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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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Antisemitism in Switzerland Hits Alarming Levels as Online Incidents Surge, Reports Warn
A pro-Hamas demonstration in Zurich, Switzerland, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: IMAGO/dieBildmanufaktur via Reuters Connect
Antisemitism in Switzerland surged to alarming levels last year, with two reports released on Tuesday warning that hostility and violence targeting Jews are intensifying across the country amid the broader fallout from war involving Israel in the Middle East.
On Tuesday, the Intercommunity Coordination Against Antisemitism and Defamation (CICAD) released its 2025 annual report on hate crimes, documenting a 36 percent rise in antisemitic incidents against the local Jewish community in French-speaking Switzerland compared to 2024.
With a total of 2,438 antisemitic acts last year, CICAD’s latest report marks the highest level of such incidents since the organization began monitoring them in 2003.
Based on the latest data, the association warned of a worsening trend, with incidents classified as “grave and serious” rising 16 percent — from 109 cases in 2024 to 127 in 2025.
This week, the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG), in collaboration with the Foundation Against Racism and Antisemitism (GRA), also released their annual report on antisemitic outrages in German-, Italian-, and Romansh-speaking Switzerland for the past year.
Their latest data also shows that antisemitism “remains at a persistently high level” across the country, with tensions further fueled by the ongoing war in the Middle East.
“Since Oct. 7, 2023, the war in the Middle East has been the main long-term trigger for antisemitic incidents in Switzerland,” the organizations wrote in their report, referring to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel more than two years ago.
“This influence remained significant in 2025. No return to pre-Oct. 7 levels has been observed to date,” they continued.
SIG and GRA’s latest report found the biggest surge of antisemitic activity in online spaces, with 2,185 incidents recorded in 2025 — an increase of nearly 37 percent from 1,596 the previous year.
Most incidents took place on the Telegram messaging app, with online newspaper comments coming in second, and the bulk of the reported content centered on conspiracy theories.
With such figures, the report warned that antisemitism is no longer an isolated occurrence but a structural issue, cautioning against the normalization of antisemitic rhetoric.
Even though the study found that real-world antisemitic incidents fell to 177 in 2025 from 221 in 2024 — a decrease of roughly 20 percent — the number remains about three times higher than levels recorded before the Oct. 7 atrocities.
The GRA and SIG urged local authorities to ensure the sustainable protection of Jewish life in Switzerland, calling for long-term security measures, increased investment in prevention and education, and a stronger commitment to monitoring antisemitic threats.
“Effectively combating antisemitism is not a one-off task, but an ongoing responsibility of the state and society,” the report said.
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DOGE Staffers Used ChatGPT to Cut Holocaust History Grants During Counter-DEI Purges: Lawsuit
Elon Musk holds up a chainsaw onstage during the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in National Harbor, Maryland, US, Feb. 20, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nathan Howard
The US Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) relied on the ChatGPT large language model program when deciding to cut grants for Jewish-related history programs, including one focused on violence against women during the Holocaust, according to a new class-action lawsuit.
DOGE staffer Justin Fox is named as one of the defendants in the suit filed in US federal court on Friday by the Authors Guild, which alleges that he was the one who developed the method of using ChatGPT prompts to determine which grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) — also a defendant — to cut in the name of eliminating any programs related to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives.
Fox said in a deposition that he regarded any grant related to a minority group as qualifying as “DEI” and thus up for elimination. When asked about a grant he chose to cancel related to violence against women during the Holocaust, he responded, “It’s a Jewish — specifically focused on Jewish culture and amplifying the marginalized voices of the females in that culture.” Fox added, “It’s inherently related to DEI for that reason.”
The Trump administration has made a point of targeting DEI programs, especially on university campuses, arguing they foster bigotry by replacing merit with identity-based preferences. Many Jewish groups have criticized DEI initiatives for often excluding Jews, ignoring antisemitism, or characterizing Jews as white “oppressors” rather than as a historically oppressed minority group.
