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A Holocaust survivor and her family saw ‘Leopoldstadt.’ The Broadway play told their story.
(New York Jewish Week) — On a Wednesday evening last month, three generations of a Jewish family made their way to their seats at the Longacre Theater to see “Leopoldstadt,” Tom Stoppard’s epic Broadway play about the tragedies that befall an extended Jewish family in the first half of the 20th century in Vienna.
The date of the family gathering was a significant one: Nov. 9, the 84th anniversary of the Nazi pogroms known as Kristallnacht. And in the audience was Fini Konstat, 96, who lived in the once thriving Jewish neighborhood after which the play is named, and witnessed the horrors it portrays first-hand. Alongside her were her daughter and her son-in-law, Renee and James Akers, and her oldest great-grandchild, Lexi Levin, 23.
When Konstat was a child, she lived in a “nice apartment” in Leopoldstadt. But exactly 84 years to the day of their theater date, “I was running with my father, seeing all the Jewish stores with all their windows broken,” she told Levin in a short video her great-granddaughter filmed before the curtain rose.
“It’s such a blessing for me to be here with you,” Levin said to her great-grandmother in response. “Ninety-six years old, survived a pandemic, at a Broadway show in New York City.”
Left: Fini as a child on the balcony of her apartment in Leopoldstadt. Right: Fini with her three children in front of the very same building, pictured in 2015. (Courtesy)
Since the beginning of its Broadway run in mid-September, “Leopoldstadt,” with its depiction of a prosperous Viennese family on the brink of destruction, has moved audiences to tears and inspired deep reflections on the Holocaust. Based on the celebrated playwright’s own family history — of which he was barely aware while growing up in England — it has provided a stark counterpoint to news about rising antisemitism and the celebrities who have been purveying it.
But for Konstat, the play was much more personal. “When I heard the word ‘Leopoldstadt,’ this alone gave me lots of thrills and memories,” Konstat, who is known in her family as Mimi, told the New York Jewish Week in accented English. She recalled how Levin, who recently moved to the city, invited her to fly to New York to see one of Broadway’s hottest tickets.
“Leopoldstadt,” she repeated, her voice breaking. “The second district. That’s where we lived.”
At the end of Stoppard’s five-act play, audiences learn that most of the Jewish characters had perished under the Nazis — of the four generations in the show, just three cousins survive to carry on the family’s legacy.
For Konstat too, she and her parents were among the very few in their extended family to survive the Holocaust. “Almost all of them went to Auschwitz or other camps,” Konstat said. “My mother was a twin and only the twins remained alive. [My mother’s] five other siblings and my grandmother perished.”
L-R: Renee Akers, James Akers, Lexi Levin and Fini Konstat at the Longacre Theater to see Tom Stoppard’s ‘Leopoldstadt on Broadway,’ Nov. 9, 2022. (Courtesy)
In a Zoom conversation held over Thanksgiving weekend, Konstat, surrounded by two of her daughters, two of her granddaughters and three of her great-granddaughters, shared what the play meant to her — and how her family has restored what she lost.
In the months after Kristallnacht in 1938, Konstat and her parents hid in a neighbor’s apartment; Konstat recalls hiding under the duvet when German soldiers showed up. Eventually the family fled to Turkey, and then to India, before settling down in Mexico City. There, the teenage Fini met her husband David, also a survivor who escaped Poland. The two of them began to write the rest of their story — starting with the birth of the first of their three children in 1948.
Unlike many Holocaust survivors, Fini and David Konstat were open about their experiences during the war, instilling a sense of pride and duty to remember in their children — something that eventually extended to their grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
“They were proud to speak about how they survived this,” said the Konstats’ middle child, Renee Konstat Akers. “Their life was an odyssey. They had the courage to do things that you would never think were possible. We grew up grateful knowing how our family survived in that incredible way.”
Each child moved to different places as they grew up and got married. Manuel, the oldest, stayed in Mexico. Renee married an American and moved to the Midwest, and Denise, the youngest, to Houston. Each became deeply involved in their Jewish communities, sending their children (Konstat’s grandchildren) to Jewish day schools, celebrating Jewish holidays and participating in synagogue life.
“The word ‘miracle’ really does not feel like an understatement in this scenario,” said Sherry Levin, one of Konstat’s grandchildren. “When we think about what it took for my grandmother and grandfather to survive and how they were able to intersect in Mexico, and such an amazing multi-generational family has come to fruition, it feels miraculous.”
