New Generation of Transgender Rabbis Ties Jewish Practice and Gender Change

Number of Ordained Rabbis Will Soon Double From 3 to 6

By Naomi Zeveloff for The Jewish Daily Forward

In the next few years, the number of transgender rabbis in America is expected to double — from three to six.

The tiny cohort makes up a miniscule percentage of the rabbis graduating rabbinical school, but these individuals have already played a big role in their respective seminaries to provoke conversations about gender and Judaism. They’re also paving the way for more transgender rabbis to come.

According to LGBT Jewish advocates, transgender issues are the “new frontier” for the mainstream non-Orthodox community, which has focused on incorporating lesbians and gays in the past several decades. Both the Reform and Reconstructionist movements have initiated programs on transgender inclusion.

Since 2003, the Conservative movement has deemed sexual reassignment surgery a key component of gender transition. But it could relax its halachic stance if it accepts a new legal opinion written by Leonard Sharzer, a bioethicist at the Jewish Theological Seminary. Sharzer argues that the Conservative movement should accept transgender Jews as the gender they identify with, regardless of surgical status; he says he will soon submit his opinion to the Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, the Conservative movement’s law-making body.

Yesterday, we introduced you to the first two rabbis to be ordained by the Reform movement — Reuben Zellman and Elliot Kukla. And to Emily Aviva Kapor who was ordained before her gender transition privately by a “Conservadox” rabbi.

Today, we turn to three rabbis-in-training. Jacob Lieberman and Leiah Moser are students at Reconstructionist Rabbinical College who are meeting with Reconstructionist synagogues to talk about their respective paths to the rabbinate. And Ari Lev Fornari, an activist for Palestinian rights, is a student at Hebrew College.

All six rabbis and rabbis-in-training are actively involved in creating Jewish ritual for gender transition, from a prayer for binding the chest to a prayer for taking hormones. It remains to be seen whether these individuals will gain long term employment as Jewish leaders. But they’ve already become sought-after voices on panels at synagogues and in community centers on the topic of gender transition and Judaism.

EXCLUSIVE: Interview With Cartoonist & Writer, Ariel Schrag

The author of “Potential” and “Awkward” discusses her upcoming debut novel, being a lesbian in America, issues with censorship, and much more.

 By: Ashley Ramnarain for ShalomLife

Ariel Schrag began her comic book career as a young freshman at Berkeley High with “Likewise”, her first graphic memoir. She has since completed a whole series about her high school experience including, “Potential”, “Awkward”, and “Definition”. She even went on to create “Stuck in the Middle”, a comic about her experience in middle school.

Graduating from Berkeley High, Schrag continued on at Columbia University completing a degree in English literature. She has written for HBO’s “How to Make it in America” as well as Showtime’s “The L Word” and continues to work in the television industry as a writing consultant.

Her more current works include writing the screenplay for the up and coming film adaptation of “Potential” and an online comic series with her best friend entitled, “Ariel and Kevin Invade Everything”. Ariel Schrag is awaiting the release of her debut novel “Adam”, which is expected to hit bookstore shelves April 2014.

We recently got the opportunity to speak with Schrag about her graphic memoirs, upcoming novel, being LGBT in America, and much more.

ASHLEY RAMNARAIN (AR): How did a young teenager get started with autobiographical comics in high school?

ARIEL SCHRAG (AS): I had been playing around for comics for a while, had drawn my own fictional stuff as a kid and in eighth grade kind of played around with the idea of a, doing a, strip sort of inspired by for better or for worse. Like a newspaper strip. And I came up with something like live it like me, based on my family, and did like a few of those and then when I entered ninth grade I kind of became more familiar with the alternative comic book scene which was kind of big in Berkeley where I grew up in the early mid nineties and I sort of started to realize that, you know, there were comics beyond newspaper comics and that’s when I had the idea to make an actual comic book based on my high school: first on my freshman year of high school and then after I did that to continue the project every year.

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Yosemite Rim Fire Causes Cancellation Of LGBTQ Family Camp

 JTA - The largest wildfire in California’s history has led to the evacuation of a Jewish summer camp and destroyed at least one of its buildings.

The Yosemite Rim Fire triggered the cancellation of Camp Tawonga’s annual Keshet LGBTQ Family Camp, San Francisco’s j. weekly reported.

