The appalling behavior of the organizers at the Chicago Dyke March, who expelled three Jewish women for bearing Jewish Pride flags, is still fresh on everyone’s minds, as is the earlier confrontation of Jewish Queer Youth by JVP (Jewish Voice for Peace) at the Israel Day Parade, but these are only part of a larger trend of ignoring the presence of Jews in queer spaces at best, and discriminating against them at worst.

Carolina Jews for Justice (CJJ), a North Carolina non-profit focusing on Jewish issues, liberal policy issues, and advocacy, released a lengthy statement on June 26, noting that the annual Pride Fest was scheduled on Yom Kippur.

Yom Kippur falls on September 30th this year, which also happens to be the last Saturday in September. Normally, many Jewish groups participate in the march, but putting it on Yom Kippur puts the kibosh on that for many, and to that end, CJJ encouraged their readership to email NC Pride Fest about the conflict this date caused.

Since then, CJJ has not released a further action plan, nor has NC Pride Fest responded either to their public appeal, or to email inquiries. However, Anna Grant of the CJJ confirmed over email that John Short, the director of NC Pride Fest, said that “it’s always been last Saturday of September,” likely to maximize potential student participation and collaboration with the nearby University. No one’s crunched the numbers, but Grant says according to Short, for the past 17 years he’s chaired the event, it hasn’t fallen on a Hebrew holiday. Grant did not respond to email inquiries to confirm.

It seems that in this case, the exclusion is a result of casual ignorance or lack of care, rather than deliberate malevolence or targeting of Jewish people. However, CJJ noted both in their Facebook post and in emails to Jewcy that NC Pride has a history of dropping the ball when it comes to intersectionality. On their Facebook post, CJJ talked about the rise of Christian chauvinism, noting how it affected their Muslim neighbors too.

“As we were running around yesterday trying to figure out what to do about this scheduling SNAFU, our Muslim friends, colleagues and neighbors were celebrating Eid — and our country’s president broke with a 20-year tradition of hosting an Eid al-Fitr feast at the White House. During end-of-year testing in our schools, some Muslim students were fasting as families were universally instructed to make sure their children came to school well-fed on testing day.”

Over email, Anna Grant directed me to a news article that reported how just two years ago, Black Lives Matter activists were physically assaulted and shut down at NC Pride. The argument is that lack of intersectionality harms the community along multiple axis — and this time, the blow fell on the Jewish community.

“The Pride march has had controversy in the past, and certainly needs to be more inclusive to other communities outside of this one-year issue that affects the Jewish community: the trans community, people of color, and other more marginalized communities than gay cisgender white men, who are also the primary ones organizing NC Pride and the queer community at large,” wrote Grant.

It’s a powerful argument, that calls for inclusion, acceptance, and actively working to broaden community accessibility, and it comes at a troubling time. The American Jewish community is seeing troubling events aimed at excluding Jews from public events, and it is usually justified using this very rhetoric, the language of intersectionality, the same rhetoric CJJ uses here to call for inclusion of many marginalized groups, Jews included. And some of these cases are very blatantly anti-Semitic, even as the language of intersectionality calls for inclusion. It seems that intersectionality means different things to different people — and so do the Jews.

CJJ’s post says it best:

“No group of people, Jewish or otherwise, should have to choose between our LGBTQ identities and the other identities that are important to us and shape our lives.”

We’ll see who makes queer Jews choose next.

Image via Wikimedia

The post Does Pride have a Jewish Problem? appeared first on Jewcy.

It was past midnight and we were driving home when I broached the subject. “Who can we set him up with?”

“I was already considering it,” my husband answered a bit too quickly. “Actually, it’s all I’ve been thinking about since we walked out of the theater.”

We had spent the evening at a big Broadway production. A friend from high school had a prominent role. I’d seen Andy rarely in the years since we’d graduated, at weddings mostly. Still, I was eager to cheer his success. It was exciting, but I was dreading the visit backstage after the show. I hate feeling like a hanger-on, waiting around awkwardly while I try not to look like a gawker.

This time was different, though. Andy was so sweet and generous, asking about our kids and excitedly introducing us to the actors. I felt not at all a gawker, more a visitor to a friend’s for an intimate dinner party. When my husband asked Andy if he was involved with anyone, Andy—looking almost longingly at the iPhone pic of our brood—answered, “No, I’m all alone.”

