Above: Detail from Golan Moskowitz. A Jewish History of Drag?, 2025.

ROUNDTABLE

Orthodoxy and LGBTQ+ Identity

Roundtable Editor: Jason Schulman

Contributors: Orit Avishai, Shlomo Gleibman, Miryam Kabakov, Mie Astrup Jensen Cathy S. Gelbin

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Introduction
Jason Schulman:

More than twenty years ago, Rabbi Steven Greenberg’s Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition and films like Trembling before G-d and Keep Not Silent, about a lesbian group called OrthoDykes, paved the way for a more open conversation within Orthodox Judaism about gay identity. In recent years, the controversy (and subsequent lawsuit) at Yeshiva University over its Pride Alliance student group brought the topic to a broader public. For this roundtable, we asked five scholars to reflect on the evolving relationship between Orthodoxy and LGBTQ+ identity.

On Tolerance, Acceptance, and Affirmation
Orit Avishai

For over a decade, LGBTQ+ students at Yeshiva University had sought official recognition for their Pride Alliance, facing persistent resistance from university leadership, which argued that the club contradicts Jewish traditions. After years of negotiations and public disputes, the students sued, citing violations of New York City’s anti-discrimination law. In June 2022, a New York state court ruled in their favor, though appeals had continued. In an attempted compromise, the university launched Kol Yisrael Areivim, a school-sanctioned alternative meant to support LGBTQ+ students while adhering to Halakhah and undefined “Torah values.”ⁱ The YU Pride Alliance rejected the initiative, arguing that it failed to provide a truly inclusive space. Still, this was a significant moment—a flagship Orthodox institution openly acknowledging LGBTQ+ persons.

This incident underscores both the progress and limitations of Jewish Orthodoxy on LGBTQ+ issues. It reveals how far the community has evolved, how much further it has to go, and why full inclusivity and affirmation—beyond tolerance or even acceptance—remain unlikely. Ultimately, the primary barriers to change in Jewish Orthodoxy are not Halakhah, but culture and politics.

Yeshiva University’s stance marks a departure from traditional Orthodox views, which regarded LGBTQ+ individuals as deviant and transgressive and often sought to exclude them from the community. In 1976, Rabbi Moshe Feinstein, a revered Orthodox leader, described homosexual desire as a “deviation from the path of nature”—a perspective still echoed in conservative Modern Orthodox and Haredi circles.ⁱⁱ Yet, some leading Orthodox figures advocate for greater acceptance, grounding their positions in Halakhah. In 2020, Israeli Orthodox Rabbi Benny Lau outlined a halakhic framework for monogamous same-sex relationships, while in 2023, Rabbi Jeffrey Fox of Yeshivat Maharat, a progressive Modern Orthodox yeshiva in New York City that ordains women clergy, issued a responsum addressing intimate relationships between women.ⁱⁱⁱ

Though not affirming like the latter interventions, Yeshiva University’s stance of proposing Kol Yisrael Areivim reflects the significant shifts Jewish Orthodoxy has undergone regarding LGBTQ+ issues in recent decades. Not long ago, openly embracing an LGBTQ+ identity while remaining within Orthodox Judaism was nearly unthinkable. In my recent book, Queer Judaism, I documented how, in just over a decade between the late 2000s and the late 2010s, Orthodox LGBTQ+ persons in Israel emerged from the shadows. Once silenced and uniformly vilified, they built social supports, activist organizations, and communities; established a network of allies; gained visibility; and advocated first for tolerance and acceptance and now for full inclusion and affirmation.

Several factors converged to explain these remarkable shifts within a relatively short time. The broader LGBTQ+ movement has influenced Jewish Orthodoxy and other conservative religious traditions. The Internet, particularly social media, has allowed previously isolated persons to connect, build community, and find support. Additionally, Orthodox feminists, who have long challenged traditional frameworks of gender and family, helped lay the groundwork for greater LGBTQ+ inclusion.^iv

The most significant driver of change has been the activism of Orthodox LGBTQ+ persons themselves. In Israel, their advocacy, outreach, and education efforts have coalesced into a movement that has gained Orthodox allies, from family members to rabbis and educators. In the United States, while less visible, similar efforts have taken root, with the Orthodox LGBTQ+ organization Eshel leading initiatives to promote inclusion through education, advocacy, and support. Eshel’s founder, Rabbi Steve Greenberg, was among the first to use traditional rabbinic sources to argue that homosexuality is not only biblically permissible but also no less sacred than heterosexuality.^v

Orthodox LGBTQ+ activists have persuaded their communities by working within the framework of Jewish Orthodoxy rather than opposing it. Unlike broader LGBTQ+ movements often associated with radicalism and secularism, they have adopted what I call a politics of moderation—seeking to build rather than dismantle—and a politics of authenticity, emphasizing their belonging within Orthodox life. As one LGBTQ+ activist put it in a 2018 talk at the Orthodox-affiliated Bar-Ilan University in Israel, “We’re not seeking to destroy the institution of the straight family.... All we want is a room of our own within the Jewish home.”

