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

The post Jewish LGBT Trailblazers appeared first on Jewcy.

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

The post With ‘Revival,’ Hope Through Music appeared first on Jewcy.

Mindy Raf didn’t have enough time to come out to her mother who passed away ten years ago. But Raf’s one-woman show, NOT THE ONE: A Love Story creates a stage to keep Raf’s dialogue with Kitty Raf alive; a celebration of her mother mixed with an interrogation of how relationship models are evolving in 2018.

NOT THE ONE: A Love Story made its international debut at the 2017 Edinburgh Fringe Festival and the show has continued with monthly NYC performances, including January 25th and 26th at The Tank. Directed by Tara Elliot, the 60 minute show blends stand-up with storytelling and traditional theatre, juxtaposing the more traditional values Raf’s Jewish mother taught her about love with her current polyamorous relationships.

Raf, who identifies as pansexual, is interested in expressing fluidity and acceptance when it comes to love, sex, gender, and monogamy.

“You don’t have to fully understand something in order to accept it,” says Raf. “And when you tell your story you become visible, you represent nuances and this allows other people to see themselves and be seen as well.”

Are people shocked by polyamory?

“There are many preconceptions about non-monogamy and polyamory, like assuming you’re always going sex parties. Which is fine if that’s your thing, but a relationship structure doesn’t mean you’re love or sex life is just one thing or the other,” says Raf.

She also mentions that people come back to see her show multiple times likely searching for answers while delighting in listening to love and sex spoken about in such a frank way: after all it’s just one woman standing on the stage, no mic, no bells and whistles.

Raised in a Detroit suburb, Raf went to a Reform synagogue, attended Hebrew school and went through all the usual milestones of a Jewish upbringing from confirmation to a bat mitzvah. “You know there’s that Jewish thing we all joke about, calming your anxious Jewish mother down when it comes to your love life. The show deals with the struggle and the celebration of that dichotomy, the parts of your life that are Jewish mother approved and the parts that are tougher to communicate.”

Are Jews really that neurotic? “I’ve met a lot of chill Jews,” Raf says, also mentioning that she experiences humor to be very much part of Jewish culture and often functioning as a refuge from anxieties. Her 2013 young adult book, The Symptoms of My Insanity, deals with a hypochondriac teenager and Raf is interested in dismantling stereotypes about native Jewish anxiety.

The world of Raf’s childhood was largely heteronormative, and NOT THE ONE: A Love Story explores a way to blend past and present.

“We tend to insert our own point of view into other people’s experiences out of fear of the unknown. We think we have to put ourselves and others in these boxes with solid walls. We don’t all have to be fluid, but if we come from kindness and allow the space for other people to live their lives and be fluid… it’s just better,” Raf comments.

Raf, (recently she’s been called the female Woody Allen. Does it bother her? Not at all, but she does hope people will start to move away from the cis white male stereotypes of Jewish humor) feels very connected to her Jewish identity and talks about the developing process of executing Judaism in everyday life in a way that feels authentic. She considers herself very spiritual, but much like her path to becoming who she is today, she’s working towards balance within organized religion and personal spirituality.

“Specifically in the Jewish family narrative, it’s very challenging to be modern and also identify with something that relies on tradition without feeling like you’re letting someone down. But I’m trying to take the things that I identify with in Judaism and recreate them in a way that works for me. Sometimes I feel guilty about that process and other times I’m like, this really isn’t anybody else’s business.”

As an afterthought Raf adds,  “And if people do make it their business, I hope they do so with kindness and curiosity. ”

For more information about Raf, weed lube, and upcoming performances click here.

Photo credit Christiana Chavez

The post ‘NOT THE ONE: A Love Story’ appeared first on Jewcy.

I met Vladimir Mukhotaev, 28, at the Metropolitan Council on Jewish Poverty, where he helps low-income New Yorkers access food stamps. After he provided translation for an article I was reporting, I asked him about his path from Russia to the United States. He explained that he had followed his husband to New York and had never planned to leave Russia. I was intrigued: how could he feel so warmly towards his homeland as a gay man? And what had led him to Jewish social work after he was raised Eastern Orthodox? Vladimir’s story is below in his own words.

I was born in Russia in 1989. My native city is Orenburg, which is very close to the Kazakhstan border, but I moved to Moscow when I was 10.

My father, he left our family when I was three. My mother, she used to be a mother and father as well. She was very strong. She had her own business and gave a nice education to me and to my older brother, who didn’t live with us.

Around seven or eight years old, I realized that I like more boys than girls. I didn’t question myself. I was just like, “OK, it’s fine.” It was very natural, very organic. I never struggled with that. Maybe my mom noticed something at some point, but she never asked me.

At age 12, I got my first computer, and I started to chat people online. When I was 17 or 18, I started to go out, but I hid that. I just said, “I went with my friends.” So I never said, “Mom, I’m going with gay people to a gay bar or a gay club.” I don’t think I used to hide that because she would never understand. I did that to make sure she was not getting nervous.

