Israel’s Second Largest City Named as Best Gay Travel Spot

Tel Aviv Takes Top Honours in Online Poll

By: Leonard Carl for ShalomLife.com

The Israeli city of Tel Aviv has been named as the best gay travel destination of 2011.
Israel’s second largest city came first on an online poll sponsored by American Airlines and Gaycities.com by garnering 43% of the vote, followed by New York’s 14 percent, Toronto’s seven percent and London’s 5 percent.

Tel Aviv hosted approximately 5,000 gay tourists in June for the city’s annual Gay Pride Parade, an increase of over 25 percent from the previous year.

"This year, we estimate that this number will double," city council member Yaniv Waizman said in a statement.

Tel Aviv-Jaffa Mayor Ron Huldai took the victory as a sign that his city's reputation continues as one that "respects all people and allows everyone to live according to his/her own principles. Ours is a city in which everyone can be proud of who they are."

Huldai added that the city's Gay Center has received roughly NIS 500,000 a year for the last three years since 2008, while Gay Pride Week and various nonprofit associations also receive funding from the municipality.

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Gender Through a Jewish Lens

New memoirs by transgender authors Kate Bornstein and Joy Ladin illustrate the power of religion to shape how people construct their identities

By Raphael Magarik for Tablet Magazine

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.

For Bornstein and Ladin alike, Jewish boundaries around sex and weird gender hang-ups—whether the pressures of passing Jewish manhood between generations, or God’s sexless aphysicality—provide productive language for expressing transgender experience. Bornstein is an award-winning writer, performer, and queer activist, whose sprawling memoir chronicles a journey across continents, religious traditions, and (many, many) partners. The pained Jewish masculinity of Bornstein’s youth formed the backdrop for an eventual embrace of Scientology; though she may not intend this, it also helps explain and frame her subsequent rejection of Scientology.

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For Transgender Jews, a Visit to the Western Wall Holds Unique Symbolism

Praying on the side with their chosen gender is a quiet political statement for some, and a personal milestone for others

By Daniella Peled for Tablet Magazine

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.

“You hear a lot of stories about ultra-religious people who can get very aggressive when it comes to these things,” Knan added, referring to protests such as those against Women of the Wall, a group campaigning for the rights of women praying at the Kotel. “Would they kick me out, call the police, throw stones, spit at me?”

Knowing the visit would be as much a political action as a religious pilgrimage, Knan decided to document it on video. But the anxiously awaited fight never came. “It was obvious people on the male side didn’t realize that I was a non-cis male, but that’s not the point,” Knan told me. “The achievement of the action was to raise awareness and open a discussion, which shouldn’t stop with: Can you pass as a woman or as a man?”

As Knan explains in the video: “I want to show that gender separation ‘by biology’ doesn’t make any sense.”

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Meet Sue-Ann Levy, Toronto's Gay, Right Wing Columnist

By Michael Kaminer for The Jewish Daily Forward

Sue-Ann Levy doesn’t sound like the devil, which a 2012 headline in a Toronto publication, The Grid, suggested she might be.

In fact, the woman who picked up the phone to chat with the Forward’s Michael Kaminer has a sweet, chirpy voice and an endearingly cheery manner. But these qualities belie the Toronto Sun investigative columnist’s steel spine. An out lesbian and relentless advocate for Israel, Levy’s also a dogged reporter whose scoops on municipal corruption and cronyism have made her both an idol and a punching bag.

Detractors have pounced on her more outrageous actions, like her 2012 tweet implying Barack Obama may be Muslim. Enemies have called her “an Internet troll, but in real life.” But those jabs just seem to stoke her. “Either you love me or you hate me,” she told the Forward from the home she shares with her wife, interior designer Denise Alexander, and dachshunds Kishka and Flora.

Michael Kaminer: That headline was severe. What is it about you that provokes such strong reactions?

Sue-Anny Levy: What provokes strong reactions is that I say it how I see it. There’s no BS about me. I’m outspoken, and I don’t fit into any molds. I’m right of center politically, fiscally conservative, socially aware, and openly gay. I’m not afraid to tackle the status quo. I love exposing waste and corruption. And I always do my homework. They can never tackle me on my facts. My scorn has been heaped on what I call the intolerant lib left here in Toronto, who say one thing and do another. Few people in my profession have the guts to do it.

You’ve just completed an autobiography set for release by Random House in 2015. Can you give us a sneak peek?

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