This work is far from complete. Tolerance and even acceptance often rest on disapproval, regulation, and hierarchy. To tolerate is not to affirm—it is to conditionally allow what is seen as marginal or deviant, as Yeshiva University did with its university-sanctioned alternative to the Pride Alliance. Yet, even such imperfect acknowledgments can have a profound impact. Many people I encountered in my research described these shifts as life-saving, allowing them to remain within their communities, be embraced by their families, and cultivate a positive sense of identity.

Orthodox LGBTQ+ persons, including members of the YU Pride Alliance, will continue advocating for full affirmation. However, even if Jewish sources and Halakhah can be interpreted to support evolving interpretations of gender and sexual diversity—an approach shared by Orthodox LGBTQ+ activists, scholars, and Jewish leaders such as Rabbis Greenberg, Fox, and Lau—the broader framework of Jewish Orthodoxy and the world in which it operates impose constraints on such progress. Some of these limitations are internal. As an intra-Jewish conflict, the fight for LGBTQ+ acceptance—like other debates over gender and sexual norms—faces skepticism and resistance from established authorities who fear its destabilizing impact on traditional structures.

But Orthodox Judaism’s approach to LGBTQ+ rights is not merely an intra-Jewish or intra-Orthodox affair. In both Israel and the United States, religious conservatives have framed LGBTQ+ persons as a threat to national character, portraying them as dangerous outsiders. In Israel, the Nationalist Orthodox political party Noam, whose main goal is to advance policies against LGBTQ+ rights out of concern about “the destruction of the family,” is part of the governing coalition. In the United States, where religious and political identities are increasingly intertwined, many conservative religious groups regard opposition to LGBTQ+ rights as a core to their beliefs. This movement, too, has gained significant influence in legislative, administrative, and judicial spheres in recent decades.^vi

From this perspective, Yeshiva University—serving as a proxy for mainstream Orthodoxy—is walking a fine line between purportedly authentic Jewish traditions and aligning with the expectations of its conservative Christian political allies. ^vii Jewish tradition, culture, and scripture may allow for greater LGBTQ+ inclusion— indeed, they might demand it. As Rabbi Lau put it in an impromptu public speech in Jerusalem in 2015, following a deadly attack at that year’s Pride Parade by an ultra-Orthodox extremist: “It is not permissible for anyone to live in a closet. A closet is death! . . . and you should choose life.”

Yet broader political dynamics had led Yeshiva University down a different path—one shaped more by the influence of Christian conservatives than by internal Orthodox Jewish discourse. Rather than engaging with Jewish legal and ethical traditions to navigate LGBTQ+ inclusion, the university has adopted a strategy favored by the Christian Right: invoking religious liberty arguments to oppose LGBTQ+ rights. In seeking to shield itself from government intervention on anti-discrimination grounds, Yeshiva University positioned itself within a broader conservative Christian legal and political framework rather than a distinctly Orthodox Jewish one. Notably, the university has been represented by the Becket Fund, a law firm closely tied to conservative Christian advocacy.

Pride Alliance students must have understood this complex political and legal landscape. In late March 2025, the two sides reached a settlement: Yeshiva University would recognize an LGBTQ student club on campus, and in return, the students would end litigation. The settlement stipulated that the club, named Hareni (“I Hereby”—a religious Jewish term instead of the secular “Pride”), would operate in accordance with university- sanctioned guidelines. The decision to compromise likely reflects the students’ astute reading of the political climate: legal observers believed the students would likely prevail in New York State courts but face defeat if the case reached the United States Supreme Court. The students presumably wished to avoid having their names and cause associated with a precedent that could strengthen the broader movement seeking to prioritize religious rights over LGBTQ+ protections. Ultimately, the decisive forces at play are not scripture and Halakhah, but culture and politics.

