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Inside the auction house driving the rare-book craze in the Orthodox world
(JTA) – Israel Mizrahi joined dozens of fellow connoisseurs of rare Jewish books last December to watch the livestream of Genazym, the hottest auction house in the market. A bookdealer by trade, Mizrahi was also on the phone being paid to advise a wealthy client who had signed up to make bids.
But as the auction proceeded, Mizrahi’s advice had little use. His trigger-happy client didn’t seem to care about established valuations: He ended up paying about $50,000 for a book estimated at half that price. “He just pressed the button and kept on bidding until the bidding was over,” Mizrahi said. “There was no convincing him out of it. He spent nearly $600,000 that day and there was no sense to it.”
Behavior that confounds veterans of the rare Jewish book market has become routine at auctions organized by Genazym.
Mizrahi recalled the sale in 2021 of a Passover Haggadah printed in the 1920s in Vienna. With attractive illustrations of a prominent 19th-century rabbi named Moses Sofer and his family, the book makes for a nice addition to a collection. It also happens to be very common.
“I sell copies for $100, and I have probably sold 150 copies in my life,” said Mizrahi, whose shop in Brooklyn is a mecca for Jewish book lovers. “It sold for about $5,500 at Genazym’s auction. I currently have it on sale still for $100.”
At the highest end of sale prices, a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, commanded $620,000 at a Genazym auction last September, while a copy of Noam Elimelech, a classic rabbinic treatise, printed in 1788, fetched $1.4 million four months later — in both cases at least doubling or tripling what experts thought the items were worth based on past sales of the same texts.
“Genazym has come on like a freight train into the world of Jewish auctions. Some of the prices realized are far beyond what this market has seen before,” said David Wachtel, the former Judaica consultant for Sotheby’s auction house.
Since Genazym’s first auction in 2017, it has sold some 1,900 books, manuscripts and other collectible documents for about $26 million plus commission, roughly $12 million above total starting prices, according to an analysis by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency of auction records on Genazym’s website. Genazym has increasingly outperformed the longest-standing Judaica auction firms in New York and Jerusalem.
A page from an illustrated Passover haggadah printed in Vienna in the 1920s. (Courtesy of Genazym)
It’s hard to tell exactly what’s driving the boom because the identity of Genazym’s customers is confidential and few flaunt their collections widely. One of the auction house’s owners, in a rare public comment, ventured that Jewish buyers are craving a connection with their heritage. What’s clear is that at a time when traditional libraries are cutting back on buying Jewish texts, Genazym is tapping into an emerging luxury market among Orthodox Jews — and fueling the rise of religious texts as both a status symbol and investment vehicle in some communities.
“I know the sellers, the customers and everybody involved and there is a new wealthy class of Orthodox Jews that have a limited range of things they can splurge on,” Mizrahi said. “They don’t go to Vegas, they don’t do crazy vacations. They keep kosher. So this is a way that they can splurge and show off.”
Rabbi Pini Dunner, who collects rare Jewish books, said investing in Judaica is likely attractive for some in the Hasidic community, whose religious observance is stricter than that of congregants at his Modern Orthodox synagogue in the Los Angeles area.
“There are people I know here in Beverly Hills who’ve got car collections worth tens of millions of dollars,” Dunner said. “In the Hasidic world that has no currency, just as the wow factor of a Picasso has no currency. An original manuscript or first-edition of the Noam Elimelech has a real wow factor, particularly if you can tell people the book sold for more than a million dollars at a Genazym auction.”
The impression that the Hasidic world has grown wealthier over the last decade or two is widespread and based, at least in part, on the proliferation of luxury products and services tailored for the community in places like Lakewood, New Jersey, and Kiryas Joel, New York. Weddings have become increasingly expensive and elaborate, fine dining options are common, and high-end kosher wine and liquor are more readily available.
“It wasn’t that long ago that sit-down dining was looked down upon or not even available. Now there are a plethora of options,” said Chaim Saiman, a law professor at Villanova University who studies the intersection of commerce and Jewish law. “It’s no secret that $200 bottles of Scotch appear at kiddush clubs all the time. $50 used to be a big deal, then $100 was a big deal, now we are at $200.”
Where the new wealth is coming from is not totally clear. Limited survey and U.S. Census data suggests that Orthodox Jews feel crunched by costs associated with practicing religion and that there are large pockets of poverty among them, particularly in Hasidic communities, according to Mark Trencher, the founder of Nishma Research, a nonprofit dedicated to studying the Orthodox Jewish community. The prevalence of large families also means that generational wealth can be harder to accrue for Orthodox Jews.
