, she blacked out and was moved to the prison medical unit for emergency intravenous fluids.
The activist, who has undergone three angioplasty procedures, faces a “direct and immediate” threat to her right to life, her family said. “We call for all charges to be dropped immediately and for all sentences imposed for her peaceful human rights work to be unconditionally annulled.”
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Is supporting peace illegal in Israel? A shocking arrest carries a warning
A Jewish man is wearing his kippah at a local café when an angry customer accosts him. The kippah is against the law, the man is told; the other customer calls the police.
Within minutes, officers arrive. They confiscate the Jewish man’s belongings, and place him in a cell without water for around 20 minutes. He is not allowed to call his wife. Near release, the officers threaten to put him back in the cell if he does not leave the station without his kippah.
The man refuses. And so an officer of the law takes a blade to the man’s sacred religious symbol. “She’d taken my possession, a religious ritual object, something that is very dear to my heart, and destroyed it,” the man said.
This was not Europe in the 1930s. It was Israel in 2026. And it all happened because Alex Sinclair, 53, had a Palestinian flag embroidered onto his kippah.
That Sinclair is a Zionist — his kippah also featured an Israeli flag — meant little to his fellow citizen, or to the police, who have taken an increasingly authoritarian tack against Palestinian symbols.
Israeli censorship of innocuous political expression isn’t new, especially for Palestinian citizens of Israel. But the egregious case of a Palestinian flag being cut off of Sinclair’s kippah shows the predictable consequences for Jews of policies that repress others’ speech in our name. A government that lets officers cut a Jew’s kippah is taking a page out of the playbook of antisemites by defining what it means to be a good Jew who gets to live freely in society
A kippah built for complexity
Sinclair is a Jewish education lecturer at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. His 2013 book Loving the Real Israel: An Educational Agenda for Liberal Zionism — a finalist for a National Jewish Book Award — argues that Jewish education should be built around principles including complexity, conversation and empowerment.
He has spent his career insisting that you can love a country honestly only if you confront its flaws. As part of that effort, he has worn a kippah bearing both an Israeli and a Palestinian flag for nearly 20 years.
“The reasons behind the kippah are long and complex,” he wrote on Facebook after his detention, “and related to the messy ambivalence of my Jewish-Zionist identity.”
The kippah was, in part, his way of expressing his religious commitment without being folded into assumptions about what a kippah-wearing Jew stands for politically.
His wearing of it has sometimes sparked meaningful reactions from other Israelis, especially Palestinians. Once, a cashier in Sinclair’s neighborhood supermarket told him: “Thank you on behalf of all of us.” Another time, the mechanic fixing his flat tire saw the kippah and burst into tears. Among Jews, the kippah acts as necessary friction in a country sometimes desperate to maintain a smooth narrative.
In a 2024 essay called “The Two Most Important Flags for Liberal Jews Today,” Sinclair argued that the dual flags answer extremism from both Hamas and the Israeli right:
“By portraying the Israeli flag and the Palestinian flag together, we show Hamas and other Palestinian terrorists that we will not give up our country and our national identity, but we show potential Palestinian partners that we accept their national identity and wish to live in security, mutual dignity, and peace with them.”
Cutting the Palestinian flag out of Sinclair’s kippah was the state literally cutting complexity out of acceptable Jewish vocabulary.
The gap between what the law is and what it does
What happened to Sinclair was not a case of bad laws so much as police taking matters into their own hands despite the law.
No Knesset law makes the Palestinian flag illegal in Israel. Israeli legal authorities and courts have repeatedly affirmed the Palestinian flag as protected political expression, while allowing police only narrow authority in cases where there is a high probability of a breach of the peace or genuine suspicion that someone identifies with or supports a terrorist organization
Israel once used the power of the state to discipline Jewish radicals. The country’s first anti-terror law, passed in 1948, was directed at Jews. It was used to designate Lehi, a Jewish paramilitary group that assassinated United Nations mediator Folke Bernadotte because his proposed partition plan was seen as too favorable to Arabs. (This despite the fact that the Swedish nobleman’s “White Buses” operations rescued tens of thousands of prisoners, including Jews, from Nazi camps in 1945.)
Now, police contorted the statutory tradition descended from that law against a Jew for the peaceful connotations of his kippah. Politicians and law enforcement whose beliefs are arguably influenced by extremists like Lehi are abusing their power to harass peaceful citizens of the state.
Foremost among them is National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir. In January 2023, days after being sworn in, Ben-Gvir directed the Israeli police to remove “terror-supporting flags” from public spaces — a directive that in practice included the Palestinian flag. Senior police commanders quickly said that the order was not legally sound. None of that has stopped censorship from happening.
The legal-rights organization Adalah has documented at least 645 people arrested for speech-related offenses since the Hamas attack of Oct. 7, 2023. The overwhelming majority of that number are Palestinian citizens of Israel, many of whom were eventually indicted. By contrast, human rights organization Yesh Din has found that nearly 94% of investigations into settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank have been closed without indictments.
