Lifestyle
92NY, a historic cultural center, turns 150 — grappling with today's Israel-Hamas war
The 92nd Street Y, New York is celebrating its 150th anniversary. As a Jewish cultural institution, it’s also facing criticism related to the Israel-Hamas war.
92NY
hide caption
toggle caption
92NY
The 92nd Street Y, New York is celebrating its 150th anniversary. As a Jewish cultural institution, it’s also facing criticism related to the Israel-Hamas war.
92NY
Nonprofits often struggle to adhere to their original mission statements, especially as they develop new programs and serve new audiences. For Jewish institutions, the Israel-Hamas war has been an inflection point.
That’s been especially true of The 92nd Street Y, New York, which turns 150 this month.
92NY was founded by a group of German Jewish New Yorkers as one of the earliest branches of the Young Men’s Hebrew Association, which were modeled on the Young Men’s Christian Associations, better known as the YMCA.
It had a simple goal — help immigrants assimilate, said Seth Pinsky, CEO of 92NY.
“They saw a growing wave of Eastern European Jews and felt that these new immigrants would need a place where they could learn how to become Americans, become educated, gain skills, and adjust to a new life in a new country,” Pinsky said.
Swimming at New York’s Young Men’s Hebrew Association (YMHA) in 1911. The YMHA eventually became The 92nd Street Y, New York, a cultural force that hasn’t lost its community center vibe.
92NY
hide caption
toggle caption
92NY
Over time, The 92nd Street Y, New York became much more: a nondenominational, cultural powerhouse open to all. “Even though it was founded as a Jewish institution, has always been a Jewish institution, it is also an institution that has always served the wider world,” said Pinsky.
‘Category buster’
Look through the archives and it seems like anybody who’s anybody in culture, science, politics and the like has appeared at 92NY: writers such as Dylan Thomas and Nobel Peace Prize winner Elie Wiesel, entertainers like Paul Robeson and Carol Burnett, and scientists like Dr. Jane Goodall. Modern dance pioneers Martha Graham and José Limón taught at 92NY before founding their own companies. Alvin Ailey debuted his best known work, Revelations at 92NY in 1960.
Martha Graham was among the modern dance pioneers who taught at 92NY before founding her own company.
The 92nd Street Y, New York
hide caption
toggle caption
The 92nd Street Y, New York
Every day, thousands of people still use The 92nd Street Y, New York as their local community center. They come for its swimming pool, daycare, gym and numerous classes, from tap dancing to jewelry making.
They also come for events and lectures. Recent speakers include actor Emily Blunt and actor/singer Audra McDonald, former U.S. Rep Liz Cheney, and Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, the U.S. Special Envoy to Combat and Monitor Antisemitism. During the pandemic, 92NY started streaming virtual presentations online, reaching millions of people around the world.
“It’s a category buster and there’s really nothing else like it anywhere,” said Pinsky.
Pinsky said 92NY was built on Jewish and American values including “debate and a robust exchange of ideas.” From Israeli prime ministers to civil rights activists, for decades it has thrived as a place for diverse programs and points of view.
Ambassador Deborah Lipstadt, U.S. Special Envoy to Monitor and Combat Antisemitism, spoke with Rabbi David Ingber, senior director at 92NY’s Bronfman Center for Jewish Life on Jan. 24, 2024.
Vladimir Kolesnikov/Michael Priest Photography/The 92nd Street Y, New York
hide caption
toggle caption
Vladimir Kolesnikov/Michael Priest Photography/The 92nd Street Y, New York
But that identity was shaken after the Hamas-led attacks on Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Afterward, 92NY postponed an event by one of its divisions, the well-regarded Unterberg Poetry Center.
Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Viet Thanh Nguyen was scheduled to talk at 92NY two weeks after the attacks. But he was also one of hundreds of writers who’d signed an open letter in the London Review of Books condemning Israel’s occupation and calling for a ceasefire. The Israeli government says that a ceasefire could lead to further attacks.
Nguyen’s novels are about surviving war and trauma, but Pinsky said it was not the right time for him to appear at 92NY.
“It was during the traditional Jewish period of mourning, and it was about a week after the so-called Day of Rage, when Hamas called for the targeting not just of Israelis, but of Jews and Jewish institutions,” Pinsky said. “And so what we said was not that he couldn’t hold those opinions and not that he could never appear on our stage. But maybe that moment wasn’t the right moment.”
The Poetry Center’s director, Bernard Schwartz, refused to postpone and quickly arranged for the event to take place at a local bookstore instead.
Nguyen told the audience he believed he was canceled.
“Art is supposed to keep our minds and hearts open. So the greatest irony of all of this is that what could save us — or one of the things that could save us — art — has been silenced,” Nguyen said.