ⁱ “Yeshiva University Approves a New Student Club Grounded in Halacha to Enhance Support for Its LGBTQ Undergraduates,” YU News, October 24, 2022.

ⁱⁱ Moshe Feinstein, Iggerot Moshe, ʾoraḥ ḥayim 4:115.

ⁱⁱⁱ Jeffrey Fox, Nashim Mesolelot: Lesbian Women and Halakha—A Teshuva with Responses (Teaneck, NJ: Ben Yehuda Press, 2024).

^iv Orit Avishai, Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel (New York: New York University Press, 2023).

^v Steven Greenberg, Wrestling with God and Men: Homosexuality in the Jewish Tradition (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2004).

^vi Katherine Stewart, The Power Worshippers: Inside the Dangerous Rise of Religious Nationalism (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020).

^vii Joshua Shanes, “The Evangelicalization of Orthodoxy,” Tablet Magazine, October 12, 2020.

“Foreseen by the Sages”: Gay Desire in Orthodox Jewish Discourses
Shlomo Gleibman

The title of this essay points to a paradox. Modern categorization of sexuality is primarily defined by attractions, yet Jewish law is silent on the topic of same-sex desire. Confronted with this cognitive dissonance, Orthodox Jewish leaders in the twentieth century, presumably heterosexual, had to be creative in their efforts to conceive of Jewish homosexual desire. The examples discussed in this essay show the struggles of Orthodox rabbis to conceptualize this desire within traditional Jewish categories. These examples demonstrate that (a) biblical, talmudic, and medieval Jewish sources lacked conceptual tools to address the notion of same-sex desire, and (b) the responses of Orthodox leaders shifted throughout the twentieth century due to the changes in the larger social contexts. This essay is not a chronological survey but rather a meditation on the Orthodox Jewish cultural imaginary in relation to same-sex desire.

Traditional Jewish sexual categories, just as those in surrounding cultures, focused on specific practices rather than feelings. Two verses in Leviticus, 18:22 and 20:13, prohibit “intercourse of a woman,” mishkevei ʾishah, between males, understood in talmudic sources as anal penetration. ⁱ Ancient Israel, like its neighbors, viewed this act as gender inversion: perceived emasculation of men through a sex role associated with women, often in the context of violence. The Levitical passages do not address other sexual acts between men or same-sex desires, attachments, and relationships. Jewish biblical commentaries and halakhic traditions clearly defined the forbidden sexual act (graphically described by Rashi as “entering like a brush into a tube”) but rarely mentioned sexual feelings and never categorized them.ⁱⁱ In contrast, modernity attributed social significance to sexual feelings rather than acts. Therefore, when the concept of same-sex desire entered Jewish Orthodox discourse in the twentieth century, rabbis framed it within existing halakhic categories—as desire for anal penetration.

The modern category of sexuality emerged in psychiatric and psychoanalytic works of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century that were interested in feelings and personality types and that developed the concept of homosexuality based on object-choice. ⁱⁱⁱ In the 1920s, Abraham Isaac Kook, the first Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Mandatory Palestine, acknowledged “the new science concerning the natural inclinations that some men have from their conception.”^iv Kook, however, claimed that this inborn desire “was foreseen by the sages” who permitted anal sex between a man and a woman even though anal intercourse between males was prohibited.^v According to Kook, the sages accommodated men with homosexual desires, making heterosexual anal intercourse a form of kosher gay sex. Kook thus reinterpreted talmudic law in psychological terms, suggesting sublimation of homosexual desire through heterosexual marriage. Kook’s interpretation, which replaced attraction to same sex with craving for anal penetration, can be seen as a failed attempt to synthesize the traditional Jewish categories of sexual acts with modern theories of sexual orientation.

