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Queer yeshiva to publish first-ever collection of Jewish legal opinions written by and for trans Jews
(JTA) — In the midst of writing a 13-page analysis of a complex area of Jewish law, Rabbi Xava De Cordova found something she wasn’t expecting to see in the medieval-era sources: flexibility.
De Cordova is transgender and had long wondered whether she could feel a sense of belonging while studying reams of rabbinic writings on halacha, or Jewish law, which stretch back thousands of years and often prescribe different practices for men and women.
The laws of ritual purity, for example, prescribe specific behaviors for women on the assumption that they all menstruate. Trans women do not. De Cordova said that gap and others had her thinking, “I don’t really know if I can find a place for myself in this literature.”
But after digging into Jewish texts on the topic, De Cordova realized she’d sold the sages short: Medieval European rabbis were asking many of the same questions she was — and their answers reflected real-world complexity.
“I just found that the rabbis and the early halachic authorities’ understanding of niddah was so much more conceptual and vague and fluctuating than I ever realized before I started this particular work,” De Cordova said, using the Hebrew term for purity laws. Her conclusion: “Wow, there’s so much space for me within this literature.”
De Cordova’s realization is one of many that a dozen Jewish scholars and rabbis have had over the last year as they have scoured Jewish texts for guidance on how transgender Jews can adapt traditional rituals to their lived experience. Now, the group is preparing to release a batch of their essays, analyses of Jewish law called teshuvot, in hopes that they can inform the experiences of trans Jews who seek to live in accordance with traditional Jewish law.
The release of the essays comes at a time when lawmakers in dozens of states are targeting trans people and their rights, in some cases instigating fights that have heavily involved rabbis and their families.
In that climate, writing trans Jews into Jewish tradition “becomes an act of resistance because it’s about celebrating lives that are being demeaned and celebrating people who are being dehumanized in the public sphere,” said Rabbi Becky Silverstein, co-director of the Trans Halakha Project at Svara, the yeshiva founded in Chicago two decades ago to serve the queer community. The dozen rabbis and scholars are based at Svara and collectively form the Teshuva Writing Project.
Among the questions they have tackled: How could a trans man converting to Judaism have a bris, required for male converts? Is the removal of body tissue after gender-affirming surgery a ritual matter, given Jewish legal requirements for burying body parts? And is there a Jewish obligation, in certain cases, to undergo gender transition?
Just how widely their answers will be consumed and taken into account is a question. Most Jews who consciously adhere to halacha throughout their daily lives are Orthodox, and live in communities that either reject trans Jews or are reckoning with whether and how to accept them. Non-Orthodox Jewish denominations have made efforts to embrace trans Jews, but halacha is less often the starting point for most of their members. The Reform movement, the largest in the United States, expressly rejects halacha as binding.
Still, a growing number of Jews and Jewish communities strive to be inclusive while staying rooted in Jewish law and tradition. There are also a growing number of trans Jews who are connected to traditional communities, or who want to live in accordance with Jewish law.
“I think individual trans Jews who are not part of communities could use these teshuvot to guide their own decision-making,” said Silverstein, who was ordained at the pluralistic Hebrew College seminary. “We live in a time of religious autonomy in Jewish life, and where trans Jews actually are hungry for connection to tradition. And so they could use these teshuvot to help inform their own conversations.”
Organizations and initiatives such as the Jewish LGBTQ group Keshet; Torah Queeries, a collection of queer commentaries on the Bible; and TransTorah.org have created rituals, readings, blessings and customs for trans Jews, and Svara runs a Queer Talmud Camp as well as intensive Jewish study programs throughout the year. But until now, no collection of Jewish legal opinions has been published by and for trans people.
“Halacha has to be informed by the real lived experiences of the people about whom it is legislating,” said Laynie Soloman, who helps lead Svara and holds the title of associate rosh yeshiva, in an approach that they said the group had adopted from the disability advocacy community. “That is a fundamental truth about halacha that we are holding as a collective and taking seriously in the way we are authoring these teshuvot.”