But there have always been high earners whose philanthropy has buttressed their communities, Trencher noted. “There are a lot of people in that community that are very successful in their businesses and they have large amounts of wealth,” he said. “Those people generally are huge donors to charities. From a financial perspective, those communities are probably doing much better than you would expect them to.”
Many of those high earners make their money through entrepreneurship rather than professional success in the white-collar world. Many nursing home chains — an industry valued at an estimated $171 billion and where growth is expected — have Orthodox owners. Amazon has also created new opportunities for Orthodox businessmen. Orthodox landlords, meanwhile, have benefited from skyrocketing real estate prices in places like Williamsburg, Brooklyn.
A page from a 16th-century first-edition Shulchan Aruch, a book of Jewish law, which fetched $620,000 at a Genazym auction. (Courtesy of Genazym).
Recent reporting in The New York Times about the Hasidic education system has provided a window into another stream of revenue for private businesses in the community. Entrepreneurs in the community have responded to the increased availability of government funding for special education in New York in recent years by establishing companies to service Hasidic schools, with the government footing the bill. In one example highlighted by the Times, a married Hasidic couple opened such a business in 2014 when they were 21 and 19 years old; in 2022, their company received more than $38 million in government funding.
The owners of another set of companies providing services to Hasidic schools appear to have used their windfall to purchase rare books through Genazym. The owners were indicted in January for allegedly billing the government for more than $1 million in childcare services that they never provided and otherwise defrauding the government out of more than $2.8 million.
Prosecutors are seeking to have the alleged fraudsters forfeit seven books and other documents as listed in a federal indictment. They include manuscripts with a rabbinic signature and rare books of blessing and Jewish law, all of which match items listed on Genazym auctions, where they sold for a total of about $274,000.
Buying Jewish texts at auction can seem like a savvy investment for buyers seeking to safeguard or grow their wealth. Before Genazym launched, a typical Genazym buyer might have invested in U.S. Treasury bills or the stock market, according to Wachtel, the former Sotheby’s consultant.
“I think Genazym has been able to convince people that this is a good vehicle for establishing and growing wealth,” he said. “That also dovetails with your ability to, let’s face it, show off. Somebody comes to your house, you can show them a first-edition Shulchan Aruch. But you’re not going to say, hey, come look at my T-bills.”
The auction house’s tactics appear tailor-made for this growing market. Its motto is “Own your heritage,” and it’s printed on the catalogs the company distributes through popular Orthodox magazines like Ami or Mishpacha or podcasts, places where people with no prior interest in books might encounter the hype. The catalogs also appear in synagogues in heavily Hasidic areas like Brooklyn or Lakewood, but without the prices printed on them so as not to violate a Jewish prohibition against discussing financial matters on Shabbat.
The descriptions in the catalogs emphasize any links that exist between the items for sale and notable rabbis from history, especially figures who established rabbinic dynasties that continue to exist today and who are revered by yeshiva-educated Orthodox Jews. The link might be a signature of a rabbi in a ledger from an old fundraising tour that took place 200 years ago. Or it might be that an important rabbi owned the book in question or even prayed out of it. Like a pair of pants of a prominent Israeli rabbi that drew widespread attention when they briefly went up for auction last month, these texts are seen by some as conferring holiness onto those who possess them. By virtue of their pedigree, these artifacts might even be seen as a segula, or Jewish protective charm.
In its promotional materials and live auctions, Genazym also uses more colloquial and hyperbolic language to describe its items than traditional auction houses, which tend to stick to the kind of terminology used by academic scholars.
“Genazym found a formula to make books and manuscripts really exciting for the layperson, especially in the Orthodox community,” said Yoel Finkelman, a former curator of the Judaica Collection at the National Library of Israel. “They are not using the vocabulary of experts, they’re using plain ordinary language, like ‘very old’ or ‘very rare.’ No one at Sotheby’s would ever refer even to a thousand-year-old book that way.”
Genazym’s unique approach extends to the delivery of items to buyers. A traditional buyer in the rare Jewish book market, like Michelle Margolis, Columbia University’s Jewish studies librarian, might only care that the book they bought is safely delivered. But with Genazym, the books come wrapped in a proper clamshell and velvet bag. “I rolled my eyes when my delivery arrived, but at the same time that’s a lot of investment,” Margolis said, adding that many other auction houses have been cutting costs, for example, by doing away with their customary printed catalogs.
Jacob Djmal, who lives in Brooklyn, has dabbled in Judaica collecting for many years, an interest he picked up from his grandfather. He remembers suddenly seeing Genazym’s advertising everywhere. “They started reaching out to you in every way possible, finding a demographic that wasn’t aware before. Every Genazym auction I have people texting me — ‘Did you hear about this? Did you hear about that?’ — as if something is happening that had never happened before.”
