Jewish Float Set for Gay Amsterdam Canal Parade

Joins First Moroccan Boat in Flamboyant Festival

By Cnaan Lipshiz in The Jewish Daily Forward

Amsterdam — (JTA) — Its maiden voyage is months away and will only take a couple of hours, but the Jewish boat of Amsterdam’s annual gay parade-on-the-canals is already making international waves.

On Monday, the Jewish boat got the thumbs up from the British actor Stephen Fry, who described it on Twitter as an “Ace event for LGBT Jews worldwide,” adding: “As one of each I wish I could be there!”

The Jewish boat for the Amsterdam Pride Canal Parade 2014 is scheduled to hit the murky waters of Amsterdam’s Prinsengracht canal on Aug. 2. It was one of approximately 80 boats to win a March lottery ensuring its participation in the world-famous event, believed to be the world’s only aquatic pride parade. Other winners included the first boat for Moroccan gays.

The 18-year-old annual event draws hundreds of thousands of spectators who huddle along the canal to watch the decorated, themed vessels chart a west-east course through one of the Dutch capital’s main waterways. The Jewish boat, and an international Jewish LGBT conference that immediately precedes it, are being organized by a group called Exodays, whose board is made up of several young Jewish activists.

Even before it officially entered the parade, the Jewish boat was making a splash in the local media. Several Dutch dailies led their coverage of the lottery with news of the Jewish boat’s candidacy.

And it again made headlines in the Dutch media last month amid erroneous reports that the passenger list — which has not yet been made public — would include Onno Hoes, the Jewish, gay mayor of Maastricht and chairman of CIDI, the Dutch Jewish community’s main advocacy group focusing on Israel and anti-Semitism. Hoes congratulated the organizers on Twitter but said he would not be joining.

While Hoes is not on the boat, passengers include feature sports journalist Barbara Barend — another Dutch Jewish gay celebrity, who is a member of the CIDI board.


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Orthodox, gay, and the rest is private

By Mordechai Levovitz for The Times of Israel

First I’d like to congratulate and thank David Benkof for courageously being out of the closet and talking about his gay identity so publicly while still working in the Orthodox Jewish community. I hope David’s bravery and the corresponding compassionate communal reception to his article empower more LGBT Jews to come out of their respective closets. This is no small feat.

As Co-Executive Director of JQY, an organization that provides support for LGBT Youth in the Orthodox and Hassidic community, I have come to appreciate that there is no process that creates more impact, change, and understanding than LGBT Jews coming out to their friends, family and leaders. Statistics tell us that there is likely at least one LGBT person in every extended Frum (Orthodox) family. In an Orthodoxy where everyone personally knows someone who is LGBT, there is hope for more kindness, love and dignity extended to every Jew. Consequently, Benkof deserves credit for telling his story.

However, with respect to Benkof’s publicly divulging personal choices about his own sexual behavior, I am of two minds. On the one hand I have great respect for anyone who sacrifices that much to live up to his religious ideals. Self control and discipline in abiding to one’s understanding of halacha (Jewish law) are hallmarks of Orthodoxy. His dedication seems heroic. On the other hand his public declaration of personal celibacy strikes me as particularly out of place in Orthodox public discourse. It seems almost Un-tzniut (immodest) to need to tell the world about the sexual behaviors in which you do not engage. It reminded me of an incident that I experienced back in Orthodox Yeshiva when I was fifteen.

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A Double Commemoration

By GoGay for A Wider Bridge

As gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender Jews, Holocaust Remembrance Day is a special day in which we commemorate and remember the heavy price of hatred, violence and discrimination.

This is a day when the State of Israel remember the fallen Jews, and we as a community also gather to remember those who were killed against the background of gender and sexual identity. This day embodies the essence of being Israeli and simultaneously presents a challenge: should we separate between commemorating our Jewish and our LGBT people, or convene these two identity components together into one memory?



There was a great deal of talk about the place that gay people, in particular, took in the Nazi killing machine, from de-legitimization of homosexual relationships through sending LGBT people to labor and extermination camps. It is a dark, painful and repressed point in history.

Only in recent years has the general public opinion begun to recognize the importance of perpetuating the LGBT Holocaust by Nazi Germany, not without bitter arguments infected with harsh homophobia against the inclusion of the gay community in the commemoration. Memorials around the world that deal with the murder of LGBT people are vandalised from time to time, and there are many who think there’s no point mentioning the gay community as part of the victims of the Nazi death machine. Again, LGBT history is erased and suppressed, and our place is muted.

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Among LGBT Jews & Their Allies, Leviticus is a Dirty Word

Among LGBT Jews & Their Allies, Leviticus is a Dirty Word

By Rabbi Maurice Harris for MyJewishLearning.com

Many LGBT Jews and allies find Leviticus to be challenging. Here is one rabbi’s reading of the passage. More can be found here.