Pictured here on their 40th anniversary, Fini and her husband David met in Mexico City after both had fled Europe. They were married 54 years before David died in 2001. (Courtesy)
Reviews of the show have ranged from rhapsodic to resistant, with some critics suggesting the play is simplistic and obvious in its story-telling or that it is less a well-crafted play than a well-meaning lesson on the Holocaust.
But just as the Merz family clashes and argues about everything from antisemitism to intermarriage to socialism in “Leopoldstadt,” each generation of the Konstat family that saw “Leopoldstadt” that night came away with something different — a reaction influenced by their age, their Jewish identity, their nationality and their relationship with their family.
For Konstat, the arc of “Leopoldstadt” was so familiar that it hardly stirred her. “It was just very happy watching it and enjoying it and enjoying my children with me, “ she told the New York Jewish Week. “I didn’t think about anybody else.”
Akers, too, felt an intense familiarity with the story, and, perhaps toughened by her own family history, didn’t experience an intense emotional reaction. Her own parents’ lives gave Akers a sense of purpose in her life — for example, in the 1990s, she was passionate about helping resettle Jews fleeing the former Soviet Union. With her own children, she instilled in them a strong sense of Jewish purpose in their work, their education and their family.
“I was a sandwich in between seeing my mother and my granddaughter,” she said of her “Leopoldstadt” experience. “I was emotional thinking of my mom who went through it, but I was more emotional about seeing my granddaughter be so moved. It really hit her at her core.”
Indeed, it was the youngest member of the family present that night who was most shaken by the play.
“It really felt like a gift to my family and to me, specifically, to be able to see what Mimi’s life looked like before the war,” Lexi Levin said, surmising that, as a fourth-generation survivor, she is among the first in her family to be able to start processing the loss on a grander scale.
“For the first time in my life, I really felt the magnitude of her loss,” she added. “I’ve known her story and I’ve been inspired by her story to be involved with my own Jewish causes, but I have never been able to access and truly empathize with her grief and what it meant that she lost the entire family she had before this one that she created.”
Turning to her great-grandmother, as if trying to make her understand the exact precision of the show, Levin explained, “It’s a play about generations and the family was large and then it was small.”
“You made it large again,” she said, referring to the generations of family that had assembled — in the Broadway theater and again over Thanksgiving weekend. “Look at this room.”
Pictured on her 90th birthday in 2017, Fini Konstat now has three children, ten grandchildren and twenty great-grandchildren. (Courtesy)
There was a coda for the family after the curtain went down. The day after the show, the family wanted to see the 1907 “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I,” one of Gustav Klimt’s most famous paintings, which currently hangs at the Neue Galerie on the Upper East Side. A version of the portrait’s true story — how a painting of a socialite from a prominent Viennese Jewish family was looted by the Nazis and the family’s efforts to get it back — features in the plot of “Leopoldstadt.”
The gallery, however, was closed on the only day the family could visit. After a call to the management at the gallery, which showcases the German and Austrian art collections of Jewish philanthropist Ronald S. Lauder, the gallery’s director arranged a private tour.
“It felt like we were in a puzzle and everything was finally coming together,” said Akers. “It was an emotional, emotional time.”
When the week was over and the emotions were spent, Konstat and the Akers returned home with a reignited passion for their family story. But there was yet another twist: In addition to the whirlwind trip Levin planned for her grandparents and for Mimi, she had been undergoing the laborious process of applying for Austrian citizenship. Six members in Konstat’s large family have undertaken the process over the last two years.
“Part of the motivation was knowing Mimi’s story, and knowing that she survived because her mother had citizenship in Turkey,” Levin said. “That story was just inspirational to me, knowing that dual citizenship was what saved our family.” She convinced her brother and mother to apply for Austrian citizenship as well.
The day after her grandmother and great-grandmother left New York, Levin called them with news from her small apartment in Manhattan: An Austrian passport had arrived in the mail. The curtain was rising on another act.
Konstat was surprised at how interested her family was in getting Austrian citizenship. “I feel very good,” she said. “I’m very happy.”
“Does it make you emotional?” Levin asked her during the Zoom call with the New York Jewish Week.
“It does — of course it does. I used to love Austria,” she said. “I was sad to leave. I was disappointed. We never thought of coming back. I was happy to be able to escape. Thank God we made it out of hell.”
