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A couple of blocks away from the Upper West Side home of radio’s king of raunch, Howard Stern, his Torah-scholar daughter sits in her ankle-length skirt and recites a blessing.
Emily Stern, 32, couldn’t have a life more different from her famous father’s.
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Howard Stern with his first wife Allison and daughter Emily.Photo: Getty Images
Nearly a decade ago, Howard’s eldest child decided to practice Orthodox Judaism, and traded in Friday nights about town for 20-person Shabbat dinners in an uptown apartment. Strappy dresses gave way to outfits that cover her elbows and knees.
She’s also single — and chalks that up to her pop’s habit of blabbing about graphic sex on the airwaves five days a week.
“It’s rare I go on dates [now],” Emily tells The Post. And, “my dad’s emphasis on sexuality [in his career] kept me out of the dating ring [when I was younger].”
She’s also still scarred by her parents’ 1999 split — Howard divorced college sweetheart Alison Berns, the mother of Emily and her sisters, Ashley and Debra, after 21 years of marriage.
“I believed that my parents were very much in love,” Emily says. “I felt like the divorce came out of nowhere. I thought that sacred bond was so strong. He used to be one way, and then he marries a model.” (Howard, 61, married blond bombshell Beth Ostrosky, who is 18 years his junior, in 2008.)
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Howard and second wife Beth (née Ostrosky) SternPhoto: Getty Images
She muses that her mom’s re-entry into the working world might have been the straw that broke Howard’s back. “Maybe he couldn’t handle it when she went back to work as a psychoanalyst.”
Raised in tony Old Westbury, LI, the Stern daughters’ sheen as progeny of a celebrity belied a much more complicated adolescence.
Emily says it was difficult to deal with Howard’s fame.
“My dad always instilled in us, ‘Everybody’s watching you,’ ” she recalls. While Howard “always said it was for our protection,” she attributes his warnings to “narcissism.”
“I was alone. The belief that we were so different made it unhealthy,” she says. “Maybe because he was disconnected from the world, he experienced so much shame about who he was.”
She grew up fasting for Yom Kippur and enjoying family Passover Seders, but her parents weren’t particularly religious. Howard once said on-air that he hated wearing yarmulkes and joked that the theme of Emily’s bat mitzvah should be “I hate Jews.”
But Howard and Alison did practice Transcendental Meditation. Emily got her first mantra at age 10, and still practices today. In 2014, Howard told Jerry Seinfeld on an episode of “Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee” that “everyone in my life meditates; I don’t think I could really live without it.”
Emily went on to graduate from the theater program at NYU’s Tisch School, but laments a lack of familial guidance when it came to pursuing a career.
“We never discussed what I’d be when I was growing up,” she says. “It sort of did me a disservice.” She now works full-time as an artist (writing plays and music and acting) while also studying Torah at the Drisha Institute.
In 2005, she was cast in the off-off-Broadway play “Kabbalah.”
Playing Madonna, Emily says she was “so excited for and committed to” the role that she colored her raven locks blond — and went nude.
But things went south after mediocre reviews surfaced. According to Emily, low ticket sales forced director Tuvia Tenenbom to trade on her “daughter-of” status — and an unauthorized video of her wearing next to nothing — to promote the show. (Tenenbom denies doing any of this.)
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Gan Tiferet (Garden of Compassion) is part of Emily Stern’s series “Wells of Miriam.”
She quit six weeks in, armed with the muscle of her father’s lawyers.
“I told the director, ‘Don’t advertise who I am.’ He manipulated my love for the show for his gain,” she says.
Still, even now that she lives a life of modesty, Emily doesn’t regret the experience, and won’t discount the possibility of getting nude onstage again.
“I don’t say never to anything,” she coyly concedes.
Her next public exhibition is much more sedate: a photo exhibit opening Nov. 18 at the Hadas Gallery in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, that focuses on the water-retention landscape in Portugal. Emily calls the works the “Wells of Miriam” because it reminds her of the “mikveh,” a ritual bath in Judaism that’s associated with renewal.
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Lazman Hazeh (To Reach Now) is also a part of the series “Wells of Miriam.”
“This is my way to connect with the world,” she says of her art.
As for connecting with her family these days, Emily says she is “close with both my parents” and that they have no problem with her more-religious life. “Everyone in my family is evolving — no one has that resentment toward Judaism,” she explains. She even keeps her own set of kosher dishware at her mom’s place for family dinners (sans Howard, of course).
“It took a lot of bravery [to become religious],” she says of her change over the past nine or so years. “I was trying to figure out what to be in the world. I’d say, ‘God help me.’
“The question was, ‘What am I going to do with my life?’ It was a little bit of a crisis,” she admits.
“F - - k it if [people] think it’s weird or doesn’t make sense.”
by new york post
Photographer: Annie Wermiel/NY Post; Stylist: Cody Jones; Hair/Makeup: Mary Guthrie/ABTP.com. “Jane” maxi dress, $35 at charmingcharlie.com. Necklace, $13 at charmingcharlie.com. “Jackpot” pumps, $79 at ninewest.com.
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