Pride and Prejudice

By Rabbi Jillian R. Cameron

During June, designated as LGBT Pride Month, we often read Parashah Balak. It is a curious tale, replete with a talking donkey and the roundabout air of prophecy; a story of attempted curses that ultimately lead to blessings.

The Israelites have been saved from cruel Pharaoh, and for the past two and a half books – Exodus, Leviticus, and now Numbers – they have been wandering the desert, perhaps a little aimlessly, toward the hope of a Promised Land. We meet Balak, the King of Moab, who is a bit nervous about the group of Israelites who have settled near his kingdom. He states in Numbers 22, verse 5, “There is a people that came out of Egypt; it hides the earth from view.” This sounds all too familiar, but Balak, takes a different path than old Pharaoh. He attempts to enlist Balaam, a Moabite diviner saying, “Come then, put a curse upon this people for me, since they are too numerous for me; perhaps I can thus defeat them and drive them out of the land. For I know that he whom you bless is blessed indeed, and he whom you curse is cursed."

Balaam agrees to the task, but each time he attempts to curse the Israelites, the Divine interferes – and all three times Balaam blesses, rather than curses, Israel. “My message was to bless: When [God] blesses, I cannot reverse it.”

As a member of the gay Jewish community, I ask: Are we blessed?

All too often, the message of religion is used to exclude rather than include; to curse rather than bless. For so long, the LGBT community has been at odds with religion, feeling this exclusion, perhaps feeling cursed. But we learn from Balaam, the unlikely mouthpiece of God, that nothing that God has blessed can be cursed. We have all been blessed by God.

So why do we – why do I – sometimes still feel the linger of the curse?

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San Francisco's Gay Jewish Hero

The late gay activist and San Francisco politician Harvey Milk seemed to have organizing in his blood. His grandfather, a Lithuanian Jewish immigrant, helped found the first synagogue in his Long Island town, and Milk himself would go on to make great strides for gay communities across the country.

Milk first became interested in politics during the rampant police raids of gay bars of the 1960s. He was already affectionately known as the "Mayor of the Castro," organizing Teamsters, firefighters, and construction unions. And though he lost his first races, when he finally won a position as City Supervisor in 1977, he immediately made history: Milk was the first openly gay person to be elected into political office in America. Tragically, his historic career ended on November 27, 1978, when Milk and Mayor George Moscone were murdered in City Hall by a fellow city supervisor.

Today, Milk's legacy has been memorialized in documentary and feature films alike. A huge rainbow flag flies in Harvey Milk Plaza in San Francisco, and New York City even has a high school named in his honor.

We're kvelling with pride.

Biden: Jewish leaders drove gay marriage changes

 

WASHINGTON (AP) — Vice President Joe Biden is praising Jewish leaders for helping change American attitudes about gay marriage and other issues.

Biden says culture and arts change people's attitudes. He cites social media and the old NBC TV series "Will and Grace" as examples of what helped changed attitudes on gay marriage. 

Biden says, quote, "Think — behind of all that, I bet you 85 percent of those changes, whether it's in Hollywood or social media, are a consequence of Jewish leaders in the industry." 
Biden says the influence is immense and that those changes have been for the good. 

Biden was speaking Tuesday night at a Jewish American Heritage Month reception hosted by the Democratic National Committee. He says Jewish values are an essential part of who Americans are.

Meet The Great Gatsby Of Gay Jewish Nightlife

He attended yeshiva; leads Jewish LGBT tips to Israel and Berlin; fights accusations of Israeli 'pinkwashing' and is a certified spinning instructor. "Turn towards God in times of struggle," he says.

Jewish Week's “36 under 36” section, now in its sixth year, was born after Jewish Week staffers reflected that there ought to be a way to honor the best and the brightest young stars in the firmament of New York's Jewish community.
Sometimes it seemed as though at every Jewish organizational dinner another older Jewish person was accepting an award---all fine and good --- but what about the up and coming, the new generation? Chai means life, and life moves quickly; in numerology 36 is double chai, an apt symbol for the energetic, the capable, the newest among us who really are stunning the world. Let’s recognize them, it was decided.

Artists, doctors, businesspeople, journalists, policymakers, activists, educators, and clergy, the younger contingent of Jews in New York were battling injustice, speaking truth to power, creating works of devastating beauty, and finding new ways to carry the candelabra of Jewish life into the future.

In 2009, Brooke Goldstein was recognized as one of the 36. Her investigative documentary film, “The Making of a Martyr,” exposed the horrible truth about Palestinian terrorists in the West Bank who admitted on camera to recruiting children as young as 10. Brooke now heads the Lawfare Project, a nonprofit dedicated to protecting the rights of journalists and others against legal efforts to undermine the values of Western and liberal democracies. Her high level of achievement continues.

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A Chained Man

Thanks to the patchwork of laws about same-sex marriage, I got trapped in legal limbo when I wanted a divorce

Last week, the Supreme Court heard testimony in two cases that may decide the future of same-sex marriage in the United States. But personally, I’ve been more concerned lately with same-sex divorce.

