Sources of Pride: Jewish Views on Gender and Sexuality by Abby Chava Stein
(Ben Yehuda Press)
September 2, 2025
FOR THE UNINITIATED, Abby Stein is a rabbi, activist, and author of the 2019 bestselling memoir Becoming Eve: My Journey From Ultra-Orthodox Rabbi To Transgender Woman. Born in the strictly religious, largely Yiddish-speaking Hasidic enclave of Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Stein is a tenth-generation descendant of the Baal Shem Tov, the founder of Hasidism. She spent the first 18 years of her life pickled in the rich culture, education system, and rituals of Hasidic life, and, as the first-born scion of a dynastic rabbinic family, would have been poised to be a future leader of that community. That very particular identity — as someone with both a deep, embodied knowledge of life in the Hasidic world, and of life as a transgender woman — gives Stein a rare perspective on the material. Zachary Kauffman
