Gay candidate blazes new trail in Israel mayoral race

by Allyn Fisher-Ilan, Reuters

As a candidate to become the Middle East's first openly gay mayor, Nitzan Horowitz is hoping his bid to run Israel's famously liberal city of Tel Aviv will help homosexuals across a region where they are widely frowned upon.

The left-wing legislator is not predicted to defeat the incumbent, the well-established ex-fighter pilot Ron Huldai, in an October 22 municipal vote.

But the 48-year-old remains upbeat, pointing to an opinion poll his dovish Meretz party commissioned last month that gave Huldai only a five-point lead.

A survey in the Maariv newspaper last week predicted a Huldai victory, but found 46 percent of voters were still undecided.

"I'm going to be not only the first gay mayor here in Israel, but the first gay mayor of the entire Middle East. This is very exciting," Horowitz told Reuters.

Horowitz's prominence in Tel Aviv is not altogether surprising. In a region better known for its religious and social conservatism, it is dubbed the "city that never sleeps".

With a population of 410,000, it was also ranked in a poll by Gaycities.com last year as a top gay destination.

By contrast, more than 800,000 ultra-Orthodox Jews wearing black coats and hats poured on to the streets of Jerusalem last week for the funeral of Rabbi Ovadia Yosef, a divisive figure whom critics called "Israel's ayatollah."

Huldai, Tel Aviv's mayor since 1998, already apportions city budgets for its annual beachfront gay pride parade, and there is a gay film festival and municipal center for the gay community offering cultural and athletic programs for teenagers and young adults.

"You can't take away the fact that gay life has blossomed in the city under Huldai," said Itai Pinkas Pinkas, 39, a onetime city councilor who worked with the mayor.

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Being Queer and Jewish in Ultra-Orthodox Brooklyn

by J.E. Reich for The Blog/HuffPost

I walk home from a friend's house party at 2 o'clock in the morning, tired from drinking. Nearing the corner of Kingston Ave., I hear an aching chant. It is a prayer, the v'ahavta, and it comes from an elderly woman in a ratty dress, shuckling on the mezzanine of the Chabad synagogue. I stop and blink once, twice. She sees me and motions for me to come over, to join her. I sit beside her and begin to recite it, this prayer I know with easy memory. A communal longing surges through me from the bottom of my ribcage, igniting my bone marrow. It is only after we end the prayer with a quiet, resounding "amen" that she asks for my name.

"No," she says with a Yiddish inflection after I answer. "Your real name." My Hebrew name.

"Esther Yaakova bat Shimon ve Chaya," I say, relishing the formalities, the guttural buzz at the back of my throat.

She claps her hands once. "Aha! My name is Esther too!"

Esther begins a line of questioning: Do I live in the neighborhood? Where do I go to shul? Do I have anywhere to go for next Shabbos? I reply with a soft shyness, afraid that this moment of Jewish connection will end too soon, in a place where I perpetually press my face against glass, only able to look in and never enter.

We come to the subject of Jewish learning. I admit that I've contemplated seeking out a Torah study group.

"Yes, yes," she says. "Join my group. I meet with girls just like you."

Just like me, I think, but not like me at all. "You should know," I tell Esther, feeling a sense of hope that things might be different this time, "I live with my girlfriend." She blinks once, twice. "I'm gay," I say. Again, no recognition. "I'm a homosexual."

She inches away, ever so slightly, and closes the siddur in her lap. Could I not be that way, she wonders out of the side of her mouth. I tell her that it's impossible to not be any other way for me.

"Oh," she says. "Then no."

At my apartment, my girlfriend asks why I'm home so late. After I finish the story, my head cradled in my hands, she says that sleep will make me feel better in the morning. But in truth, I know that these small words are empty consolations, despite her best intentions. Only I could know otherwise, and yet I don't.

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Let’s Talk About Here!

Opinion, The Conspiracy; by Jonathan Katz for newvoices

Publications aimed for a queer Jewish audience, like any niche-aimed work, tend to concentrate on certain themes. There are your coming out to your community publications, there are your famous-queer-Jews publications, there are your “my story” publications.

And then there is another trend: a deep, heavy, nearly-overwhelming concentration on Israel.

Israel is everywhere in the queer Jewish community – and we’re not talking objective or straightforward discussions here. (Mention “pink-washing” and things might not go so well for you.) “Look at the equality and glory of Israel” is a message almost ubiquitous in the queer Jewish community – of course, with a heavy dose of hasbara (Hi AIPAC!), nationalist feel-good rhetoric, and reproduction of racist stereotypes. Almost always, one finds highly distorted truths. To a certain point, I – the son of a mother raised in Israel – do not completely mind. But in fact, I mind quite a lot.

To a point, this focus is simply annoying – and exclusionary for those who are even mildly critical of Israel’s government or its policies, for it has developed a culture of “you’re with us or against us.” There’s also the point at which it is obsessive – it feels as if nothing else is discussed.

And what I’m concerned with is that this obsession comes at the expense of discussing queer Jewish experiences right here, right now in the United States.

Of course, it can already be argued that the American Jewish community is dangerously obsessed with Israel, to the point of damage to our own communal health. As one Israeli filmmaker aptly said, Israel is “too cherished.” Yet, in my own experience, I find that the wider American Jewish community is less concentrated on Israel than the queer Jewish community.

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Maintaining a Family Fiction About My Uncle—and His Partner of 33 Years

Last week’s Supreme Court decision on gay marriage came too late for Uncle Bill, who had to keep his relationship a secret

By Melanie Radley for Tablet from July 1, 2013

When my uncle Bill Murstein died on June 7, 1967, at age 70, he was eulogized as a civic leader, philanthropist, and noted owner of his eponymous department store, Wilmurs, which had been the major retail presence in Hamilton, Ohio, for 32 years. The extensive obituary in the Hamilton Daily Journal cited his many accomplishments, local and national, and the edifices he endowed, including the William Murstein Synagogue at Hebrew Union College, Jerusalem, and the Murstein Alumni Center at Miami University. But the article made no mention of Sanford Eaffy, his companion of at least 33 years, who had died just four months earlier. Bill had been an honorary pallbearer at Eaffy’s funeral that spring, as were my father and a cousin, testament to the place “Uncle Eaffy” had in our family. Eaffy’s obituary mentioned his connection to Uncle Bill, but only in coded terms. From the Hamilton Daily Journal, March 13, 1967: “His association with William Murstein, president and owner of Wilmurs, was a close one not alone in the operation of the department store but in sharing other interests as well.”
Now, as I approach Bill’s age when he died, I finally understand the depth of their relationship. All these years later, as the Supreme Court finally struck down a key part of the federal Defense of Marriage Act—although Ohio’s own constitutional ban on gay marriage stands—I finally understand how important their relationship was and the impact that denying that relationship’s importance had on our entire family.

Uncle Bill and his partner Eaffy moved in together in 1934, sharing accommodations in Hamilton’s luxury Anthony Wayne Hotel. Ohio already had some of the most stringent and often-enforced sodomy laws in the country; that hadn’t changed by the time they both died in 1967, two years before Stonewall, and seven years before the state legislature repealed those laws.

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