The transgender rabbi on religious rituals, gender fluidity, and the language of LGBTQ inclusion.
The first thing you learn about Rabbi Becky Silverstein is that despite the “Becky,” he uses male pronouns. Upon meeting him, you might see what he calls “a female-bodied person” wearing clothing typically associated with men: jackets, slacks, a snazzy tie. That Becky is a “he” is the occasion for a small instant of cognitive dissonance. For Rabbi Silverstein, it’s appropriate that this moment is generated first in language, as that’s how his own process of identifying as a genderqueer person began, during conversations with mentors at the Rabbinical School of Hebrew College in Newton, Massachusetts.
For Silverstein, it’s also fitting that gender identity begins with semantics, because the work of a rabbi is one of active engagement with the rich canon of Jewish texts. The Torah, as well as the countless scholarly commentaries about it, wrestles deeply with the problems of language. A rabbi must embrace such debate, parsing differences in meaning between Hebrew and English, as well as between ancient cultural conceptions and modern ideas. In Silverstein’s view, conversation is a crucial tool for contemporary American Judaism to fully recognize, understand, and welcome transgender Jews into the community, starting with the same talks the nation is having about gay and transgender rights, as well as women’s equality. All of these battles for inclusion, he argues in the interview that follows, are linked: “Misogyny is at the root of all homophobia and transphobia. It’s no surprise that a movement that still struggles with the place of women would also struggle with the place of LGBTQ-identified folks.”
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(JTA) — Rabbi Gil Steinlauf struggled for decades with an identity that he only acknowledged publicly this week.
I’ve
written about the successes and shortcomings of my fourteen years of
Modern Orthodox day school education before, from religious, secular,
and Zionist perspectives. I’ve also written about the thought processes
behind my decisions to leave the Modern Orthodox world and join — at
least for now — egalitarian communities that fall more in line with my
(ever-evolving) vision of what my Jewish community should be.
“At
Temple Israel of Hollywood, a true Reform congregation, I am blessed to
say that a gay, pregnant, female rabbi is no more out of place on the
bima than any of my colleagues!”
It’s
been an eventful summer for Beitar Jerusalem. In June, after several
young Israelis brutally murdered an Arab teenager in retaliation for the
kidnapping and killing of three Jewish youths, police sources suggested
that the killers were members of La Familia, a small group of several
thousand fans of the iconic Israeli soccer club who are known for their
extreme right-wing views and their love of violence. Shortly thereafter,
when Israeli soldiers entered Gaza and peaceniks in Tel Aviv and
elsewhere took to the streets to demonstrate for peace, La Familia’s
minions, some wearing their favorite club’s jerseys, were caught on
camera confronting the demonstrators with their fists. And then, just as
Beitar seemed to be irredeemably affiliated with the actions of its
most vile followers, came Kicking Out Shoshana.
When
Wayne Steinman and his partner Sal Lacullo brought four-month-old Hope
with them to High Holy Day services at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah
in New York's Greenwich Village, they opened the floodgates to
parenthood for New York City's gay and lesbian community. In 1987, as
part of the first gay couple to openly adopt a baby in the city,
Steinman recalled the reaction of friends in the congregation that day.
"It was a 'Wow!'" he said. No one really thought about having
grandchildren before," he said.
Although
I’m not a mother nor a daughter myself, I enjoyed Jordana Horn’s recent
review of “The Jewish Daughter Diaries” in her post, “Do Jewish Moms
Smother Their Kids With Too Much Love?” While some of the book’s
authors’ have their gripes with overbearing, meddlesome mothers, I’d
like to repeat Horn’s statement that you can never love a child too
much.
The Israeli city of Tel Aviv has been named as the best gay travel destination of 2011.
You
might expect transgender Jews to see Jewish law and tradition as
constricting or limiting, full of static categories and lines that must
not be crossed. But two new memoirs by male-to-female transsexuals
suggest otherwise: Kate Bornstein’s A Queer and Pleasant Danger and Joy
Ladin’s Through the Door of Life use Jewish tropes and themes to explore
the authors’ identities, with surprising results.
Transgender
activist Surat Knan, who is currently transitioning from a female to
male identity, visited Jerusalem’s Western Wall last November to pray on
the men’s side. “I was very nervous, but elated,” said the London-based
founder of the LGBT group Rainbow Jews, who was prepared for a fight.
Sue-Ann Levy doesn’t sound like the devil, which a 2012 headline in a Toronto publication, The Grid, suggested she might be.
WASHINGTON
— A number of Jewish groups praised President Obama for extending
federal job protections for gay employees to employees of government
contractors.
NEW
YORK – More than most kids, Moshe, who lived with his mom and siblings
in a midsize Midwestern city with a small Orthodox community, loved
going to shul.
Growing
up in Haifa, people basically specialized in becoming parents,” says
Guy Tatsa-Laur 44, who runs one of the more than a dozen surrogacy
consulting agencies in Israel. “We all had the same banal fantasies of
family life.”
NEW
YORK — Though he had lots of friends, Amram Altzman still felt alone at
Ramaz High School. As a 16-year-old sophomore at the modern-Orthodox
Manhattan institution, Altzman worried about what people would think,
whether they would accept him, if they knew he was gay. “Being gay and
being Orthodox just wasn’t something that was talked about. It was
isolating,” says Altzman, now 19 and in college.
What do you do if you’re ultra-Orthodox and gay? You almost certainly hide.