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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Gay Jews celebrate ‘High Homodays’ with Manischewitz shots and matchmaking

By Lucy Cohen Blatter for JTA

It was nearly midnight Saturday, and Jayson Littman was milling about an upscale Manhattan nightclub greeting friends with a wide smile and often a big hug. Standing alongside a “shot boy” — clad only in underwear, a kippah and Star of David necklace — he offered partygoers shots of Manischewitz in plastic cups.

Littman was hosting some 400 gay Jewish men who filled the top floor of the Hudson Terrace for “High Homodays,” his annual gay Jewish party held between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Israeli EDM music sounded from the DJ booth along with the occasional Britney Spears and Taylor Swift song — plus some shofar blasts in the mix for good measure. Some people were dancing, others just mingling.

“I want people to go to the occasional Jewish event outside Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services,” Littman told JTA. “And a lot of people are focused on their relationship to Judaism this time of year.”

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Coming Out on Yom Kippur

by Rebecca Mark for Tikkun

I often believe that Yom Kippur falls at exactly the right moment in one’s life each year. Five years ago Yom Kippur fell a week before my fiftieth birthday. At that moment, exiled in Washington, D.C., after Hurricane Katrina, I had to help my family survive our evacuation. Last year, a few weeks before Yom Kippur, our rabbi, Alexis Berk of Touro Synagogue in New Orleans, had a meeting at Jeff and Mark’s (my co-parents) house, to discuss what the synagogue could do in order to become more gay-friendly. Rabbi Berk mentioned that she wanted to speak in support of gay marriage during the high holidays, but she had not decided whether or not she would. We can be liberal in our warm, family-oriented synagogue in New Orleans, but we are not San Francisco or New York or even Chicago.

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Found Tribe: Jewish Coming Out Stories

by Lawrence Schimel (Editor)

Found Tribe is a collection of intimate essays by and about gay Jewish men on the experience of coming out as gay within a Jewish context or as Jewish within a gay context. No longer necessarily lost or excluded, today’s gay Jews tell their courageous, powerful stories of finding and embracing their religious and sexual identities that enrich both the Jewish and gay experience. Written with honesty, humor, and insight, Found Tribe explores the joys and oys of coming out to family, lovers, rabbis, and others--and an Orthodox gay rabbi writes about Gayness and God. Found Tribe gives voice to the inextinguishable longing for community and acceptance in a religious identity that is defined by family and lineage, and serves as a beacon to isolated gay Jews that dignity and welcome await at the end of this rainbow. Found Tribe is intended as a gift and a resource for Jewish families with a gay son or sibling, and for gay Jews and all who love them. Found Tribe is the companion volume to the award winning volume, Kosher Meat.

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The High Holidays are upon us, check out our High Holidays Spotlight Kit