First Generation of Transgender Rabbis Claims Place at Bimah

Pushing Conversation on Gender in Jewish Community

By Naomi Zeveloff for forward.com

When it comes to the acceptance of transgender Jews, the American Jewish community is itself in a moment of transition.

In 2008, Joy Ladin became the public face of transgender Judaism when she transitioned from male to female after receiving tenure at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. Five years later, there are at least six transgender rabbis and rabbis-in-training across the United States. Both the Reform and Reconstructionist movements have programs on transgender inclusion at synagogues and in seminaries.

Still, the tiny community of transgender Jews and their advocates say that the mainstream Jewish world has been slow to reach out to them. Even as non-Orthodox Judaism has embraced lesbians and gay men, transgender individuals pose a unique challenge to an ancient faith built on strict gender roles. “Parents who are perfectly liberal in most other respects don’t necessarily want a trans person to be their kid’s bar or bat mitzvah tutor or teach the teen youth group or to be hired as a rabbi,” said Rabbi Jacob Staub, a professor at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College who co-founded a student and faculty group on transgender issues. “Inclusion will take time.”

Questions of transgender inclusion become even more complex when Jewish law comes into play. In 2003, the Conservative movement deemed sexual reassignment surgery an essential component of gender transition. But many trans people never receive surgery, and so their transitions go unrecognized by the movement. Rabbi Leonard Sharzer, a bioethicist at the Jewish Theological Seminary, has written a Jewish legal opinion that counters the Conservative ruling, saying that Jewish law should consider trans Jews according to the gender they identify with regardless of surgical status. He plans to submit his opinion to the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, the Conservative movement’s law-making body.

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Jewish Teacher Strikes New Blow in Gay Marriage Fight — Eyes Supreme Court

Helena Miller Suit Could Prompt Same-Sex Nuptials Decision 

By Josh Nathan-Kazis for forward.com
A Jewish school teacher from Philadelphia is a face of a new landmark lawsuit that could prompt a Supreme Court ruling guaranteeing same-sex marriage rights nationwide.

Helena Miller, a lesbian whose wife is not recognized as a parent of their baby daughter, is one of more than 20 plaintiffs in a landmark federal lawsuit filed July 9 challenging a law that bans same-sex marriage in Pennsylvania.

The law also bars the state from recognizing such unions performed elsewhere, a provision that directly affects Miller and her family.
“We would really like for our child, when she’s old enough to understand what these things all mean, we want her to understand and see that our family is equal to any other family,” Miller told the Forward.

Dara Raspberry and Helena Miller hold their newborn baby, Zivah.
The new lawsuit, filed jointly by the American Civil Liberties Union and a Philadelphia law firm, is on the cutting edge of an aggressive new legal strategy aimed at pushing the U.S. Supreme Court to guarantee marriage equality across the country.

“I think you’re looking at a case with potentially very broad national implications,” said Mark Aronchick, the pro-bono Philadelphia lawyer bringing the case, an attorney with Hangley Aronchick Segal Pudlin & Schiller. “If there was ever a reason why I became a lawyer, its because of cases like this. It’s because of the ability to move everything along, move justice along, move freedoms along.”The new suit is the first federal case to challenge any state law barring same-sex marriage since the U.S. Supreme Court’s June 26 ruling making same-sex couples eligible for federal benefits.

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The 19th-Century Transgender Surrealist

 A Jewish, transgender, anti-fascist, Surrealist artist, born in France at the end of the 1800s? Keep reading.

Lucy Renee Mathilde Schwob was a prolific writer, photographer, and actor who didn't like to be called any of the above. But while she eschewed labels in her personal life, her art revolved around identity. In her theatrical and often androgynously sensual self-portraits she's costumed as everything from an effeminate weightlifter to Little Red Riding Hood, from a skinhead to a puppet folded into a cupboard. She tried on a series of pseudonyms, eventually sticking with the gender-neutral "Claude Cahun."

