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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Jewish groups praise Obama on LGBT worker rights expansion

Executive order adds transgender employees to those deserving protections

By JTA

WASHINGTON — A number of Jewish groups praised President Obama for extending federal job protections for gay employees to employees of government contractors.

Obama signed two executive orders, one extending existing job protections for federal employees who are gay to employees of federal contractors, and another adding transgender employees to those deserving protections.

Praising the move this week were Bend the Arc, a social action group; the Anti-Defamation League; the National Council of Jewish Women; and the Religious Actions Center of the Reform movement. The orders were signed on July 18.

“The immediate impact of this executive order is that the many LGBT Americans who are part of the vast workforce of federal contractors no longer have to fear that they might be fired from their job because of who they are,” Stosh Cotler, Bend the Arc’s CEO, said in a statement.

“There are still millions of LGBT Americans working in private industry with no protection from discrimination.”

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The trials and triumph of an Orthodox Jewish transgender child

'God knows I'm a girl,' says the Midwestern teen who was shunned from her synagogue upon transitioning from Moshe to Miryam.

By Debra Nussbaum Cohen for Haaretz
NEW YORK – More than most kids, Moshe, who lived with his mom and siblings in a midsize Midwestern city with a small Orthodox community, loved going to shul.

But shortly after Moshe began preparing for his bar mitzvah, he suddenly changed. From a sunny little boy to one who was withdrawn. Depressed. His grades, which had always been excellent, plummeted.

“He wasn’t himself. I didn’t know what was going on,” says his mother, Rebecca. “He started refusing to go to shul, not seeing his friends. This happened very, very quickly over about two months.”

One day, 12-year-old Moshe stood in his mother’s bedroom and said, “‘Hashem [God] knows I’m a girl,’ going on to explain that he just couldn’t do it anymore, couldn’t have a bar mitzvah, that every time he put on tzitzit [ritual fringed garment worn by men] he was lying to Hashem. It just began pouring out of him,” Rebecca recalls.

His tutor had been emphasizing that becoming bar mitzvah meant Moshe was preparing to take his place as a man in the Jewish community.

“This is when it hit him, and he couldn’t take it any more,” says his mother, adding that when Moshe “finally told us what was going on, [he] went into therapy immediately. I think I was more shocked to find out that my beautiful child with the bright and shiny neshama [soul] was contemplating suicide than I was to learn that she was a girl.”

A psychologist and a physician both concluded that Moshe was likely transgender. Moshe and Rebecca traveled to meet with Dr. Norman Spack, a pediatric endocrinologist at what is considered the leading center in the United States for transgender children: the GeMS (Gender Management Service) Clinic at Boston Children’s Hospital.

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Gay in Israel 2014: It’s a family affair

Surrogacy increasingly an option for gay singles and couples looking to have children.

By Danna Harman for Haaretz

Growing up in Haifa, people basically specialized in becoming parents,” says Guy Tatsa-Laur 44, who runs one of the more than a dozen surrogacy consulting agencies in Israel. “We all had the same banal fantasies of family life.”

When he realized he was gay, continues Tatsa-Laur, the first reaction he got at home was typically Israeli: “What? No grandchildren?”

“Twenty years ago, coming out and being true to yourself basically meant giving up on family,” he says.

But that was then. Today, same-sex couples (and gay singles) in Israel are as much about having children as their heterosexual next-door neighbors. And while this is increasingly true in Western countries, Israel, with its mix of family orientated character and generally liberal attitude toward homosexuality, makes for a special case.

For example, the theme of this year’s gay pride week in Tel Aviv is “families.” And, as a nod to that theme, the main parade will end not at the beach – where in past years participants have stripped down to basics and partied into the night – but at a nearby park, where gay families can join in the fun and play on the seesaws and kiddie swings.

“Sometimes, when I speak in European capitals to gay groups about surrogacy and creating families, there are those who raise an eyebrow as to why this is so important. Europeans just don’t have the same peer pressure as we do in Israel to become parents,” says Tatsa-Laur.

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To be young, Orthodox and openly gay

Orthodox Jewish high schools in the United States try to balance concerns for their reputation and their students, as growing number of teens openly identify as gay.

By Debra Nussbaum Cohen for Haaretz


NEW YORK — Though he had lots of friends, Amram Altzman still felt alone at Ramaz High School. As a 16-year-old sophomore at the modern-Orthodox Manhattan institution, Altzman worried about what people would think, whether they would accept him, if they knew he was gay. “Being gay and being Orthodox just wasn’t something that was talked about. It was isolating,” says Altzman, now 19 and in college.

He told his closest friends first, then his parents. Before long, almost everyone at Ramaz knew that he was gay. While there were a few negative comments, Altzman felt accepted overall. At home in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, however, it was a different story. There, comments were so routinely hostile that his parents moved the family to a different community, in order to take Amram and his younger siblings out of an environment they felt could alienate their sons from Judaism altogether. And while Altzman says that he was embraced by both his friends and his family, he wishes that Ramaz handled the issue of homosexuality differently, framing it not as a sin and a chosen lifestyle, but rather as an identity.

Like a growing number of students, the topic of homosexuality is beginning to come out at Orthodox high schools in the United States. Until very recently, the norm for gay Orthodox Jews was to come out in college or later. But for a few years now there has been a marked shift. Students at Orthodox high schools who identify as gay are increasingly pushing to not only make sure that they are not overtly bullied, but also wholly accepted and able to explore what it means to be both gay and Orthodox. Now that same-sex marriage is legal in 18 U.S. states, and American attitudes are becoming, in many places, far more accepting, the challenge to Orthodox high schools is growing.

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