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

The post Ride Off Into the Sunset With Jewcy appeared first on Jewcy.

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.

The post A Space for LGBTQ Mizrahi and Sephardi Jews 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.

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.

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.

If you can’t wait until Jewcy‘s Purim Pun-A-Palooza to get in to the holiday spirit, this weekend you can start getting your Purim freak on with the freakiest of celebrations— the JFREJ Purim Spiel.

A step back: JFREJ is Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, and most of the year they organize political and community actions— think marches, training, protests. A Purim spiel is the Jewish tradition of a comic play that retells the holiday story, often with music, satire, irreverence. And when you combine the two? You get this year’s performance: JEWS WITH THORNS: A Purimshpil & Masqurade Ball.

The spiel is the baby of JFREJ’s partner: the Afselokhis Spectacle Committee— a collective of local artists, visual, musical, theatrical, you name it (all paid for their work), as well as several political action groups, Jewish and not. (Yiddish performance artist Jenny Romaine is generally at the helm, and her partner in crime was the late, great, Adrienne Cooper.)

The project began in 2002, and past productions have included Giant Puppet Purim Ball Against the Death Penalty, Rehearsal for the Downfall of Shoeshine: An Immigrant Justice Purim Spectacular!, Roti and Homentaschn: The Palace Workers Revolt! A Purim Carnival Spectacular, Your Homentaschen Are Killing Me! A Purim Ball for the body, its resilience, its fragility, and its bounce!… you get the general idea.

And what actually happens in these plays? They are definitely better experienced than described, but let’s just say that Purim is about turning society on its head, and JFREJ got the memo. Imagine running with that, with an unapologetically political bite. Last year, Vashti was a deposed queer leader of her people. The year before, Esther went by ze/hir pronouns and literally donned white-face to subsume hir racial identity and blend in with privileged palace life. All this while maybe a local band plays, or a spoken-word artist pauses the narrative to deliver a poem. The sets are made of all sorts of found-objects and simple supplies. Glitter is probably involved.

The story follows the general trajectory of Purim; or at least the stock characters are there. Haman represents institutionalized evil (though who knows what form he takes any given year), and some other characters (though maybe not the ones you would expect) resist. While the play changes greatly year to year, there will be some constants. There will be puppets. There will be music. There will be radical politics, and don’t expect to be comforted just because you’re the member of any particular oppressed group. In short, it will be Brechtian AF. Lather, rinse, go to the after-party.

The after-party is a spectacle in and of itself. It’s decidedly adult; you’re just as likely to see someone wearing leather as dressed as a superhero. You’re also just as likely to run into queer gentile acquaintances as traditional Jewish friends. It’s definitely a open free space for experimentation of expression. If you have a costume idea not quite tznius enough for the Megillah reading next weekend, try it out here. If you just want to rock jeans and a t-shirt, go anyway, with an open mind.

If you want the quieter, chiller evening, sans party, check out the spiel’s dress rehearsal tonight (doors 7:30, show at 8). You’ll still get the full joy of the performance, but for better or worse, without the energy of a bunch of leftists crammed into a space together. If you want to go all-out (and you should), attend the event this Saturday night, March 4th, doors at 7:45, show at 8:30. If you have kids, consider the Sunday family Purim carnival, from 12 to 4 p.m. The location for all of these is East Midwood Jewish Center, 1625 Ocean Avenue in Brooklyn.

Be there, or be part of what the spiel has called the “white Christian hetero-patriarchy.”

Photos of this year’s play in rehearsal by Erik R. McGregor.

The post The Radical Queer Purim Spiel You MUST Attend appeared first on Jewcy.

Who’s up for some Jewish-queer intersectionality? And how about if that intersection is the form of a Chanukah treat? That’s right, you can make latkes all colors of the rainbow, without getting too far away from traditional potato pancakes, and no, there’s no food coloring involved.

These are really easy, really pretty, and really flavorful. The base recipe (regardless of color) is:

Ingredients:

• (1) egg
• (1/4) onion
• (1) grated vegetable

Instructions:

Mix all in a bowl and form into patties before frying ’em up nice and crispy.