The teshuvot will be published later this month, and follow a long tradition of rabbis setting halachic precedent by answering questions from their followers. Those answers are traditionally based on an analysis of rabbinic texts throughout history. They can address questions ranging from whether smoking cigarettes is permissible to the particulars of making a kitchen kosher for Passover.
Some Jewish legal questions tackled by the group at Svara had not previously been answered, such as how to mark conversion for someone who is male but does not have a penis. In other cases, accepted Jewish law pertaining to gender can be painful for those who are nonbinary or trans, either because the answer is not clear or because the law does not match up with contemporary understandings that gender and sex are distinct.
“[Those are] areas where trans people are sort of most likely to either feel lost themselves or be interrogated by their community. … And so they’re sort of these urgent halachic needs,” said De Cordova, who was privately ordained by a rabbi from the Renewal Judaism movement. “And 99.9% of the literature about them so far has been written by cis people, about us.”
De Cordova concluded that trans women are obligated in niddah, the ritual purity laws. In her teshuva, she provides several approaches to emulate the complicated counting cycle that tallies the days a woman is considered ritually impure following menstruation. She suggests using a seven- and 11-day cycle originally proposed by Maimonides, the 12th-century scholar and philosopher. De Cordova also suggests that the imposition of a cycle not based in biology means ancient and medieval rabbis had some understanding of womanhood as a social construct.
“There’s many cases in which the rabbis sort of choose to orient niddah around their understanding of women, which I would call the social construction of womanhood by rabbis, rather than observable physical phenomenon or actual women’s experience,” she said.
For De Cordova, the experience of writing about niddah provided her with new insights about some of the oldest Jewish legal texts on the subject.
“They’re flexible enough and sort of responsive enough that I can really find a lot of freedom and space in working with them,” she said of the ancient sources. “And that was just a really sort of wonderful and freeing transition to go through.”
Last year, the Conservative Movement approved new language for calling up a nonbinary person to various Torah honors. The rabbis behind the opinion consulted with groups serving LGBTQ Jews and synagogues centered on them, but acknowledged that they were imperfect authors.
“When my coauthors and I published the teshuva, we wrote in it that we are all cisgender rabbis and that we hope that, increasingly, halachic work dealing with nonbinary and trans and queer Jewish life and identity and practice will… come from queer rabbis and scholars themselves,” said Guy Austrian, the rabbi of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center, a synagogue in upper Manhattan. “And I think the publication of the first batch of teshuvot from the Trans Halakha Project shows that that process is underway, and I think that that can only be a good thing for the Jewish world.”
Scholars at Svara, the queer yeshiva based in Chicago, have served the Jewish LGBTQ community for two decades and are now creating the first written set of Jewish law by and for trans Jews. (Jess Benjamin)
Adding to the question-and-answer tradition of Jewish legal opinions means trans Jews will now have new texts to guide their religious practice, Silverstein said. Trans Jews, the writers of the opinions acknowledge, already have their own ways of performing Jewish ritual that accords with their lived experience. But they say that when it comes to Jewish law, informal custom without a sourced legal opinion is not enough.
“I want cis[gender] clergy to realize that there are resources written by and for trans people that they can turn to when they’re trying to help a member of their congregation,” De Cordova said.
The authors of the legal opinions applied to be part of the collective and come from a religiously pluralistic group, ranging in affiliation from Orthodox to Conservative to Jewish Renewal. They have varying expectations for how far-reaching the impact of the new legal opinions will be.
Mike Moskowitz, an Orthodox rabbi and the scholar-in-residence for trans and queer Jewish studies at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, which serves the LGBTQ community, said the teshuvot could provide a model for observant Jews who are also trans.
“I think it’s significant in modeling what an informed conversation can look like, which hasn’t really happened in Orthodox publications,” said Moskowitz, who was not part of the collective that composed the teshuvot on trans Jews’ practice. “I hope this models what can be done in other movements. What’s been tricky is that every movement has a different understanding of what halacha means.”