Orthodox Jewish discourses on sexuality in the 1970s, while mostly adopting Kook’s reframing of gay desire in traditional halakhic terms, as strictly the desire for anal intercourse, also understood it in a broader sense, as homosexual culture, which they perceived as incompatible with Judaism. This was, to a significant extent, a response to the emergence of the gay and lesbian liberation movement, as Orthodox Jewish leaders of the time often adopted the moralistic and theological rhetoric of the New Right and New Christian Right.^vi The Levitical prohibition, previously understood as a ban on a specific sexual act, was now reinterpreted as a condemnation of “homosexuality”— defined as same-sex desire and identity based on this desire. The conversation shifted from halakhic nuances of transgressive behavior to a broader opposition between “Judaism” and “homosexuality” as conflicting worldviews. Norman Lamm, a leader of American Modern Orthodoxy, emphasized the perceived moral and social dangers of same-sex desire.^vii Moshe Feinstein, a leading halakhic authority, focused on desire, too. Feinstein equated same-sex desire with a craving for anal penetration, “the lust for male sex,” but framed it in theological terms, as desire to rebel against God: “A person has such a craving because it is a prohibited thing.” ^viii He insisted that same-sex desire per se did not exist, claiming that “even the wicked do not lust for this in particular,” because it is “against the essential desire”^ix (apparently, for vaginal penetration). Feinstein thus conceptualized same-sex desire not as sexual attraction but as religious heresy. In the 1980s, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, the last Lubavitcher Rebbe, still understood the pleasure derived from “the act” to be the basis for same-sex attraction. He argued that this act was inherently less pleasurable than heterosexual intercourse.^x

Whereas Orthodox Jewish thinkers in the 1970s and 1980s, just as Kook in the 1920s, still defined gay desire as essentially desire for a specific sexual act and built their arguments on this presumption, in subsequent decades, Orthodox rhetoric came to distinguish between sexual desire and sexual acts. In the 1990s, resolutions of the Modern Orthodox Rabbinical Council of America (RCA) emphasized that the prohibition only applied to “homosexual behavior” and not to “homosexual inclinations.” ^xi In 2010, the Open Orthodox movement—a liberal group that split from mainstream Modern Orthodoxy in the early twenty-first century—issued a statement that advocated for the acceptance of “Jews of homosexual orientation” while maintaining the halakhic ban on same-sex sexual practices.^xii This statement recognized same-sex desire as a legitimate part of human experience and discouraged pressuring homosexuals into heterosexual marriages. Having given up efforts to define others’ desires for them, this statement recognized the diversity of personal experience. More recently, in 2020, Benny Lau, an influential Israeli rabbi from the family of two former chief rabbis of Israel, acknowledged the fundamental incompatibility of “the world of the Torah and the world as it is in reality” and proposed that Orthodox Jewish communities accept the diversity of human sexuality as a matter of fact, without necessarily attempting to understand it in traditional terms: “As with all human needs, sexual needs are not uniform.”^xiii

ⁱ E.g., tractate Yevamot 83b. Cf. Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, negative commandment 350. In the androcentric and patriarchal culture of Jewish antiquity, sex between women was outside the discourse.

ⁱⁱ Rashi, commentary on Leviticus 20:13. Arguably, Maimonides expands the prohibition from anal penetration to sexual desire: “Both partners liable to stoning as soon as one arouses the other” (Mishneh Torah, laws of forbidden intercourse 1:14).

ⁱⁱⁱ “Contrary sexual feeling” or “sexual psychopathy,” as German psychiatrists Karl Friedrich Otto Westphal and Richard von Krafft- Ebing named it in the 1870s and 1880s. The medicalized theories of homosexuality were adopted by many Orthodox Jewish leaders, who treated same-sex desire as mental illness. This includes Norman Lamm, Menachem Mendel Schneerson, and the Rabbinical Council of America (the RCA withdrew their endorsement of “reparative therapy” in 2011-2012).

^iv A. I. Kook, ʾOrot ha-kodesh, vol. III (Mosad ha-Rav Kook, 1985), 297.

^v Ibid.; tractate Nedarim 20b; Moses Isserles’s commentary on Shulḥan ʿarukh, ʾeven ha-ʿezer 25:2.

^vi Marc Stein, Rethinking the Gay and Lesbian Movement (London: Routledge, 2012), 115–116, 138–141.

^vii Norman Lamm, “Judaism and the Modern Attitude to Homosexuality” (1974), in Contemporary Jewish Ethics, ed. Menachem Marc Kellner and Norman Lamm (New York: Sanhedrin Press, 1978), 375–399.

^viii Moshe Feinstein, ʾIggeret Moshe, ʾoraḥ ḥayim 4:115 (1976).

^ix Ibid.

^x Menachem Mendel Schneerson, “‘Rights’ or Ills” (1986), in Sichos in English, vol. 30 (New York: Sichos In English, 1988), 120–130.

^xi RCA Resolution: Homosexuality (June 1, 1993).

^xii Statement of Principles on the Place of Jews with a Homosexual Orientation in Our Community (2010).

^xiii Benjamin Lau, “On Same-Sex Couples in the Orthodox Jewish Community,” The Times of Israel, December 11, 2020.

