As double minorities, LGBT Jews are small in number but have left a profound mark on the course of history.

Inherent in Jewish identity is a drive for social justice, or tikkun olam, the belief in repairing the world. It’s not surprising then, that much of LGBT history is woven with a deeply Jewish fabric.

In honor of Pride Month, here are some of the LGBT Jewish trailblazers who broke new ground and transformed the consciousness of society in ways that were unimaginable at the time:

Politics:

Harvey Milk:

As the first openly gay person elected to public office in California (1977), he became the most visible LGBT figure of his time and set the stage for further mobilization of gay rights in American politics. Once in office, Milk quickly moved to sponsor a bill outlawing discrimination against gays and lesbians in the workplace that, when signed into law, became the most progressive such measure in U.S. history. Only eleven months into his term, he was assassinated, brining an even greater emergence of gay activism in the late 1970s. In 2009, he was posthumously awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Barney Frank:

In 1987 he became the first congressman to publicly come out as gay. In 2012, he would make history again as the first person to marry someone of the same sex while serving in congress.

Roberta Achtenberg:

In 1993 she became the first openly gay public official in the US to be appointed to the Cabinet when the Senate confirmed her appointment to serve as Assistant Secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development under President Clinton.

David Cicilline:

The now congressman from Rhode Island made history in 2003 when he became the first openly gay person elected to be mayor of a U.S. state capital.

Jared Polis:

In 2009 Polis became the first openly gay person elected to congress in their first term, and the first gay congressman to raise children while in office. He is currently running for governor of Colorado, which if he wins, will make him the first openly gay person elected to that position.

Barbara “Babs” Siperstein:

In 2009 she became the first transgender person appointed as a member of the Democratic National Committee (DNC).

Culture:

Joel Simkhai:

The founder of the mobile dating/hookup app, Grindr is an Israeli Jew. Love it or hate it, Grindr has revolutionized the way gay men interact and has helped remove the veil of obscurity for gay people—particularly in non-metropolitan areas. When it was launched in 2009 it became the first gay social app to be available on the iTunes App Store and has since become the most popular gay mobile app in the world.

Renée Richards:

In 1977 she competed in the U.S. Open women’s competition, marking the first time a transgender athlete was allowed to play in a competitive sport.

Dana International:

In 1998 she became the first transgender person to win the Eurovision singing competition, representing Israel.

Adam Lambert:

In 2012, Lambert’s second studio album, Trespassing premiered at number one on the U.S. Billboard 200, making him the first openly gay artist to top the album charts.

Martine Rothblatt:

In 2013, she broke new ground when she became the first transgender woman to be ranked as the highest-paid female CEO. Her influence long precedes that, however. She is also one of the co-founders of Sirius Satellite Radio and is a pioneer in artificial intelligence.

Activism:

Magnus Hirschfield:

Dubbed the “Einstein of sex,” he founded the Scientific-Humanitarian Committee in 1897 which was the first recorded advocacy group of LGBT rights in history. His research supported the validity of sexual diversity and transgender identity and he later went on to perform the world’s first sexual reassignment surgery. In 1933 his institute and its library were destroyed when the Nazis took power in Germany.

Larry Kramer:

Dubbed the “angriest man in America,” he channeled his firebrand style of activism to combat anti-LGBT forces and expose bigotry during the AIDS epidemic. In 1982, he co-founded GMHC (Gay Men’s Health Crisis), the nation’s first and largest HIV service organization. Then, in 1987, he founded ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), a more radical group that pressured government agencies to focus on resolving the crisis.

Evan Wolfson:

Regarded as the architect of the marriage equality movement, he founded the Freedom to Marry and is credited with driving the Supreme Court’s decision to allow same-sex marriage nationwide. As a Harvard Law student in 1983, Wolfson wrote a thesis on the legal basis for marriage equality well before the topic had been seriously considered anywhere around the world.

Jazz Jennings:

At the age of 7, her interview with Barbara Walters turned her into an overnight sensation, becoming one of the youngest people to publicly identify as transgender. Now 17, she has been the face of reality shows and documentaries and is a bestselling author, sharing her story of transitioning.