And so there we were, stuck in construction traffic at one o’clock in the morning, paging through our mental Rolodexes under “Jewish gay men, 30s, artsy.” After trying on a few matches for size, we both settled on someone we thought would be a great match: Jeremy. He was sweet, smart, good-looking, and a successful musician to boot. A little younger, maybe. There was only one problem.

We weren’t positive he was gay.

Well, it doesn’t always come up. I mean, we kind of assumed he was gay, but I couldn’t tell you precisely why. And when, exactly, is the right time to ask? Maybe it could be added to the requisite question list when you invite someone to dinner. “Any food restrictions? Allergies? Vegetarian? Gay or straight? Gluten-free?” Not exactly practical.

Because my husband is a rabbi and our family is religious, gay people are sometimes unsure whether they should reveal their orientation to us, concerned we might reject them—or try to turn them. But keeping the laws of Shabbat should not cause a person to be less compassionate or understanding. As far as I’m concerned, if a Jew reads the Torah and her takeaway is a list of people she’ll never accept into her “club,” then she’s missed the point.

Someday in the not-so-distant future, I choose to believe, the sight of Yeshiva kids walking into school with their two Abbas will be old hat. In the meantime, I identify with those Abbas in so many ways. As a religious Jew and a feminist, I have to gauge how “out” I can be in all kinds of situations.

Is this the kind of Orthodox shul where I can wear a tallit when I pray? Can I go into this bookstore and buy a Gemara and reveal that it’s for me? Or would it be safer to say it’s for my son? And lest someone think I’m being paranoid, I relate this story that happened two weeks ago. I started an online conversation about women wearing kippah and tzitzit in Jerusalem. The response I got from one woman was chilling. If you are interested in being safe, she said, you won’t ever do something like that. Someone could, God forbid, break your jaw. Or, God forbid, throw acid in your face. It was like a conversation out of “The Godfather.”

I’m a mother of four with a masters degree, but part of me remains a 12-year-old girl, angry as her body begins to betray her and advertise her sex on the outside. When your sexuality and gender are the first things people notice about you, it’s exhausting. I get it. But still, I was determined to make the match.

After discreetly inquiring with an acquaintance of Jeremy’s (who couldn’t answer with any certainty), I realized my best option was to be direct. My husband agreed to take one for the team. He casually texted Jeremy to give him a call when he had a chance. Jeremy called back. While they talked, I did what I often do when faced with an awkward situation: I hid.

While I cowered idiotically in the next room, I thought about the conversation I had had with my kids the previous night when they overheard us discussing our predicament. Why, they wanted to know, had we been assuming Jeremy was gay? How could you tell just by looking at him, or having a conversation? “You’re just stereotyping!” they insisted. I knew they were wrong, but I was having trouble with the why.

The truth is, we’re constantly making assumptions about people based on superficial evidence—the car they drive, the shoes they wear, their accent, their haircut. Using these limited clues, we determine class, education, politics, religion. Sexuality is more complicated, though. As a child, I was a serious ballet dancer. Dance had a culture of its own, but even then I noticed that some teachers and choreographers deliberately and consciously carried their delicate movements with them outside the studio. It was complicated to be out in the eighties. Yet these men proudly announced, by the tiny choices they made about how to present themselves to the world, who they were.

As self-involved ten and eleven year olds, my fellow dancers and I didn’t dwell on the private lives of our teachers. As far as we were concerned, they vanished into thin air when we left the building. So when one of our favorites stopped teaching, and didn’t even attend our performances, we felt only a vague annoyance that we’d have to get used to a new set of expectations with our next instructor. A year or so later, when we heard that he had died, you could almost see the little light bulbs clicking on above our identical, perfectly groomed buns. Oh. Our hunch was correct. No judgment. Just sadness.

I suppose that’s what I want my kids to know: thinking someone is gay is only bad if you believe being gay is bad. It’s the negative judgment that’s harmful—not the supposition itself.

I got the transcript of the conversation as soon as my husband gave me the all-clear.

“Jeremy,” he’d started, “can I ask you a strange question?”

“Sure?”

“Are you interested in being set up?”

Pause. “Well… I’d be interested, but there’s a twist.”

And here, I’m pained to admit, is where my husband was a rock star, while I hid in other room with a pillow over my head, mortified by the awkwardness of the situation. “So,” he replied, “if the twist has anything to do with the fact that the person we had in mind for you is a man, you’re in luck.”