I got divorced in February. Or, since I was never technically married as far as the federal government is concerned, maybe I should say I got a dissolution. Or a disunion. Whatever you call it, a relationship that began with lively gaiety under the chuppah but had long since become a moribund afterthought reached its legal end, releasing me definitively and finally from any remaining force of my vows.

Divorce isn’t unusual in itself. But in my case, because we were a same-sex couple, it had taken nearly 11 years from the time we ended the relationship until we could make it official. For more than a decade, I had been not-quite-married and not-quite-divorced, chained to a man I could not free myself from.

***

Just after I came out as gay to myself, my family, and my friends at the start of 2000, I met a nice Jewish boy at synagogue, of all places. He and I were in our late 20s and had grown up in the Philadelphia suburbs not far from each other. Our relationship was “mixed” insofar as he was from a Reform background and I was Conservative, but Judaism and Jewish community were important to both of us. Given this background and where we found each other, it was no surprise that our religious and cultural values and traditions played a significant part in how our time together unfolded.

About a year and a half after we started dating, the two of us entered into a civil union—also known derisively as marriage lite. Although our home state of Pennsylvania denied us all matrimonial rights, as it continues to do for all same-sex couples today, Vermont had no residency requirements for civil unions—which, at that point, were the closest thing to marriage available to gay couples in any state. Making effective use of a long weekend, we drove up one fall Friday, got our license that afternoon, stood under the chuppah before a rabbi on Sunday evening, and returned to Philadelphia on Monday.

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New York’s New Firebrand Rabbi

For Sharon Kleinbaum—friend of Christine Quinn, partner to Randi Weingarten—the personal is political

By Allison Hoffman for Tablet Magazine

Last winter, Sharon Kleinbaum, the firebrand rabbi of Congregation Beit Simchat Torah—the country’s largest and best-known gay synagogue—marked her 20th anniversary in the pulpit with a Hanukkah celebration headlined by the actress Cynthia Nixon, who has been active in gay-rights and a regular guest at the synagogue. The evening featured a panel with the political writer Frank Rich, a longtime congregant, and an appearance by Christine Quinn, New York’s City Council Speaker, who came to present Kleinbaum with an official city proclamation. “She is one of the favorite religious leaders in my household,” Quinn told the crowd. “I’ve never seen her at an event or at a function or on the street or wherever where she hasn’t gone out of her way to give me—you’d think she was a bear, that’s what you get from this little woman, I always get that hug.”

On cue, Kleinbaum dashed onstage and wrapped her arms around Quinn, New York’s first female and first openly gay political leader and currently the front-running candidate to succeed Michael Bloomberg as mayor. Then the rabbi turned and made her way back to her seat in the audience next to the other political powerhouse in the room: the labor leader Randi Weingarten, who is head of the American Federation of Teachers, a close friend of the Clintons, and Kleinbaum’s romantic partner. As she sat down, Kleinbaum gave Weingarten an exuberant kiss that was audible from the balcony of the crowded auditorium, at John Jay College near Lincoln Center.

Kleinbaum is hardly the only religious leader in New York who balances a public record of spirited demonstrations and arrests with serious insider pull; the Rev. Al Sharpton practically defines the form, and other Jewish leaders, including Rabbi Avi Weiss, have adopted the model as well. But this, in many ways, is Kleinbaum’s moment: a year in which many of the issues moving the city and the country—same-sex marriage, income inequality, civil liberties—are ones Kleinbaum has long made her own, and in which those closest to the rabbi are politically ascendant.

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Gay Orthodox Jews to gather and discuss challenges they face

By Tim Townsend ttownsend@post-dispatch.com

When Hyim Shafner first started working as the campus rabbi for St. Louis Hillel at Washington University in the mid-1990s, he was approached by a male student with an unusual request.

“I’m having trouble meeting guys, rabbi,” Shafner remembers the student saying. “Can you fix me up with a nice Jewish boy?”

Suddenly Shafner’s days at the Orthodox Yeshiva University in New York “felt very far away,” he said.

But moments like that at the university got Shafner, now the rabbi at Bais Abraham Congregation in University City, to begin thinking more seriously about the special problems faced by homosexual Orthodox Jews.

“Jews are not a very big people,” he said. “I think of Judaism as a family, and it’s a shame someone has to leave Orthodoxy — their faith that they value — because they don’t feel like they can find a place in the family.”

As a way to introduce St. Louis’ Orthodox Jewish community to the lesbian, gay, bi-sexual and transgender — or LGBT — community, Bais Abraham and the Jewish Community Center of St. Louis will host a weekend of events April 12 to 14 designed to support Orthodox LGBT Jews.

The event was organized by Eshel, an organization that tries to create understanding for LGBT Jews in traditional Jewish communities. Eshel is bringing in three speakers to discuss what it’s like to be LGBT and Orthodox. The organization has held similar events in New York, Los Angeles and Washington, but next weekend’s event will be the first time it has brought a program like this to the Midwest.

“A lot of people are very curious about this topic,” said Aviva Buck-Yael, a member of Bais Abraham and an Eshel board member. “In most places, we have surprising turn outs. ... They want to know why people wish to stay in the Orthodox community when they’re LGBT. They want to find out how they make that work.”

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