The Orthodox parents of LGBTQ+ children, whom my organization serves, coined a saying: “Life is short and life is long.” They mean: there are two paces to life. In one, it feels like time is flying by with rapid-fire change. In the other, time moves slowly and it can take a long time for a process to unfold. When thinking about queer Orthodox children, it behooves us to take the long view. Whenever a new Orthodox parent calls our warmline in a panic about their LGBTQ+ child, and we’ve been busy on the line supporting the trans community, I repeat that mantra to them. The story of their lives—and of their children’s lives—has not yet unfolded.

Eshel, founded in 2010, is an organization that knows this duality in our work. We create spaces where LGBTQ+ Orthodox Jews and their families can find community, support, and networks. Equally important, we work to make the mainstream Orthodox Jewish community a place where LGBTQ+ Jews and their families can fully belong. The project of creating community among LGBTQ+ Orthodox people testifies to the sense that the world can change quickly. The parallel project of making a place for LGBTQ+ Orthodox Jews in the larger Orthodox community goes much slower. We cannot know how long it will take to bring these two projects together.

The work toward mainstream Orthodoxy fully embracing LGBTQ+ Jews and their families moves at what often feels like a glacial pace. The slowness of change surprised us. Initially, we were sure that sharing our stories would open people’s hearts and change their minds. In 2012, Eshel established a speakers bureau of parents, allies, and LGBTQ+ people ready to be deployed to any Orthodox community. Then we stood by, waiting to be summoned to deliver our message. But no one summoned us. We began to see that as queer Orthodox Jews, we had no credibility in Orthodox spaces. Rabbis who engaged with us got into trouble with their peers and rabbinical associations. One New York rabbi was excommunicated for hosting an Eshel Shabbaton in his shul. Rabbinic authorities in Cleveland threatened to take away kosher certification from a rabbi who invited us in. In Baltimore, the local rabbinical board told a rabbi he was not allowed to build the eruv that his community needed after he engaged with us. Orthodox institutions had built a fortress around them, and Eshel was on the outside.

We needed to change our expectations. Once we readjusted our expectations about how long change would take, we could better identify the work that could only be accomplished slowly and carefully. For example, we realized that we needed to tend to the spiritual needs of queer Orthodox folks and their families. Some Orthodox rabbis were solely focused on why Halakhah cannot allow them to fully incorporate queer people into communal religious life. In turn, LGBTQ+ Orthodox Jews could and would no longer turn to them for pastoral care. So Eshel helps people design halakhic ceremonies to celebrate and mourn. We help people figure out how to have babies and how to navigate Jewish day schools. We see this part of our work as not letting Orthodoxy be taken away from us, even though many Orthodox communities won’t recognize our presence. The quicker and easier project of building and supporting Orthodox queer communities empowers individuals to tackle the long, slow, harder project of communal change and acceptance. Recognizing that there are queer Jews who experience ourselves as frum, and who are entitled to their Orthodoxy like anyone else, is the first step in giving ourselves chizzuk, or strength, to create the open, proud lives we deserve to have.

Sometimes it is hard to believe that the community around us really will ever fully welcome us in. But I have seen that change does happen, as long as we are still invested in it happening. I know this not only as an organizational leader, but also from personal experience. If I had taken the long view with my own family, instead of believing that the story had ended before it really began, I would have avoided a lot of pain. When my wife and I became engaged, I shared the news with all my siblings. I was the last of six to marry, I was sure my siblings would celebrate with me. But one of them did the opposite. They wrote to me and my parents and said it was shameful to claim that a gay Jewish wedding was legitimate, that it made a mockery of Judaism. My parents, who—after their own years of struggle, saw that I was determined to live a frum queer life—wrote back and asked my sibling to apologize to me. My partner and I were going to be living a religious life, we planned to raise religious children, and we deserved the same respect each of my other siblings had received upon announcing their engagements. My sibling never replied. I wondered if my sibling had missed the email or simply ignored it. I was devastated.

Twenty years later, as I was pulling on my black dress on the morning of my father’s funeral, I saw a phone call coming in from Israel. It was from the same sibling who had written that letter to me, whose home was my father’s last residence. My father’s belongings had trimmed down significantly since my mother’s passing, to one suitcase containing few material objects and his most precious papers. That morning, my sibling had opened the briefcase and discovered that one of my father’s few possessions was a frayed copy of the email my father had sent, defending me and asking them to apologize. Knowing I was in a rush to get to the funeral, my sibling blurted out “I read the email, and, I’m sorry.” After twenty years, I had finally gotten the response I had craved for so many years.

