During middle school, Yoni Kollin took part in “Shevet,” a Jewish teen group in Los Angeles for boys post-bar mitzvah. The program, facilitated by Moving Traditions, a Jewish organization that provides progressive educational teen programming, offered a parallel program for girls, too, called “Rosh Hodesh.” Yet for Kollin, neither program was a perfect fit. Kollin,…
There are literally hundreds of different ways of choosing, wrapping, and storing a set of tefillin [phylacteries]. Eichler’s Judaica superstore offers more than 2,000 tefillin-related items for purchase online alone, from a Swarovski crystal adorned bag, to a military camouflage case, and a strangely economical set of blinged-out gold plastic storage boxes—all to compliment the…
On Sunday night I was in the balcony of a packed sanctuary of a Brooklyn synagogue that was hosting a literary event. A loud, cracking sound split the air behind me. Another time, a disruption like that would have triggered automatic head-swiveling, that jerk of human curiosity that forces you to turn with interest towards…
The Israeli documentary “Family in Transition” has a happy ending. Sort of. The film, directed by Ofir Trainin, is about the Tzuk family — father Amit, mother Galit and their four children — who live in Nahariya, Israel’s northernmost coastal city. Amit and Galit run a successful software design and programming firm. But four years…
The idea that there are two and only two sexes is relatively new. This week, in a memo leaked to the New York Times, the Trump administration stated its goal to institute a federal definition of sex as “unchangeable, and determined by the genitals that a person is born with.” Furthermore, “any dispute about one’s…
When I came out in 1990 as a fifteen-year-old queer (my gender-nonconforming nature required no announcement) and promptly started being public about it, my father sat me down for a talk. My father, who attended a Hillel weekend in college that was surrounded by jeering anti-Semites from which he had to be snuck out a…
Business Insider removed a published op-ed defending the casting of Scarlett Johansson as a transgender man in an upcoming film, the Daily Beast reported. The Weekly Standard went on to publish the piece by conservative columnist Daniella Greenbaum, which had been taken off Business Insider’s website after staffers complained that it was offensive. In “Scarlett…
Scarlett Johansson has faced massive criticism this week for taking on a role as an apparently transgender man. Johansson will play Dante “Tex” Gill, an iconic massage-parlor kingpin who dominated Pittsburgh’s illicit pleasure centers in the 70’s and 80’s in the upcoming movie “Rub and Tug.” Johansson is a cisgender woman. Gill presented and identified…
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