Meet The Great Gatsby Of Gay Jewish Nightlife

He attended yeshiva; leads Jewish LGBT tips to Israel and Berlin; fights accusations of Israeli 'pinkwashing' and is a certified spinning instructor. "Turn towards God in times of struggle," he says.

Jewish Week's “36 under 36” section, now in its sixth year, was born after Jewish Week staffers reflected that there ought to be a way to honor the best and the brightest young stars in the firmament of New York's Jewish community.
Sometimes it seemed as though at every Jewish organizational dinner another older Jewish person was accepting an award---all fine and good --- but what about the up and coming, the new generation? Chai means life, and life moves quickly; in numerology 36 is double chai, an apt symbol for the energetic, the capable, the newest among us who really are stunning the world. Let’s recognize them, it was decided.

Artists, doctors, businesspeople, journalists, policymakers, activists, educators, and clergy, the younger contingent of Jews in New York were battling injustice, speaking truth to power, creating works of devastating beauty, and finding new ways to carry the candelabra of Jewish life into the future.

In 2009, Brooke Goldstein was recognized as one of the 36. Her investigative documentary film, “The Making of a Martyr,” exposed the horrible truth about Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank who admitted on camera to recruiting children as young as 10. Brooke now heads the Lawfare Project, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the rights of journalists and others against legal efforts to undermine the values of Western and liberal democracies. Her high level of achievement continues.

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A Chained Man

Thanks to the patchwork of laws about same-sex marriage, I got trapped in legal limbo when I wanted a divorce

Last week, the Supreme Court heard testimony in two cases that may decide the future of same-sex marriage in the United States. But personally, I’ve been more concerned lately with same-sex divorce.

I got divorced in February. Or, since I was never technically married as far as the federal government is concerned, maybe I should say I got a dissolution. Or a disunion. Whatever you call it, a relationship that began with lively gaiety under the chuppah but had long since become a moribund afterthought reached its legal end, releasing me definitively and finally from any remaining force of my vows.

Divorce isn’t unusual in itself. But in my case, because we were a same-sex couple, it had taken nearly 11 years from the time we ended the relationship until we could make it official. For more than a decade, I had been not-quite-married and not-quite-divorced, chained to a man I could not free myself from.

***

Just after I came out as gay to myself, my family, and my friends at the start of 2000, I met a nice Jewish boy at synagogue, of all places. He and I were in our late 20s and had grown up in the Philadelphia suburbs not far from each other. Our relationship was “mixed” insofar as he was from a Reform background and I was Conservative, but Judaism and Jewish community were important to both of us. Given this background and where we found each other, it was no surprise that our religious and cultural values and traditions played a significant part in how our time together unfolded.

About a year and a half after we started dating, the two of us entered into a civil union—also known derisively as marriage lite. Although our home state of Pennsylvania denied us all matrimonial rights, as it continues to do for all same-sex couples today, Vermont had no residency requirements for civil unions—which, at that point, were the closest thing to marriage available to gay couples in any state. Making effective use of a long weekend, we drove up one fall Friday, got our license that afternoon, stood under the chuppah before a rabbi on Sunday evening, and returned to Philadelphia on Monday.

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New York’s New Firebrand Rabbi

For Sharon Kleinbaum—friend of Christine Quinn, partner to Randi Weingarten—the personal is political

By Allison Hoffman for Tablet Magazine

Last winter, Sharon Kleinbaum, the firebrand rabbi of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah—the country’s largest and best-known gay synagogue—marked her 20th anniversary in the pulpit with a Hanukkah celebration headlined by the actress Cynthia Nixon, who has been active in gay-rights and a regular guest at the synagogue. The evening featured a panel with the political writer Frank Rich, a longtime congregant, and an appearance by Christine Quinn, New York’s City Council Speaker, who came to present Kleinbaum with an official city proclamation. “She is one of the favorite religious leaders in my household,” Quinn told the crowd. “I’ve never seen her at an event or at a function or on the street or wherever where she hasn’t gone out of her way to give me—you’d think she was a bear, that’s what you get from this little woman, I always get that hug.”

On cue, Kleinbaum dashed onstage and wrapped her arms around Quinn, New York’s first female and first openly gay political leader and currently the front-running candidate to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor. Then the rabbi turned and made her way back to her seat in the audience next to the other political powerhouse in the room: the labor leader Randi Weingarten, who is head of the American Federation of Teachers, a close friend of the Clintons, and Kleinbaum’s romantic partner. As she sat down, Kleinbaum gave Weingarten an exuberant kiss that was audible from the balcony of the crowded auditorium, at John Jay College near Lincoln Center.

Kleinbaum is hardly the only religious leader in New York who balances a public record of spirited demonstrations and arrests with serious insider pull; the Rev. Al Sharpton practically defines the form, and other Jewish leaders, including Rabbi Avi Weiss, have adopted the model as well. But this, in many ways, is Kleinbaum’s moment: a year in which many of the issues moving the city and the country—same-sex marriage, income inequality, civil liberties—are ones Kleinbaum has long made her own, and in which those closest to the rabbi are politically ascendant.

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Gay Orthodox Jews to gather and discuss challenges they face

By Tim Townsend ttownsend@post-dispatch.com

When Hyim Shafner first started working as the campus rabbi for St. Louis Hillel at Washington University in the mid-1990s, he was approached by a male student with an unusual request.

“I’m having trouble meeting guys, rabbi,” Shafner remembers the student saying. “Can you fix me up with a nice Jewish boy?”

Suddenly Shafner’s days at the Orthodox Yeshiva University in New York “felt very far away,” he said.

But moments like that at the university got Shafner, now the rabbi at Bais Abraham Congregation in University City, to begin thinking more seriously about the special problems faced by homosexual Orthodox Jews.

“Jews are not a very big people,” he said. “I think of Judaism as a family, and it’s a shame someone has to leave Orthodoxy — their faith that they value — because they don’t feel like they can find a place in the family.”

As a way to introduce St. Louis’ Orthodox Jewish community to the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender — or LGBT — community, Bais Abraham and the Jewish Community Center of St. Louis will host a weekend of events April 12 to 14 designed to support Orthodox LGBT Jews.

The event was organized by Eshel, an organization that tries to create understanding for LGBT Jews in traditional Jewish communities. Eshel is bringing in three speakers to discuss what it’s like to be LGBT and Orthodox. The organization has held similar events in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, but next weekend’s event will be the first time it has brought a program like this to the Midwest.

“A lot of people are very curious about this topic,” said Aviva Buck-Yael, a member of Bais Abraham and an Eshel board member. “In most places, we have surprising turn outs. ... They want to know why people wish to stay in the Orthodox community when they’re LGBT. They want to find out how they make that work.”

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