Sometimes, that is true. A breakout moment came during the December auction, when Genazym cleared $4.4 million in sales, about $2.6 million above total starting prices.
“If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on Earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for at least twice [the estimated amount],” a major British book collector living in France said on his anonymous Twitter account, which has around 110,000 followers, in December.
If there was any doubt that Genazym were now the most commercially remarkable rare book auction house on earth, the results of their latest Judaica auction this week put paid to that: essentially almost every lot sold for *at least* twice estimate…. 1/https://t.co/iAC4sQudIz pic.twitter.com/eeunjqWzAs
— Incunabula (@incunabula) December 13, 2022
It remains to be seen whether Genazym can challenge Sotheby’s Judaica division as the destination for sellers with the rarest and most valuable books. Last year, a medieval prayer book sold for $8.3 million at Sotheby’s and this year, the New York auction house is accepting bids for the oldest known copy of the Hebrew Bible, which is expected to fetch as much as $50 million.
But Djmal considers especially remarkable about Genazym is not just the high prices but also the way in which rare books have caught on among Orthodox youth as something cool. “My son and his friends in yeshiva are talking about these items,” Djmal said. “These books represent rabbis they have heard about from a young age.”
The team behind Genazym’s success is led by three brothers from the Stefansky family who live in Jerusalem and New York. Before starting an auction house they worked for many years as private dealers in the rare book market. Their names, Chaim, Moshe and Bezalel, rarely appear anywhere and they almost never grant interviews. Chaim Stefansky made an exception for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and requested that this article not put him in the spotlight nor portray Genazym’s success as a product of his business acumen.
Stefansky said Genazym has tapped into a universal and deep-seated desire of people to strengthen their identities by connecting with the past. The Jewish community, he said, has been poorly served by an emphasis on historical and even current persecution.
“Always, we are victimized and we cry,” Stefansky said. “What we have in common maybe is that your grandmother and my grandmother were sharing the same bed in Auschwitz. Give me something positive of my past to be proud of. Your heritage has not only sorrow but also a happy, rich, and huge intellectual tradition. So Genazym comes and tells people about their heritage. It’s yours. It belongs to you.”
He said the same thing can be done with any ethnic or religious group.
“If you go to the Irish community and press the right buttons in terms of what you know that every Irish person is extremely proud of, I think you’ll be very successful,” Stefansky said.
He rejected the impression that Genazym’s buyers come primarily from the ranks of the nouveau riche in the Hasidic world.
“It’s coming from all sections,” Stefansky said. “People will say that there’s a lot of fresh money in the market. But we also have very good old money. We have institutions. And, also, the regular man. Mostly, the regular man, who never knew he could have access to any of this.”
One of the only customers who agreed to be identified and interviewed for this article is Rick Probstein, who says he’s spent more than $100,000 at the company’s auctions. He can’t remember when he started seeing Genazym catalogs but he had never collected Judaica before, which is perhaps surprising given that he’s an Orthodox Jew who’s been working in the collectibles business since he was a child trading baseball cards.
Today, at 53, Probstein is one of the largest sellers of sports collectibles in the world, operating through a dedicated account on eBay. “I run a humongous business — I am doing something like $160 million a year,” he said of his sales volume.
Probstein, who lives in Passaic, New Jersey, had long felt a pang of guilt about the lack of Jewish content in his collection. “I collect things but what do I have of my own heritage?” he recalled thinking to himself. “So when I started getting the catalogs, I said, ‘I gotta be a good Jew.’ I started bidding on things and I got really into it.”
Once Probstein got started, the Stefansky brothers began checking in on him, providing concierge service and cultivating him as a client.
“This is a boutique run by a Jewish family with a personal touch,” Probstein said “They call me on the phone, saying, ‘Rick, did you get the catalog? What did you think? Here are some items that you could really like.’”
Bidding on Genayzm items is not purely sentimental for Probstein. “I’m putting real money into it because I think that from an investment standpoint, it has a lot of upside,” he said.
Still, the items he buys tend to have personal significance.
“I am partial to items relating to the Chofetz Chaim,” Probstein said, referring to the rabbi and Jewish scholar Yisrael Meir Kagan, who died in 1933. Probstein’s oldest son is named Yisrael Meir in his honor. The Chofetz Chaim also appeals to Probstein because of his writings about lashon hara, the prohibition in Jewish law against speaking evil of people. “I think that speech is important and he’s sort of the embodiment of that,” Probstein said.
