Jewish Suitmaker Wins Accidental Gay Following

By Michael Kaminer for The Jewish Daily Forward

Three years ago, Toronto-born Daniel Friedman was a newly minted architect whose livelihood evaporated when the economy crashed.

Today, hundreds of people are living in Friedman’s designs — but sewing machines and measuring tapes are his work tools.

With business partner David Kusy, Friedman runs Bindle and Keep, a New York-based bespoke mens- and womenswear company whose custom suits and shirts are drawing a rabid following. Meticulous tailoring drives the company’s success. But Bindle and Keep also makes house calls, which has helped it carve a distinctive niche in a fiercely competitive field.

Friedman, 34, spoke to the Forward’s Michael Kaminer about growing up Orthodox, the long thread connecting Jews and apparel and the former Jewish archivist who helped spark Bindle and Keep’s accidental gay following.

Michael Kaminer: You were an architecture major who never studied fashion. How did the business start?

Daniel Friedman: I was an undergrad at McGill in Montreal, and studied architecture at Penn. I got another Master’s degree at Columbia, and thought, “I’m moving up in the world”. Then the economy fell out. I’d graduated at the top of my class, had no money, and was living on a friend’s couch.

At Penn, I’d had a classmate whose family had a small factory. They were retiring. My classmate and I always joked that if architecture didn’t work out, we could go into clothing. I’m a small guy, about 5’6”, and I need to wear custom suits. When the economy went to hell, we looked around at the custom business and said, “Let’s give this a go. We can do it better.”

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Opposition urges Netanyahu: Recognize gay rights in Israel

Labor and Meretz MKs tell Knesset 70 percent of Israelis support legislative changes, call on prime minister to openly take a stand on the matter.

By Jonathan Lis for Haaretz

Opposition Knesset members used Tuesday’s plenary session to call on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to openly take a stand on granting equal rights to the gay community in Israel.

As members of the LGBT community demonstrated outside the Knesset, MKs from the Labor Party and Meretz criticized the coalition for failing to pass legislation that would address this issue.

MK Stav Shaffir (Labor) noted the results of a survey conducted by Haaretz showing that 70% of the public supports granting full and equal rights to gays. "This government does not support the community. Whereas 70 percent of the population lives in 2013, the government straggles behind, caught somewhere in the 19th century," she said.

Shaffir listed the failed legislative initiatives thus far: “My bill, which proposed allowing same-sex couples to have recognized civil unions, was rejected by the Ministerial Committee on Legislation; a similar proposal by Yesh Atid disappeared since their last press conference. A prohibition on discrimination in hiring based on gender and a bill aimed at equalizing mortgage terms for same-sex couples were also rejected.”

MK Nitzan Horowitz (Meretz), the first openly gay Israeli lawmaker, also assailed the prime minister: “In almost every major speech he’s given overseas in the last few years, he has used the LGTB community in Israel as a means to attack Iran. For that purpose we’re okay, showcasing Israel as a liberal paradise. I ask the prime minister what he has done to address the issue here. The truth is that for the last five years, during which he has headed the government, any advancement of the gay community toward full and equal legal rights has been frozen.”

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So, a Rabbi Walks Into a Bar. It’s Not the Beginning of a Joke, but of a Spiritual Journey

Trained in erotic massage and queer spiritual counseling, Rabbi David Dunn Bauer comes back to the New York shul where he started

By Merissa Nathan Gerson for Tablet Magazine

Rabbi David Dunn Bauer’s new boss, Rabbi Sharon Kleinbaum, senior rabbi at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, is expecting a lot from him as he starts his new job heading the synagogue’s social justice outreach: “My agenda is a simple one: change the world,” Kleinbaum told me. “David is going to help us do it.”