What has been the case in my own life has been true for the landscape of building LGBTQ+ Orthodox belonging. Frum queer Jews who have stayed within Orthodoxy have taken the long view, and have seen that relationships of love and care can power great change. It will take a long time. But just as I had change happen in my own family, I see it happening in the larger community, with over 280 Orthodox synagogue rabbis across North America helping match LGBTQ+ people with communities that have begun to open their doors to them. But if we create Orthodox environments that can make space for difference right now, in the long run, they may stay. There is much to show for our years of work, and as we hold onto that long-range vision, we are continuing to make progress, in surprising ways. Slow does not mean infinite or never. And eventually, we will receive apologies from Orthodox leaders, like my sibling gave to me.

In the meantime, Eshel’s slogan has proved true: We’re here, We’re queer, We’re machmir (stringent observance of Jewish law) … and we are not going to disappear.

To Be Queer or to Be Orthodox? Why Not Both?
Mie Astrup Jensen

Within Orthodox communities, there has historically been a view that it is impossible to be Orthodox and LGBTQ+. In the early 2000s, Rabbi Steven Greenberg expressed that he, like many LGBTQ+ Orthodox people, had been confronted with a difficult choice: either be openly LGBTQ+ and leave Orthodoxy, or be Orthodox and closeted. However, more recently, conversations within numerous Orthodox communities have increasingly developed from asking if one can be Orthodox and LGBTQ+ to how one can be Orthodox and LGBTQ+. In July 2024, I defended my PhD on being queer and Jewish in England and Israel—a thesis that aimed to understand how queer Jewish women understand, navigate, and express their lived experiences and practices. The thesis was built on biographic-narrative interpretive method (BNIM) interviews with forty queer Jewish women, whose life stories grappled with what it means to be a queer Jew in often complex and multi-layered contexts.

Six of the forty participants in my research identified as Orthodox. Additionally, a handful of women had been raised Orthodox but no longer identified as such. While all the Orthodox women in my research had, at times, felt an identity conflict related to their queer and Jewish identities (something with which a couple of them still struggle), my research found that queer Orthodox women have gradually found ways to live their lives meaningfully and authentically.

In what follows, I give a few glimpses into some of the ways that the women in my study—who had been raised in Orthodox communities, had lacked representation and visibility, and had often spent years repressing their identities—eventually forged a way to more meaningfully express their multiple identities.

For the Orthodox women in my study, religious practices, especially key ones like keeping kosher and observing Shabbat, remained significant to their lives, not only for religious reasons, but also for spiritual, cultural, and familial ones. For example, the women I interviewed kept kosher in their homes because it was important to them for cultural, religious, and/or communal reasons. For example, Rivka (queer) explained, “Judaism to me is really about family and community life.…We have Shabbat together, we have meals together on holidays, and we get together with family for Yahrzeit.” Those who were fully or partially Shabbat observant underlined the spiritual significance of Shabbat by noting, for example, that the day of rest was made for a reason and that it was important to follow the rules of Shabbat to be spiritually satisfied and connected to the tradition. For example, Leah (lesbian) and her wife, who were expecting a baby at the time of the interview, strictly observed Shabbat. Leah explained, “For me, Shabbat is Shabbat. You don’t have a phone on Shabbat. I have a lot of opinions about that.” On the other hand, another participant, Abigail (queer), expressed that she used her phone on Shabbat because she did not believe she could completely remove herself from society for a day and it was important for her to be able to contact her family. Instead, she paused for a bit, reflected on her life, recited some blessings, and had a special meal on Shabbat. This shows how queer Orthodox women navigated and engaged with religious practices through negotiating personal and communal beliefs and norms.

Similarly, prayers and blessings offered a chance for these women to uphold Orthodox practices, either through traditional recitations or with a twist that acknowledged their queer identities. Some recited prayers in a traditional manner every day. The women explained that it was important to them to recite prayers because prayers such as the Amidah and the Shema give them a connection to God and their spiritual selves. Prayers were a way for them to affirm their beliefs and identities, and the morning prayers gave them a good and comforting start to the day. Some participants, such as Ella (lesbian), recited non-traditional prayers due to a desire to engage in more inclusive and affirming practices. Ella had been raised in an ultra-Orthodox community and now identified as Conservative. For most of her life, she had deeply struggled with the line in the morning brakhot, “Thank you God for not making me a woman,” because she was assigned male at birth. Years ago, Ella, inspired by queer readings of the scriptures, revised the prayer to “Thank you for making me a Jew, making me for every person, and making me in your image.” In addition to the morning brakhot, she often recited other prayers and blessings that aligned with and affirmed her identity and values.