The lawsuit alleges that Fox and his fellow DOGE staffer Nathan Cavanaugh “made and executed the termination decision without any legal authority conferred by Congress. There is no jurisdictional barrier to vacating these unlawful terminations, and permanent relief is warranted.”
One of the projects targeted by DOGE was a translation project titled In the Shadow of the Holocaust: Short Fiction by Jewish Writers From the Soviet Union, which the lawsuit describes as “a critical, annotated translation into English of Yiddish and Russian works written in the aftermath of the most significant Jewish tragedy of the 20th century.”
ChatGPT put the book on the chopping block, stating that “this anthology explores Jewish writers’ engagement with the Holocaust in the USSR.”
According to the suit, the DOGE cuts “are unconstitutional several times over. The record establishes, without genuine factual dispute, that the terminations violated the First Amendment by targeting grants for their viewpoints and perceived political associations; that they violated the equal protection guarantee by classifying grants based on race, sex, and other constitutionally protected characteristics.”
DOGE also allegedly targeted Catholic efforts to promote Holocaust studies. The suit notes that another grant Fox and Cavanaugh chopped was support for the National Catholic Center for Holocaust Education at Seton Hill University.
In a deposition, NEH’s acting chair Michael McDonald said he did not know DOGE had relied on ChatGPT and rejected including Holocaust-related grants under DEI. He also claimed DOGE ignored his disagreements. DOGE possessed the final say about which projects to cut.
In response to the question “In your view, does this grant relate to DEI?” McDonald answered “no.” When the lawyer followed up with “would you consider this to be wasteful spend?” he replied “I would not, no.”
Since the NEH’s founding in 1965, the agency has provided over $6 billion in grants to fund over 70,000 projects in all 50 states.
The lawsuit details that Fox and Cavanaugh lacked “any relevant background in the humanities, public or private grant administration, peer review, or government service of any kind prior to joining the administration.”
According to the filing, the two DOGE staffers met with McDonald and Assistant Chair for Programs Adam Wolfson on March 12. However, Fox and Cavanaugh “entirely controlled the process of selecting grants to terminate and executing the terminations — their approach was top-down, viewpoint- and race-based, and indifferent to the views of NEH leadership or the ordinary processes of grant administration.”
DOGE’s mastermind, billionaire Elon Musk, has a professional rivalry with Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT.
Musk faced multiple controversies last year involving alleged antisemitism, Nazis, and the Holocaust. Following his decision to make a gesture at a Jan. 20 rally which many interpreted as resembling a “Sieg Heil”-style salute, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) initially defended the billionaire before criticizing his choice to promote Holocaust humor on his X social media platform.
“We’ve said it hundreds of times before and we will say it again: the Holocaust was a singularly evil event, and it is inappropriate and offensive to make light of it. Elon Musk, the Holocaust is not a joke,” Jonathan Greenblatt, the ADL’s CEO and National Director, wrote on X in response to Musk.
Musk faced criticism days later when addressing a gathering of Germany’s far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, where he said, “There is too much focus on past guilt, and we need to move beyond that.” Critics decried the comments, arguing they minimized or dismissed the Holocaust.
“The remembrance and acknowledgement of the dark past of the country and its people should be central in shaping the German society,” Dani Dayan, chairman of Yad Vashem, Israel’s national memorial to the Holocaust, said in response to Musk on X. He warned that not focusing on learning lessons from the past is “an insult to the victims of Nazism and a clear danger to the democratic future of Germany.”
In July, following an upgrade to Musk’s ChatGPT rival Grok, the program began promoting antisemitic conspiracy theories and in one instance labeled itself “MechaHitler.”
Two months later, the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) and the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) released a report revealing the rise of antisemitism on X.
The report utilized OpenAI’s since-discontinued GPT-4o model and drew on a year-long investigation to find that “679,000 posts sampled violate X’s policies on antisemitism, and posts identified as antisemitic got 193 million views in the 11 months of this report, despite X’s promises to limit their visibility. Also, antisemitic conspiracies appear to perform disproportionately well on X, constituting 59% of posts in the sample but 73% of likes.”
