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This week, the Forward launched our month-long series on the lives of transgender Jews. Our project kicked off with six profiles of transgender rabbis and rabbinical students. As the editor of the series, I first became interested in transgender issues after I spent a year reporting on gay and lesbian inclusion in Jewish settings. In…
In the next few years, the number of transgender rabbis in America is expected to double — from three to six. The tiny cohort makes up a miniscule percentage of the rabbis graduating rabbinical school, but these individuals have already played a big role in their respective seminaries to provoke conversations about gender and Judaism….
“I am one of those people who have wanted to be a rabbi since I was a little kid,” said Ari Lev Fornari, a fifth-year rabbinical student at Hebrew College, a pluralistic college of Jewish studies in Newton Centre, Mass. His professional ambitions were “not disconnected from my own queer inclination.” The only out gay…
“I didn’t come to be a rabbi because I wanted to change the Jewish world about transgender issues,” said Jacob Lieberman, 34, a fourth-year student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, in Wyncote, Pa. “I came because I have Jewish ideas that I want to help to infuse into our society.” Lieberman’s aim to make Judaism…
When Leiah Moser began her gender transition last year, she found an unexpected cushion in rabbinical school, where many of her fellow students were trying on new identities and even new names. “All of my classmates are undergoing this intense, extreme process of transformation, and most of them feel just as challenged and confused about…
When it comes to the acceptance of transgender Jews, the American Jewish community is itself in a moment of transition. In 2008, Joy Ladin became the public face of transgender Judaism when she transitioned from male to female after receiving tenure at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women. Five years later, there are at least…
“I don’t think it was an accident that I found myself coming out as trans at the same time that I found myself becoming ordained,” said Rabbi Elliot Kukla, the first out transgender rabbi to be ordained in 2006 at HUC-JIR’s Los Angeles campus. “There is a certain identity transition in becoming a rabbi that,…
As the first out transgender student accepted at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, in 2003, Reuben Zellman recalled reading about his historic admission in a local newspaper. “I realized I was the first transgender person I had ever seen in the media who was still alive,” he said. At the time, transgender issues barely…
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