Edie Windsor:

In 2010, Windsor sued the federal government after she was forced to pay more than $360,000 in estate tax because it did not recognize her marriage to Thea Spyer, a Jewish woman whose family fled Europe before the Holocaust, despite their 44-year relationship. Represented by star (Jewish) litigator, Roberta Kaplan, her landmark victory at the Supreme Court in 2013 set the precedent for what would soon pave the way for marriage equality in all fifty states two years later.

In Judaism, one of the most important principles is the act of remembrance. It’s what has sustained our community through thousands of years of persecution; and likewise, as a gay Jew, invoking that same mindset is important to me when exploring LGBT history. Remembering these people, and celebrating them, today and everyday, is how I express my pride— both as a Jew, as a gay person, and more so as both—an LGBT Jew.

May sharing their stories inspire others to follow in their footsteps.

Photo of Edith Windsor via Wikipedia

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Good news and bad news, kinderlakh.

The bummer is—Jewcy is going on hiatus. Don’t worry—you’ll still be able to peruse the site and learn all about RBG’s hot grandson. There just won’t be new content for a while. But this has happened before; you haven’t heard the last of us!

In the meantime, the good news: We’re going to party before we go! Come hang out with us in Brooklyn after the parade, grab a drink, and toast the good times. And will there be surprises, giveaways, queerness, mishegas? Of course there will!

The party is Sunday, June 24, from 7 to 10 pm at Halyards in Gowanus, Brooklyn (406 3rd Ave.)

Plus: Interested in doing a short set of, well, anything? Email Gabriela@jewcy.com— queer performers encouraged, but all are welcome.

Like usual, no cover.

Facebook RSVP here!

See you soon<3

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On a Friday evening of February last year, Ruben Shimonov was waiting in his friend’s apartment in Brooklyn, New York. Everything was ready for the traditional Shabbat dinner to begin: The table was set, the food ready to be served. Now, it was time for the guests to come in.

What he had prepared was not an ordinary Shabbat dinner. Through a secret Facebook group, he and his friend Ramiz Rafailov had organized their first-ever Shabbat gathering for queer Jewish 20s and 30s with Sephardic and Mizrahi (Middle Eastern) backgrounds in New York.

When he proposed the idea of hosting the dinner, Shimonov had no idea how many people would show up. About thirty people ended up coming; including some with a Persian background, some Iraqi, some originally from Azerbaijan. “There was a gap that needed to be filled,” Shimonov said in an interview. “This showed there was the desire to have a space where we could unapologetically be our full selves.”

Shimonov was born in Uzbekistan, and moved to the States with his parents as refugees seeking asylum when he was six. He was raised in Seattle in a Bukharian Jewish family. After moving to New York, he began working as a communal leader in organizations like the Queens College Hillel and the American Sephardi Federation.

He had recently joined the small Facebook group for Sephardic queer Jews, when he and his friends started wondering: “Where do we fit? Is there a place where we can bring our full selves? The answer was, ‘Not really.’” They felt that they could not fully belong to queer Jewish spaces—which are predominantly Ashkenazi—or to Sephardic synagogues and cultural spaces, where LGBTQ identities are often a taboo.

Shimonov, who is now 30, believes that whenever “you want change, you should make it yourself. I wrote in a post [in the Facebook group], ‘Maybe we can take this beautiful digital space to the next step and meet somewhere.’ . . . I started getting positive responses.”

That first dinner was so successful, that ever since he has organized similar gatherings on a monthly basis—each time in a different private home, always on Shabbat. Some participants said they felt as if they had regained possession of their Jewish roots without compromising their LGBTQ identity.

The Facebook group, which remains secret to protect the identities of its members, not all of whom are publicly out of the closet, has grown from fewer than 100 members last year to over 300. The group, which has now evolved into a grassroots organization, will gather at the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center for its first weekend retreat this coming Friday. The Shabbat dinners and the retreat are both taking place thanks to the support of Moishe House, COJECO, OneTable, and Genesis Philanthropy Group.

