Ex-Hasid transgender writer and actor Lili Rosen did not expect to have such a strong connection with Cincinnati when she submitted her one-woman show, The Second Circumcision of Lili Rosen, to the Cincy Fringe Festival.
“I did not expect to fall in love with Cincy like that,” she said. “I’m actually conceiving of new ideas I could come here with.”
Her show about her gender transition and coming out to her Hasidic family has made a big splash at the festival and has received praise from festivalgoers.
Rosen began developing the show while participating in an artists’ lab in New York, as she was starting to process how to come out to her family. The idea began as a short screenplay and quickly evolved, according to Rosen.
“I couldn’t write my way out of this impossible situation…How do you come out to Hasidic parents who don’t share the same vocabulary as you,” she said.
That’s when the show began to change into what would become her one-woman show, which she debuted in New York in 2024. Rosen worked as a consultant on shows like Unorthodox and found her way into acting after leaving the Hasidic community, but before she came out as transgender. She credits her move into acting as one of the ways she was able to begin her process of coming out.
“Theater was the one place where I was able to be myself,” Rosen said. “The more I was putting on and taking off masks of different characters, the more I got to know myself.”
The actor and writer didn’t officially come out to herself until after she made her first short film, The Binding of Itzak.
“Someone asked if The Binding of Itzak was a trans film. I was like – wait, that’s me,” she said. “A few minutes later, I came out to myself.”
Rosen sees herself as a bridge between the world she used to inhabit and the new reality she finds herself in, which is why she translated a children’s book about gender and sexuality into Yiddish, and how she came out as trans publicly.
“The publisher set up an interview with somebody at the JTA. So this reporter calls me from Jerusalem, and asks, ‘So what made you decide to translate this book into Yiddish?’” She said. “So I said, as a trans person from that community…. And she immediately goes, ‘Wait, you’re trans?’ I was like, ‘Yeah.’ … And then it turns into a Jerusalem Post headline.”
After the end of her run at the fringe festival, Rosen is returning to New York to work on a feature-length version of The Binding of Itzak. Rosen also wants to take her one-woman show on the road to Jewish and non-Jewish organizations across the US and the world.
Despite the risks of being publicly out, especially as both trans and a former Hasid, Rosen says visibility is the only option.
“I’ve never felt fully safe,” she said. “But hiding won’t protect us. All I know how to do is keep showing up.”