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Trump wants to remake Washington — Hitler tried to do the same to Berlin
“It was natural that I also followed my passion for architecture. My faith increased that after many years my dreams would become reality. I was firmly convinced that I would win fame as a builder.”
–Adolf Hitler
“I own buildings. I’m a builder; I know how to build. Nobody can build like I can build.”
–Donald Trump
Adolf Hitler personally drew up architectural plans to remake Berlin into a 1,000-year monument to himself with a three-mile-long “Avenue of Splendors,” on one end an Arch of Triumph that would dwarf the Paris original, and on the other, the domed Hall of the People, which would have been the largest enclosed structure in the world.
Hitler’s grandiose remodeling schemes were suspended in 1943, in order to redirect resources to the war he had begun.
Like Hitler, Donald Trump is also busy designing and creating monuments to himself, including an arch even larger than the one Hitler had planned for Berlin. Unlike Hitler, Trump is proceeding at a fevered pace on completing his legacy projects despite the soaring costs of a war he began.
History is replete with monarchs, emperors, pharaohs and tyrants who sought to immortalize themselves with monuments. In modern times, what sets Trump and Hitler apart is their decision to personally draw up a plan to entirely change the look of a capital city to project their powers.
Hitler began sketching his plans to remake Berlin in the 1920s, years before he came to power. In his postwar book Inside the Third Reich, Hitler architect Albert Speer recalled Hitler showing him two sketches the Nazi leader had already made of his own concept, hoping to recruit the architect to the project. In 1937, the Hitler tasked Speer with making it happen.
Speer started by making a model of the redesigned city, to be renamed Germania. In his book, Speer wrote of Hitler’s glee while inspecting the scaled model.
“He bent down, almost kneeling, his eye an inch or so above the level of the model, in order to have the right perspective, and while looking he spoke with unusual vivacity. These were the rare times when he relinquished his usual stiffness. In no other situation did I see him so lively, so spontaneous, so relaxed,” Speer wrote.
Hitler admired the imperial architectural styles of Rome, Vienna and Paris, but came up with designs for Berlin that were meant to surpass those cities not in elegance, but in expressions of Teutonic power.
The Germania model designed by Speer looks like an elaborate Wagnerian stage set: Visitors disembarking from a new train station would immediately see the 380-foot-tall Arch of Triumph, and as they passed beneath they would follow a wide boulevard lined with about a dozen monumental ministry buildings made of hand-hewn stone, a Soldiers’ Hall with a crypt for the tombs of German field marshals, and, at the terminus of the avenue, the monstrous centerpiece of the whole project — the domed Hall of the People, with enough space to hold 150,000 people.
“He wanted the biggest of everything to glorify his works and magnify his pride,” Speer wrote.
The New Reich Chancellery went up, and some other pieces of Germania were completed. But as Hitler’s regime focused on building concentration camps and death camps, and German invasion forces spread across Europe and the Soviet Union, Hitler had to divert resources to pay for his war crimes.
The Reich suspended work on Germania in 1943. Hitler’s original idea was to complete the transformation in 1950, creating Germania as a new Rome, capital of a vanquished continent. But when the Soviet army entered Berlin, the city had been reduced to ruins. Hitler’s Germania fantasy came to a bloody end on April 30, 1945 when he put a bullet in his head inside the Führerbunker.
Like Hitler, Donald Trump seems to favor classical architectural styles for public buildings, although his love of gaudy glitter – on display inside the White House and at Trump’s own properties — contrasts with Hitler’s preference for a Teutonic austereness.
A few days ago Trump gave the White House press pool a tour of work that he has directed to be done on and around the White House. It reminded me of Speer’s description of Hitler’s glee while inspecting Speer’s model of Germania.
“I’m fixing the country. We’re fixing the White House too. One thing I know how to do is build,” said Trump, who spoke of having columns of the White House repaired, its exterior cleaned, of work on his ballroom and the “military complex” that would be built beneath it. He staged the dog-and-pony show to show off a helipad that was under construction.
“It’s ridiculous the way this place was taken care of. Nobody, including presidents, they didn’t see it. But I see it because I was very good at real estate, like maybe the best in a lot of ways,” said the man who went through multiple bankruptcies and has a history of failed business ventures: Trump University, Trump Steaks, and Trump’s airline, to name only a subset of available examples.