On Friday, Tawonga Executive Director Ken Kramarz said in a post on Facebook that one cabin had burned, and that downed power lines, fallen trees and “active fire” had made the last 1.5 miles of road to the camp impassable.

Earlier last week, camp director Jamie Simon-Harris emailed the board of directors and board alumni to report that the fire line was holding and flame retardant had been dumped on all “essential structures,” according to a report in the j. weekly.

“As Shabbat arrives tonight, I urge every Tawongan to pray for the safety of the firefighters,” Kramarz wrote on Facebook.

In 1999, a forest fire destroyed several buildings on the perimeter of the camp, according to the j. weekly.

The fire is burning over 143,980 acres and is only 7 percent contained. On Monday, the fire destroyed the Berkeley Toulumne Family Camp, a city-owned camp for residents, the Bay City News reported.

In July, a falling tree at Camp Tawonga struck five counselors, killing one and severely injuring two others.

When Jewish Transgender Teens Come Out of Closet, Many Leave Camp Behind

Alternatives Spring Up as Camps Struggle To Be Inclusive

By Sarah Seltzer for The Jewish Daily Forward

At summer camp, sneaking into the boys side or the girls side is as classic an activity as roasting marshmallows. But what if the side you were assigned isn’t where you think you belong? Or what if you don’t fit into either side?

Jewish summer camp — with its gender-segregated bunks, bathrooms, activities and rituals, not to mention emphasis on heterosexual “hookups” — can be a minefield for transgender kids and their families, a newly-visible population that is gaining increasing recognition in the Jewish and political mainstream.

Now, just as public schools are complying with legal orders to allow trans children to use the bathrooms of the gender they identify with, camps, too, are becoming aware that trans kids have always been present among the legions of youngsters who hop off the bus for a summer of fun. Making Jewish camp trans friendly is a brand-new undertaking, and no one knows exactly what lies ahead.

“Alex,” a 15-year old transgender boy from Newton, Mass., attended Eisner Camp, a Reform Jewish sleepaway camp in the Berkshires, for three years before he came out as transgender. (Alex asked that the Forward identify him by a pseudonym to protect his privacy.) He slept in the girls bunk and was treated as a girl. Sports, which were coed, were a favorite activity, and the Jewish traditions and community at camp were “cool” and “interesting,” he said. But at age 11, as he began to consider living as a boy, Alex chose not to return to the camp. “I didn’t want to have to go through being in that awkward in-between phase of, ‘Which cabin did I go to?’” he said. His mother jokes that he blamed his choice to leave on the dining hall food. But Alex added, “The vibe I got was that the counselors or older people, the campers, wouldn’t be that great about [my transition].”

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Why the IOC’s Olympic-sized, Big Gay Russian Problem Isn’t Going Away—and Shouldn’t

Jews, too, have a stake in the Olympic committee’s cowardly attempt to stifle gay rights protests at Sochi this winter

By Rachel Shukert for Tablet

The London Olympics last year, I’m sure you’ll agree, were a smashing success, despite all the public grumbling about “unreadiness” and “terrible British weather” that preceded them. Michael Phelps and the U.S. women’s gymnastic team were dizzyingly triumphant, nobody died in any freak accidents and/or terrorist attacks, and thanks to Kenneth Branagh and his Abraham Lincoln costume, the world finally learned of the glorious achievements of Isambard Kingdom Brunel.

So, by the immutable physical laws of pessimism (a subject in which I have a hereditary doctorate), it stands to reason that the 2014 Winter Olympics will be a magnet for certain catastrophe, a fate the International Olympic Committee, ever eager to defend their place on the wrong side of history, seemed to presuppose by choosing Sochi, Russia—a subtropical resort destination with pictures of palm trees—palm trees!—on its Wikipedia page—for competitions in alpine skiing, lugeing, and other things that require the fairly constant presence of ice and snow.

But even so, I don’t think they realized just how bad things would get.

I can’t pretend to exactly understand the reasoning behind the Putin government’s relatively sudden and utterly horrific enshrined persecution of homosexuals and those who would rise to their defense—or even, given the malignant and wholly purposeful ambiguity of the law, might simply happen to know a couple. The best explanation anyone seems to have is that Putin is merely exercising the age-old prerogative of the demagogue: Transfer all responsibility of your country’s decay to some defenseless enemy within—I imagine posters in St. Petersburg are circulating even now featuring grotesque caricatures of Neil Patrick Harris with his tentacles wrapped around the globe.

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