Genazym has sold six letters and a handwritten blessing signed or written by the Chofetz Chaim at prices ranging from about $16,000 to $68,000.
Ever since Probstein started collecting Judaica, these items have served as a draw for family and friends visiting his home.
“People in my community that come over for kiddush [refreshments after Shabbat service] know that I have this stuff and they always want to see it,” Probstein said. “Nobody ever looks at my sports memorabilia collection because it’s in my office but my Judaica stuff is in my house. They look at the letters and talk about the historical context. People love it.”
The revelation that so many Jews appear fascinated with their own history and want to engage with scholarly tradition comes at a time when many Jewish libraries have been struggling.
The library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan, which has the most comprehensive and significant collection of Jewish books outside of Israel, has seen its footprint downsized amid budget cuts at the Conservative movement seminary. Also under financial pressure, American Jewish University was forced to sell its Bel Air campus in Los Angeles, which housed a library. Hebrew Union College, meanwhile, opted to end its Reform rabbinical training program in Cincinnati and even though the campus library has survived the cuts, financial uncertainty remains.
Genazym’s populist approach might hold lessons for Jewish institutions and university libraries with significant Judaica collections that hope to engage the public around books.
“The lesson is to lay off the snobbery a little bit,” said Finkelman, the former Judaica curator at the National Library of Israel, which is slated to reopen in a new and more accessible space later this year. “The goal of public institutions is to enable preservation but also to enable public access and public education. There are great stories in books and archives.”
Finkleman said he has encountered sneering reactions to the way Genazym promotes books, and they are similar to the response in the United States when the pop star Lizzo played a crystal flute that belonged to James Madison on stage at the Library of Congress.
“There are echoes of the same thing here,” he said. “Get out of the snobby ivory tower and realize you are preserving history for people.”
—
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A Jewish philanthropist funded this pioneering school for Black students. Now it’s getting a second life.
A small Kentucky town has saved a piece of Black history, with a little-known Jewish connection.
This summer, Sadieville, Kentucky — population 320 — opened an exhibit in a one-room schoolhouse that served Black students during segregation.
Built between 1917 and 1920, the school was partly funded by Jewish philanthropist Julius Rosenwald, an owner of Sears, Roebuck and Company who gave much of his fortune away as part of a collaboration with the influential Black educator Booker T. Washington.
The Sadieville school was one of 5,000 schools for Black students across 15 states that Rosenwald helped fund. The schools transformed Black education across the rural South during the Jim-Crow era, dramatically improving students’ literacy rates and economic mobility.
But today, many of the schoolhouses are in danger of abandonment. As preservationists seek federal recognition of Rosenwald schools in Congress through a proposed national park, the residents of Sadieville took matters into their own hands.
“It is one of our little special treasures that we have here, because there are so few of them remaining in the United States,” Laura Centers, Sadieville’s city clerk, told the Forward. “We want to protect our history.”
Recently introduced legislation in both the House and Senate would help protect that history nationally, but both bills have languished in committee. To pass, they will need Republican support — at a time when the National Park Service is already dealing with staffing shortages and a slim budget. So far, Rep. Rob Wittman of Virginia is the only Republican to sign on.
Sadieville would not be included in the proposed national park, which would initially cover three schools in Maryland, South Carolina and Virginia, along with a headquarters in Chicago. But Dorothy Canter, a retired biophysicist who leads the Rosenwald national park campaign, said local preservation efforts are still essential to the broader movement.
“It helps the campaign because it’s a part of history,” Canter said. “It’s part of Sadieville history.”
As one of more than 150 Rosenwald schools in Kentucky, the Sadieville school operated until integration in 1954 — the year of Brown v. Board of Education. Pioneering journalist Alice Allison Dunnigan, the first Black woman to receive White House press credentials, taught at a Rosenwald school in New Hope, Kentucky.
Getting the Sadieville school in shape for visitors was not easy. During a 14-year renovation of the schoolhouse, the town dealt with termite damage, replaced the pine floors, restored the building’s foundation, patched the drywall on the walls and ceiling, rehabbed windows, and replaced doors.
The town also added historically accurate furnishings, including a chalkboard, desks scattered across the room, and a coal stove for heat. Because the school lacked electricity, large windows provided natural light. The sparse decor includes a photo of Abraham Lincoln and a book about Nicodemus, Kansas, a Reconstruction-era Black farming town founded by a group of formerly enslaved people who fled Kentucky seeking land ownership.
The project was funded by a combination of community donations and national support, with a $10,000 grant from Toyota Motor Manufacturing Kentucky, $7,000 from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, and $2,000 from Friends of Sadieville, Inc.
