Arts
The Koffler is thrilled to present the Toronto launch of Abby Stein’s Becoming Eve: My Journey from Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman. Abby will be joined in conversation by Rev. Jeff Rock, Senior Pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church of Toronto, Toronto’s LGBTQ2+ Church. Trans activist 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. As the first son in a dynastic rabbinical family, Abby was poised to become a leader of the next generation of Hasidic Jews. However, from a young age, Abby felt certain that she was a girl. In her groundbreaking memoir Becoming Eve: My Journey From Ultra- Orthodox Rabbi To Transgender Woman, Abby traces her extraordinary coming-out story, from suppressing her desire for a new body, to looking for answers in forbidden religious texts, to orchestrating her final exodus from ultra-Orthodox manhood to mainstream femininity – a radical choice that forced her to leave home, her family and way of life. Powerful in the truths it reveals about biology, culture, faith, and identity, Becoming Eve poses the enduring question: How far will you go to become the person you were meant to be? kofflerarts.org