The report noted that X had allowed for the rise of so-called “antisemitic influencers” and that “approximately one third of all likes on antisemitic posts were on posts shared by just 10 antisemitism ‘influencers.’ 9 out of these 10 ‘antisemitism influencers’ have more followers on X than any other platform, and 6 out of the 10 are verified on X. 3 out of the 10 profit from paid subscriptions on X.”
Amid the criticism, Musk has denied accusations of antisemitism and said his priority is to make X a bastion of free speech. He visited Israel in late 2023, weeks after Hamas’s Oct. 7 invasion of the Jewish state, and Auschwitz in January 2024. Following the latter trip, Musk said he was “frankly naive” about antisemitism and described himself as “Jewish by association.”
The Tesla CEO and X owner vowed to wear around his neck a dog tag reading “Bring Them Home” that was given to him by a parent of one of the Israeli hostages held in Gaza until all the captives were returned home.
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Trump’s Iran dithering puts Israel in an unprecedented position
Israel today finds itself in an unusual strategic position: It’s fighting a war that could last for weeks — or end almost instantly. And someone else will decide which way things go.
Down one path lies a prolonged campaign against Iran, with the possibility of regime change. Israel’s leaders openly hope that the campaign will enable the Iranian people to overthrow their rulers. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu recently put it bluntly: “Our aspiration is to enable the Iranian people to cast off the yoke of tyranny.”
Down the other is a rapid cessation of the conflict, with incomplete results. President Donald Trump has already suggested that the conflict may be nearing completion. In a Monday interview with CBS News, Trump said bluntly: “The war is very complete, pretty much.”
Yet in the very same news cycle, Trump offered a strikingly different message. When asked whether the war was essentially over or just beginning, he replied: “I think you could say both.” He suggested he was considering the possibility of taking control of the Strait of Hormuz, the critical global oil chokepoint, and warned on social media that if Iran interfered with shipping there, the United States would strike it “20 times harder than they have been hit thus far.”
Those contradictory statements capture the extraordinary ambiguity surrounding the conflict. And that ambiguity has left Israel in a profoundly complicated position. Now, it must be prepared simultaneously for two radically different scenarios: a prolonged war whose outcome could reshape the Middle East, or a sudden declaration that the conflict is over.
A successful start, and mixed outlook
So far, Israeli and American forces have struck deep inside Iran, decapitating the regime and crippling major parts of military infrastructure. Iran has retaliated with missile and drone attacks against Israel, most of which have been intercepted by Israel’s air defenses, but some of which have brought tragedy.
In recent days, Tehran has picked a new supreme leader: Mojtaba Khamenei, a hardliner and the son of the longtime despot killed on the first day of the war.
If the conflict continues on this trajectory, the implications could be enormous. Sustained pressure on Iran could destabilize the regime. Even without that best-case scenario outcome, a prolonged campaign could dramatically weaken the Islamic Republic.
But a long war carries real dangers. Iran still possesses missiles capable of reaching Israel, and has been firing them daily. Israel’s multilayered defense system intercepts most of them, but not all. A cluster missile strike on Monday killed two; if the war continues, more deaths are likely to follow. And the longer the war lasts, the greater the statistical likelihood that one missile will slip through and cause a true catastrophe.
Even without a disaster, the cumulative strain on Israeli society is unmistakable. The acquisition of weapons and callup of reserve troops is further disrupting an economy that has been in various states of disruption since Oct. 7, 2023. It is also measured in the unquantifiable damage that the stress is causing pretty much every person in the country.
Many businesses are closed, and public life is minimal. Missile alerts — often in the middle of the night — repeatedly send millions of civilians into shelters (and, for a privileged minority, reinforced “safe rooms” in their home). Many offices are half empty. Parents struggle to work while caring for children who are afraid to leave the house.