Despite Trump’s boasts, his vanity projects have hit some rough patches. There’s the reflecting pool debacle, a court ruling that his name had to come off the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Some Senate Republicans tried to stop him from spending taxpayer money on his garish ballroom.
But because of a Supreme Court ruling, it looks like the ballroom will go up after all. And Trump is not about to abandon other legacy projects – like his Triumphal Arch, and a National Garden of American Heroes.
Trump’s powers are cracking faster than he can build these monuments to himself. His approval ratings are abysmal. Global respect for America is tanking. Allies who have tried to mollify him are beginning to defy him. Iran has outsmarted him. Former MAGA loyalists like Marjorie Taylor Greene and Tucker Carlson have abandoned him. Trump is increasingly looking like an empty shell – a man who has chosen building narcissistic monuments, and corruptly enriching himself and his family, over paying heed to Americans who are suffering because of his self-aggrandizing rule.
Economist Paul Krugman just released a video titled Der Untergang, and subtitled “How badly will Trump punish America?” Der Untergang, German for “downfall,” is the title of a 2004 movie about Hitler’s last days in the Führerbunker. Krugman says that Trump’s obsession with his vanity projects is an indication that Trump knows his powers are rapidly vanishing, and that Trump is becoming perilously desperate.
“In many ways he is behaving like somebody who knows that his days of supreme power are about to end,” Krugman said.
Krugman argues that Trump is showing a deranged proclivity to tear things down rather than preserve them, as evidenced by his demolition of the beloved East Wing. And now Trump is threatening to raze the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, simply because he can’t get his name on it.
History has shown how perilous things can become when a despot finds himself backed into a corner. As we approach the mid-term elections, we should all worry about the wreckage Trump is capable of wreaking while watching his powers vanish. Trump’s downfall, whenever and however it may come, must not also be America’s.
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John Galliano bows out of Met exhibition as backlash over antisemitism mounts
(JTA) — John Galliano withdrew from a planned exhibition of his work at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in response to a rapidly escalating controversy over the museum’s decision to honor the fashion designer despite his history of antisemitic and racist remarks.
Galliano said Monday that, after discussions with the Met and others involved in the exhibition, he had decided that it was best for the show not to take place “at this time.” He said he remained accountable for the pain caused by his past words, particularly to Jews and Asians, and recognized that an exhibition honoring his work could be painful for some. The Met said it agreed with his decision.
The reversal came less than a month after the Met announced that Galliano would be the subject of its spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition, a rare honor that would have made him only the third living designer to receive a solo show there. The exhibition was to open in conjunction with the Met Gala, one of New York’s biggest annual cultural and celebrity events.
Opposition to the exhibition appeared to mount steadily in recent weeks. Early public pushback came from Dana Thomas, Galliano’s biographer, who wrote in an Aug. 6 New York Times guest essay that the Met had made a serious error in choosing to honor him. The criticism then broadened, with Jewish leaders, museum donors and New York politicians publicly urging the museum to reconsider.
Those criticizing the exhibition were New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin, who called the decision deeply painful for Jewish New Yorkers. Prominent Met donor Alice Tisch described the planned exhibition as a “whitewash,” according to the Times.
The reversal is also a setback for Anna Wintour, Condé Nast’s chief content officer and the driving force behind the Met Gala. She had championed Galliano for decades and was among the Met figures most closely associated with bringing the exhibition to the museum.
The controversy was complicated by the fact that some prominent rabbis had actually met with Galliano before the exhibition was announced and had come away believing that his repentance was sincere, as JTA reported earlier this month.
Rabbi Rick Jacobs, president of the Union for Reform Judaism, said Galliano had shown the contrition necessary to earn his return to the fashion world. Rabbi Joshua Davidson of Congregation Emanu-El, a Reform synagogue in New York, likewise said he was convinced by Galliano’s statements of remorse and his efforts to educate himself about Judaism and the Holocaust. Neither rabbi endorsed the Met’s decision to honor Galliano, however. Rather, both told the museum that if it proceeded, it had a responsibility to make Galliano’s antisemitic conduct and the lessons of his repentance an explicit part of the exhibition.
That distinction was reflected in the Met’s original plans. Andrew Bolton, the Costume Institute’s curator, said in announcing the exhibition that it would address Galliano’s antisemitic and anti-Asian conduct, as well as his firing from Dior, a hate speech conviction in France and his subsequent treatment for addiction and public acknowledgment of his actions.
