Jewish woman is White House’s first transgender staff member

from JewishNews

The White House has hired its first openly transgender member of staff – a woman who served on the Jewish student union in her home town of Minneapolis, writes James Graham.

Raffi Freedman-Gurspan will join the personnel department. Her mother Marion said: “I sent a son abroad for his junior year of college – by the time I visited Norway in May, I was visiting a daughter.”

Mara Keisling, formerly of the National Centre for Transgender Equality, has said: “A transgender person was inevitably going to work in the White House. It is seen as a great step towards greater transgender equality… That the first transgender appointee is a transgender woman of colour is itself significant.”

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First Ex-Chasidic Gay Memoir Defies Niche

Publishers didn't know what shelf to put it on: Jewish or gay?

Hannah Dreyfus, Staff Writer for The Jewish Week   

The latest ex-chasidic memoir adds a rainbow twist to an emerging literary genre.

Leah Lax’s “Uncovered: How I Left Hasidic Life and Finally Came Home” (She Writes Press) hit the shelves in late August, and it joins the ranks of popular out-of-the-fold authors including Shulem Deen and Judy Brown. Taken together, the memoirs provide readers with a seldom-glimpsed look at chasidic life from the inside, and trace the often-painful story arcs of those who leave the straight-and-narrow religious path.

But, unlike its literary predecessors, “Uncovered” is also a gay memoir. Lax, 59, who today lives with her wife of 10 years in Houston, said that she initially had difficulty publishing the book because of its double niche.

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Classes for LGBT People Who Explore Converting to Judaism Open in Los Angeles

Yanik Dekel, The Gay Wire on  JPost.com

Coming from the world  of entertainment Journalism, I recently heard that popular American singer Arianna Grande declared that she’s “no longer a Christian” and now thinks of converting to Judaism after her homosexual brother was shunned by the Catholic Church. Several years ago, when I interviewed Elizabeth Banks, she told me that she converted to Judaism because she loved the way Reform Judaism treats women, and that the real meaning of Rabbi is a teacher.

But it’s not only celebrities who raise interest in Judaism. Many people, including LGBT people, are going through conversion to Judaism every year or consider conversion, and all of the studies to date show that converts to Judaism make steadfast and loyal members of the community.

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Chief Rabbi Claims Jerusalem 'Disgusted' by Gays

In The Jewish Daily Forward

Only months after an Israeli teen was murdered by an ultra-Orthodox man during the Jerusalem Gay Pride parade, the city’s chief rabbi Shlomo Amar has lashed out at the LGBT community, saying “I believe that this phenomenon will wane and disappear, because most of the public is disgusted by it and detest it.”

Amar, who was chief rabbi of Israel until two years ago and remains a member of the High Rabbinical Council, was speaking in an interview with the ultra-Orthodox website Behadrey Haredim.

“The level of shame has been breached and trampled these days,” he said. “There’s almost nothing left. And since then, we’ve seen impudence and brazenness which previously no one would have even thought of. People do them publicly and we need to find ways of dealing with it.”

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