the seen
Ex-Chasidic Trans Activist Abby Stein Photographed
by Annie Leibovitz
Mercado, and the Jewish director with alopecia
Rachel Fleit, among others — will be made avail-
able for anyone to use, in an eff ort to change the
public face of the cruise industry.

“What Annie, indeed all of the artists involved
in this project have captured so beautifully, is that
for vacations to really live up to the marketing
moniker ‘all-inclusive,’ then they should start by
using images that are inclusive of all, not just a
few,” Celebrity Cruises President and CEO Lisa
Lutoff -Perlo said in a statement.

Working with Leibovitz gave Stein “a lot of cour-
age,” Stein said. She added, “It was legitimately
such a diverse crowd. People with diff erent abil-
ities, people with diff erent looks, diff erent ages,
diff erent body types and everything. So it was a
very, I would say empowering moment.”
For the shoot, Stein got to pick from a few
1950s-style options, ultimately choosing
a white one-piece with black polka dots and
posing on a chaise on the deck of a Celebrity
Cruise liner where she and other models spent a
full week. JE
—Jackie Hajdenberg
Abby Chava Stein, an American transgender author,
activist, blogger, model, speaker and rabbi, relaxes
on the Resort Deck of Celebrity Apex.

Photographed by Annie Leibovitz for Celebrity Cruises’ All Inclusive Photo Project
Abby Stein remembers two things well about her
fi rst-ever editorial photo shoot after coming out
as an ex-Orthodox trans woman.

The fi rst was that the shoot, in her bedroom for
Vogue magazine in 2018, was the fi rst time Stein
had posed in a bra, and she wasn’t totally com-
fortable with the experience.

The second was that someone asked her who
her dream photographer would be.

The name that popped into her mind was “one
that I knew was never going to happen,” she
recalled recently — Annie Leibovitz.

“She’s defi nitely done a lot of work to elevate
LGBTQ voices and portraits,” Stein said about
why she was drawn to Leibovitz, the award-win-
ning portraitist. “And she is obviously Jewish.”
Four years later, that dream has come true:
Leibovitz has photographed Stein in a setting that
couldn’t be more diff erent from her New York City
apartment — on the deck of a cruise liner.

Stein, an activist for LGBTQ+ inclusion in Jewish
communities and beyond, is one of dozens of
subjects of photographs in a new library created
by Celebrity Cruises to showcase the diversity
of people who love to travel. The images —
which also include #MeToo movement founder
Tarana Burke, disability activist and model Jillian
The U.S. Postal Service released a new series of Forever stamps in
honor of Shel Silverstein.

4 APRIL 14, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
The U.S. Postal Service released a new
series of Forever stamps in honor of
Shel Silverstein, the Jewish author and
illustrator who died in 1999.

The stamps commemorate what is
perhaps Silverstein’s most famous book,
“The Giving Tree,” which tells the story
of the relationship between a boy and
a tree. The stamps feature an image of
the boy from the story catching an apple
with Silverstein’s name written below.

“The issuance honors the extraordi-
narily versatile Shel Silverstein (1930-
1999), one of the 20th century’s most
imaginative authors and illustrators. His
picture book The Giving Tree and his
quirky poetry collections are beloved by
children everywhere,” the description on
the postal service’s website reads.

Silverstein was born in 1930 to a
middle-class Jewish family in Chicago.

He started drawing and writing from a
young age and drew his fi rst cartoons for
adult readers when he was a GI in Japan
and Korea. In addition to his career
as a children’s book author, Silverstein
was a prolifi c songwriter and play-
wright. (He also inspired the name of the
youngest child of a Jewish family that
recently appeared on Ava Duvernay’s
home-swapping TV show.)
The Postal Service’s special edi-
tion stamps commemorating notable
Americans have included many Jews,
including the physicist Richard Feynman
in 2005, cartoonist and inventor Rube
Goldberg in 1995 and, in 1991, come-
dian Fanny Brice, the inspiration for
the musical “Funny Girl.” The series in
which Brice appeared was drawn by the
Jewish illustrator Al Hirschfeld.

—Shira Hanau
USPS Postal Service Honors Shel
‘The Giving Tree’ Silverstein