Becoming Eve with Abby Chava Stein

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. Born as the first son in a dynastic rabbinical family, Abby was 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.

Join Randi Reed, Keshet, for a conversation with Abby as she shares her journey and paints a portrait of a life that every human being can relate to— the vulnerability and the glory, the frustrations and the revelations, the shedding of one identity and growing into another.

Copies of Abby Chava Stein’s book, Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman, will be available for sale at this event.