Legendary basketball player Sue Bird bid farewell to the sport on Sept. 6 when her Seattle Storm lost to the Las Vegas Aces, who advanced to the WNBA Finals.

Bird, 41, announced in June that this season would be her last. In her final game, she finished with 8 points and 8 assists. Bird , the No.1 overall pick in the 2002 WNBA draft, is the league’s all-time assists leader and a 13-time All-Star.

She player her entire career with the Storm, where she has won four championships along with five selections to the All-WNBA first team and a record 12 All-Star Game appearances. She has also won a record-tying five Olympic basketball golds with Team USA, and was on four World Cup-winning teams.

“Not a lot of people do something for their entire lives the way that athletes do,” she said, pointing out it was the end of a sporting life that began when she was 5 or 6 years old. She looks forward to retirement, she said, noting “I get to start this new life.”

“Gatherings,” a retrospective of the work of Jewish American figurative artist Alex Katz, 95, will open in the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum on Oct. 21 and run through Feb. 20, 2023. “Across eight decades of intense creative production, Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, NY) has sought to capture visual experience in the present tense,” the museum said. “Katz has forged a mode of figurative painting that fused the energy of Abstract Expressionist canvases with the American vernaculars of the magazine, billboard, and movie screen.

The retrospective will include paintings, oil sketches, collage, drawings, prints, and freestanding “cutout” works. The exhibition will begin with the artist’s intimate sketches of riders on the New York City subway from the late 1940s, and will culminate in the immersive landscapes that have dominated his output in recent years.

Shelley Greenspan, a policy advisor to the National Security Council and a former foreign affairs officer at the State Department, has been appointed liaison to the Jewish community. She takes over the position from Chanan Weissman, who served under President Biden and most recently traveled with the President on his trip to the Middle East that included Israel and Saudi Arabia.

The position of White House liaison to the Jewish community dates to the Carter administration and typically works on outreach to the Jewish community. Antisemitism has been growing globally and domestically. The Anti-Defamation League recorded a record-high 2,717 antisemitic incidents in the U.S. in 2021. “I applaud President Biden for a continued commitment to the Jewish community,” said Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), a Jewish member of Congress active on issues related to Israel, the Jewish community and antisemitism.

Allen H. Weisselberg, an accountant and one of Donald J. Trump’s most trusted lieutenants, admitted before Judge Juan Merchan in a Lower Manhattan courtroom on August 18 that he had conspired with the former president’s company to commit numerous crimes related to tax fraud.

Mr. Weisselberg’s guilty plea painted a damning picture of the company, which now faces significant financial penalties if it loses its own trial on similar charges.

Under the plea deal, Mr. Weisselberg must pay nearly $2 million in taxes, penalties and interest after accepting lavish off-the-books perks from Mr. Trump and his company, including leased Mercedes-Benz automobiles, an apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, and private tuition for his grandchildren. In exchange for testifying at a trial scheduled in October that names the Trump Organization as complicit in various tax schemes, Mr. Weisselberg is likely to receive a five-month jail sentence and, with time credited for good behavior, might serve as few as 100 days.

For nearly four years, Amy Spitalnick led the effort to hold organizers of the August 11, 2017, Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, VA, legally liable for the violence of that day. Her effort paid off last year, when a jury found a group of white nationalists liable for $25 million in damages.

In November, Spitalnick, who is currently executive director of Integrity First for America, will become CEO of Bend the Arc: Jewish Action, an organization that blends community organizing, political advocacy and leadership training about white nationalism and anti-Black racism.

Shul president Judith K. Weiner is one of 20 artists named in an international competition sponsored by Long Island’s Heckscher Museum of Art for its innovative Instagram Takeover Series. Each artist selected is invited to take over the museum’s Instagram account for an entire day, raising the artist’s visibility, sharing her work with thousands of the museum’s followers, and generating traffic to the artist’s Instagram account and website, @judithkaufmanweiner/. A selection of the artist’s current paintings and prior work will be visible on Instagram @heckschermuseum on Wednesday, August 24.

Coinciding with the Heckscher Museum invitation, Judith Weiner is showing several paintings in a group show, “Summer Abstractions,” at the Ilon Art Gallery in Harlem, where one of her paintings will be offered also as an NFT (nonfungible token). An NFT is a digital collectible listed on the blockchain, which provides authentication and provenance to each purchaser, while protecting the artist.

Ilon Art Gallery, located in an historic brownstone in Harlem, specializes in painting, sculpture, photography and street art. The gallery’s new NFT Shop promotes and sells NFT’s online.

Peter Stein, son of shul members Ken and Nancy Stein was featured in the July-August issue of Avenue Magazine. Peter, who started his own oyster farm, Peeko Oysters, in New Suffolk, six years ago, supplies many of the best restaurants in New York City.

Peter told Avenue that when he was a teenager, his father would take him to the Oyster Bar in Grand Central Station as a special treat. Little did he know back then that oysters would become his life’s work and passion. He harvests daily out of Little Peconic Bay, and a day’s haul could yield 3,000 oysters, Avenue reported.

Stein calls what he does “mariculture,” more commonly known as aquaculture, and he cannot overemphasize its importance. “This is a cultural renaissance, working waterfront farms. This is regenerative ocean farming.” Unlike land farms, mariculture does not introduce anything into the process. “We just tend to the oysters in a self-contained ecosystem. We are nurturers,” he said.