Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Socialites Hold Séance To Summon Leonard Bernstein’s Spirit — In His Onetime Pad

Larry and Toby Milstein, two rising young Jewish socialites, held a séance in Leonard Bernstein’s former apartment, attempting to summon the spirit of the deceased composer, according to The New York Times.

The ghostly communication took place at The Dakota, the Central Park West building perhaps most famous for being the site of John Lennon’s murder. Bernstein died in 1990.

The Milsteins, heirs to a fortune in the billions that was garnered from flooring and real estate, convened their friends — all in their early 20s- – in the family apartment. The siblings, according to the Times, have been “cutting a dash on the city’s junior philanthropy circuit recently, making sizable donations to institutions like the NewYork-Presbyterian/Morgan Stanley Children’s Hospital.”

For the séance, participants gathered around the piano and sang Bernstein’s iconic “Maria” from “West Side Story” and “Imagine” by John Lennon, along with Taylor Swift’s “I Don’t Wanna Live Forever.”

“It’s a modern séance that’s rooted in the music of the individuals that inhabited this place,” Larry Milstein said. “You can feel the vibrations of them, and that means they’re there.”

Contact Jesse Bernstein at [email protected] or on Twitter, @__jbernstein

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.