All the Orthodox women in the study expressed that there was a lack of representation of queer identities within their respective Orthodox communities. They all explained that they were raised in exclusively heteronormative environments, where queer identities were taboo. For example, Abigail (queer) and Avital (queer) both expressed that it was difficult for them to imagine getting married to a same-sex partner and having a family because they had, in the words of Abigail, “never seen an observant Jewish family that was queer, so it was difficult for me to imagine it was possible.”

The stigmatization of queer identities within Orthodox communities meant, in part, that several of the women had previously repressed their sexuality or queer identity. This was especially the case when they had attended Orthodox seminary—although two of my participants noted that they had had secret same-sex relationships at seminary. These relationships were discovered, and one participant was made to attend conversion therapy and the other was expelled from the seminary. Nevertheless, most of the participants, including those who had faced disciplinary action for having same-sex relationships, continued to engage with Jewish learning.

The study of Jewish material was something that participants found valuable because Orthodox Judaism values education and learning and because the study of Jewish sources enhanced their meaning-making processes and self-understanding. Talia (asexual), for example, read the weekly parashah individually and spent approximately seven hours per week studying midrash, the Talmud, and Maimonides’s code of Jewish law. She expressed that she viewed herself as being in a relationship with the Torah. She was committed and devoted to the Torah, which she linked to the talmudic text in which Shimon ben Azzai discussed marriages, declaring, in Talia’s paraphrase, that he was not interested in marriage because his “soul is in love with the Torah.”

In conclusion, while the Orthodox participants in my research had, to varying degrees, experienced conflicts due to being queer and Orthodox, my research found that the participants gradually found ways to overcome those conflicts. To a great extent, they slowly started to find ways to integrate their identities and consequently felt more able to live meaningfully and authentically.

Queer and Orthodox Jewish Lives on Screen
Cathy S. Gelbin

Film treatments of queer Jewish lives stage the preconceived tensions and elective affinities in intersectional queer and Jewish sensibilities from the 1980s to the present, a period in which postmodern paradigms came to the fore in popular culture, academic theory, and alternative community politics. Traditional Jewish settings in these films highlight the core themes within queer Jewishness on screen, with their proposed push and pull between Jewish religious tradition and cultural innovation; between older essentialisms and more recent postmodern fluidities of ethnicized, gendered, and sexualized constellations; between Israel and the Diaspora; and between cosmopolitanist and nationalistic discourses. These tensions are mediated through critical explorations of the place of women and gay men in Jewish religious and communal life and, coupled with this, a search beyond traditional milieus to actualize queer Jewish subjectivities. Although the resulting patchwork of new Jewish gender and sexual subjectivities can be seen as a postmodern undoing of received notions of Jewishness, the films’ character constellations ultimately do not move beyond normative conceptions of cisgender and halakhic Jewishness, and their reconciliation of tradition and queerness remain incomplete.

Released on the cusp of the feminist Jewish movement, Barbra Streisand’s Yentl (1983) has been rightfully read as the commercial Big Bang of queer Jewish film.ⁱ Yentl conveyed the contemporaneous seismic gender revolution within Judaism, where women, who traditionally were to be seen but not heard, were asserting their voices and rising into ritual leadership roles. Yentl proposes a woman’s essential fitness to fully partake in all aspects of Jewish communal life while abstaining from a radical critique of the patriarchal foundations of Jewish tradition itself, which the film’s inspiring images of Jewish people and Jewish rituals paint as a thing of beauty. Vivid close-ups, luminous lighting, and sweeping camera movements convey the profound beauty and emotional properties of traditional Jewish life in prewar eastern Europe in order to integrate the (forbidden) female figure into this already eroticized realm.