Among LGBT Jews and their allies, Leviticus is a dirty word. And not just because of its two famous homophobic verses. There are many challenging issues with Leviticus. For instance, while we support gender equality, Leviticus establishes an all-male system of ritual leadership. While we affirm the equal worth of people with physical disabilities, Leviticus excludes them from the priesthood. And of course, while we celebrate the blessing and beauty in loving same-sex relationships, Leviticus prescribes the death penalty for gay men who have intercourse.

So how do we work with a sacred text that is at odds with some of our deepest values–values that other parts of Torah affirm (like every person being created in God’s image)? For me, it starts with an approach to sacred texts that views them as human-created documents. Consistent with my Reconstructionist philosophy, I view the Torah as a record of our Israelite ancestors’ best efforts to describe their experiences of God and Truth.

The Torah contains tremendous spiritual wisdom as well as the spiritual errors of the people who created it. Seen this way, the Torah takes its place in Jewish religious life as the beginning of an ongoing process of spiritual discussion and discernment–but it does not have the final word on the subjects it addresses. When credible reinterpretations of harmful biblical laws are not possible, we dissent from those verses without abandoning our faith or our intimate relationship to Torah.

This is how I approach the anti-gay verses in Leviticus. I’m not persuaded by the attempts some have made to reinterpret Lev 18:22 and 20:13 to mean something other than what they appear to mean. Rather, I acknowledge my disappointment and anger at the suffering these texts have wrought, and I believe that our ancestors were mistaken on this issue. Similarly, I respond to other passages in the Torah that advocate things that modern liberal Jews openly condemn (such as the passages in Numbers 31 in which God and Moses commanded the genocide of all Midianite men, women, and children).

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The Dyke and the Dybbuk

by Tamar Fox for Jewniverse

It's not easy being a dybbuk. Jewish tradition holds that dybbuks are demons who drive people crazy, but what happens when the Head Office assigns a dybbuk to haunt someone who's already pretty nuts? In Ellen Galford's 1994 novel The Dyke and the Dybbuk you'll find out just how the dybbuk Kokos deals with an extremely difficult assignment: Rainbow Rosenbloom, a lesbian film-critic-cum-taxi-driver in London, already living a pretty crazy life.

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The Lesbian Flick Banned by the Nazis

by Jenny Levison for Jewniverse

 Quick, a riddle: Who wouldn't love a lesbian boarding school romp?

Answer: Nazis.

Believe it or not, the first widely-released film featuring a lesbian plot came out in Germany just as Hitler was rising to power.

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Jews Have an Obligation to Accept, Protect, and Value

By Dr. Saundra Sterling Epstein for MyJewishLearning.com

I am a Modern Orthodox Jew. As a Jewish educator, I have written, spoken and taught about homosexuality and our need as a community to address this issue within the framework of Halacha, or Jewish law, for many years. I had already been an advocate for the GLBTQ community for decades when one of our four children, our daughter Rachie, came out more than four years ago.

Why? Because I feel that as religious Jews, we have a moral imperative to insure that all members of our community are safe, valued and healthy. We are taught to use the midah of compassion, as we do for so many other issues.

Four years ago when Rachie was twenty two years old, she called me and my husband, and in the course of our conversation, basically said, “Mom, I am seeing someone I really care about and this person is a woman. I am gay.” Neither of us were surprised.

As an educated person, I am certain that biology and “how we are wired” is just the way G-d makes us. Further, I am aware that 10 to 15 percent of any community is on the gay spectrum, and there is no exemption from this reality in the religious Jewish community.

My husband and I firmly believe that as shomrei mitzvot, or Torah observant, Jews, we have an obligation to accept, protect and value all human beings who are created in the image of G-d, BeTzelem Elokim. Halacha teaches us this.

Of course, many in our Orthodox community and extended family do not see it this way. I am deeply saddened by any community that judges and pushes our daughter away. Any community that does not fully embrace and value Rachie is the one that loses, for she is a gifted young lady and an observant and knowledgeable Jew. I often lament how our observant communities are sending away some of our exceptional people who could contribute so much and would — if only they would embrace and value instead of judge and exclude.

Rachie has not been able to see herself associated with anything “Orthodox,” though she is observant and engaged Jewishly in profound and meaningful ways.

However, this has changed recently, due to her involvement in ESHEL, the Orthodox GLBTQ community, named for the tent into which Avraham and Sarah invited all who came by. Rachie (and the rest of us) now have a home for her religiously observant, gay self, being able to interface various aspects of Halacha with the reality of her life. It is so critically important for us to have ESHEL and KESHET as spaces for our GLBTQ Jews both as safe spaces and to hold the anchor while hopefully more of our community realizes that Jewish law can often be more kind and understanding than we are too often led to think. Our wish as a family is that more of our community would learn to see and accept and value each of our children for who they are and the sexuality they were born with.

Sunnie Epstein is a member of the Keshet Parent & Family Connection, a community of parents and family members of LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) Jews who are coming together for support, to hold events, and to advocate for change in the Jewish community. You can find a chapter or start your own here.For more LGBT news, check out our    page.