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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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Far-Left, Anti-Israel Candidates Flop in Illinois Congressional Races
Kat Abughazaleh (D-IL) participates in a door knocking event while campaigning for the 2026 Illinois Democratic primary election in Evanston, Illinois, US, March 14, 2026. Abughazaleh is running for Congress in Illinois’ 9th district. Photo: REUTERS/Jim Vondruska
A series of Democratic primary contests in Illinois on Tuesday delivered a decisive setback to progressive candidates aligned with the party’s left flank, underscoring the continued strength of more moderate voices and signaling potential limits to the electoral appeal of anti-Israel messaging within the party.
Across multiple congressional districts throughout the midwestern state, candidates backed by prominent progressive and anti-Israel groups failed to gain traction with voters, losing to opponents who emphasized pragmatism, coalition-building, and a more traditional Democratic policy agenda. The results mark what some observers are calling a sweeping defeat for the “Squad”-aligned movement in one of the country’s largest Democratic strongholds.
In Illinois’ 9th District, left-wing challenger Kat Abughazaleh was defeated by Daniel Biss, another progressive candidate with experience in local governance and a more moderate position on Israel, by a margin of 4 points. Notably, Abughazaleh, who is of Palestinian descent, repeatedly accused Israel of committing a “genocide” in Gaza and vowed to vote against additional US aid to the Jewish state. Biss, who is Jewish and an Israeli-American, issued criticism of Israel’s military operations in Gaza but refused to accuse the country of “genocide.” Biss has also expressed admiration for the country and its people despite criticizing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the foremost pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, celebrated Abughazaleh’s defeat on Tuesday night. Notably, Biss did not accept financial assistance from AIPAC and repudiated the group in his victory speech, instead boosting J-Street, a progressive Zionist group.
“This district understands nuance and wants someone who accepts the reality of competing, even contradictory, priorities and values and realities. That point of view is not the point of view of AIPAC. AIPAC spends an unbelievable amount of money. Over $7 million to try to buy this seat,” Biss said in celebratory remarks.
“So enough about AIPAC. May tonight be the last night I utter their name. This victory belongs to J Street,” Biss continued.
In a statement, AIPAC lamented the defeat of their preferred candidate Laura Fine, while celebrating the successful thwarting of Abughazaleh.
“While disappointed Laura Fine didn’t prevail, the pro-Israel community is proud to have helped defeat would-be Squad members Kat Abughazaleh and Bushra Amiwala, who centered their campaigns on attacking Israel and demonizing pro-Israel Americans,” the group said in a statement.
Similar outcomes unfolded in the 8th and 2nd districts, where left-leaning insurgents fell short against candidates with broader institutional support and more moderate platforms. In the 8th District, AIPAC-supported Melissa Bean defeated left-wing insurgent Junaid Ahmed. Ahmed received endorsements from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (D-NY), one of the most vocal critics of Israel in the US Congress, and Justice Democrats, a populist, far-left organizing group. Ahmed positioned himself as a staunch opponent of Israel, accusing Jerusalem of committing “genocide” in Gaza.
Donna Miller, who competed in the 2nd District, pulled off an improbable upset victory over the well-financed and establishment-backed Jesse Jackson Jr. AIPAC had poured approximately $2.4 million into the race, according to reports.
The outcomes come after months of intense campaigning and significant outside spending. Pro-Israel advocacy organizations and allied political action committees invested heavily in the races, backing candidates who supported a strong US-Israel relationship and opposing those whose campaigns centered heavily on criticism of Israel.
Supporters of such efforts argue the results reflect voter skepticism toward candidates who prioritize divisive foreign policy positions over domestic concerns. They say Democratic primary voters, even in reliably blue districts, remain broadly supportive of Israel and wary of rhetoric they view as overly ideological or polarizing.
Amid the war in Gaza, AIPAC had become a new flashpoint within the Democratic Party. Democratic hopefuls across the country were pressed about their connections to AIPAC and were pressured to disavow any funding from the group. Further, various surveys suggested that Democratic voters responded less favorably to candidates after learning they harbored connections to AIPAC. However, the mixed results on Tuesday indicate that anti-AIPAC sentiment was not as animating as left-wing pundits predicted.
Progressive groups, however, downplayed the failures of their ideologically aligned candidates, pointing to the scale of outside spending in the races and arguing that well-funded campaigns overwhelmed grassroots challengers and shaped voter perceptions through aggressive advertising. Some also contended that messaging in the races blurred ideological distinctions, making it more difficult for voters to differentiate between candidates.