Even within Orthodoxy, conflicting opinions already exist, in a reflection of how halacha has always operated. For example, Talia Avrahami, a transgender Orthodox woman, follows the opinion of the late Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, known as the Tzitz Eliezer, who ruled that a trans woman who undergoes gender affirmation surgery is a woman according to Jewish law. But Avrahami was told she could not sit in the women’s section of her synagogue, because the rabbi who the synagogue follows does not accept Waldenberg’s opinion. Months earlier, Avrahami had also been asked to leave her teaching job at an Orthodox day school after students and parents learned that she was transgender.
Avrahami declined to comment on the new teshuvot, citing restrictions set by her current employer.
Silverstein says some Conservative rabbis have expressed interest in using the opinions to guide practice in their own congregations. But he is less sure if they will be adopted in the Orthodox community, which is the target audience for most traditional literature on Jewish law.
“When it comes to the Orthodox community, I’m not sure I am bold enough to dream that these teshuvot specifically are going to be adopted,” Silverstein said. “I’m not even sure I know what that means. But it is my hope that they will permeate throughout the Jewish community, at least through the Modern Orthodox community.”
The scope of the opinions written by the collective extends beyond the trans community. The first batch of answers, for example, includes an opinion about how to increase physical accessibility to a mikvah, ritual baths used to fulfill some requirements of Jewish law.
“Judaism thrives and Torah thrives when people are bringing their life experiences to the text and asking their questions of the text,” Silverstein said. “That’s how new Torah is uncovered in the world. And that’s how Judaism and Torah has stayed alive through so much of Jewish history.”
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Clavicular cuts a path across Tel Aviv, dividing pro-Israel influencers over his record of antisemitism
(JTA) — TEL AVIV — When Israeli influencer Aaron Morali realized that the celebrity drawing a crowd at the Loullie beach club on Saturday night was Braden Peters — better known as Clavicular — he alerted staff.
He knew that in addition to being a prominent “looksmaxxing” influencer, Peters had appeared alongside the white supremacist Nick Fuentes singing Ye’s “Heil Hitler” and otherwise consorted with antisemites.
“We thought maybe he was a big influencer supporting Israel,” Morali told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “But we very quickly understood that he wasn’t.”
Peters was soon asked to leave the club. But elsewhere along the beach in Tel Aviv, Clavicular has gotten a warm reception. Even though he is closely associated with an online ecosystem steeped in antisemitism, a number of pro-Israel and Jewish influencers have enthusiastically filmed content with him in Israel, and crowds of young Israelis have gathered around him as he livestreams from beaches and nightclubs.
The welcome has bewildered many of Peters’ own followers. His livestreams from Israel have been filled with comments accusing him of selling out, urging him to “kiss the wall” — a reference to the Western Wall that has become a taunt in some far-right online circles — and mocking him for embracing Israel.
In addition to becoming well known for his efforts to optimize his physical appearance, Peters drew attention in January when he was part of a group at Miami’s Vendôme nightclub — including Fuentes and the manosphere influencers Sneako and Andrew Tate — singing along to ‘Heil Hitler,’ the Ye song that samples a speech by Adolf Hitler.
Amid a backlash, Peters doubled down. “I am not sorry. I don’t apologize for what I did,” he said at the time. “I would do it again today.”
Now, Clavicular’s visit to Tel Aviv has raised questions about why he was admitted to Israel given the country’s recent record of denying entry to right- and left-wing figures with records of antisemitic and anti-Israel activity. The Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism declined to comment about Clavicular’s entry into Israel.
It has also exposed a divide in the pro-Israel influencer community. Some influencers have sought to partner with Clavicular to film content, attempting to springboard into his vast audience and taking pride in presence at a time when Israel is widely seen as a pariah. Others have decried his presence, his content objectifying Israeli women and the readiness of fellow Jews to overlook his antisemitic activity.
Orthodox Jewish influencer Golda Daphna posted a series of Instagram videos criticizing Peters during his visit. In one video, she played a recording in which Peters, after being shown a photo of an Israeli woman, says, “Does she want to have sex? Just tell the girls I’m looking to have sex in a bathroom.” In another post, Daphna criticized fellow pro-Israel influencers who collaborated with him, writing, “Whoever gives this behavior a platform, in my opinion, has ended their career.”