Staffing the exhibit in such a small town is also a challenge, Centers said. The school opened to the public for only two days this summer. After the initial unveiling on June 19 — in honor of Juneteenth – it will open again on August 15.
But Centers hopes those two days will generate enough interest to justify opening for more days next summer.
The exhibit is meaningful for the entire town, she said, but especially for Rosenwald students’ descendants.
“We just want to get the word out there that we do have this,” Centers said. “It’s important to a lot of people’s history.”
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‘Time to double down’: Why AIPAC sees El Sayed’s win as a sign to spend still more
Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens for an open Michigan Senate seat prompted an immediate split reaction as the Democratic Party endures a historic internal fight over U.S. support for Israel.
To progressives, the result showed that even more than $60 million in outside spending — including more than $30 million by AIPAC, the largest investment it ever made in a single race — could not stop a candidate who made opposition to Israel and its U.S. lobby a defining theme of his campaign.
To AIPAC and its allies, the one-point margin proved that their spending kept what could have been a much bigger defeat within reach and prevented a broader progressive landslide.
The race was widely viewed as the clearest test yet of the Israel advocacy campaign group’s political influence after months of progressive victories by candidates who have condemned Israel and made inflammatory rhetoric — including using the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe its conduct. But instead of getting to a decisive verdict, Tuesday’s primary left each camp more convinced than before they are on the right path.
For El-Sayed’s supporters, simply defeating an incumbent backed by the Democratic establishment and AIPAC was historic. Citizens Against AIPAC Corruption, known on social media as “Track AIPAC,” declared the primary season “a repudiation of the idea that our democracy is for sale” by the power of grassroots organizing.
Former Rep. Andy Levin — who lost his own primary in 2022 to Stevens because of AIPAC mass spending — said Democratic voters are increasingly frustrated with special-interest money and that El-Sayed effectively turned opposition to AIPAC into a winning political message. “It worked,” he said.
But AIPAC and its allies see no reason to rethink their strategy.
AIPAC President Bernie Kaminetsky struck a defiant tone in an email to members after the race was called on Wednesday morning. “This narrow loss stings,” he wrote, “but her defeat doesn’t change our principled opposition to the dangerous policies El-Sayed wants to bring to the U.S. Senate.”
Kaminetsky called the fight “generational,” telling supporters that the organization remains committed to defeating El-Sayed in November and defending what it contends should be a bipartisan pro-Israel consensus. “Our conviction will not be measured in a single race or a single cycle,” Kaminetsky wrote. In a fundraising email, AIPAC used the phrase, “When we get knocked down, we get right up and back in the fight,” before adding: “It’s time to double down.”
That response suggests AIPAC views Michigan less as a repudiation than as evidence that its intervention still mattered — preventing what could have been a far more decisive rejection by voters of the Democratic establishment. The group’s super PAC, United Democracy Project, is reportedly weighing additional spending in the general election to boost Republican Mike Rogers against El-Sayed. It would likely be joined by other groups, including the centrist Democratic groups Third Way and Welcome PAC, as well as the Republican Jewish Coalition.
However, backing a Republican in one of the nation’s most important swing states would also carry political risks. It would reinforce critics’ argument that AIPAC has effectively picked sides in partisan politics. The group has already become increasingly controversial among mainstream Democrats for backing pro-Israel Republicans who joined President Donald Trump’s crusade to question the 2020 election results. The Gaza war has only intensified that backlash, as Democratic voters have increasingly rejected U.S. policy supporting Israel.
If AIPAC is signaling it will double down, El-Sayed is doing the same. In media appearances Wednesday after clinching the nomination, he gave the progressive base that carried him to victory more red meat.
In a CNN interview Wednesday night, he said his opposition to U.S. military aid for Israel also extends to defensive systems such as Iron Dome, arguing there is no meaningful distinction. “I don’t believe that there’s really a difference between offensive or defensive weapons,” he said. Israel’s Iron Dome first started under the Obama administration in 2011 and is credited with saving countless lives, intercepting most of the short-range rockets and missiles fired indiscriminately at civilians by Hamas, Hezbollah and other Islamic terror groups. El-Sayed said American tax dollars should be spent on priorities in Michigan rather than “fund foreign militaries.”
CNN commentator Van Jones argued that El-Sayed’s support for a complete military embargo on Israel gave Israel’s advocates a legitimate reason to oppose his candidacy. “This guy is saying that the U.S. government can’t even sell defensive weapons to Israel, which would make Israel completely defenseless,” he said on an election night politics panel. “Now that would be a reason for a group of people who care about Israelis to say this is not our guy.”