After spending the last three years in San Francisco, where he most recently served as Bay Area director of programming for the Jewish LGBT organization Nehirim—creating such events as a transgender retreat and a “summer camp” for gay men—Bauer has taken a new position at CBST, New York’s LGBT synagogue. While it’s a big move, it’s also something of a homecoming; His rabbinical career began at CBST, where he served as an intern more than a decade ago. “There’s a special pride (and challenge) in coming home as a ‘grown-up’ to the place that nurtured you when you were a child,” Bauer said. “I want to do my best here, give back to the place that first gave me my queer Jewish identity.”

After leading Friday night services during his CBST internship in 2001, Bauer headed downtown to the LURE—a gay bar in the Meatpacking District whose name stood for Leather, Uniform, Rubber, Etc. That leather bar was also a place where God lived, he said, an erotic community where people were able to be who they were. “I actively work against the idea that you have to check your religiosity at the door of the bedroom, bar, or bathhouse,” he told me recently in an interview in San Francisco, “and that you have to check your sexualities at the door of the church or the synagogue.”

The fusion of sex and God, the gay and the divine, isn’t new for Bauer. He came out when he was 12, after watching The Desert Song, a Sigmund Romberg opera, on television. “I guess I got sexually aware early,” he said. “I never had the feeling of, ‘Oh, this is a phase I am going through.’ When I look back, all my earliest sexual impulses were gay.”

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Sequel Sees Author Open Up

Savas Abadsidis for Huffington Post

High-school teacher and writer David Berger has just released the second volume of his superhero meets Greek myth epic, Task Force: Gaea -- Memory's Curse, the sequel to Task Force: Gaea -- Finding Balance. But before the openly gay writer could write about his heroes, he had to overcome a hero's journey himself, escaping an abusive relationship, and finding his own balance.
How was writing an escape/outlet for your sexuality when you were younger?

Actually, writing was less an escape for my sexuality and more an escape from my reality. I didn't really start writing stories until I was about ten, and back then I wrote my way into worlds where being the child of divorced parents didn't matter. With my sister, I wrote tales of Smurf adventures, largely due to her infatuation with them, so I suppose that was my first foray into the fantasy genre, even before I knew what either 'fantasy' or 'genre' meant. Coupled with my love of comics, I wrote stories that encompassed the realms beyond the everyday world I lived in, stories of superheroes saving the world because I felt my world needed saving. My stepfather and I didn't get along, and I was constantly looking for doorways to other places, whether through painting, reading, models, and especially writing.

What was "gay life" like in the age of AOL messenger? I think to some people it seems like the dark ages.

That age was indeed a dark age for many, especially for those of us who had to be honest with ourselves. When I got my first computer in 1993, a PC with a 2400-baud modem, my world then became limitless. AOL saved my life, I believe. Growing up as the eldest son of three children, I was expected to marry a "nice Jewish girl" and have a family, but I knew from around the age of 8 that my interests lay elsewhere. Having AOL and access to the online chat world allowed me to enter the global community and pioneer my way across chat room after chat room. I had two different screen names -- one for the regular rooms, and one for the gay chat rooms. Even with the anonymity of a screen name, I didn't want my straight "cyberfriends" to see me in gay rooms. I found two rooms in particular where I could live in both worlds, the GnuMemberLounge and an LGBT chat room. I lived a double life. I made some incredible friends, many of whom I still talk to today. I actually miss those days because that was the first time in my life I felt accepted by people who were just like me. Largely because of the support system I had on AOL, I was finally able to come out to my family in 1994 at 27. The downside of this was that I met someone for whom I should have seen 'red flags', but before I knew it, I was moving to Florida (from New Jersey) to be with David, someone I'd met online and had spent only one week with in person. If there is a word for being even more than naïve, then I was that.

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Lesbian Penguin Couple Calls Israeli Zoo Home

Ramat Gan Zoo staff had always just thought one was a small male

By Stephanie Butnick for Tablet Magazine


In your animal news of the day (we are an Internet publication, after all), Haaretz reports that two young penguins at the Ramat Gan Zoological Center, who zookeepers assumed were male and female (apparently it’s an easy mistake to make), are in fact both females.