Galliano, among the most celebrated designers in the world, was fired by Christian Dior in 2011 after a video surfaced showing him praising Hitler and making antisemitic remarks in a tirade in a Paris cafe, and directing an anti-Asian slur at the partner of a Jewish woman. A French court convicted him of making public insults based on race, religion and ethnicity.
After entering treatment for substance abuse, he embarked on a process of rehabilitation and eventually returned to the fashion industry. Abraham Foxman, then national director of the Anti-Defamation League, met privately with Galliano repeatedly; in 2013 the ADL said that Galliano had demonstrated “true contrition.”
After the initial announcement of the exhibition, Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO and national director of the ADL, noted that the organization had “long since accepted his apology,” but added that he understood “why some Jews may question the decision to include Galliano’s work in an exhibit given the massive spike in antisemitism in recent years.”
In a statement Monday, Greenblatt appeared to take a harder line in welcoming Galliano’s withdrawal.
“With antisemitism at crisis levels, the Met honoring John Galliano at this moment was misguided, and even Galliano ultimately recognized what the Met should have done from the start,” Greenblatt wrote on X. “This was the wrong move at the wrong moment. Timing matters.”
Galliano’s withdrawal leaves the Met without a planned spring 2027 Costume Institute exhibition. The museum said information about a replacement exhibition and the 2027 Met Gala will be announced later.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Julie Moos Named as the Forward’s New Editor-in-Chief & Chief Content Officer
The Forward today announced the appointment of Julie Moos as Editor-in-Chief & Chief Content Officer. This newly created executive position merges newsroom leadership with audience strategy, positioning the nation’s premier independent Jewish news outlet to accelerate digital growth and serve audiences across platforms.
The appointment was announced by Forward Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen.
Moos, who joined the Forward in 2024 as Managing Editor for Audience, previously served as Interim Editor-in-Chief and Vice President for Audience & Strategy. In these roles, she advanced the publication’s digital content strategy and helped secure major grant funding, including a prestigious Luce Foundation award to support the “Holy Ground” series chronicling Jewish life and reinvention across rural and small-town America.
Under Moos’ leadership, the Forward has hit unprecedented growth milestones:
- Record Audience Scale: Surpassed 100 million total audience views in 2025 across web, video, audio and social channels, as measured by Brandwatch.
- Social Acceleration: Grew social media reach by 280%, expanding video reporting to meet the audience where they are.
- Critical Acclaim: Led the Jewish journalism field in reporting awards, including record recognition from the New York and Los Angeles press associations.
- Product Innovation: Successfully relaunched specialized newsletter offerings, including Antisemitism Decoded.
“Julie’s new role marks a pivotal shift toward a fully integrated structure that meets the demands of the rapidly changing news environment,” said Feddersen. “By bringing editorial stewardship and audience strategy under unified leadership, we can ensure our high-impact reporting meets readers where they consume media today, expanding our reach and amplifying the Forward’s mission to elevate issues vital to the American Jewish community.”
Joel F. Brown, Chairman of the Forward Board of Directors, added: “Julie has made important contributions to the Forward from her first days with us and our franchise will accelerate its growth significantly under her editorial leadership. She has a deep and authentic devotion to Jewish communal life which she braids brilliantly with her excellence in journalism and her advanced command of media distribution strategy. I am confident that her leadership will ensure the Forward remains the premier, trusted media source for American Jews.”
Moos said, “I’m honored to lead this incredible team at a moment of dramatic change in the Jewish world and in the media. For over a century, the Forward has been a trusted guide and voice of Jewish life in America. Today, that requires deep, principled reporting, groundbreaking storytelling and ongoing innovation — from dynamic newsletters to video and live events — to ensure our work invites conversation and connection everywhere people watch, listen, read, talk and meet.”
Moos is a nationally recognized editor and media leader who has served in senior roles at McClatchy Media, the National Press Club Journalism Institute and The Poynter Institute. She edited the New York Times bestseller President Obama Election 2008: A Collection of Newspaper Front Pages Selected by the Poynter Institute.
She lives in Alexandria, VA. She is a graduate of Barnard College and earned a nonprofit management certificate from Georgetown University, where she taught digital journalism at the graduate level. She serves as an ambassador for Central Synagogue’s online community, The Neighborhood, and co-hosts the DC-area chapter. Julie has served for decades as a synagogue board member, staff member and active congregant in North Carolina, Florida and Chicago.
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