Echoes of Mamdani, but a different electorate
The reaction to Tuesday’s results echoed the approach many Jewish organizations and moderates took after Zohran Mamdani won the Democratic primary for New York City mayor last June.
Mamdani’s campaign roiled the Jewish community more than any mayoral contest in recent memory. He faced the most scrutiny for refusing to outright condemn the slogan “globalize the intifada” and for saying he doesn’t recognize Israel as a Jewish state. But he didn’t back down. Mamdani’s stance on the conflict in Gaza resonated with a majority of voters. He also enjoyed support among progressive and younger Jews who saw his criticism of Israel as compatible with Jewish values of justice. Mamdani was elected in November with just over 50% of the vote and has repeatedly come under scrutiny from Jewish leaders over his handling of antisemitism and anti-Israel protests.
Like Mamdani’s rise in New York, El-Sayed’s victory demonstrates that candidates running to the left of the Democratic establishment can overcome intense opposition.
Speaking with reporters on Wednesday, Mamdani said: “I am proud to be part of a movement of politicians and candidates who are looking to put working-class Americans back at the heart of our politics.”
But the comparison has limits. New York City is overwhelmingly Democratic, where the primary is often the race that decides the election. Mamdani also benefited from a fractured opposition and an unpopular rival. El-Sayed faces a different political reality. Michigan remains a politically divided state, and Republican Mike Rogers — who narrowly lost a Senate race in 2024 — held a small lead versus El-Sayed in several polls conducted before Tuesday’s primary. El-Sayed has no guarantee of winning the general election.
Amid the uncertainty of the ultimate outcome of the Michigan Senate race, neither side is retreating.
El-Sayed’s narrow margin has set up the next phase of the fight over the direction of the Democratic primary and U.S. support for Israel with fodder to claim to speak for a majority of voters and new ammunition.
The test of who’s right won’t end in November. Progressive activists are increasingly turning their attention to toppling Democratic leadership, arguing that House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Senate Democratic Leader Chuck Schumer are too closely aligned with AIPAC and out of step with the party’s base. Schumer embraced El-Sayed only after the primary and said he was looking to lead a “big-tent” party to victory. Jeffries has not publicly weighed in.
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Is it time for a Wendy Wasserstein renaissance?
Is it time for a reassessment of Wendy Wasserstein’s 1997 An American Daughter, which she described as “darker” than her 20th century hits? On Aug. 11, when La Femme Theatre Productions opens the first major New York revival at the Signature Center’s Irene Diamond Stage, audiences will find out.
Wasserstein was among the most commercially successful female theater artists of the 20th century. Along with Lorraine Hansberry and Lillian Hellman, she was one of few women to open a play directly on Broadway. According to an interview with Wasserstein in The Paris Review, she received the biggest advance ever given to a straight play for 1992’s The Sisters Rosensweig. (It lost the Tony for Best Play to Angels in America.)
And yet since her death from cancer at age 55 in 2006, (the same year as Betty Friedan, who scolded her about the end of her 1989 play, The Heidi Chronicles, where Heidi gives up her career to adopt a child) she has been sidelined. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Heidi, and her other big plays, An Uncommon Woman and Others, Isn’t It Romantic?, and The Sisters Rosensweig were considered paradigm changing. They told the stories of elite women navigating the enormous social changes second-wave feminism wrought. No other American playwright so consistently created worlds in which women — Jewish and not — juggled relationships and careers.
Written in the mid-1990s, An American Daughter is different. Sometimes described as Wasserstein’s most political play, it was her first work to be set outside of New York. The Beltway comedy-drama emerged out of her frustration at the backlash against feminism and the scandals tanking women in the Clinton era, such as Hilary’s Cookiegate and Zoe Baird’s Nannygate. And while An American Daughter is, like Wasserstein’s earlier work, autobiographical, it sounds different. Angrier. While Wasserstein was writing it, she was struggling to have a child as her sister, Sandra, was battling cancer. (A year after An American Daughter, she would conceive.)
The Hilary/Zoe figure is Lyssa Dent Hughes, a nominee for surgeon general whose life gets overturned by a media scandal after she admits on camera that she ignored a jury summons. The DC types who line up or fall away include her best friend, her husband, her father, a pro-life senator from Indiana, her best friend, a Black Jewish oncologist, a gay conservative modeled after Andrew Sullivan and a third- wave feminist modeled after Naomi Wolf.
Jean Lichty, the artistic director of La Femme, who plays Lyssa in the revival, believes An American Daughter deserves another look. “This is a deeply felt important play about social, political and class divisions,” she said in an interview.