There’s a Jewish tradition, more a superstition, I suppose, that anyone who makes three matches—presumably ending in a wedding—is automatically granted entrance into the world to come. It’s holy work, to help people find partners and build homes together. I don’t want to go back to a time when people felt compelled to extinguish a piece of their essence in order to conform. But all the uncertainty is a little too stressful for me, I’m not sure I can handle the pressure. I’ll take my chances with charity and good deeds.

The post When The Rabbi’s Wife Plays Gay Matchmaker appeared first on Jewcy.

The renowned British actor-comedian-author Stephen Fry has spoken to the UK’s Jewish News of his pride in his gay, Jewish, secular identity.

“I’m as proud of being Jewish as I am as proud of being gay,” he told the newspaper’s new LGBT section on Monday. “And just as I don’t go to shul, I don’t go to gay clubs. The identity can never be taken away from me… for Jews not to celebrate gays within their own community would be a schande, it seems to me, a shame and a disgrace.”

Fry, who rose to fame as one half of the sketch comedy duo Fry and Laurie, was born to a Jewish mother, but raised in a secular environment. For many years he has been one of Britain’s most popular (and controversial) multi-hyphenate intellectuals, and the host of the BBC comedy quiz show QI. In 2006, he appeared in an episode of the genealogy documentary series “Who Do You Think You Are?” in which he traced his the fate of his great-grandparents and extended family from Hungary to Auschwitz. His maternal grandparents emigrated to Britain in 1927, sparing one branch of the family.

When asked by a Twitter follower why he would want to belong to a religion which disapproves of homosexuality, Fry responded thusly:

@JulianStorey @JewishNewsUK Being Jewish is not a matter of religion: I’m a Jew, but don’t follow judaism.

— Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) June 24, 2014

And there you have it: Stephen Fry, proud gay Jew.

Related: In the Story of Queen Esther, Echoes of My Own Coming Out

Image: s_bukley / Shutterstock

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The U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv is showing its support for Israel’s Gay Pride Week by flying the rainbow pride flag along with the American flag.

Ambassador Dan Shapiro posted an image of the flags to his Facebook page on June 10, along with the following message in both Hebrew and English:

“For the first time in history, the U.S. Embassy in Tel Aviv has raised the Pride flag together with our American flag. We are proud to join with the municipality of Tel Aviv-Yafo and its residents in celebrating LGBT Pride Week.”

The media response has been overwhelmingly positive, but some commenters were not so pleased. Mary Moskowitz wrote: “Mr. Shapiro, I would like to know what gives you the right to speak for all Americans and hoist a “gay pride” flag along with the American flag? This is a blatant violation of your position as Ambassador to Israel. I am not proud of this and I am sure there are many in the United States and Israel who feel as I do.”

Others commenters weighed in with approval and encouragement. Jeremiah Sammons wrote: “Makes me proud to be an American each time we slowly make our way towards equality and justice for all!” And this, from M.V. Atinous: “This is what core American values are – freedom, liberty, equality…and support for *everyone*. It’s great to see America taking a stand in the world for those who are (or may be) marginalized not only by their fellow countrymen, but also their government.”

The image has received over 1,000 shares and 2,000 likes so far. I think the ayes have it.

Update, June 13: The British Embassy in Tel Aviv is also flying the pride flag.

The post U.S. Embassy in Israel Flies Pride Flag Along with American Flag in Honor of Pride Week appeared first on Jewcy.

• Things got a little weird yesterday on Twitter when the woman operating the @Sweden handle—as part of the country’s nobly intentioned experiment to let a different citizen tweet/represent the country each week—started asking why some people hate Jews. We’d refer her to Henry Blodget, but she seems nice, if terribly naive.

• In honor of Pride Month, the IDF posted a photo on Facebook of two male soldiers holding hands, claiming they were a gay couple. The photo attracted a great deal of attention (of all types) but has since been revealed as staged. Only one of the soldiers is gay, and both serve in the office of the military spokesman who posted the photo.

• Andy Samberg hopes that his new British TV show Cuckoo will “cement the special relationship between our two great countries.” We just want more digital shorts.

• In her new music video for “Don’t Leave Me (Ne Me Quitte Pas),” Regina Spektor puts toast on her face, sings to animatronic caterpillars, and sets things on fire. We think she’s wonderful.

The post Daily Jewce: James Deen, a Swedish Twitter Snafu, IDF Gay Pride, and More appeared first on Jewcy.