There was never going to be a firewall
It was always naïve to assume that the coercive apparatus used against Palestinians could be cordoned off from the democracy Jews live in.
Unchecked power, as critics like the Orthodox Jewish philosopher Yeshayahu Leibowitz warned, corrodes everything it touches. A state’s abuses undermine democracy for the citizens in whose name they are carried out.
The Israeli right may object that Hamas and its supporters have used the Palestinian flag in hateful contexts, including in imagery surrounding the Oct. 7 massacre and at rallies celebrating Hamas’s attack. (Hamas has its own, separate flag). That’s true, and it helps explain why many Israelis experience the Palestinian flag as threatening.
But just as the Israeli flag does not mean that every Jew who flies it endorses every action of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the Palestinian flag does not mean that every Palestinian who waves it endorses Hamas. Flags, and nations, contain multitudes. Many Palestinians wave their flag out of a sincere desire for self-determination.
“I, like every Israeli, know people who lost loved ones on Oct. 7 or in the war thereafter,” Sinclair himself said. “Hamas is my enemy: an enemy who seeks my destruction, an enemy who is not interested in coexistence.” His kippah does not pretend otherwise.
If officers had cut a Jew’s kippah in any other country in the world, Israeli MK Gilad Kariv noted last week, “there would have been an uproar here in Israel.” He’s right.
Instead, the Israeli police have publicly described what they did to Alex Sinclair as a “clarification process.” That sounds like the bureaucratic vocabulary of a state that no longer trusts its citizens to exercise their rights and liberties. Following his detention, Sinclair filed a complaint with the Department for Internal Police Investigations. He requested compensation for the kippah and a written commitment that he could walk through Modiin without harassment.
“I’m not holding my breath,” he said.
His assessment is haunting: “If we are looking ahead, oh my God, is this what is in store for us?” The answer, if things continue along these lines, is a government that is increasingly authoritarian, deeply insecure and farcical. Days after Sinclair’s detention, Israeli police seized another suspect flag that was red, green, and white at an anti-Netanyahu protest. It was Hungarian.
The post Is supporting peace illegal in Israel? A shocking arrest carries a warning appeared first on The Forward.
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Iran Expected to Ramp Up Chemical, Biological Weapons Programs
Symbolic mock-ups of Iranian missiles are displayed on a street, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 22, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Amid sustained international scrutiny of Iran’s nuclear program, missile development, and regional proxy network, new assessments point to a quieter and more troubling front as allegations grow that Tehran may be expanding work related to chemical and biological weapons capabilities.
According to a new report from the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, the Islamist regime in Iran may be advancing efforts to significantly develop its chemical and biological weapons programs — a move experts warn would pose serious risks not only to Israel but also to the wider region and the Iranian population itself.
Iran’s chemical and biological research programs allegedly focus on a range of toxic agents, including blister agents like mustard gas, nerve agents such as sarin and Novichok, and substances that attack the lungs or blood and can cause suffocation.
These reportedly also include biological threats such as anthrax, ricin, and botulinum toxins, as well as certain viruses, all of which can cause severe illness or death by disrupting the body’s nervous system, organs, or immune response.
Israeli officials have previously warned that the Iranian government has been developing dual-use chemicals, with both civilian and military applications, and may be channeling them to its regional proxy terrorist forces, raising fears they could be used to intensify proxy conflicts and destabilize the wider Middle East.
Tehran is also suspected of having used such agents to help suppress the nationwide anti-government protests earlier this year, which were violently crushed by security forces in a crackdown that left tens of thousands of demonstrators tortured, imprisoned, or killed.
Similar allegations have repeatedly emerged in the past, adding to a wider pattern of reported abuses against civilians and violations of human rights.
According to a report from Iran International, a medical staff member in Karaj said some detainees released during the January protests had reported body aches, lethargy, weakness, loss of appetite, nausea, and vomiting — all symptoms that may indicate possible drug-related poisoning.
Iran first began developing chemical weapons-related capabilities in the 1980s. In recent years, those efforts have reportedly evolved to include pharmaceutical-based agents and other compounds designed for incapacitation or riot control.
US government assessments have indicated for decades that Iran has been researching and developing chemical agents, including anesthetic compounds designed to incapacitate individuals by targeting the central nervous system.
These reports point to Iran’s academic sector playing a key role in this area, with Imam Hossein University and Malek Ashtar University of Technology — military-linked institutions associated with the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the Ministry of Defense — reportedly conducting research since at least 2005 into chemical agents designed for incapacitation.
Since the start of the war earlier this year, the Israeli Air Force has carried out sustained strikes targeting sites linked to chemical weapons research, development, and production, aiming to disrupt facilities embedded within Iran’s broader military-industrial infrastructure and associated pharmaceutical-based programs.
Even though Tehran has long denied pursuing chemical or biological weapons and remains a party to the Chemical Weapons Convention, Western governments continue to accuse the regime of violating international norms.