The Illinois results could carry national implications as Democrats look ahead to future elections. While progressive candidates have found success in certain districts, particularly in urban areas, the latest outcomes suggest that their coalition may face challenges in more competitive or diverse electorates.
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Message From a Democratic Legislator: Iran’s Long Oppressed People Deserve to Be Free
Cars burn in a street during an anti-regime protest in Tehran, Iran, Jan. 8, 2026. Photo: Stringer/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Yesterday’s election results in Illinois sent an unmistakable message: the American people are rejecting the far left’s reflexive opposition to the war with Iran.
In Illinois, every member of the Squad on the ballot lost their primary, a stunning repudiation of the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) wing of our party that has spent years excusing Iranian aggression, undermining our alliance with Israel, and treating supporters of human rights and democracy as warmongers. The voters have spoken, and I am proud to stand with them.
As an elected Democrat, I have no interest in endless wars in the Middle East. What is happening in Iran is, I believe, not a repeat of the mistakes of the Bush administration. It is instead an American-led effort to put an end to the war that Iran has been waging against its people, its neighbors, and the United States of America for the past 47 years.
The people of Iran have long suffered at the hands of their government. The Islamic Republic denies basic human rights to Iranians, particularly women, the LGBTQ+ community, and religious and ethnic minorities. As a Democrat, the Islamic Republic stands in opposition to every value that I cherish.
Iran’s now former Supreme Leader, the theocrat Ayatollah Khamenei, deserves no mourning. On the other hand, Iran’s long-suffering women deserve both our prayers and our efforts to eliminate their tormentors. The women of Iran are subject to a puritanical head-to-toe dress code in public. They are also subject to “male guardianship” by their fathers, husbands, or other male relatives.
The situation is equally as bad for Iran’s beleaguered LGBTQ+ community. Homosexuality is illegal in Iran and can be punished by death, sometimes carried out by hanging victims from giant construction cranes in the center of major cities, a medieval punishment with a surreal modern twist.
Non-Muslims are similarly persecuted. Jews, Christians, and Zoroastrians have some protections as “Peoples of the Book,” but these are quite limited in practice. Iranian Jews have been arbitrarily arrested and tortured for allegedly “spying for Israel,” and Iranian Christians have been sentenced to up to 280 years in prison for religious practices as simple as putting up a Christmas tree. Believers in other faiths are not tolerated at all by the regime.
Against such intolerable oppression, it is no wonder that the Iranian people have repeatedly expressed their desire for change.
The Iranian people are considered the most pro-American population in the Middle East. Yet every time the people have sought redress of their grievances, they have been violently crushed by their government. Although the people of Iran have elected reformist presidents, these elected presidents are figureheads who are sidelined by the unelected “Supreme Leader.”
Beyond its borders, Iran has waged war and slaughtered civilians in an effort to export its “Islamic Revolution.”
Iran militarily supported the unpopular Assad dictatorship in Syria until it was finally overthrown in 2024 after more than 13 years of civil war in Syria. Iran has also supported terrorist groups like Hezbollah and the Houthis in their bids for power against the legitimate governments of Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen. Iran also aided Hamas, which seized power by force in Gaza in 2007, enabling its brutal invasion of Israel on October 7, 2023, during which more than 1,200 civilians were massacred, including dozens of Americans, and more than 250 (including 12 Americans) were taken hostage to Gaza.
When Operation Epic Fury began, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) tweeted, “President Trump, along with his right-wing extremist Israeli ally Benjamin Netanyahu, has begun an illegal, premeditated, and unconstitutional war.”
Senator Sanders could not be more mistaken. The right-wing extremists waging a premeditated war are the fanatical Islamist clerics in Tehran. This is a war they have been waging since 1979 against their own people, their neighbors, and against Americans.
The goal of Operation Epic Fury is not endless conflict; it is to end this conflict once and for all. A better future is possible — a future where Iran can join the community of free nations, where women can live without fear of being beaten or even murdered for not covering their hair, where minorities can practice their faith openly, where LGBTQ+ people can live openly, and where citizens can choose their leaders through real elections.
I believe that one day, the Iranian people will experience freedom and build the peaceful, democratic nation they deserve. And I believe that Operation Epic Fury will lead to the future that the Iranian people deserve.
Democratic state legislator Rep. Alma Hernandez represents Arizona’s 20th House District in Tucson.
