JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
A new book called “The Love That Dares” offers a collection of letters and poems exploring LGBTQ love and friendship. Some of those whose words are quoted are famous, some are not so famous. Some had secret relationships while others refused to hide. Among the three dozen individuals included are the Jewish poets Allen Ginsberg…
When Danya Lagos-Brown and Eliza Lagos-Brown got married in 2018, they knew they wanted a religious Jewish wedding. But instead of the standard ceremony, they crafted a personalized contract of obligations to one another, signed by witnesses, and recited their own Hebrew blessing under the huppah: “In acquisition of these rings, we are hereby partnered…
Hayden Cohen, a trans high schooler from Houston, Texas, has found moments of queer joy in recent months. They’ve baked rainbow cookies, distributed rainbow flags and decked their high school’s halls with rainbow stickers with friends in their gay-straight alliance. But those kinds of moments, Cohen said, have lately become “the only things keeping people…
Dressed in gold from head to toe, I put one foot in front of the other and made my way onto the stage. I opened my overdrawn nude tone lips, batted my fake eyelashes and swallowed my nerves at performing in drag in front of the very Persian Jewish community that I had tried to…
Being called up to the Torah is an honor. But for nonbinary Jews — those who identify as neither male nor female — it can be fraught. The Hebrew words “please stand” — “va’amod” for a male and “ta’amod” — are gendered. They are followed by the person’s name and more gendering: “son of” or…
Students come to Jewish Queer Youth secretively — through a Google search, a meme on social media, a pamphlet in their local pizzeria, a chat between two friends who suspect they might be the same in some way. “I told my parents I was hanging out with a friend after school,” said N., a Bronx…
Hasidic children will learn about LGBTQ allyship, gender expression and the diverse world of identity when “You Be You: The Kid’s Guide to Gender, Sexuality and Family” arrives in Yiddish Jan. 31. The author, Jonathan Branfman, first published the book in English in 2019. His goal was to make a resource that offers stigma-free information…
If you arrived at Linke Fligl around 3 p.m. last Sunday and ambled into the tall grassy meadow at the heart of the farm, you would have seen something curious: A bunch of Jews squatting in patches of goldenrod, counting their blessings. They — or rather we, since I was among them — were saying…
