Allen Ginsberg, Siegfried Sassoon in collection of letters about LGBTQ love and friendship
'The Love That Dares' looks at poems and letters exploring queer relationships from Sappho to the 21st century
'The Love That Dares' looks at poems and letters exploring queer relationships from Sappho to the 21st century
As we celebrate another Pride Month, our nation is backsliding, and our hard-fought gains are in peril.
“Pride is also a Yizkor.” Those were the words of the Forward’s archivist, Chana Pollack, early in Pride month, as she and I discussed her planned dive into the Forward’s archives in search of its queer history. Her point: Generations of LGBTQ Jews who have faced exclusion from their families and communities have wondered who…
If an American reader had glanced casually at the front page of the Forward on May 7, 1933, they would have had no idea that one of the most pivotal events of the early Nazi regime had occurred the day before. No, it wasn’t the decision of Adolf Hitler’s Justice Department to allow for the…
In February 2021, Toronto’s largest Conservative synagogue, Beth Tzedec, announced that they would perform LGBTQ marriages. They were one of the last major North American Conservative synagogues to do so: Beth Tzedec’s announcement came nearly a decade after the Rabbinical Assembly, the international association of Conservative rabbis, first formally approved clergy performing LGBTQ marriage. For…
Abby Stein is a proud Jewish woman. But growing up, she didn’t feel that Judaism had a space for people like her. Abby was raised in an ultra-Orthodox hasidic Jewish community, and as she puts it, “growing up, we had a very strong focus on studying, researching, questioning and finding answers in texts.” The Torah…
Sarah Schulman had already been covering AIDS as a journalist for five years when she attended a 1987 demonstration organized by the newly-formed AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, better known as ACT UP. ACT UP members picketed outside New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center for 72 hours in protest of the sluggish pace…
It’s traditional for the gay community to gather for brunch before a Pride march during Pride month, or nachas khoydesh in Yiddish. Today, we propose instead a forshpayz, an appetizer-sized portion of queer archival Forverts history — rare treasures celebrating LGBTQ dignity, visibility and equality: our first archival Pride march back in time. For me,…