Penguins, as anyone who’s seen Never Been Kissed knows, mate young and mate for life. So when Suki and Chupchikoni, two Jackass penguins (settle down everyone), paired off together, it was for the long haul. And it wasn’t until an Israeli veterinary student researching avian malaria (which especially afflicts penguins) analyzed blood samples from the zoo’s flock that they learned that Chupchikoni wasn’t just a petite male penguin, he was in fact a female.

And the countdown to animal pinkwashing claims starts in 3, 2, 1…

Let’s Queer the Jewish Legal Tradition

by Amram Altzman for Newvoices.com

I had the honor of speaking at the Jewish Orthodox Feminist Alliance’s Voices of Change conference last week, where I, only for a day, became a high school student once again and spoke on a panel about navigating relationships and sexuality in high school as a feminist. While speaking, the topic of Shemirut Negi’ah, or the rabbinic prohibition of members of one sex touching members of the other sex, came up. It was there and then that I realized how abandoned I felt by the guidelines that dictate the movement with which, at least on a theological level, I identify.

To be sure, I’ve felt some sort of separation between myself and the Orthodox world since I came out of the closet over two years ago (something that has been chronicled in New Voices), and I always felt somewhat abandoned by the Orthodox community. However, that separation between myself and Orthodoxy became even more pronounced as a result of speaking at the conference.

To be clear: I spent about fifteen whole minutes being shomer negi’ah when I was in sixth grade, and then promptly stopped — at the time, for no apparent reason. Since then, I’ve never really looked back, and do not regret my decision.

However, in starting to seriously think about issues like this, I’ve come to truly understand just how much of the Jewish legal tradition — the same tradition that I was taught was timeless, applied to me, and that, as a “Good Jew,” I was charged with protecting and transmitting to the next generation — no longer applied to me. Given the fact that the rabbis who wrote the Talmud, the basis for the whole genres of legal literature that came after it, could not fathom two members of the same gender entering a lasting, romantic relationship and raising children, and that homosexual acts (or, at the very least, male homosexual acts) are biblically prohibited, there was never any need to include such discussions in the Talmud.

Thus, according to the strictest interpretations of rabbinic literature, if I wanted to obey the letter of the law, I would be barred from physical contact with women, but not from men. And, given the fact that I am queer, this seems horribly backward.

While I’m not about to become shomer negi’ah right now, the fact of the matter is that the Modern Orthodox community has started looking past the biblical prohibition that, in the past, meant that LGBTQ people could not remain part of the Modern Orthodox community. Halakhah, or Jewish law, however, has stayed behind.

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Memorial To Gay Shoah Victims Inaugurated In Tel Aviv Park

Steve Lipman for The Jewish Week

A municipal-funded memorial to gay victims of the Holocaust, both Jews and non-Jews, was inaugurated on Tuesday in Tel Aviv’s Meir Park, according to Haaretz. It is the country’s first.

The memorial in front of a community center is the creation of attorney Eran Lev, an activist in the gay community who was a city councilman for Meretz. “It’s important to me that people understand that persecution of gay people was not the usual story of the Holocaust that we know from the final solution, and from the Wannsee Conference,” he told Haaretz. “This is a different story, more modest, but still an important one. It’s important that people in Israel know that the Nazis persecuted others as well, not because they were Jews, but because they were gay.”

The memorial consists of three triangles – the symbol of the gay community, Haaretz reported. On each a sentence is written in Hebrew, English and German: “In memory of those persecuted by the Nazi regime for their sexual orientation and gender identity.”

An inscription states that special steps were taken against gay people and that “according to Nazi ideology, homosexuality was considered harmful to ‘public health.’ The Gestapo had a special unit to fight 
homosexuals and the ‘Center for the Fighting of Homosexuality and Abortions’ kept a secret file on about 100,000 homosexuals.”

An estimated 15,000 gay people in the Third Reich were sent to concentration camps and more than half were murdered.