The Israeli drama The Secrets (2007), which sees queer love blossoming in a girls’ yeshiva in Safed, the centuriesold center of Kabbalah (Jewish mysticism), takes its central cues from the mother of all lesbian films, Girls in Uniform (1931), as well as Yentl.ⁱⁱ Its opening shot at a shivah, in which a higher-angled camera captures a Haredi man looking at a group of male mourners below him before panning to the women at the back, establishes the theme of male dominance within Haredi Judaism, from which the main character Naomi must free herself religiously, intellectually, and sexually. Her enrollment at the yeshiva, whose headmistress dreams of a “silent revolution” to change the subordination of women in traditional Judaism, is but one step in this development. This sees her falling in love with another female student with whom she creates a secret tikkun (ritual repair) for a troubled non-Jewish French woman; the girls are ultimately expelled from the yeshiva. Yet the film stages the tikkun as a ritual cleansing of the girls’ overlapping gender, sexual, ethical, and ethnic-religious transgressions to suggest the symbolic repair of the shared outsider status of the woman, lesbian, and stranger in Judaism.

Albeit visually more radical in its open portrayals of lustful lesbian sex, Disobedience (2017) rests on a similar construction of the implicit permissibility of the lesbian within normative Judaism. Led by major stars Rachel Weisz and Rachel McAdams, both with strong public heterosexual profiles, the film confidently aims for mainstream appeal, which seems to indicate the growing social acceptability of queer Jewish themes. While giving some credence to secular lifestyles outside of traditional Judaism, the film’s ending narratively punishes Weisz’s rebel character by once again expelling her from her Jewish fold, while revalorizing normative Judaism as the only space where true heterosexual love blossoms and where the lesbian can be accommodated as long as she subsumes herself under heterosexual patriarchy.

Such attempts to repair Jewish religion are altogether thrown overboard in the Israeli independent film Red Cow (2018), whose shaky hand-held camera explores the emotional upheavals of teenage girl Benny’s coming out in the Jewish national-religious community in the Israeli-occupied West Bank.ⁱⁱⁱ Benny’s queer path, which brings about a growing distance from her religious father’s world, allows the film to critique the national-religious project, with its ideology of excluding and expelling its perceived Others. Benny’s statement that she sometimes feels “like a complete gentile” signposts the film’s construction of a shared outsider status of the lesbian and stranger which cannot be resolved within Jewish tradition. In the end, Benny breaks free from the divisive world of her father and elopes to Tel Aviv, where we see her blending into a poetic performance scene.

Most likely due to the prohibition of male-on-male sex in the Torah, portrayals of queer Jewish masculinity have been far more limited and pained. Among these films, Eyes Wide Open (2009) stands out in its treatment of a claustrophobic Haredi milieu in Jerusalem, where a butcher and married father of four drowns himself in a mikveh after having forcibly disavowed his male lover.^iv The dystopian location of the butcher shop, with its associations of death, sex, and violence, foreshadows the film’s contention that Haredi Judaism requires the gay individual to give up his true self for tradition and thereby self-destruct. Given the film’s iconic setting of Jerusalem, which in the drabness shown here rejects its usual touristic promotion as a picture-postcard pilgrimage site, the film may also suggest the Haredi community as a dystopian symbol for the dwindling cosmopolitanism and growing insularity of Israeli society more broadly. The queer theme has enabled a series of Israeli filmmakers to critically interrogate the egalitarian state of their country, and to explore alternative national and political narratives beyond both traditional Judaism and Zionism.

Finally, on the small screen, a site of current global Jewish migration, Berlin, the former epicenter of the Holocaust, has, of all places, played a key role in reimagining the contemporary queer Jewish subject with regard to ethnic, cultural, gendered, and sexual intersectionalities. The Netflix miniseries Unorthodox (2020) depicts a young woman following her mother’s flight from their Haredi community in New York to a new life in Berlin, where she bonds with an international group of friends and discovers her mother living in a lesbian relationship with a German.^v Although Unorthodox is at pains to point out the lasting presence of Germany’s more recent totalitarian pasts, its queered and Jewish predicaments ultimately serve to once again shore up a vision of cleansed national legacies in the future.

While such portrayals suggest that the rebelliousness of queer Jewish figures is itself dependent on their contexts, they simultaneously stress the as-yet unactualized nature of these experimental subjectivities.

ⁱ Yentl (dir. Barbra Streisand, 1983).

ⁱⁱ The Secrets (dir. Avi Nesher, 2007); Girls in Uniform (dir. Leontine Sagan, 1931).

ⁱⁱⁱ Red Cow (dir. Tsivia Barkai Yacov, 2018).

^iv Eyes Wide Open (dir. Haim Tabakman, 2009).

^v Unorthodox (dir. Maria Schrader, 2020).

Read More: The Rainbow Issue