Gay Jews celebrate ‘High Homodays’ with Manischewitz shots and matchmaking

By Lucy Cohen Blatter for JTA

It was nearly midnight Saturday, and Jayson Littman was milling about an upscale Manhattan nightclub greeting friends with a wide smile and often a big hug. Standing alongside a “shot boy” — clad only in underwear, a kippah and Star of David necklace — he offered partygoers shots of Manischewitz in plastic cups.

Littman was hosting some 400 gay Jewish men who filled the top floor of the Hudson Terrace for “High Homodays,” his annual gay Jewish party held between Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. Israeli EDM music sounded from the DJ booth along with the occasional Britney Spears and Taylor Swift song — plus some shofar blasts in the mix for good measure. Some people were dancing, others just mingling.

“I want people to go to the occasional Jewish event outside Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur services,” Littman told JTA. “And a lot of people are focused on their relationship to Judaism this time of year.”

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Coming Out on Yom Kippur

by Rebecca Mark for Tikkun

I often believe that Yom Kippur falls at exactly the right moment in one’s life each year. Five years ago Yom Kippur fell a week before my fiftieth birthday. At that moment, exiled in Washington, D.C., after Hurricane Katrina, I had to help my family survive our evacuation. Last year, a few weeks before Yom Kippur, our rabbi, Alexis Berk of Touro Synagogue in New Orleans, had a meeting at Jeff and Mark’s (my co-parents) house, to discuss what the synagogue could do in order to become more gay-friendly. Rabbi Berk mentioned that she wanted to speak in support of gay marriage during the high holidays, but she had not decided whether or not she would. We can be liberal in our warm, family-oriented synagogue in New Orleans, but we are not San Francisco or New York or even Chicago.

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Found Tribe: Jewish Coming Out Stories

by Lawrence Schimel (Editor)

Found Tribe is a collection of intimate essays by and about gay Jewish men on the experience of coming out as gay within a Jewish context or as Jewish within a gay context. No longer necessarily lost or excluded, today’s gay Jews tell their courageous, powerful stories of finding and embracing their religious and sexual identities that enrich both the Jewish and gay experience. Written with honesty, humor, and insight, Found Tribe explores the joys and oys of coming out to family, lovers, rabbis, and others--and an Orthodox gay rabbi writes about Gayness and God. Found Tribe gives voice to the inextinguishable longing for community and acceptance in a religious identity that is defined by family and lineage, and serves as a beacon to isolated gay Jews that dignity and welcome await at the end of this rainbow. Found Tribe is intended as a gift and a resource for Jewish families with a gay son or sibling, and for gay Jews and all who love them. Found Tribe is the companion volume to the award winning volume, Kosher Meat.

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They Made It Out of Gay

The father of Jewish ‘gay reparative therapy’ had some even worse ideas for making a buck

By Hella Winston for Tablet Magazine

Before 1998, religious proponents of so-called “reparative” therapy for gay men and lesbians were affiliated mostly with evangelical strains of Protestantism and the Mormon Church. But that year, Arthur Goldberg, a self-described “born salesman” and “New York Jewish liberal,” discovered he had a son who was “struggling with homosexuality.” Soon after, Jews Offering New Alternatives to Homosexuality (later changed to “for Healing”), or JONAH, was born. “There was nothing in the Jewish world,” Goldberg said in recent court testimony, by way of explaining his decision to co-found JONAH with Elaine Berk, another Jewish parent of a gay son.

    There were a lot of Christian based organizations. There were some secular based organizations, but there was nothing in the Jewish world. I kind of prayed about it one day and said maybe this is the message God has given me. The reason God has this is he knows I have been a social activist all my life and maybe this is what he wants to lead me to.

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