(JTA) — Sawyer Goldsmith said he has always felt accepted as a a member of the LGBTQ community in United Synagogue Youth, the Conservative movement’s youth group. But the 16-year-old from suburban Chicago hopes his recent election to serve as religion/education vice president on the group’s international board, the first time an openly transgender person…
Orthodox leaders are demanding changes in a proposed Jewish communitywide policy backing rights for transgender people over concerns that it won’t allow enough space for religious exemptions, the Forward has learned. The Reform movement and its partners submitted the proposed policy to the Jewish Council for Public Affairs, which operates as a sort of parliament…
Leah came out as transgender long before she thought about converting to Judaism. As a trans woman with a Jewish father, she was befriended by some Orthodox Jews at her college. “They treated me like one of their own and helped me not feel the all-encompassing isolation that my formative years had graced me with.”…
Blaire White is a popular conservative YouTube personality with 360,000 subscribers. Her bio says she “create[s] videos making fun of ideologues and cultural marxism” — a far-right term of art for undesirable Jewish cultural influence. Several times a month she posts videos with names like “Fat Acceptance Is Stupid” and “The Most Racist Black Man…
Welcome back to Jane Looking Forward. If you wish to continue reading this weekly newsletter, please subscribe here. And spread the word! Richard Fausset’s weekend story in The New York Times about a neo-Nazi’s “normal” life in the Ohio heartland drew a barrage of complaints for soft-pedaling his odious beliefs. The Forward writes about neo-Nazis,…
Yesterday was Transgender Day of Remembrance. It’s a day to mark the violence against the Transgender community. Unfortunately, in one Jewish Facebook group, it was marked by cruelty instead. Facebook groups have evolved over the last few years from groups of a few dozen people from your high school class to thousands of people with…
After coming out to her children as a lesbian, a formerly Hasidic woman lost custody of her children. Now, after a landmark ruling by three Brooklyn judges, she has won not only the right to see her children, but the right to express herself however she wants with them, the New York Post reported. When…
Liberalism, in its classic sense of a free society based on individual rights, intellectual pluralism, and democratic government, is in peril—as numerousvoices havewarned over the past two years. The common assumption is that the illiberal tide comes from the right: the xenophobic populism, nationalism, and authoritarianism represented by Donald Trump in the United States and…
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