Eden Sisson, another influencer involved in hasbara, or public diplomacy on Israel’s behalf, similarly urged Israeli women not to appear in Peters’ videos. “Don’t give him the attention he’s looking for. If he approaches you with a camera, think twice before participating,” she wrote. Referring to his past use of Nazi slogans and symbols, she added, “Someone who has chosen to use Nazi slogans and symbols in the past does not deserve your trust.”
The influencer Hallel Abramowitz-Silverman, writing in the Jerusalem Post, denounced what she said was “a growing culture within parts of Israel’s advocacy and creator community that mistakes influence for integrity.” She added, “Somewhere along the way, we started believing that if someone has enough followers, we should be grateful they’re willing to talk to us at all — even if they have spent years platforming hatred, extremism, or misogyny.”
Peters could not be reached for comment via multiple channels and multiple attempts by JTA. He told The Free Press that he had come to Israel because it was “unexplored territory” for major influencers, few of whom have broadcast from the country, which he said was “viral.”
Among those willing to engage with Peters was Rabbi Yossi Farro, who has built a large social media following by wrapping tefillin on celebrities and what he calls “powerful Jews.”
Farro met Peters for lunch at the Royal Beach Hotel in Tel Aviv and later posted a video presenting him with a necklace combining the OpenAI logo and a Star of David, joking that it amounted to “ChatGPT mogging David,” using internet slang meaning to outshine or dominate someone. Farro later wrote that Peters was “loving Israel and Israel is loving him.”
Farro did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
Meanwhile Shira Braun, an influencer whose bio says she is “representing Jewish & Israeli women,” appeared in videos with Clavicular in which she was presented as his girlfriend. She said she had received death threats as a result.
Their collaborations with Peters drew swift criticism from other pro-Israel creators, who argued that collaborating with someone associated with antisemitism risked legitimizing him while exposing Israelis to manipulation.
“If he approaches you with a camera, think twice before participating,” Channel 12 personality Hagar Amgar warned on Instagram. “A few seconds of footage can be edited, taken out of context, and shared with millions of people.”
Some prominent advocates went further. Yoseph Haddad, the Arab Israeli activist and influencer, called for Peters to be deported.
Peters also briefly crossed paths with Topaz Luk, a longtime adviser to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, at the Tel Aviv nightclub Shlavata. Peters has said he hopes to film a “collab” with Netanyahu himself, whom he calls “The Big Yahu.”
Luk described the encounter as coincidental in an interview with the Israeli outlet Walla. He said Peters “asked to express regret over his antisemitic statement,” and said the influencer told him he was in Israel to show the truth about the country and planned to meet Holocaust survivors and issue a public apology. Luk was skeptical: “We’ll wait and see,” he told the outlet.
Peters’ connection to online antisemites continued during his Israel visit. He shared a post by Fuentes during his trip. And his stream chat has been filled with antisemitic and anti-Israel comments, with viewers deriding him as a sellout, hurling slurs and mocking the trip; his former friend, the streamer Sneako, who has espoused Islamist views, publicly lamented the visit, while an AI-generated image of Peters kissing the Western Wall circulated on X.
Peters has also commented repeatedly on stream about Israeli women, calling them “Stacys,” looksmaxxing slang for attractive women.
In response to backlash from his fans over the visit to Israel, Peters told The Free Press that he is “not a political guy” and that the trip was not about wading into the Israeli-Palestinian debate.
Peters’ presence in Israel has puzzled many of his critics.
The Ministry of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism has recently urged the Population and Immigration Authority, which has the power to permit or deny entry to Israel, to bar prominent figures on both the right and left who have drawn allegations antisemitism and anti-Israel activity.