Maybe so. Although the play’s politics sound quintessentially 1990s, it also anticipates our mob and media driven politics. After Lyssa describes her mother in an interview as “an ordinary Indiana housewife,” women in Indiana turn against her. It doesn’t matter how great her liberal policies are.
Still, I wonder if this production can overcome Wasserstein’s conflicted reputation. The critic Adam Kirsch pointed out years ago that she “is a descendant not just of Neil Simon but of all the family playwrights of the 1950s.” Yet unlike Simon and, say Arthur Miller, during her lifetime, critics derided her for being too glib. About her 1992 play, The Sisters Rosensweig, the critic and director Robert Brustein said “wisecracks come too easily to her.” A 1994 New York Times article wondered how a play about “bickering middle aged Jewish sisters” was selling out.
Some producers judged her plays “too New York,” which she retorted was code for too Jewish. Even worse, magazine features regularly mentioned her giggling, her weight, her single status, and her age, as though they explained something. She’s “pushing 40,” Newsweek proclaimed in 1989. A 1993 New York Magazine profile announced: “She’s finally starting to feel comfortable with herself. She recently lost 40 pounds.” These details remind me of the ones used to discredit Betty Friedan. They point to the way the press collaborated in minimizing women writers well after second-wave feminism supposedly eradicated it.
Moving towards a new way of writing
About the 1997 production of An American Daughter, Wasserstein told an interviewer she had wanted to write something that “was not just Jewish jokes.” And in part because the Jewish comedy and characters in it are darker than, say, The Sisters Rosenswieg, some critics judged it to be her strongest play. But it’s ultimately a strange piece of theater. It seems like it is moving towards another way of writing, which we didn’t get to see because she didn’t live long enough.
Like Heidi Holland, Lyssa, the central figure in An American Daughter is not Jewish. She is a fifth-generation descendant of Ulysses S. Grant. And yet the play, which is set during Rosh Hashanah, contains more direct Jewish references than Wasserstein’s earlier ones. The Jewish characters operate differently — the stakes for outsiders trying to be inside are different in political circles of court. But the balancing act feels most acute in one character who is unique in Wasserstein’s oeuvre — Lyssa’s BFF, Judith B. Kaufman, a Black Jewish oncologist (and a convert) who quips that she “has endured every in vitro and hormone treatment known to modern medicine.” (In a 1995 reading of the play, Whoopi Goldberg played this role.)
Wasserstein wrote in the introduction to the published version that Kaufman — one of her few Black characters — is the one “emotionally closest” to her. Daniel Sullivan, who directed the 1997 production, said in an interview that, with Kaufman, “she [Wasserstein] is drawing so much from herself.”
And yet this is not just autobiography plopped on stage. Perhaps she was influenced by Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, which ran on Broadway in 1992. Regardless, Wasserstein engineers some of the play’s most unnerving tonal swerves around Kaufman, swerves that bind questions of gender to those of race in ways that are unlike anything she had ever written. One minute, Kaufman is confessing to Lyssa her failure to drown herself during the Jewish ritual of Tashlich, the festival of regrets, during Rosh Hashanah. The next she is making a joke. And a few lines later, Lyssa is delivering a harsh rebuke that seems more like something from a play of ideas.
This sequence starts with Kaufman recounting to her friend the ritual where Jews throw breadcrumbs into water to absolve their bad acts. As she tells Lyssa, she throws her muffin top into the Potomac chanting “‘…Oh Lord, my God, the Lord is one, I’ve wasted my life,’ and I jump in.” Then she sees a box of donut holes, which cheers her up. She gets out of the water. But here Lyssa seems to snap: “What gives you the audacity to believe you’ve failed if you can’t make life or stop death?”
The moment seems like more than a friend’s rebuke and more like a white paper on the aftermath of feminism. And it may be what made critics of the 1997 production write sharp critiques such as Wasserstein “doesn’t know entirely where she’s heading or how to get there.” But I think such a hairpin swerve — a moment where it’s not clear if you are supposed to laugh or gasp — is exciting. I think Wasserstein wants me to be unsettled by Kaufman. She wants me to ask what it means to be a Jew and what success and failure mean. Such moments are there to show how desperate women are, how hard they are on each other and themselves. And how in the drive to remake the world, we have misunderstood what’s important. And how although there are fewer ways to live than we think, we still have choices.
Another Jewish character, Lyssa’s philandering professor husband, Walter Abramson, is only slightly less unnerving. He studies the sociology of the elites and declares himself agnostic. (“I was Jewish until I was bar mitzvahed.”) He is the opposite of the callow Scoop Rosenberg in The Heidi Chronicles who abandons Heidi Holland for a Jewish girl. Abramson has amplified his assimilation by marrying a non-Jew. And — I wonder if I’m imagining it —Wasserstein seems to link his philandering to his assimilation.