Writers, including playwright Tony Kushner, signed an open letter angry at 92NY’s decision. Some of those scheduled to speak last fall withdrew. Schwartz and the two other members of the Poetry Center’s staff resigned, effectively suspending the program.
“It sends a terrible message, because writers have to be able to express themselves,” said James Shapiro, an author and English professor at Columbia University. He’s been actively involved with 92NY for years, including teaching a class on Shakespeare. He said he’s so furious, he doesn’t plan to return.
“I’m a Zionist. I’m a supporter of the Y. I’m a defender of my community,” said Shapiro, “And when a group within that community is effectively making it worse by aligning it with a view that Jews censor writers who don’t line up with their beliefs, it sets a terrible example.”
Shapiro praised the work of the Poetry Center’s small staff and “the brave stand that they took in defense of free speech.”
Pinsky said he’s well aware there are people in the literary world “who are not happy with the decision we made.” He vowed to rebuild the Poetry Center. “We’re ready to do the work and we think our poetry program and literature program is an important one, and it’s one that we want to get back on its feet.”
Cultural institutions need to ‘reconsider everything we do’
92NY is just one of many cultural institutions getting heat for whatever they do — or don’t do — related to the Israel-Hamas war. The decisions they make could affect their funding, audiences and staff morale.
“The 92nd Street Y, like all Jewish institutions, but I think all institutions with conscience, have to think ‘How do we respond?’ ” said Susannah Heschel, chair of the Jewish Studies Program at Dartmouth College. “I think it means we have to reconsider everything we do. As a professor of Jewish Studies, what do I hope to achieve? And I’m not sure.”
CEO Pinsky said 92NY’s commitment to a “robust exchange of ideas” hasn’t changed. Since Oct. 7, it has featured conversations that have been both critical and supportive of the Israeli government.
Trying to make sense of difficult topics is one of the many reasons people go to 92NY. But they also come for concerts or to take a class or go for a swim. Pinsky said its mission to enrich individuals and create community is needed now “more than any time” in its 150-year history.
“The fabric of society is being pulled apart in so many different ways,” he said. “And bringing people together and making them feel connected is incredibly important. And that’s who we’ve always been and that’s who we continue to be.”
This story was edited for audio and digital platforms by Jennifer Vanasco.
A gold-colored item embossed with the word “President” sits on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office of the White House on Nov. 10, 2025.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
The New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan has spent the past 11 years covering President Trump through three political campaigns, his first, and now second, term in office and the ongoing war with Iran. Swan says aside from the COVID-19 pandemic, he can’t remember a time where Trump looked “as stuck as he looks right now.”
“It’s pretty clear he realizes that this war [with Iran] has not gone well, has not played out the way that Netanyahu pitched him or that Trump himself thought [it] would play out,” Swan says. “Trump is someone who is naturally given to hubris, but I think we saw a very extreme version of that with this war.”
Swan and his co-author Maggie Haberman spoke with more than 1,000 sources for their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. The book paints a picture of an unrestrained president remaking the American government and its international relations in profound ways.
Swan notes that the president, who sat for an interview for the book, has been particularly fixated on becoming a “great man of history” during his second term. During one interview, Trump showed Swan and Haberman a document that compared him to notorious historical figures like Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.
“[The list had] nothing to do with morality, all just about pure power projection. And Trump was relishing being in their company,” Swan says. “Maggie and I talked about it afterwards, and it really occurred to us that when you look at it through that lens, his second term makes a lot more sense.”
Swan says the president’s fixation on power is reflected in his decisions to go to war in Iran and implement regime change in Venezuela. But he also sees it manifested in Trump’s White House decor, which leans on what Swan calls the president’s “inner Louis XIV” style.
“He’s gilded almost every corner of the Oval Office,” Sway says. “The history of the Oval Office in the White House has been of modesty when it comes to design and decoration, reflecting the fact that America is a republic, not a monarchy. Trump has no use for that history.”
In a post on Truth Social, Trump referred to Regime Change as “mostly made up, Fake News, largely fiction, as have been most of the things [Haberman] has written about me for so many years.”
Interview highlights
On how Trump’s second term differs from his first
This term is unrecognizable from term one. And I still think a lot of people view [this] administration and government through the lens of the first term. It just couldn’t be more different. One of the ways in which it’s different is the team around him.
I remember in term one covering Trump, and you would have so many conversations with senior officials, including senior national security officials, and the overwhelming impression that you would receive from talking to these people was, A, they thought they were working for someone who was dangerous. And they saw their own roles as protecting the country and the world from the person that they were ostensibly working for. Those types of people don’t exist anymore in this administration. …
At a senior level, it’s really a group of people who believe in him, are loyal to him, in some cases went through the campaign with him. Many of them were radicalized on the campaign through the investigations and the efforts to prosecute Donald Trump. Many of them received some subpoenas themselves and viewed the stakes of the 2024 election as not so much about policy, but about staying out of prison.