In May, Israel denied entry to the streamer Tyler Oliveira, who had made the Hasidic community in Kiryas Joel, New York, and the Orthodox community of Lakewood, New Jersey, the targets of his content. He was deported back to the United States after landing at Ben Gurion Airport, and Diaspora Minister Amichai Chikli confirmed the decision on X, resurfacing a month-old post in which Oliveira had asked whether Israel would let him into the country and replying with one word: ‘No.’”
Peters has a lengthy record of run-ins with the law in the United States, one standard by which those who seek to visit Israel are sometimes denied. He was charged with unlawfully discharging a firearm in Florida after appearing to shoot a dead alligator in the Everglades on a livestream, resolving the case in May through a plea deal that carried six months of probation and 20 hours of community service.
He was arrested earlier this year in Arizona on suspicion of drug possession and using a fake ID. Maricopa County prosecutors subsequently dropped the charges, citing no reasonable likelihood of conviction. He is also being sued in civil court by an influencer who alleges he sexually assaulted her when she was 16. His lawyer has denied the claims, calling them unproven.
Morali, who rose to fame as a cast member on “Love Island Israel,” has joined the growing chorus asking why Peters was allowed to enter Israel in the first place. “Obviously we welcome everybody to Israel, but whoever is posting content against us or doing something controversial, that’s a bit more tricky,” he told JTA.
Morali said he was at the club for a night out with friends when he spotted Peters standing outside. The video he filmed of Peters standing outside the nightclub, which he captioned, “We don’t need any antisemites here. Am Israel Chai,” quickly went viral.
According to Morali, after Peters entered the beach club with his security detail and began approaching patrons and trying to film content, security began to take notice. Loullie did not respond to a JTA request for comment but confirmed the account to Israeli media.
“We decided to tell the right people about it so something could be done, because we didn’t feel comfortable having someone with his camera in everyone’s face, filming something that could potentially harm our country,” Morali said. “They removed him right away. And I must say, I’m proud of them for doing that.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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How Shabbat bound Lindsey Graham to Joe Lieberman
Lindsey Graham did not always know what time Shabbat started, but he always knew when it ended. That was the joke the South Carolina Republican made while remembering his close friend, the late Sen. Joe Lieberman, at a memorial service in Washington in 2024.
In his remarks, Graham said that while traveling around the world with his Senate colleague, Lieberman, an observant Jew and author of a book about Shabbat, always knew exactly when sundown arrived on Friday, no matter where they were. After years of traveling together, Graham joked, he learned to recognize when Shabbat ended on Saturday “so we didn’t have to do this anymore.”
This past Saturday evening, almost exactly as Shabbat came to a close, Graham died after suffering an apparent heart attack at his Capitol Hill townhouse. Emergency dispatch audio indicates first responders were called to his home at around 8:30 p.m. after a report of chest pains.
The two politicians from different sides of the aisle first became close when Graham joined the Senate in 2003, joining an already close friendship between Lieberman and Sen. John McCain, who died in 2018. Despite disagreeing on many domestic issues, Graham and Lieberman bonded over shared views about American leadership abroad, traveling together to the world’s most dangerous conflict zones in the years after the Sept. 11 attacks. The three senators, who became known as the “Three Amigos,” also made repeated trips to Israel.
At Lieberman’s memorial, Graham recalled one of their more memorable trips together, accompanying McCain during his 2008 presidential campaign to visit the Western Wall in Jerusalem. Graham said he was pinned against the ancient stones by photographers scrambling for the perfect shot and injured his knee. “They crushed me against the wall, and I began to wail,” Graham joked, referencing the site’s English name, the Wailing Wall. Lieberman, he recalled, helped pull him back to his feet.
Months later, during a meeting with the Dalai Lama in Colorado, Lieberman brought the Tibetan spiritual leader over to Graham and asked if he could heal his injured knee. The Dalai Lama placed a hand on it and asked if it felt any better. “No,” Graham replied.
“I didn’t think so,” the Dalai Lama quipped.