Rebecca Davoudian, who lives in Great Neck, New York, and hosted one of the dinners, said that homosexuality is often a taboo in Sephardic communities. “It’s nice to give people a space where they can be Mizrahi and Sephardic and queer and Jewish.”

Another participant, Jonathan Cohen, felt similarly. “We’re a minority within the minority within the minority,” he said. Cohen’s family is originally from Iraq and Yemen. He recently moved back to New York after spending eight years in Israel; in Tel Aviv, he laughed, “half of the people are Mizrahi and gay. But when I moved to America, I wondered, ‘Who is my friends group going to be?’”

Cohen described the dinners as fun and intimate. Shimonov usually breaks the ice between the attendees, asking them to share their thoughts or memories on a specific concept or word.

“The Mizrahi identity is complex,” continued Cohen. “We’re not one people, we come from different countries and speak different languages. But being the ‘other’ unifies you. Seventy years ago we thought we’d lose our culture, but now we’re reviving it.”

Until a few years ago, Shimonov himself thought he could not merge his Bukharian and queer identities. But now he thinks differently.

“It’s difficult,” he said, “but many of us refuse to forego part of our identity for another. We are a composition of all these different tiles of the mosaic that makes us up. We want to hold on to all these different parts of our identity, because they’re beautiful.”

Photo from March 2018’s Shabbat dinner, courtesy Ruben Shimonov.

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After Donald Trump won the election, Kristen Plylar-Moore felt demoralized and fearful of what was to come. For months, she had been writing songs to cope with that fear—until she had gathered enough material for an entire live show. The music project was called Revival. “I wanted to give people a sense of hope, even despite what we were facing,” she recalled. 

Now, those songs about healing, spirituality and moral issues may become one studio album. Or so Kristen and her folk-rock band are hoping.

The musicians of Revival have created an Indiegogo campaign for their friends and fans to support their project, and they’re already well on their way to their goal of $6,700.

“Support spiritual folk-rock music for love and justice!” reads the campaign slogan.

It all began in the fall of 2015, when composer Plylar-Moore was feeling overwhelmed by Trump’s presidential campaign. “The political rhetoric was becoming intense, particularly towards minority groups and immigrants,” she said. Kristen was born in San Antonio, Texas, where she was raised Catholic. Later in life, she was drawn to Judaism. As a kid, she had always considered spirituality and music as ways to advocate for social justice. So she gathered a group of people—her wife Julia Ostrov (who also does Jewish prayer-leading professionally), a soprano, Lea Kalisch, alto, and three other instrumentalists, and created Revival.

https://vimeo.com/253382414

Some of the songs are rooted in Hebrew biblical texts, such as the track “Tent Revival,” which was inspired by some passages from the book of Isaiah: “It’s time to revive, raise your tent to the sky/ Drive your stakes deep, draw your ropes wide/ Let the people in, it’s time.”

Other songs, “celebrate the divine in all of us,” said Kristen. One song is based on the story of Susanna, from the apocryphal Book of Daniel. Susanna is a Jewish woman who is falsely accused of promiscuity; at the end of the story, the truth emerges. “It’s an empowering song for women, it’s particularly resonating in these times.”

The lyrics are “morally conscious,” with themes ranging from immigration to LGBTQ empowerment, feminism and climate change, and help envision the world that the members of the ensemble dream of living in. The ultimate goal, Kristen explained, is rooted in the Jewish concept of tikkun olam— repairing the world.

“It’s necessary, but it can be hard and despairing,” she said. “There is so much we’re going up against… Music plays an important role in revitalizing ourselves.”

So far, they’ve performed the show in what they call “progressive spiritual spaces” in New York. These include small theaters, recreation centers and synagogues, such as Congregation Beit Simchat Torah and the 14 Street Y.