Navigating the upheaval of a generation
Wasserstein’s Jewish roots were, like many Jewish artists and writers born after the Holocaust, complex. She was born in 1950 in Flatbush, the youngest child of immigrant parents. Her father, Morris, ran a successful textile factory with his brother and patented velveteen. In Wasserstein’s telling, her mother, Lola, sounds like a cliché, making Wendy take dance lessons and comparing her unfavorably to her conventionally successful siblings, Georgette, and Bruce, who would become a financier. Less cliché are two half siblings ‚ the children of her mothers previous marriage to her uncle ‚ Sandra, and a developmentally disabled half-brother Abner who she first met in her twenties.
The family moved to the Upper East Side when Wasserstein was 12. She attended The Calhoun School, where she wrote skits to get out of Phys Ed. Next was Mt. Holyoke, where she got terrible grades. In 1973, she was accepted to The David Geffen School of Drama. She was the only female playwright in her class. “I decided I wanted to see an all-women’s curtain call,” she recalled at a moment when hyper-masculine playwrights were all the rage. “There were an awful lot of would-be Sam Shepards, and Wendy felt a little left out,” her friend, the playwright Chris Durang, told The Paris Review.
In 1989, after The Heidi Chronicles won a Pulitzer and a Tony for best play (the next woman to win the Tony for Best Play would be Bess Wohl, whose 2026 play, Liberation, about second-wave feminism, closed early) radical feminist journalists and scholars scorned Wasserstein’s realist dramaturgy, charged her of ridiculing the movement, of writing heroines who were more acted upon than acting. Although after her death some reconsidered when the last major revival of Heidi in 2015, closed early, The New York Times proclaimed that the ideal of “having it all” no longer captured anything about the zeitgeist.
It’s true that Lyssa doesn’t so much rail against the unfairness of the media circus destroying her as tolerate it. Until she doesn’t. (Some critics of previous productions called her a cipher and others that the play was too topical.) But to me it’s real. Moreover, I can’t think of another play showing middle-aged women in a larger context than The Family Drama. Much less one dealing with the backlash against second-wave feminism with multiple Jewish characters.
Moreover, Wasserstein’s realist dramaturgy may be old-fashioned but few American playwrights deal so frankly with daughters — including Jewish daughters —navigating the upheaval of the 60s and 70s and sometimes ending up alone. Wasserstein never underestimates the cost of sticking to your principles. Lena Dunham has said she was fascinated by Heidi.
An old play in a new era
Wasserstein herself thought the negative reviews of An American Daughter were sexist. In 1997, most of the first night theater critics were men. Newsday’s Linda Winer, the only one to review An American Daughter positively, described it as reminiscent of George Bernard Shaw. I think a better comparison is the one Wasserstein herself made. She called Henrik Ibsen her “postfeminist muse.” Like Ibsen’s characters, Wasserstein’s can seem like symbols one minute and real people the next. They often wind up alone with their convictions.
It will be interesting to see how the play is received now, when the chief critics at The New York Times and The New Yorker are women. And interesting too to see how audiences respond to it in a postfeminist world where Jewish plays of the moment are about Oct. 7 or the Holocaust.
Plus ça change is the point of view of Jean Lichty, who became interested in the play after Kamala Harris lost the presidential election. “I was devastated by Hillary. I was twice as devastated by Kamala,” she said in an interview, adding that the play’s rage appealed to her.
Lichty stresses that the cast is older in this production. “I think that raises the stakes.”
But the big difference is that the script is revised from the 1997 one, especially Act II. The production weaves together eight drafts that Wasserstein did during rehearsals of the play in regional productions, including Chicago’s Organic Theatre, and the 2000 teleplay starring Christine Lahti. (It’s worth mentioning that, even revised, the regional productions received mixed reviews.)
The Wasserstein estate approved the changes and Andre Bishop, the former artistic director of Playwrights Horizons and co-executor of the estate, came to rehearsal and gave notes.
Maybe the most notable change is that whereas in the 1997 New York production, Lyssa stays with her cheating husband, the 2026 version ends with the two female friends.
JUDITH: What will you do now?
LYSSA: I don’t know. Same as you. Rise and continue.
She is quoting a letter from Ulysses S. Grant to his wife, Julia Dent Grant, for whom Lyssa is named.
If this ending seems ambivalent it is also real. It gives a consolation that doesn’t seem phony: You have to live with regrets and compromises and go on.
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