A strong ally of Israel
Israel occupied a central place in Graham’s political career. He was one of Congress’ strongest supporters of the U.S.-Israel alliance, pushed for a tough approach toward Iran and backed efforts to expand peace between Israel and its Arab neighbors. Axios reported Sunday that Graham spent his final weeks working on a renewed push aimed at normalizing relations between Saudi Arabia and Israel.
In a Sunday appearance on Fox News, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu revealed that he and Graham disagreed over Israel’s recent proposal to phase out U.S. military assistance in the coming years, amid growing criticism of aid to Israel from both parties. Graham “went ballistic,” Netanyahu said. “He said, ‘No way. You can’t do that.’ He was so concerned with our security, which he believed was your security, that he actually fought the prime minister of Israel on keeping America’s aid – or actually increasing it.”
As news of Graham’s death spread Saturday night, Jewish organizations and leaders mourned his passing and reflected on the legacy he leaves as one of the Senate’s strongest advocates for Israel and Jewish causes.
In his farewell to Lieberman two years ago, Graham concluded: “One of the best things that ever happened to Lindsey Graham was to meet Joe Lieberman. So until we meet again, my amigo, God bless.”
For those who watched their friendship over the years, it is hard not to imagine that somewhere beyond this world, McCain, Lieberman and Graham have found each other once again.
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I was there when the lights went out and New York was plunged into darkness
I’m the lifelong resident of a vast and complicated metropolis that smugly prides itself on never stopping. Subways, buses and cabs running day and night, bodegas and diners open 24/7, hundreds of thousands of people at work or out partying somewhere, bike couriers and truck drivers making deliveries — all in a town with a million moving parts, where the show always goes on — until, suddenly, it doesn’t.
I was reminded of that one evening not long ago in a drab Chinese restaurant uptown on Broadway, clutching a pair of wooden chopsticks poised to shovel another mound of chicken and walnuts into my mouth.
Music was playing softly over the house PA system. The melody suddenly sounded strangely familiar, but oddly out of place in those surroundings. I froze mid-bite, trying to place what I was hearing. Then it hit me. I glanced at my dinner companion Ann Aptaker, author of the Cantor Gold noir crime novels.
“Wow,” I said. “Do you hear that?”
She paused, tilted her head slightly, then raised an eyebrow.
“Yes,” she said. “It’s Threepenny Opera!”
Sure enough, the song drifting through the room was Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht’s wickedly jaunty tango, “Ballad of Immoral Earnings.” Even stranger, it was a track from my favorite production of the show: the Lincoln Center revival from decades ago, starring the late, great Raul Julia as Mack the Knife and Ellen Greene as his favorite prostitute, Jenny Diver.
“Of all things! What a weird song to play while people are eating,” I mused.
“I don’t think I’ve ever heard it in a restaurant before,” she agreed. “And certainly not a Chinese place.”
“They must have good taste in musicals.”
Shrugging, we resumed picking away at our dinner. A minute later another song from the same show began to play. We gaped at each other.
“They’re playing the whole album!” I sputtered. “What are the odds?”
Ann frowned and paused. then suddenly whirled to reach into the pocket of her denim jacket hanging behind her chair. She pulled out her phone, and the music instantly grew louder. We both laughed. She must have leaned back against her jacket and set off her music app. Whew — mystery solved!
But hearing those distinctive strains of Weill’s score transported me back to one of the hottest summers New York City had ever endured.
It was 1977, the year I attended an outdoor performance of Threepenny Opera at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park. My mother and a roommate from Pratt had joined me that night.
The Delacorte sits beneath the stone towers of Belvedere Castle, lit by floodlamps like a fairytale illustration, open to the sky and the sounds of the city beyond the trees. On a good night it can feel magical. On this particularly sweltering night, the air hung over us in the audience like a damp blanket as Philip Bosco, who had replaced Raul Julia for this summer staging, swaggered across the stage as Mack the Knife, and Ellen Greene reprised her role as Jenny.
And then — just as she was belting out her furious solo number, Pirate Jenny — all the lights shut off. Greene’s mic abruptly went dead, and the band lurched sourly out of tune before grinding to a halt.
We were plunged into pitch darkness. For a moment, there was silence.
