Philadelphia artist sees beyond city's grit to paint heart of the city
Artist
Nina Hurwitz
is in her happy place at Braid Mill Studio in Philadelphia's Germantown neighborhood, where she transforms squiggly lines into stunning artwork.
In her studio, Hurwitz uses markers to create a drawing of her son Manny. In his eyes, she places a little heart. The heart is a symbol she uses in most of her vibrant pieces.
"I love to hide it and tuck it," Hurwitz said. "I'm trying to push the boundaries of what we can do with a heart."
That's the inspiration behind her series called "Generational Hugs." It's a collection of affection, forgiveness and embracing oneself, like in the portrait of RuPaul.
"He says at the end of the show, 'if you can't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?'" Hurwitz said.
A quote the artist holds close to heart after leaving the Hasidic community.
"I came from a place where you weren't encouraged to be different or yourself," Hurwitz said.
Hurwitz picked up a paintbrush, moved to Philadelphia with her two boys, and has been painting for over 12 years. She sees beyond the grit and paints people — the heart of the city.
"I'm allowing people to come in and just exhale," Hurwitz said. "To celebrate love in all its different forms."
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CBS News
14-04-2025
- CBS News
Philadelphia artist sees beyond city's grit to paint heart of the city
Artist Nina Hurwitz is in her happy place at Braid Mill Studio in Philadelphia's Germantown neighborhood, where she transforms squiggly lines into stunning artwork. In her studio, Hurwitz uses markers to create a drawing of her son Manny. In his eyes, she places a little heart. The heart is a symbol she uses in most of her vibrant pieces. "I love to hide it and tuck it," Hurwitz said. "I'm trying to push the boundaries of what we can do with a heart." That's the inspiration behind her series called "Generational Hugs." It's a collection of affection, forgiveness and embracing oneself, like in the portrait of RuPaul. "He says at the end of the show, 'if you can't love yourself, how in the hell you gonna love somebody else?'" Hurwitz said. A quote the artist holds close to heart after leaving the Hasidic community. "I came from a place where you weren't encouraged to be different or yourself," Hurwitz said. Hurwitz picked up a paintbrush, moved to Philadelphia with her two boys, and has been painting for over 12 years. She sees beyond the grit and paints people — the heart of the city. "I'm allowing people to come in and just exhale," Hurwitz said. "To celebrate love in all its different forms."
New York Times
02-04-2025
- New York Times
From Hasidic Brooklyn to Off Broadway: The Life of a Trans Rabbi
One morning in 2015, a few years after she had begun to separate herself from the ultra-Orthodox Jewish world in which she was raised, Abby Stein met with her father to come out as a woman. Raised in a Hasidic enclave in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Stein was all but certain that her family was unfamiliar with the notion of being transgender. In their isolated community, gender roles were rigid, and the internet was blocked entirely or made 'kosher' with software that restricted sites like Wikipedia. 'Any modern gender theory wouldn't speak to him,' Stein, 33, said of approaching her father. 'I needed to find something that would work.' That high-stakes conversation is at the center of a new Off Broadway play, 'Becoming Eve,' opening next week. In the lightly fictionalized play, the protagonist is called Chava, which is Stein's middle name. She is portrayed by Tommy Dorfman, opposite Richard Schiff, the 'West Wing' star who, playing her father, is transformed by the traditional garb of a Hasidic man, complete with a long beard and a black silken coat. The play ends shortly before the real events that turned Stein into a public figure. The same day that she had the conversation with her father, Stein, who was ordained as a Hasidic rabbi in 2011, came out to the larger world in a blog post. She woke up the next morning to find that the post on her typically lightly read blog had around 20,000 views. Soon, there were news headlines about her transition: 'Member of prominent U.S. Hasidic family comes out as transgender,' one read. 'Before I knew it, it was everywhere,' Stein said. In 2019, Stein published a memoir about her upbringing and transition. It became the source material for the play, which is being produced by New York Theater Workshop and staged at Abrons Arts Center in Manhattan. That tense meeting at the center of 'Becoming Eve' is interspersed with scenes from Stein's past before her transition: desperate prayers, at 6 years old, to be turned into a girl; rebelliousness, at 14, against the strictures of religious schooling; a growing discomfort with life inside the community, at 20, after an arranged marriage and the birth of a son. To translate Stein's memoir to the stage, the production had to find a way to represent Chava at all of those ages. After two workshops, the playwright, Emil Weinstein, and the director, Tyne Rafaeli, decided to try a different approach: puppets. Weinstein's mother, Jessica Litwak, who specializes in experimental theater, had performed with puppets throughout his childhood. The format seemed both practical — there was no need to hire a group of child actors — and metaphorical, signifying Stein's experience of dislocation between her body and her true self. Brought alive by two masked operators, the puppets interact with the actors, sitting on Schiff's lap or taking a cookie from Judy Kuhn, who plays Chava's mother. Dorfman, positioned on the edge of the action, delivers the dialogue. 'It transports you to the past while also portraying this visual metaphor of trans-ness and feeling disembodied,' said Weinstein, whom Stein supported as the choice for the playwright in part because he is both trans and Jewish. (Stein officiated Weinstein's wedding last fall.) The emotional center of the play, however, involves three flesh-and-blood actors, who meet for a fraught conversation at the progressive Upper West Side synagogue where Chava gravitated after leaving Hasidism. The expectations on Stein were loftier than for most. Both of her parents descended from rabbinical dynasties, including, on her father's side, the founder of the Hasidic movement, known as the Baal Shem Tov. The progressive synagogue's rabbi, played by Brandon Uranowitz, joins Chava in trying to explain her gender identity to her father in a language he might understand: Hasidic rabbinical commentary. They direct him to an interpretation of a biblical story by an 18th-century rabbi — an ancestor of Stein's. Citing an earlier mystical text, the rabbi wrote that, at times, the soul of a female has ended up in a male body. 