So that’s the mindset of Trump and his inner circle. And it’s created a situation where there’s very little friction between a Donald Trump idea that might’ve just leapt straight from his internal monologue out of his mouth, with no filter, to an effort to make it actual American policy and execution.
On Trump’s meeting style
Meetings have no beginning, middle or end. There’s almost no delineation. And what often ends up happening is it’s essentially one meeting that just rolls throughout the afternoon with different people joining and leaving. And Trump [is] engaged or not engaged, people who have no business being in the meeting sometimes joining, whether it’s a pro wrestler, or a crypto investor, or foreign somebody from a golf monarchy, or a CEO. …
The New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are the authors of Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
hide caption
toggle caption
Doug Mills/The New York Times
The conversations are non-linear. Trump will get fascinated about one thing that has nothing to do with the topic and that can derail a meeting. We have a scene in the book where he’s having a conversation, a very small meeting, which is highly classified about a defense program, and this guy comes in, just walks into the Oval, salt of the earth, kind of country looking guy, and he’s holding stone samples for the Rose Garden … and the two go off and sort of start conferring, looking out the window, talking about the paving and the stone and this and that, gets on the phone with another contractor. And before time’s up, the meeting’s ended, they haven’t actually resolved the issue they were going to resolve.
On the higher level of secrecy in Trump’s second term
When there are issues that Trump really cares about, or his team wants to keep secret, they can be incredibly secretive, to the point of great frustration across the government. And when it comes to the weightiest issues like the planning of going to war with Iran, we found that very, very senior people in the government were, A, completely cut out of the loop and, B, had no idea about what was being discussed in the Oval Office.
On Trump’s focus on decorating the White House
I traveled with President Trump to the Middle East, palace after palace. And it was really instructive to watch him with these Middle Eastern rulers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Emirates. He was just in a state of absolute pleasure, going from one palace to the next, admiring the marble, looking at most rarefied displays of state wealth on Earth. And that’s essentially what he’s trying to create at the White House. … He’s building this grand ballroom. He seemed to almost be competing with Melania as to who had had the better bedroom. They have separate bedrooms and he was taking objects that she had placed in the center hall of the residence and putting them in his bedroom.
YouTube
On the challenge of interviewing Trump
An interview with Trump requires an enormous amount of preparation if you want to hope to come out of it with any level of success. He’s a really difficult interview… He’s an overwhelming presence and you are confronted with a sort of tidal wave of words. Many of the words and the sentences are detached from reality or completely false. And you have to make judgments in real time about what you let go. You can’t fact-check everything. You just can’t. You can pick your moments.
I see my role in every interview as the representative of the people in that chair. You’re the one who’s lucky enough to be sitting in that chair interviewing the president of the United States. What would regular people want to know and want me to do in that situation? And I think that when you’re interviewing a president of the United States, you want to find the balance between letting them explain themselves and not cutting in every two seconds, but finding moments that are really important to puncture the bubble. Trump creates an unreality bubble. It’s the way he operates. … Tucker Carlson actually described it publicly as like being under a spell and I certainly wouldn’t ascribe a supernatural dimension to it, but I know what he’s getting at.
Thea Chaloner and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
The real spectrum of housing insecurity
Annika McFarlane/Getty Images/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Annika McFarlane/Getty Images/Getty Images
Who counts as homeless in America?
If you ask the Department of Housing and Urban Development, around 750,000 people are homeless in America. If you ask the Department of Education, that number shoots up into the millions. What does this discrepancy tell us? And how do our cultural ideas about homelessness shape who we see as homeless, and who gets help? To find out, Brittany talks with Dr. Margot Kushel, Director at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, and Dr. Molly Richard, assistant professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Rhode Island’s College of Health Sciences.
Want more deep dives on cultural taboos? Check out these episodes:
The truth about men on the ‘down low’
Why can’t we be normal about polyamory?
Support Public Media. Join NPR Plus.
Follow Brittany on Instagram: @bmluse
For handpicked podcast recommendations every week, subscribe to NPR’s Pod Club newsletter at npr.org/podclub.
This episode was produced by Corey Antonio Rose. It was edited by Neena Pathak. We had engineering support from Josephine Nyounai. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.
Lifestyle
They just completed all of L.A. Times’ 101 Best California Experiences — and we’ve got questions!
By December of 2023, Paul Preston realized that his girlfriend Susan Huckle was a big fan of road trips and lists. So for Christmas, he gave her L.A. Times’ ”101 Best California Experiences” zine, a traveler’s bucket list highlighting my top destinations throughout my four decades of traveling the state.
The gift, I’m delighted to hear, was a hit.
