Edith Windsor

The Jewish Daily Forward

Who would have predicted that one of America’s most crucial battles for gay and lesbian rights would be won by an 84-year-old bottle blond Jew?

On June 26, Edith Windsor won her suit at the Supreme Court, a decision that struck down the federal Defense of Marriage Act.

Windsor, who lives in New York City’s Greenwich Village, married her longtime partner, Thea Spyer, in 2007 in Toronto. When Spyer died in 2009, she left her estate to Windsor. Because of DOMA, Windsor was prohibited from the benefit of a tax exemption for surviving spouses, and she was compelled to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars in real estate tax on Spyer’s estate.

In 2010, with the help of her lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, also a Jewish lesbian, she filed suit to recoup her money.

According to Ariel Levy’s profile of Windsor in The New Yorker, Kaplan saw her client as the ideal plaintiff to defeat DOMA. A feminine octogenarian whose lifelong partner was deceased was unlikely to be painted as a political radical in the press. Windsor was the “perfect wife,” taking care of Spyer for decades after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis in 1977.

Windsor and Spyer’s relationship was much more than that of caretaker and patient. Over their four decades together, the two women traveled internationally — to Suriname, St. Thomas, Venice and elsewhere. Though Kaplan advised Windsor not to speak publicly about her sex life because of how it might affect the case, sex was an essential part of Windsor and Spyer’s romance, even after Spyer grew increasingly immobile because of her MS.

Spyer and Windsor were both Jewish, but they came from strikingly different backgrounds. Spyer, a psychologist, was born in Amsterdam. Her family made a fortune in the pickle business and escaped Holland before the Nazi invasion. Windsor, on the other hand, grew up in a family of modest means in Philadelphia. A graduate of Temple University, she married her brother’s best friend but divorced him less than a year after the wedding. (She kept his last name; her maiden name was Schlain.) At 23, Windsor moved to New York City to pursue a master’s degree in mathematics at New York University. She later became one of the first female senior systems programmers at IBM.

In 1967, two years before the Stonewall riots galvanized the gay rights movement, Spyer proposed to Windsor. So as not to arouse suspicion among Windsor’s co-workers, who didn’t know about her sexual orientation, Spyer giving her a round diamond pin instead of an engagement ring. Four decades later, the two finally wed.

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Y-Love’s Hanukkah Gift: Speaking Up for LGBT Inclusion

By Melanie Weiss for MyJewishLearning

Check out the video Y-Love, the gay Orthodox hip-hop artist, recorded for us for Hanukkah.

Yes, that’s Yiddish you hear.

The rapper known off-stage as Yitz Jordan has been a major player on the Jewish music scene since the release of his first mixtape in 2005, followed by his first solo full length album in 2008. He made waves in a big way this spring when he officially came out. We’re proud to have Y-Love as our celebrity spokesperson and have teamed up to spread the message of LGBT inclusion.

If your Yiddish is iffy, be sure to turn on captions once the video is running (the red “cc button in lower right corner) for the translation. Better yet, call your bubbie and watch it together.






 Y-Love’s statement about the video:

“So since coming out this May, one of the major things that I have felt is an overwhelming sense of wanting to give back to the LGBT community in general and the Jewish LGBT community in particular. Spending most of my career in the closet, I never used my platform to speak against heterosexism and homophobia — the same homophobia I was suffering from — and never gave my efforts to the struggle for equality. 2012 changes all that, and I’m trying to put as much of my effort and influence into the LGBT struggle for equality as I can.

To this end, Keshet has been there for LGBT inclusion nationwide for years. At the Keshet teen shabbaton, I was inspired by stories of overcoming far worse than I had even feared would happen in my own life. I realized that I couldn’t sit on the sidelines. By putting my name – as a premier Jewish urban artist – with Keshet’s, I think we can raise LGBT visibility and inclusion to even higher levels, and work towards one of my bigger goals for klal Yisra’el and humanity — that we should be the last generation to know of the closet.”

Sex-reassignment ops in Israel put on hold as waiting list continues to grow

The surgeries were stopped when the only authorized surgeon went on sabbatical, but have remained at standstill even after his return; an American surgeon will fill the gap temporarily next month, but others candidates must keep on waiting - or have the surgery abroad.

By Ido Efrati for Haaretz

In September 2012, Dr. Haim Kaplan, a high-ranking surgeon at Sheba Medical Center, Tel Hashomer, went on sabbatical. That was more than a year ago. Dr. Kaplan was the only surgeon in Israel who was authorized to perform sex-reassignment surgeries — and since he went on sabbatical, no such operations have been performed in Israel, even though he has since returned. The fact that Israel has one of the world’s highest doctor-to-patient ratios on earth does not change the untenable situation for Israel’s transgender community, and the waiting list for the surgery is only growing longer.

There is no official data on Israel’s transgender community. Nobody knows its size, how many sex-change operations have been performed in Israel over the years or their success rates. The waiting list for the operation comprises between 12 and 20 transgender men and women, who have completed the approval process and are eligible for the operation, according to the Health Ministry’s sex-reassignment committee. But for 14 months, no operations have been performed, mainly because the Health Ministry did not prepare in advance for the temporary departure of the only surgeon in Israel who is authorized to perform them.

Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned expert in sex-change surgery, is due to land in Israel next month. Bowers, who underwent the procedure herself, is scheduled to perform five sex-change operations in Israel and then return to her surgical practice in Trinidad, Colorado, a town that has become known as “the sex-change capital of the world” because of her practice there.

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Reconstructionists Pick First Woman, Lesbian As Denominational Leader

Reconstructionist Judaism has a new leader. For the first time, she is a woman — and a lesbian.

In fact, Rabbi Deborah Waxman, who will take the reins of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, the newly merged seminary and congregational apparatus of the Reconstructionist movement, is the first woman to ever head a Jewish congregational organization. She is also the first gay rabbi to take on such a senior leadership position.

“It has been energizing to know that I will not be marginalized or disqualified from serving the Jewish people,” Waxman, 46, wrote in an email to the Forward. “I deeply appreciate—and have richly benefited from—the Reconstructionist movement’s vanguard work on inclusion, and hope to continue it as president.”

The future of the Reconstructionist movement, the smallest of the major strands of American Judaism with about 100 congregations, has been uncertain since Rabbi Dan Ehrenkrantz, Waxman’s predecessor, announced he was stepping down as head of RRC in February.