'The soul and the body can be in mismatch,' Chava explains to her father in the play. (Though the play is performed in English, the actual conversations generally took place in Yiddish, the language that Stein's family speaks at home.) Stein said one of her goals for the play is to present a transgender story that embraces aspects of religion rather than rejecting it entirely. After gradually leaving the Hasidic community starting in 2012, Stein repudiated Judaism, before reclaiming the parts of it that she found meaningful. She is now a rabbi at a progressive synagogue in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Park Slope. She remains largely alienated from her family, though, including most of her 12 siblings. Before rehearsals for the play started, Stein took Dorfman, fresh off her Broadway debut in 'Romeo + Juliet,' on a tour of her old neighborhood. They visited a grocery store and a bakery, saw the wedding venue where her family members have been married and stood across the street from Stein's family home. 'It made clear the stakes,' Dorfman said. Last fall, the production hit a major speed bump. New York Theater Workshop was planning to stage the play at the Connelly Theater in the East Village, but the building's landlord — the Roman Catholic Archdiocese of New York — rejected the show. The Archdiocese had begun more intensely scrutinizing the content of shows proposed for the venue, saying in a statement from October that 'nothing should take place on church-owned property that is contrary to the teaching of the church.' The producers scrambled to find a new theater. Rafaeli said she was bent on keeping the play on schedule, motivated by the Archdiocese's rejection, as well as the increasingly charged political climate surrounding transgender identity. That climate, Rafaeli said, made the play feel all the more urgent. But would the small Lower East Side theater, which draws audiences that skew socially progressive, attract anyone whose mind is undecided? 'That's the biggest challenge of our culture,' Rafaeli said. In portraying that consequential conversation between Stein and her father, Rafaeli wanted to make sure Stein's father was not portrayed as a villain, but as someone whose impulses the audience could understand, too. That part took more imagination: The production had complete access to Stein, but none to her father, who does not speak to his daughter. 'My deepest commitment to this play,' Rafaeli said, 'has been that we equally empathize with each one of them and understand why the bridge is so hard to build from both sides.'
Yahoo
12-03-2025
- Yahoo
The New Yorker, a US institution, celebrates 100 years of goings on
The New Yorker magazine, a staple of American literary and cultural life defined by its distinctive covers, long-form journalism, witty cartoons and particular grammar, is celebrating 100 years on newsstands. To mark the publication's centenary milestone, four commemorative issues are being released, while its namesake city will host seven exhibitions ahead of a Netflix documentary on the title known for its artistic cover creations. Despite its storied history, the New Yorker often puts a mirror up to current events. Three founding fathers were shown on a recent cover design being marched out of office, carrying their effects in cardboard boxes in a satirical commentary on US President Donald Trump's assault on the status quo. Francoise Mouly, the magazine's artistic director, said the New Yorker was not immune from the crisis plaguing the media. "But I'm stubborn and I see the future with a lot of confidence and hope," she said. Mouly has been one of the conductors of the New Yorker orchestra since 1993, selecting the cover that week after week lends the magazine its unique identity. "There are some printed products that will never be replaced by digital -- children's books, comics, and the New Yorker," she told AFP at a recent exhibition showcasing the magazine's art, held at New York's Alliance Francaise cultural center. One example of cover art on display depicts a rush-hour subway scene in which all the passengers are animals, while another by Mouly's husband Art Spiegelman shows a Black woman kissing a Hasidic man. That 1993 design, which followed clashes between the two communities in a Brooklyn neighborhood, stirred controversy at the time and remains one of the title's most discussed covers. With more than 5,000 editions over the past century, the magazine has published literary greats like Truman Capote's 1965 "In Cold Blood", while also giving James Baldwin space to write about race relations. - 'Incredibly successful' - Ernest Hemingway, Susan Sontag and JD Salinger are among the authors to have graced the pages of the magazine which combines current affairs, analysis, fiction, reviews, criticism, poetry, and of course its legendary cartoons. Published weekly, the magazine has reported global scoops like the fullest account of the US atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, with the entirety of the August 31, 1946 edition given over to John Hersey's article. In 1961 Hannah Arendt covered the trial of Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann in the reporting of which she coined the phrase "the banality of evil." In recent years the magazine won a Pulitzer Prize for Ronan Farrow's reporting of predatory film mogul Harvey Weinstein, fuelling the "MeToo" movement. "These were all remarkable, long-form stories that really changed the course of American history, not just American journalism," said Julie Golia, curator of an exhibition on the magazine at The New York Public Library. Founded on February 21, 1925, the New Yorker did not always have such lofty ambitions. At the height of the Jazz Age, amid post-war and pre-depression euphoria, husband and wife founders Harold Ross and Jane Grant set out to create "a magazine of wit and cosmopolitanism, an urbane magazine, but not one that took itself too seriously." One hundred years on, it boasts 1.3 million subscribers, most of whom subscribe in both print and digital formats. It is a jewel in the crown of media group Conde Nast, which also publishes Vogue, Vanity Fair and GQ, having bought the New Yorker in 1985. Despite its highbrow image, the magazine has adapted to the digital age emphasizing subscriptions over advertising, editor-in-chief since 1998 David Remnick said in a recent radio interview. "The New Yorker is much more than those pages that people get in the mail," said Golia. "It's a website, it's podcasts, it's a festival, and it's a brand (and) as a brand, it's incredibly successful." arb-gw/mlm
