Rachel Delia Benaim
By Rachel Delia Benaim
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Life Finally, A Safe Space For Sephardic And Mizrahi LGBTQ Jews
On a Saturday night in May, somewhere in Crown Heights, a group of young professionals in their 20’s and 30’s swayed back and forth to the classic Mizrahi songs they grew up on — everything from Ofra Haza to Cheb Khaled. The gathering, set with mood lighting and a perfect sound system, was attended by…
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Life Why Are Modern Orthodox Millennials Like Me Looking For A Different Path?
We sat in wicker chairs at a cafe overlooking Jerusalem’s Old City. We both sipped lattes and laughed easily, silently appreciating how the sun peaked through the umbrellas covering the outdoor seating area, soaking the Jerusalem stone all around us. The amaryllis were in bloom, adding a pop of pink to the otherwise sand colored…
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Life Does the Hebrew Language Have a Gender Problem?
Beneath the rocky alps and the bright blue sky in Salzburg, Austria this summer, fellows at the Eighteen:22 conference for Jewish LGBTQ leaders sat around at the Schloss Leopolskron, the site where “The Sound of Music” was filmed, addressing each other by their preferred gender pronouns PGP, like he, she, and the non-binary, they and…
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Opinion How Not To Cover a Gay Pride Parade Stabbing
Instead of focusing on the violence involved, the human suffering or the actual blood being shed, some ultra-Orthodox newspapers focused only on philosophy. In response to the stabbings at Thursday’s Jerusalem Gay Pride Parade, those ultra-Orthodox news sources that bothered to report the violence at all referred to the “toeiva” or abomination parade. Toeiva, the…
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Life A Harriet Tubman for the Jewish LGBT Community
It’s no secret that Orthodox Judaism condemns homosexuality. Until recently, this has manifested itself as either rejecting the possibility of an LGBT identity altogether (as is delineated in the right wing on homosexuality, or sympathizing with people struggling with gender identity, but not making room for them in communal structures as is delineated in the…
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Opinion Why Did Airplane Passengers Ignore Chabad Woman’s Warning?
Have you ever been discriminated against because of how you were dressed? Or how about because of the way you spoke? Mussie Weinfeld very well might have been. have surfaced that a 22-year-old Chabad woman may or may not have saved an entire airplane full of people set to fly from Ben Gurion to Moscow…
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Life Being a Good Listener Left Me Alone on Valentine’s Day
Lior Zaltzman Many people might be weirded out that their blind date took them to a two hour lecture on monsters and mythical creatures at Brooklyn’s Morbid Anatomy Museum. I loved it. It was afterwards when I actually had to start talking to my date that things turned south rather quickly. He had been talking…
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The Schmooze ‘Frozen’ Princess Sings ‘Baby It’s Cold Outside’!
Getty Images “Do you wanna build a snowman?” ‘Cause, baby, it’s cold outside. For the first time in forever, 2014’s favorite Frozen Jewish princess, Idina Menzel, teamed up with Michael Bublé to cover the holiday favorite, “Baby It’s Cold Outside.” Menzel joins a long list of Jews singing (and writing) Christmas songs. The music video,…
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