Then the crowd began to buzz nervously. Was this part of the show? I’d seen the play several times before, and knew that it most definitely was not.
A few awkward minutes later, some of the cast reappeared wielding flashlights. While the tech crew worked on the electricity, the band filled the darkness with some lively jazz. Rubber-limbed dancer Tony Azito pranced around jovially in the flickering beams, easing the mood for a spell. But that age-old theater adage, the show must go on, was about to bite the dust.
The house manager finally stepped up on stage to make an announcement: “Ladies and gentlemen, we just learned that there’s been a massive power failure at Con Edison. It’s not just us; the whole city is dark!”
We didn’t know it yet, but this was the Big Blackout of July 13, 1977, and there we were, thousands of us stranded smack in the middle of Central Park. There wasn’t even much of a moon out that night, so it was really, really dark.
“Well, this is some pickle,” Mom said.
We wondered how the hell we were going to get out of there.
I vividly recalled the last big blackout in New York City, the one in 1965. I was just a young kid back then and safely at home, so it had actually been fun. While my mother lit a few Sabbath candles, my little sister and I roamed from room to room pretending we were in a haunted house. Meanwhile, our poor Dad had to trudge back to Brooklyn from midtown Manhattan — a five-hour hike in hot leather shoes.
But this time felt very different. I was far from the safety of home, trapped in the middle of what might as well have been a forest at night. Central Park is beautiful when you can see it. In pitch darkness it’s downright hazardous.
“Guess we’ll all just have to sleep in the park tonight,” I cracked. Neither Mom nor my Pratt roomie were laughing.
Thankfully, a phalanx of city cops eventually arrived to help guide us out. Audience members, cast and crew all joined hands as we carefully made our way along the park’s winding paths, stepping over roots and curbs, catching one another when someone stumbled. Our only illumination came from a few scattered police car headlights.
A walk that normally takes ten minutes took forever, but eventually we emerged onto Central Park West.
The scene was eerie. Streetlamps were dark. Traffic lights were out. Cars sat frozen in the intersections. Not a single apartment window was lit. For a city that never sleeps, it felt as if someone had suddenly flipped off the master switch.
Then I spotted something: “Look, the buses are still running!”
A city bus was rumbling slowly toward us, brightly lit inside. With the subways dead, getting back to my dorm in Brooklyn would have been impossible, so Mom’s place on the Upper East Side looked like the safest destination. She had temporarily split with my Dad and was living there with a roommate at the time.
The three of us squeezed aboard along with what felt like half the audience, and somehow made it across town to First Avenue. As we approached my mother’s high-rise, a dreadful thought suddenly hit me.
“Mom, what floor are you on again?”
“Twenty-five,” she replied grimly.
Of course both elevators were dead. We trudged up 25 flights of stairs in complete darkness, arriving exhausted and panting. My mother fumbled with her key, finally opening the door to reveal Sylvia, her gravel-voiced, seen-it-all Long Island roommate, standing there with her ever-present cigarette tip glowing in the dark.
“Come on in, darlings,” she rasped dryly. “Join the party.”
Sylvia had lit a few candles around the apartment, the only light we’d see that night.
Outside, the city was far from peaceful. While we tried to sleep on sofa cushions on the floor, one of the worst nights of unrest in New York history was unfolding in the streets below. Store windows were smashed. Shops were looted. Garbage cans were set on fire.
Lying there in the dim glow of flickering candlelight, hearing distant sirens punctuated by the sudden crash of breaking glass somewhere in the darkness below, I felt a growing sense of dread. An evening that had begun with music and theater had improbably ended with Manhattan plunged into darkness, its fragile machinery suddenly exposed.
By morning the city looked as though it had survived a world war.
This resilient burg has been battered and bruised over the years, enduring terrorist attacks, blackouts, blizzards, hurricanes, floods, garbage strikes, transit strikes, and the occasional collapse of its aging infrastructure. Yet somehow it manages to reset and lurch forward each time, improvising solutions the way Tony Azito danced in the dark that night at the Delacorte.
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