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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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Hillary Clinton Warns Youth Being Misled by ‘Totally Made Up’ Narratives About Gaza, Israel
Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton speaks on the first day of the 2024 Clinton Global Initiative Meeting at the Hilton Hotel in New York City, US, Sepy. 23, 2024. Photo: MediaPunch/INSTARimages via Reuters Connect
Former US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton issued a stark warning this week, arguing that young Americans are increasingly turning against Israel because they are consuming misleading and often fabricated social-media content about the Gaza war.
Speaking at an Israel Hayom summit in New York, Clinton said that young people were being influenced by “totally made up” videos depicting alleged Israeli actions in Gaza, many of which she claimed were nothing more than stylized pro-Hamas propaganda.
Clinton noted that more than half of young Americans now receive their news primarily from platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, where short, highly sensationalized clips often spread faster than verified information. She warned that these platforms prioritize emotion over context, leaving users vulnerable to narratives that ignore decades of Israeli security dilemmas, Hamas terrorism, and the broader regional picture.
Clinton lamented that her attempts to have conversations with young people over the Gaza War have been fruitless, noting that students “did not know history, they had very little context, and what they were being told on social media was not just one-sided, it was pure propaganda.”
Her remarks reflect growing concern among pro-Israel advocates and politicians about the generational shift in US public opinion. Recent polling show that younger Americans, across political lines and even within the Jewish community, are significantly less supportive of Israel than older generations. Clinton suggested that this shift is less a product of thoughtful engagement with the conflict than of a digital information culture in which Hamas and its sympathizers have gained enormous influence.
”It’s not just the usual suspects. It’s a lot of young Jewish Americans who don’t know the history and don’t understand. A lot of the challenge is with younger people. More than 50 percent of young people in America get their news from social media,” Clinton said.
“So, just pause on that for a second. They are seeing short-form videos, some of them totally made up, some of them not at all representing what they claim to be showing, and that’s where they get their information,” continued Clinton, who previously served as a US senator from New York.
In today’s fragmented media environment, a single unverified video can reach millions of people within hours. Analysts have repeatedly documented how decontextualized or manipulated footage from Gaza circulates widely before fact-checkers can intervene. Meanwhile, footage that reveals Hamas’s extensive use of human shields, its embedding of military infrastructure inside hospitals, or its responsibility for repeated ceasefire collapses rarely achieves the same viral momentum. According to experts analyzing the flow of information, the asymmetry has allowed simplistic narratives portraying Israel as an aggressor to dominate the feeds of young users who lack the historical grounding needed to assess such content.
Clinton’s comments underscore a growing consensus that modern warfare is fought not only on the battlefield but also online in the domain of public relations. Israel, she suggested, faces an unprecedented challenge in countering digital propaganda that spreads farther and faster than any official briefing or nuanced reporting.
Clinton warned that the crisis extends beyond Israel to the United States and other democracies struggling to maintain informed public discourse. The result is an American youth culture increasingly swayed by unverified images and misleading narratives rather than history, context, or the realities of Israeli security, an information landscape that has reportedly been leveraged by foreign actors such as Iran, Qatar, and Russia to push disinformation.
Clinton’s remarks amounted to a call for a more robust response to online misinformation and for renewed efforts to inform young Americans about the complexities of the conflict.
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New York Governor Puts New Holocaust Memorial Project in Motion
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul. Photo: Reuters Connect
New York Gov. Kathy Hochul on Monday signed legislation to establish a new memorial honoring victims and survivors of the Holocaust that will be constructed inside the Rockefeller Empire State Plaza in Albany.
“With the first ever state-sponsored Holocaust Memorial, we are honoring the victims and survivors of the Holocaust while ensuring that all visitors have a place to remember and reflect on what the Jewish community has endured,” Hochul said in a statement announcing the action. “New York has zero tolerance for hate of any kind, and with this memorial, we reaffirm our commitment to rooting out antisemitism and ensuring a peaceful and thriving future for all.”
Per the legislation, Senate Bill 5784, the construction of the memorial, the first ever to be sponsored by the state government, will be managed by New York’s Office of General Services (OGS). Hochul’s office said its completion will give “visitors the opportunity to reflect on issues that touch the core of our society” and “serve as a reminder of the dangers of antisemitism, racism, and all manifestations of intolerance.”
Dan Dembling, president of the Capital District Jewish Holocaust Memorial, a nonprofit from upstate New York which promotes knowledge of the Holocaust, said his group is “deeply grateful” to Hochul.
“At this time when antisemitism is so high and rhetoric is reminiscent of the Nazi era, the need to remember the Holocaust is critically important,” Dembling said. “As envisioned, this memorial will have statewide impact by helping to educate people about the consequences of prejudice left unchecked and hopefully inspire New Yorkers to stand up against hate in all its forms.”