When I started to date this guy, Nikolay, he showed me the first bars and clubs I went to. You have to understand, the gay scene in Russia, it’s so open-minded inside, and so cool and amazing, but outside there are no symbols, or the name of the bar or club. It’s just doors.

Nikolay was my first love, and when we broke up, I couldn’t struggle with my feelings alone, and I had to reveal the situation. So that’s why my mom knew that I am gay. Even at the very emotional moment when I said it, she was very supportive. She said, “It doesn’t matter. I still love you, and it doesn’t matter.” It only took her one or two days to get over that.

During my third year of university, my mom was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. It was a tough time, not just because I had to say goodbye, but because she and I had such a strong and close connection. At one point, I needed a specific medicine for my mom, and one of my friends said, “I have an oncologist who can maybe help you.” So I got connected with him, and he got me the pills for free.

I wasn’t looking for a boyfriend, but this doctor, Sergey, and I got to know each other through our souls. When I began dating him, my mom was already back in Orenburg, where she had decided to die. But she talked to Sergey a lot on the phone, and she said, “Please take care of Vladimir.” He really seemed very reliable to her.

After my mom passed away, I tried to find answers to existential questions: why do we exist, why do we love, why do we die? Priests at the Russian Orthodox Church, where I went growing up, couldn’t answer me. They just told me, “Please read the second part of the Bible.” And I did for a few months, but it didn’t help me.

Sergey had been going to a Chabad synagogue in Moscow for a while, and he said, “If you want, you can join me, and take a look.” I started to go, and from the beginning, it really impressed me. The atmosphere of discussing and trying to find answers is so different from Christianity, and there’s not so much distance between you and the rabbi. I really like that, and I was able to ask so many questions.

Judaism gave me hope. It gave me the structure of this life, how it works and why it was created. I was pretty frustrated after my mom’s death; I lost a source of love. And now, in this kind of tough world, I have a manual. I have instruction. So it was very, very powerful to me, and I might convert in the future.

In 2014, Sergey won a green card through the lottery. He’s my family, so I was like, “OK, we have to move.” We got connected with the U.S. Embassy in Russia and asked them what to do, because after the Defense of Marriage Act was repealed, I could apply for a green card with Sergey. They said, “If you get married right now and provide us proof that you’ve been together, we can extend the green card to Vladimir as well.”

We had to be very quick, because the final day the second green card could be issued was in two or three weeks. Only Iceland said we could be married in a few days, so we went with Sergey’s parents, who were our witnesses. It was very sweet.

We moved to New York in 2016. I had never thought about immigration to the United States or anywhere else. I was maybe not a patriot, but I really felt at home in Russia, and I loved my country. And part of that was my law degree, because it makes you feel that you are in service to the people or government. I knew that I had only one motherland.

In Russia, people are more connected to each other, even to someone you don’t know in the street. And here in the U.S., we’re pretty far from each other, and it was very surprising to me. Because life is supposed to be the same, right? You eat, you go out; it’s kind of the same. But the details are so different.     

In a train here, I can’t imagine someone would come up to me and say I’m wearing something that is not appropriate. And over there, a grandmother might come up to a girl and say, “You know what? Your skirt is pretty short.” Because they feel not just that there’s no border between you, but they believe they care about you, and they’re like, “You know what? It would be better for you do that.”  I think the problem of homophobia in Russia comes from that closeness.

Russians also don’t ask “How are you?” to make fun or just to fill up the atmosphere. And we do not smile just to show that we’re not aggressive right now, or you’re fine passing by. The Russian smile is always sincere; it’s if we really have a reason. Saying that these are cultural differences, we forget that they’re very important.

The Gay Pride Parade in New York has been very powerful for me, a moment when you are all together and you don’t feel that it’s wrong. Still, this feeling that I’m not at home… I’m just afraid it will never go away. And it really bothers me that my kids—which I really want to have in the future—will lose my Russian heritage, even though I will do my best. Like in the second generation, they will probably say, “Yeah, we had a father, Vladimir, who used to make Russian dumplings,” but they will be total Americans. So I’m still thinking about whether I want to stay.

The one thing I have to remember is that there is no better or worse place. Russia is a place to live in; it’s not that it’s worse or better. And the same in New York or America. I used to think that it was worse here. But once I tried to connect with people, I understood that this is just another reality.

The post Growing Up Gay in Christian Russia appeared first on Jewcy.

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

The post ‘Call Me By Your Name’ Is Jewish appeared first on Jewcy.

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!

The post New Dating Site Helps LGBTQ Jews Find Love, No Pictures Necessary appeared first on Jewcy.

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!

The post Come to the Bimah and Read Torah! But First, What’s Your Pronoun? appeared first on Jewcy.