There’s no one way to get the color palette you want, but here are some tips on how to get started:

• Red: Beets
• Orange: Carrots, Sweet Potatoes, orange cauliflower
• Yellow: Potatoes, parsnip, jicima, sunchoke
• Green: Zucchini, broccoli, or if you really want to use kale, go ahead, but mix it with potato for structure
• Blue: If you’re a rainbow completist, my best suggestion is blue potatoes
• Purple: Purple carrot, purple cauliflower

And then tada! A stack of rainbowy, pridey potato pancakes! Allies are also welcome to enjoy!

Now, while they all taste delicious, some flavors mesh together better than others. I tasted the rainbow, if you will, the first time I made these and the beets and carrots didn’t really taste so great together. But taste is subjective, so maybe you like the combination. Feel free to experiment. Don’t be limited by certain latkes identities; it’s the 21st century.

Anyway, go forth and enjoy! And feel free to share your results with us on Twitter!

Image by Rachel Jacobs

The post Rainbow Pride Latkes appeared first on Jewcy.

The transgender Jewish punk band Schmekel (Yiddish for “little penis”) is, alas, defunct, but at least we still have their songs about almost every Jewish holiday. For this time of year, there are numbers about the upcoming Tishrei parade of Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, Sukkot, and Simchat Torah. These holidays are vehicles to explore what it was like to be transgender in conjunction with being Jewish, and they used some very Jewish tools to do so— like nerdiness, humor, passion.

Schmekel saw Jewish holidays as a resonant, familiar path to discuss that topic in varied ways. When interviewed for my book, Oy Oy Oy Gevalt! Jews and Punk, Schmekel singer/guitarist Lucian Kahn said that Schmekel aimed to “talk about all of these different times in the cycle of the Jewish calendar and find ways of relating those things to trans experience.”

“The Binding of Isaac” is a poignant song, in part because of an evocative “Avinu Malkeinu” interlude. The lyrics discuss how a transgender Jew named Isaac presents himself as male, binds his breasts, and sits in the men’s section in shul on Rosh Hashanah. “Old Marvin from the Y,” whom Isaac has known since childhood, asks Isaac’s father how his daughter is doing. The father brushes off the question by saying Elaine (Isaac’s birth name) “is fine,” as if Isaac isn’t present. Heartbreakingly, while the father just continues praying, Isaac looks down in dismay and his knees buckle.

As the listener hears the story, Isaac’s father is to blame for failing to acknowledge the presence of his transgender child. But Kahn explained that the situation was “based on snippets of truth” and wasn’t so straightforward.

Kahn said, “Old Marvin’s not a real person, but he might as well be, because all of us have had an experience … running into … some sort of not core person in your life, and having that experience of, okay, they don’t recognize me … because the last time they saw me, they thought I looked like a woman. … Should I reintroduce myself? Should I pretend I’m someone else? Should I just ignore them?” These questions represent complex practical considerations related to transgender transitioning. “The Binding of Isaac” puts them into a fictional context where listeners can understand and relate to the plight of a transgender person in this situation.

Whereas “The Binding of Isaac” was one of three Tishrei holiday songs on Schmekel’s 2013 album, The Whale That Ate Jonah, “I’m Sorry, It’s Yom Kippur” appeared on 2011’s Queers on Rye. The lyrics discuss “atoning for some shit I might have done wrong.” The atonement included transgender-related examples like assuming a heterosexual person was ignorant, coming out in an “awkward way,” and putting breast binders in the drier. The song includes a shofar blast as well as Schmekel’s take on the “Al Chet” prayer from the Yom Kippur liturgy.

The prestigious Jewish Music Research Centre at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem praised the song as a venue for “atonement through punk (and traditional Jewish music).” In the article, Kahn explained that the notion of “screwing up” was more relatable—and applicable to his life—than “sin.” He said that it was “more productive” to “reflect with a sense of humor upon my mess-ups.”

“I wrote that song when I was not supposed to be writing that song; I wrote it while I was fasting,” Kahn told me. “So I was also really amused that a song that I wrote, definitely breaking a commandment or a mitzvah or something to actually write it, ended up getting analyzed by” the Jewish Music Research Centre.

“Occupy My Sukkah” is a Sukkot-themed, X-rated song about a “broke-ass queer” looking for “somebody from the one percent.” The song includes Hoshana Rabba, the seventh of Sukkot’s eight days. The lyrics ask: “If you’ve got abundance, won’t you be my sugar abba [daddy] / And smack me with your arava [branch of a willow tree] ’cuz it’s Hoshana Rabba?”