The approval of the Rockefeller Plaza Holocaust Memorial comes amid a rise in antisemitic incidents in New York, especially in New York City, where, according to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), hundreds of anti-Jewish acts have been perpetrated in 2025 and a record 976 struck the city in 2024.
During the hate crime wave, the Jewish community in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn suffered a violent series of robberies and other attacks. In one instance, three masked men attempted to rob a Hasidic man after stalking him through the neighborhood. Before then, two men beat a middle-aged Hasidic man after he refused to surrender his cell phone in compliance with what appears to have been an attempted robbery. Additionally, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood, and less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face.
Hochul’s handling of the problem has been criticized by Jewish civil rights activists and Republican lawmakers. Many lambasted, for example, her endorsement in September of the candidacy of New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, a self-described socialist who is allied with far-left anti-Zionist groups and has vowed to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he visit the city. Mamdani has also supported boycotts targeting Israel and failed to denounce the slogan “globalize the intifada,” which has been widely interpreted as a call for terrorism against Jews and Israelis worldwide.
The endorsement prompted accusations that Hochul was contributing to the rising popularity and aggressiveness of political Islamism across the Five Boroughs. Days after Mamdani won his bid for mayor, anti-Israel protesters staged a riotous demonstration in which hundreds of people amassed outside a prominent New York City synagogue and clamored for violence against Jews.
Hochul’s political opponents blamed her leadership for the incident.
“This is [Gov.] Kathy Hochul’s New York,” US Rep. Elise Stefanik, a leading Republican candidate running to unseat Hochul in next year’s gubernatorial election, said on the X social media platform. “When New Yorkers were looking for strong leadership from our governor, instead of standing against antisemitic hate, Hochul chose to endorse a raging antisemite for mayor of NYC putting Jewish families at risk.”
Hochul’s office has maintained that her administration’s efforts to combat antisemitism lead the nation, pointing to its constituting a new Division of Human Rights, enacting a “first ever statewide plan to combat antisemitism,” and approving legislation which requires colleges in the state to hire a civil rights coordinator.
College campuses in the state continue to see shocking incidents of antisemitism, however.
In September, law enforcement agents filed hate crime charges against two Syracuse University students who they say forcefully gained entry into a Jewish fraternity’s off-campus house during Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, and heaved a bag of pork at a wall, causing its contents to splatter across the floor. Just days earlier, someone graffitied antisemitic messages inside the Weinstein residence hall at New York University.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Guinness World Records Tells Israeli Charity It’s Currently Not Accepting Submissions From Israel
People stand next to flags on the day the bodies of deceased Israeli hostages, Oded Lifschitz, Shiri Bibas, and her two children Kfir and Ariel Bibas, who were kidnapped during the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack by Hamas, are handed over under the terms of a ceasefire between Hamas and Israel, in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ammar Awad
An Israeli nonprofit organization had its application to the Guinness World Records rejected recently because the latter has a current policy of not accepting submissions from Israel or the Palestinian territories.
The Matnat Chaim charity, which helps people make voluntary kidney donations, said on Wednesday it contacted Guinness World Records (GWR) to discuss an event it is planning next month at the International Convention Center in Jerusalem where 2,000 Israeli kidney donors will gather in one place, which would be a world record. The charity hoped the event would be entered into the next Guinness Book of World Records. However the nonprofit’s request was rejected by GWR, which claimed that it is currently not processing record applications from Israel or the Palestinian territories.
“We deeply regretted the decision to involve politics in a purely life-saving effort. Humanity should be above all boundaries or conflicts,” the charity, whose name means “Gift of Life” in Hebrew, wrote in a Facebook post. “But the truth is, no record book can truly contain the greatness of our donors. Our true record is not measured by certificates hanging on the wall, but by 2,000 men, women, and children who got up from their sickbeds and returned to life. It is measured by thousands of families who received their loved ones back.”
“Guinness may choose not to list us in their book, but our wonderful donors are listed in the book of lif. And this is the most important record there is,” the charity added. “Next month, we will meet in the name of God, the Matnat Chaim family, at the Nation Buildings and break a record. We continue with all our might in our activities, because there are still lives to save.”
Guinness World Records said in a statement on Wednesday that the policy has been place since November 2023, shortly after the war in Gaza started following Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre across southern Israel,
“We are aware of just how sensitive this is at the moment,” GWR explained. “We truly do believe in record breaking for everyone, everywhere but unfortunately in the current climate we are not generally processing record applications from the Palestinian Territories or Israel, or where either is given as the attempt location, with the exception of those done in cooperation with a UN humanitarian aid relief agency.”
GWR said it is “monitoring the situation carefully” and the record application policy is subject to a monthly review. “We hope to be in a position to receive new enquiries soon,” it added.
Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Sa’ar called the policy “inexcusable” in a post on X. He said Israelis “expect and demand that this twisted decision be revoked immediately.”