When asked about the risk of targeting a narrow, alike-thinking audience, Kristen said she believes music is “ought to be accessible” to people with different political views. “Apart from some extreme elements… I think most people are not that far apart. None of the songs put down other people. They express the ideas that we should be good to each other and that there is room for all of us.”

Kristen, who as a Texas native knows plenty of conservative people, believes that if they heard her music, they would have a positive response. “It’s not about politics. It’s about values.”

Foreground, left to right: Lea Kalisch, Julia Ostrov. Background, left to right: Ugene Romashov, Samantha Gillogly. By Harold Levine

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You may have already heard plenty about Call Me By Your Name, the upcoming Luca Guadagnino film. There’s original music by Sufjan Stevens, Oscar buzz, and even some (misplaced) controversy. But you may have missed that this film is not only a queer coming-of-age romance— it’s a Jewish one.

Call Me By Your Name is based on a 2007 novel of the same name by André Aciman about Elio, a teenager in Italy in the 1980s who falls for Oliver, a young academic who comes to stay with his family over the summer. Both the family and guest are Jews, a minority in a very Catholic country.

This shared bond is one of the things that brings Elio and Oliver together; Elio is enchanted by how Oliver wears his Jewishness on his sleeve (or literally, on his chest, in the form of a Magen David), and he tries to emulate him, despite the fact that his family describes themselves as “Jews of discretion.” Elio even wears his own Star of David (“My Star of David, his Star of David, our two necks like one, two cut Jewish men joined together from time immemorial,” writes Aciman in the original novel). In the novel, at least, this has a mixed effect for Elio:

Judaism never troubled [Oliver] the way it troubled me, nor was it the subject of an abiding, metaphysical discomfort with himself and the world. It did not even harbor the mystical, unspoken promise of redemptive brotherhood. And perhaps this was why he wasn’t ill at ease with being Jewish and didn’t constantly have to pick at it, the way children pick at scabs they wish would go away. He was okay with being Jewish.

In the novel, despite his secularity, Elio understands his own sexuality through the lens of Jewishness:

I remembered the scene in the Bible when Jacob asks Rachel for water and on hearing her speak the words that were prophesied for him, throws up his hands to heaven and kisses the ground by the well. Me Jewish, Clean Jewish, Oliver Jewish— we were in a half ghetto, half oasis, in an otherwise cruel and unflinching world where fuddling around strangers suddenly stops, where we misread no one and no one misjudges us, where one person simply knows the other and knows him so thoroughly that to be taken away from such intimacy is galut, the Hebrew word for exile and dispersal.

How Aciman writes Jewish characters is reminiscent of his personal essays about Jewishness; he treats the subjects with ambivalence and great poignancy. Aciman was born to a Jewish Egyptian family, living as a tiny minority until the family was forced to leave when the writer was a teenager.

As far as the film is concerned, much of the cast is Jewish as well. Armie Hammer, of Jewish descent, plays Oliver, and Jewish-American newcomer Timothée Chalamet plays Elio. Elio’s father is played by Michael Stuhlbarg of A Serious Man.

It’s exciting that an Oscar film for this season is also a Jewish queer one. The movie doesn’t come out in wide release till November, but you can enjoy the decadently Sufjan Stevens-laden trailer in the meantime (see if you can spot the Jewish star necklace):

Image via YouTube

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Dating within a minority can be difficult—ask any Jew looking for a Jewish partner outside of Israel. So being another minority within such a small group can be really frustrating. It’s unclear how many LGBTQ Jews live in North America, but assuming they’re proportionate for the population, and keeping in mind that the numbers grow smaller as we adjust for preferences—gay women, for example, want to date other women, not gay men—the options can be limited.

Thankfully, a new website is here to fix all that. It’s called “Saw You At Stonewall,” and while its mission is to set up LGBTQ Jews, by doing so it also brings to light specific issues queer Jews face when straddling multiple worlds.

Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

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Jewcy is excited to debut the trailer for A Prayer, a new indie Jewish LGBT film.