Cahun and her life partner, the prolific art nouveau illustrator Marcel Moore (née Suzanne Malherbe)—who was also her stepsister—lived in Paris until retiring to the Isle of Jersey, just before the Nazi invasion. Under occupation, the couple found the ultimate application of their Surrealist art: Dressing up as German soldiers, they distributed propaganda encouraging actual German soldiers to desert.

The pair was ultimately imprisoned and sentenced to death, but the war ended in time to release them. Still shaken by her jail time, Cahun died in 1954, closing a rich and complex life.

- Jenny Levison

I Reconciled My Gay Identity With My Orthodox Upbringing—Through a Tattoo

The mark on this yeshiva boy’s arm is a symbol of how I ultimately held on to my religious background after I came out

By Jayson Littman

It was a cold day in February 2008 when I hopped on the M train from my home in Manhattan and headed to Brooklyn Adorned, a tattoo shop on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg. The shop was spacious, clean, and comfortable—not what I expected from a tattoo parlor. Artistic pictures of tattoos hung on the wall as if they were featured in a museum. As I wondered if my tattoo would proudly be displayed on the wall, a tattoo artist named Yoni looked at me, glanced up at my yarmulke, and asked, “So, where do you want your tattoo, yeshiva boy?”

I chose what I call my T-spot, the place on my left bicep where I place my tefillin box when I pray every morning. I knew that until my tattoo healed, I would be unable to wear tefillin, which I had done every day since just before my bar mitzvah. Even though I was drifting away from the Orthodox identity I’d grown up with, laying tefillin was one of the only commandments that still made me feel a physical connection with G-d. I had learned that tefillin is placed on one’s bicep because G-d represents strength; when the box is placed on the bicep in a manner that faces your heart, it shows that G-d is truly in your heart.

Now my tattoo, a permanent mark on my T-spot, would represent the paradoxical relationship I had to Orthodox Judaism.

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Coming out, a young gay man finds self-acceptance

By Isaac Lobel

NEW YORK (JTA) — For my bar mitzvah, my parents got me a laptop. For what I searched for on it, they got me a shrink.

CyberSitter informed my computer-savvy parents that their son was searching gay porn.

On the ride to my first therapy session, I stuck my head out the car window wanting to be anywhere else. We caracoled along northern New Jersey’s winding streets to a shoddy home office.

The rabbi turned doctor had me sit in his living room as he lectured on what was and was not natural. The dry scent of gefilte fish filled the ungapatchka house, his decor as convoluted as his arguments. Where there should have been DSMs – Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders – a row of Babylonian Talmuds sat collecting dust.

Every Wednesday when I returned home, I had to wash myself of the sticky experience.

For a month, I saw the shrink weekly. I wondered what qualified this lanky rabbinical school graduate to be offering such sessions, until it hit me: He went through it, too.

One night, pitching his theory of gay as a phase for the umpteenth time, my shrink let slip that my condition was “not uncommon to boys in our community.” I sat on my excitement, but inside I was a loose spark plug. There were others? I hoped I wasn’t as alone as I’d thought.

In public, not a single feigeleh swished across the wooded streets of my Modern Orthodox Jewish corner of New Jersey. Thanks to shul, everybody knew everybody and her grandmother. A social circuit of Shabbat lunches kept us all abreast of each other’s goings-ons. There was no way of locating others like me, and I, like my parents, kept my secret hidden. Without a laptop or role models, and suffering from JIG – Jewish Intermittent Guilt – my adolescence darkened beneath storm clouds of loneliness.

During high school, my parents stopped asking how my days were. They feared me. My Modern Orthodox yeshiva high school was a blend of traditionalism and selective modernity with an ambiguity that left me stuck in the closet door, neither of one world or the next.

The 10-hour dual curriculum of Judaic and secular studies afforded me little time to socialize. Despite toilsome efforts to succeed, nothing I did overshadowed the lot life had given me. My gay “phase” grew longer. Like a forgotten houseplant, it was ugly. It was something I could not control.
When I was 15, my parents switched me to a second therapist, a tepid old man always in a three-piece suit who asked me to explain my sexuality as I saw it. As a minor, anything I said to him could be relayed to my parents. I learned to practice silence.

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