“Maybe She’s Shomer Negiyah” has the strongest lyrics of the Tishrei songs, but it adheres the least to a holiday theme. The setting is a Simchat Torah party, but the holiday isn’t discussed beyond the opening line of the song.

Shomer negiyah refers to men and women not touching each other, and in the song, the transgender male narrator dances the hora with other men. He realizes that the men probably wouldn’t want to hold his hand if they knew he was transgender. He also discussed not shaking hands with a woman when he said “chag sameach” because “she’s keepin’ it kosher like Shmuley Boteach.”

Schmekel’s songs were more than just catharsis for the band members as they dealt with their transitions. The humor in their songs served a larger purpose: Schmekel deliberately used humor to lower the defenses of non-transgender audiences and make the topic seem more approachable. From there, people could learn about and empathize with the transgender experience.

The Jewish part of making the transgender experience seem relatable had to do with Schmekel’s expertise with Jewish topics. Kahn explained, “It’s probably a little unusual to have within one band somebody who has a master’s degree in history of religions and somebody who studied Jewish education and someone who was a Jewish studies major. It’s like … a brain trust of people who have studied Jewish history.” Writing clever lyrics like the “sugar abba”/Hoshana Rabba couplet would be beyond the capabilities of most Jews with casual knowledge of their religion.

Schmekel disbanded in 2014. Kahn still has a decent chance of making some High Holidays music, though. He lives in Crown Heights, and in his own words, “I cannot make it between my building and the subway two blocks away on Rosh Hashanah without being handed a shofar at least three times.”

The post Trans Tishrei: A Little Schmekel for the Holidays appeared first on Jewcy.

Apparently, today is #HeterosexualPrideDay, because people who aren’t marginalized for their sexual identity feel left out during the one time of year designated for LGBT minorities, particularly in the aftermath of a violent hate crimes that killed dozens because they were queer.

But, you know, they didn’t get a parade, which is a bummer.

So an obvious way to celebrate would be a list of some amazing non-straight Jewish figures, but it’s really difficult to just pick a few: After all, Jews are more likely than Christians to identify as gay.

Even so, let’s narrow it down to a few famous Jews who would be BANNED FROM PARTICIPATING in Heterosexual Pride Day. Let’s try a few who had something particular to say about being a minority:

1. Lesley Gore— The late, great, pop singer-songwriter came out as a lesbian later in life only because she hadn’t really bothered to do so before; her loved ones had known for ages:

“Well, there were was very little acceptance of gay people. I think the record industry, by and large what’s left of it, is still totally homophobic… It’s always been a patriarchal situation, and it always puts women, not necessarily down, but certainly on a lower rung.”

2. Barney Frank— The congressman is one of the most politically powerful LGBT people in the country, and he came out in 1987, certainly not an easy time to publicly identify as gay:

“I’m used to being in the minority. I’m a left-handed gay Jew. I’ve never felt, automatically, a member of any majority.”

3. Harvey Milk—The politician, gay rights activist, and all-around trailblazer addressed during his life the very-real possibility that he could be assassinated for his identity, and ultimately, he was, but it never stopped him:

“Coming out is the most political thing you can do.”

4. Tony Kushner— The great playwright often writes queer themes into his work, and has never shied away from the political:

“If you’re gay and you can’t hold hands, or you’re black and you can’t catch a taxi, or you’re a woman and you can’t go into the park, you are aware there’s a menace. That’s costly on a psychic level. The world should be striving to make all its members secure.”

5.Peaches— born Merrill Beth Nisker, the raunchy musician tends to refuse most labels, identifies as queer, and often speaks her mind about LGBT rights:

“Gay men and gay women have to question standards and authorities in themselves right away when they realize, ‘Oh my God. Everything I see around me is directed towards boy-meets-girl, girl-meets-boy.’ And women do a lot of questioning because we have been so sexualized throughout the years, so now we are totally on top.”

And a very happy Heterosexual Pride Day to you, too!

Image credit: Wikipedia, YouTube, and Mike Lecht via Flickr

The post Because #HeterosexualPrideDay is Stupid, a Few Awesome Queer Jews appeared first on Jewcy.