Sitting Down with Emma: A 15-Year-Old Social Media Maven

By Jordyn Rozensky for Keshet on MyJewishLearning.com   

Tell us a little about yourself:
My name is Emma, I’m 15, and I live in Chicago. My passions include cuddling, watching Netflix, social media, social justice, and feminism.

You attended the Keshet LGBTQ & Ally Teen Shabbaton on the East Coast, and now you’re joining us on the West Coast. What was your experience like at the Shabbaton?
I’ve been looking for a queer Jewish community for a long time, and when I heard about the Shabbaton (a gathering that spans Shabbat) through Facebook, I signed up as soon as possible.

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Gay Synagogue Moves From the West Village, But Takes Its Rich Civil-Rights History With It

By Justin Davidson for New York Magazine

On Sunday, when the members of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah (CBST) march from their Bethune Street home to their new quarters at 130 West 30th Street, they’ll be hauling a lot of history. There’s the rainbow-colored chuppah that Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum used to celebrate the first same-sex Jewish weddings in front of City Hall on June 24, 2011. There’s an upholstered chair, bequeathed by a member who, in the last months before he died of AIDS in 1992, found the old metal folding chairs a torment. There are the candles carried in a shopping bag, just as they were on the Friday evening in 1973, when a dozen people answered a tiny ad in the Village Voice (“Gay Synagogue,” it announced) and gathered in a church annex.

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As Same-Sex Parents, We Weren’t Expecting This

B.J. Epstein for Kveller

Our daughter has my thick dark hair and my need for little sleep. She has my wife’s stubbornness and independence. She loves books, like me, and appears to enjoy singing, like my wife. She is clearly the product of Fi’s and my marriage.

The only thing is that she doesn’t actually have any genes from Fi; our child has two moms, but only genes from one of us.

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Diva D, the Godmother of Jerusalem Drag, Can’t Leave the Holy City Alone

By Jacob Newberry for Tablet Magazine  

For one of the founding practitioners of Israel’s cross-dressing performance art—chased out to Tel Aviv by ultra-Orthodox antipathy—Purim is just another day to do battle for her right to be her

On stage, Diva D looked tiny. She weighed maybe a hundred pounds, mostly bone and made-up skin in a strapless black cocktail dress. But like most drag queens under a spotlight, she was loud. And mean. She also speaks four languages and performed weekly in what was then Jerusalem’s only gay club, the Mikveh.

“Who here’s from America?” she called out on a recent night there. “Who’s new?”

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