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Tag : queer
April 20, 2020 by admin
“Queering the Torah”
What could we do if we all came together as a community—trans folks, gender non-conforming folks, non-binary people, cis people—to spend a day exploring Torah informed through the lens of queer experience? On Sunday, October 27th, our Beit Midrash in New York City was filled with the energy of people who showed up for each other, who showed up for inclusion and diversity, for Torah and for queerness. We kicked off the program by turning to three leaders, Rabbi Sarra Lev, Rabbi Emily Aviva Kapor-Mater and Rabbi Steven Greenberg, who have made the lives of so many queer Jews better through their work. We asked them questions like “What do you do when the Torah lets you down?” and “What does Queer Torah mean to you?”
In breakout sessions that followed, we explored topics like “How Do We Talk About Sex in the Yeshiva?” and “Declaring the Pure to be Impure and Other Queer Superpowers.” Our learning was interwoven with singing, and we gathered at the end to stand together and daven Mincha, the afternoon prayer service.
I didn’t think I needed Queer Torah in my life, but it turns out I was wrong. From Rabbi Sarra Lev I learned that the work of queering the Torah is to make the invisible visible and that the rabbis have been doing this thing called queering the Torah for centuries. This is the very same work behind the rabbinic project of midrash, of looking at the Torah and, instead of seeing just the literal plain sense of the word, attempting to give voice to that which is unsaid.
AVI STRAUSBERG “A Torah of Tears: Reflecting on Torah Informed by the Lens of Queer Experience,” on the Lilith Blog.
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April 20, 2020 by admin
LGBTQ Jewish Hero of Color Poster •
Rabbi Sandra Lawson is a veteran, a vegan, a weightlifter, one of the first queer women
rabbis of color, and Associate Chaplain for Jewish Life at Elon University in North
Carolina. “One of the things I want the larger Jewish community to understand is
that rabbis today are a diverse group. Many are people of color. Many are not straight.
Many might be married to non-Jews. My difference, my diversity, is helping people
become aware of that.” Keshet’s LGBTQ Jewish Heroes poster series is available to
synagogues, day schools, JCCs, and other Jewish institutions to demonstrate their commitment to LGBTQ equality and visibility.
keshetonline.org/resources-and-events/lgbtq-jewish-heroes
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December 2, 2019 by Avi Strausberg
A Torah of Tears: Reflecting on Torah Informed by the Lens of Queer Experience
Hadar’s Queer Colloquium.
Trent Campbell, Picture This Productions
I didn’t think I needed Queer Torah in my life. I had a narrow vision of what Queer Torah was, which was limited to queering the characters of the Torah, essentially imposing gayness onto our ancestors, for the sake of seeing myself represented in our narratives. While I don’t underestimate how for many people it is not only powerful but even necessary to see ourselves represented in Torah, for me this notion held little appeal. This is why, even as a queer rabbi, I didn’t have any of the good Queer Torah books* I was supposed to have on my bookshelf. I never sought them out, and if I’m honest, I’d say I even felt a bit turned off by them.
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June 29, 2018 by Kira Yates
Six Young, LGBTQ+ Jews Get Real About Identity
As Pride Month comes to an end, we asked six Jews who are also in the LGBTQIA+ community to speak about the interactions among their many identities. It is daunting to describe your identity in a few words, but the people featured below have done so with radical frankness —telling stories of coming out, coming to terms with identity, and joining together as a community, all of which define their lives Jewish, as LGBTQIA+, and at the intersections between the two.
Rochelle, 22
I feel as though being Jewish prepared me for being queer. When I was a small child, I learned how to move through the world with my Jewish identity always present but semi-hidden, and how to gauge when was a safe time to reveal it. I hold my lesbian identity very similarly, though recently I have been struggling to find ways to make both more visible.
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June 22, 2018 by Laura Winnick
On “Disobedience:” Threesomes, Friendship and Queer Families
Although Director Sebastian Lilio’s recent film Disobedience is about a forbidden lesbian love between Esti (Rachel McAdams) and Ronit (Rachel Weisz), the most compelling scenes are when the characters are either in solitude, or united as a threesome with Dovit Esti’s husband (Alessandro Nivola),
This oddity might be because Esti and Ronit’s queer coupling is so unrealistic; their sex, for all of the constraints they face in their frum Orthodox community, is lustless: a sequential love-making performed while the two women remain halfway-clothed. Oddly enough, the Forward published a takedown of the film by an Orthodox woman, claiming that she is sick of being fetishized. But this piece notably omits of the word queer, and similarly sidesteps any discussion of what is also fundamentally fetishized in the film: lesbian sex.
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