A Prayer (written and directed by Alon Borten) is about Maya, a young, Orthodox married woman living in New York who develops an attraction to a woman at her synagogue. Confusion, guilt, and a difficult decision follow. In the trailer, Maya (Elana Gantman) tries praying with tefillin, something she’s previously considered forbidden to women, to try to sort out her feelings.

“One of the main motivations in completing this film was because of how important I felt it was to me to tell this story and have it be shared by as many people as I could show it to,” says Borten. “At best, I hope this film can shine a light on and help those struggling to find their truths and self-acceptance.”

Keep an eye out for the film on the festival circuit, and in the meantime, enjoy the trailer, below:

Image courtesy of Alon Borten.

The post JEWCY EXCLUSIVE: The Trailer For ‘A Prayer’ appeared first on Jewcy.

An increasing number of Americans are coming out as non-binary: terms like genderqueer, gender-fluid, and agender describe a variety of identities that transcend being a woman vs. a man. While they share many of the same experiences as binary transgender people— as in, assigned male at birth and coming out as female, or vice versa, non-binary folks also have some unique obstacles. One major day-to-day example: The English language has a limited selection of pronouns; men are traditionally “he” and women are “she.” So what about someone who’s both, or neither, or something else entirely?

…

Jewcy is on a summer residency! To read this piece, and our others for July and August 2017, go to our big sister site, Tablet Magazine!

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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

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Happy Pride Month! Would you like to push your subversive queer agenda whilst enjoying traditional Jewish foods? Here are a few rainbow colored suggestions, but of course we didn’t include rainbow bagels because those are an abomination!

Rainbow challah is not an abomination (experiments tend to come from within the Jewish community, and not mess with the core concept), and is an increasingly popular Jewish treat, either for pride or not. But do you have any idea how many different pride flags there are? A whole lot, and you can try to make an appropriate challah for any of them. We recently published some pretty detailed instructions on how to make a challah resembling the trans pride flag, for example. And what about flags that have specific shapes or symbols? Consider our instructions on how to make poppy seed stencils (and tweet us your photos, of course!).

Rainbow cookies/cake (same food, different names) is not actually clear in its origins; it seems to be about as Jewish as it is Italian (though of course you can be both), a product of the overlapping immigrant communities in America. Regardless, it’s a kiddush staple, and the perfect treat to pass around as you discuss intersectionality in the Jewish community and how it can be more accommodating to queer folks.

Fruit slices may be a Passover treat, but there’s no reason you can’t eat them in June. Besides, you can be political all year, noshing on this dessert at your next seder as you politely explain that the orange on the seder plate actually originally referred to lesbians and gay men specifically, and not women as a whole.

Heck, it’s not rainbow, but eat an orange. Let’s reclaim it.

Rainbow latkes are another holiday dish good year round— and we have the recipe! Chew on the nuanced historical implications of eating these— a queer meaning juxtaposed with the a fun aesthetic twist on a traditional Chanukah food. But said food only dates back a few hundred years since potatoes are a New World food that through colonization became the central to many Ashkenazi communities’ diets— the original latke was actually fried cheese, and Italian.

Plus, Chanukah is a complicated celebration to begin with since it’s originally a military holiday for an arguably just rebellion that ultimately established a corrupt theocratic monarchy, only to have religious authorities later superimpose an ahistorical theology on it. Then, of course, ultimately to the whole thing was converted into a commercialized Christmas stand-in for American Jews, with all the various problematic aspects of capitalism coming into play.

That’s all a very queer thing to think about.

Finally, a shout out to my Facebook friends, who had some amazing responses to my question of what a “Jewish queer food” is, providing this bonus list:

“Ladies, just put two bagels on the same plate for a yonic delight. Make them Everything bagels to be sure you have pansexual representation.”

“Bacon wrapped shrimp because the best part of being queer is breaking taboos.”

“Kosher wine makes great sangria, which is pretty gay.”

“I feel like anything out of The Alice B. Toklas Cook Book would do.”

“Vodka. Just vodka.”

Challah photo by Hannah Simpson. Rainbow cake photo via Wikimedia. Fruit slices photo by Tim Sackton, via Flickr.

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