Preston and Huckle went through it and checked off locations they’d seen already. Then they hit the road.
And now, after two and a half years of roaming the state between work assignments, they’re back to report that they’ve covered all 101 locations on that list. Though the two have also traveled beyond state lines, the quest to cover California “totally informed our lives for the last two or three years,” said Huckle, who sent me a note of thanks after ticking the last box.
After the note arrived, I was eager to call them and learn more. I caught the couple, of course, in the middle of a day trip.
Susan Huckle and Paul Preston set out to visit every spot on the L.A. Times’ 2023 list of “101 Best California Experiences.” Along the way, they got married in Yosemite Valley.
(Nick Wuthrich)
“We’re out exploring,” Preston said. “So you’re getting what we’re about.”
They’re also now married. That happened last July in Yosemite Valley, which, yes, was on the list.
Huckle, 41, an actress, a host on “L.A. This Week” on Channel 35, a Universal Studios performer and an author, grew up in Santa Maria on California’s Central Coast.
Preston, 56, is also an actor. He leads movie location tours and hosts podcasts, movie trivia nights and special events. He grew up and went to college on the East Coast, so he had fewer California miles under his belt when the couple met in 2020.
Their California 101 travels began in early 2024 with a trip to Paso Robles, where they saw the green slopes along Highway 46, Morro Rock and the elephant seals at Piedras Blancas near Hearst Castle.
“And then,” Preston said, “we just kept going.”
Some of their most satisfying stops, the two agreed, were places they hadn’t heard of, such as Orange Works in the Central Valley town of Strathmore and Angel Island State Park, sometimes known as the Ellis Island of the West. Huckle called Angel Island “a marriage of natural beauty with great, powerful, historic information.”
By early this year, there were only a few destinations left to check.
In April, they did the Indian Canyons and Sunnylands estate near Palm Springs, the Integratron near Joshua Tree and the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside. In June, they rafted the South Fork of the American River, along with stops in Old Sacramento and, last of all, Columbia State Historic Park. Then they made their own favorites lists.
Susan Huckle’s top 10:
Yosemite Valley
Badwater Basin
Mammoth Mountain
Angel Island State Park
Cheech Marin Center
Joshua Tree National Park
American River South Fork
The Marshall Store on Tomales Bay
Santa Cruz Island
Sunnylands
Paul Preston’s top 10:
Yosemite Valley
Hollywood Bowl
Griffith Observatory
Catalina
Mammoth Mountain
American River South Fork
Erick Schats’ Bakery in Bishop
Huntington Library and Gardens
Palm Springs Aerial Tramway
Balboa Park, San Diego
Now that they’ve seen so much of the state, I had questions. For one, which spots not on the list would they have included?
Alcatraz, they agreed. Also, as an admirer of redwoods, Preston liked Calaveras Big Trees State Park. As an avid cyclist, Huckle liked the 22-mile Marvin Braude Bike Trail from Torrance to Pacific Palisades.
And was anything on the list a disappointment?
“The Carmel Mission,” Huckle said quickly. “It’s beautiful and the missions are an important part of California history.” But she said the mission’s account of its own history seemed “whitewashed,” saying little about the Native loss and trauma that historians are increasingly recognizing in accounts of the missions.
Said Huckle: “I was like, ‘C’mon guys, nobody really thinks this any more, right?’”
Now that they’re done with the Times’ “101 Best California Experiences,” what what will shape their next trips?
They have a list for that. Huckle picked up an L.A. guide, Danny Jensen’s “Secret Los Angeles,” and the couple plans to start where the book does, with the Triforium, a many-colored sculpture that went up outside City Hall in 1975 (and once featured music).
After that? Maybe the Faces of Elysian Valley, a traffic circle sculpture that Huckle said “looks like Easter Island in the middle of Cypress Park.”
That will leave only about 138 more destinations in the book to cover.
If anybody can do it, it’s these two.
-
Lifestyle9 minutes ago
Trump relished in being compared to dictators like Hitler and Stalin, journalist says
-
Technology21 minutes agoSkullcandy’s bass-boosting Crusher headphones now come with Bose’s ANC
-
World27 minutes agoWATCH: Russian soldier thrown through air as Soviet-era helicopter gun spins out of control
-
Politics33 minutes agoLindsey Graham’s final act reverberates in Senate as sister is urged to “keep pedaling”
-
Health39 minutes agoIs lettuce still safe to eat amid Taco Bell illness probe? Doctors answer
-
Sports45 minutes agoMarcello Hernández roasts Jake Paul, Tiger Woods and Bill Belichick in ESPYS monologue
-
Technology51 minutes agoYou paid for it. So why is your device showing ads?
-
Business57 minutes agoParamount shareholder lawsuit accuses Ellisons of corruption
