Abby Chava Stein, Becoming Eve

In conversation with Rabbi Brian Glusman, MJCCA

Community Partners: Southern Jewish Resource Network for Gender & Sexual Diversity.

Abby Stein was raised in a Hasidic Jewish community in Brooklyn, isolated in a culture that lives according to the laws and practices of eighteenth-century Eastern Europe, speaking only Yiddish and Hebrew and shunning modern life. Stein was born as the first son in a dynastic rabbinical family, poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews.

But Abby felt certain at a young age that she was a girl. Without access to TV or the Internet, and never taught to speak English, she suppressed her desire for a new body while looking for answers wherever she could find them, from forbidden religious texts to smuggled secular examinations of faith. Finally, she orchestrated a personal exodus from ultra-Orthodox manhood to mainstream femininity-a radical choice that forced her to leave her home, her family, her way of life.

Becoming Eve is the powerful coming-out story of an ultra-Orthodox child who was born to become a rabbinic leader and instead became a woman and an outspoken voice for gender freedom.

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