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US House Report Finds Faculty Driving Campus Antisemitism While Institutions Protect Them
Protesters gather at the gates of Columbia University, in support of student protesters who barricaded themselves in Hamilton Hall, in New York City, US, April 30, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/David Dee Delgado
A new damning report by Republicans on the US House Committee on Education and the Workforce slammed higher education officials for having done little to abate faculty antisemitism, as the issue continues amid allegedly craven leadership and institutional whitewashing of professorial misconduct.
Titled, “How Campuses Became Hotbeds: The Rise of Radical Antisemitism on College Campuses,” the report is comprehensive, chronicling what has been described as the “campus antisemitism crisis” from the hours and days following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. In the wake of the attack, anti-Zionist student and faculty groups throughout the US celebrated the atrocities while, according to lawmakers, being protected by college administrations even as they escalated their conduct to violence, harassment, and flagrant violations of federal civil rights law.
It adds to a growing body of literature which explores institutional protection afforded to faculty who utter antisemitic comments against Jews similar to what other colleges have condemned when directed at other minority groups.
The report listed a slew of examples: Haverford College president Wendy Raymond extolled a professor who called Jewish community advocates “racist genocidaires”; University of California president Richard Lyons described a professor who cheered Oct. 7, while proclaiming that he “could have been one of those broke through,” as a “fine scholar”; and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) refused to rule in favor of a Jewish student who filed a discrimination complaint disclosing a pattern of alleged abuse perpetrated by linguistic professor Michel DeGraff, which included his threatening to single out the student as an example of “Zionist mind infection.”
“Antisemitism continues to spread like wildfire at schools across the nation,” committee chairman Rep. Tim Walberg (R-MI) said in a statement on Tuesday. “Over the past several years, we’ve seen university leaders surrender to the radical demands of terror supporting mobs targeting Jewish students and faculty. This weakness has emboldened hatred and allowed campuses to devolve into hotbeds of radical antisemitism.”
He added, “Republicans remain committed to holding college and university leaders accountable for their failures. Time and time again, school leaders appeared before my committee and failed to take responsibility for the hatred they let spiral out of control.”
Colleges need robust oversight from Congress, the report concluded, imploring higher education to do its part by adopting the widely recognized International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, reforming admissions to foster viewpoint diversity, and fighting antisemitism as doggedly as it has combatted other forms of racism.
Another similar report, released in February by the AMCHA Initiative, touched on faculty antisemitism in the University of California (UC) system. It documented dozens of examples of faculty antisemitism, including their calling for driving Jewish institutions off campus; founding pro-Hamas, Faculty for Justice in Palestine (FJP) chapters; and endorsing institutional adoption of the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel. It also said that FJP chapters offered more than supportive words, “defending and helping orchestrate boycott-aligned activism (including encampment demands), seeking to deplatform Israeli speakers, and filing an amicus brief … that denied Zionism’s place within Jewish identity and defended exclusionary encampment conduct toward Zionist Jewish students, including expulsion from campus spaces.”
The AMCHA Initiative argued that the University of California system is a microcosm of faculty antisemitism, a vidid portrait of “how concentrated networks of faculty activists on each campus, often operating through academic units and faculty-led advocacy formations, convert institutional platforms into vehicles for organized anti-Zionist advocacy and mobilization.”
The AMCHA Initiative explored faculty antisemitism before, stressing that while student activities drive headlines, faculty act with impunity and wield governing power which shapes the campus culture and limits the power of college presidents to oppose them.
In September 2024, the organization published a groundbreaking study which showed that FJP is fueling antisemitic hate crimes, efforts to impose divestment on endowments, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Using data analysis, AMCHA researchers said they were able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FJP on a college campuses increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
The Algemeiner has previously covered this issue as well. In February, for example, it learned that, according to a lawsuit, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University assigned a Jewish student a project on “what Jews do to make themselves such a hated group.”
Similar incidents have come at a fast clip since the Hamas-led Oct. 7 massacre: A Cornell University professor praised the terrorist group’s atrocities, which included mass sexual assaults; a Columbia University professor exalted Hamas terrorists who paraglided into a music festival to murder Israeli youth as the “air force of the Palestinian resistance”; and a Harvard University FJP chapter shared an antisemitic cartoon which depicted Zionists as murderers of Blacks and Arabs.
In Tuesday’s statement, Wahlberg said the committee’s report should put higher education on notice.
“If university leaders forget their legal responsibility to address discrimination of any form on campus, my colleagues will remind them.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.