With ordinary life on hold, a prolonged war could therefore become a grinding economic and psychological burden, even if Israel continues to win militarily.
Yet Israelis broadly support the war. A poll last week found that 93% of the populace backs the operation.
How will they respond if Trump abruptly pulls the plug?
War by whim
To a degree that is profoundly unusual in the history of democratic countries, the trajectory of the war depends largely on one person.
Trump has shown himself to be prone to making unilateral decisions with enormous consequences for the international order without undergoing any of the standard processes.
He launched sweeping tariff wars that upended decades of bipartisan policy on the benefits of relatively free trade. He revived the idea that the U.S. should acquire Greenland — and for weeks refused to rule out using force against Denmark, a NATO ally, to achieve that end. Earlier this year, American forces kidnapped Venezuela’s president, after which Trump openly stated that the U.S. needs “access” to the country’s oil resources.
Even the rhetoric surrounding the Iran campaign is sui generis. In recounting why American forces had sunk Iranian naval vessels rather than capturing them, he approvingly relayed that he was supposedly told by commanders that it was simply “more fun to sink them.”
If Trump decides he is done, and the Islamic Republic limps on, Israelis will be left with the frustrating sense of having missed a huge opportunity to fundamentally alter an unacceptable situation in which Iran is constantly scheming to cause harm.
Iran has been, essentially, a fly the size of an elephant buzzing in Israel’s ear. Yes, the war will be spun as victory either way — but if it ends tomorrow, it will end without achieving all it could. And the current state of affairs, in which Israel effectively has a green light from a U.S. president as indifferent to convention as Trump, may not return.
A reopened Lebanon front
One complication that could outlast either of these scenarios is Hezbollah. The Lebanon-based militia, a regional proxy for Iran, joined the fighting almost immediately, launching rockets and drones toward northern Israel. That intervention may give Israel a strategic opportunity to address a problem that has festered since post-Oct. 7 fighting ended on the Lebanon front in November, 2024.
When that conflict concluded, the Lebanese government pledged that it would dismantle and disarm Hezbollah, finally restoring the state’s monopoly on force. In practice, little changed. Hezbollah remained entrenched in parts of central Lebanon, albeit no longer along Israel’s border.
Israeli patience with this renewed status quo has steadily eroded. But the devastation of the Gaza war had badly damaged Israel’s international standing, making Jerusalem see a renewed Lebanon campaign as diplomatically difficult.
Now, the regional picture has shifted. Lebanese officials — including the country’s president — have increasingly signaled that Hezbollah’s continued militarization is unsustainable. Beirut has in recent days already taken steps to curb Iranian influence, including by restricting activity by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps. Senior figures have made clear that Hezbollah’s role as an armed “state within a state” cannot continue indefinitely.
Elements of Lebanon’s government clearly hope Israel might finish a task they cannot accomplish themselves — the decisive debilitation of Hezbollah — though preferably without bringing another devastating war onto Lebanese soil.
What this means: Israel is likely to be at war, in some way or another, for some time to come. Trump may call time on the war with Iran; he has no such power when it comes to Israel’s own border conflicts.
But the biggest challenges, and biggest changes, facing Israel belong with the Iran war, which has the potential to truly redefine the region. Netanyahu may wield some influence over Trump, but the decision rests with the White House.
This is an unprecedented state of affairs in Israel’s history: A perilous war of aggression, conducted without real Israeli control. The cost of this is whiplash, as the country has no choice but to live with both possibilities at once: a long war that could reshape the region — or a sudden declaration that the war has been won. Netanyahu may be able to influence Trump one way or the other — but he won’t make the call.
For Israelis, that is the rub in the hyper-alliance with Trump’s U.S. Next month, as Israel celebrates its 78th Independence Day, that independence will feel a tad fictitious. An extreme dependency lies bare for all to see, and it will outlive Trump. His successor may not be as munificent.
The post Trump’s Iran dithering puts Israel in an unprecedented position appeared first on The Forward.