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Embracing their place on ‘the fringes,’ queer artists reimagine Jewish ritual garments for all bodies
(JTA) — Binya Kóatz remembers the first time she saw a woman wearing tzitzit. While attending Friday night services at a Jewish Renewal synagogue in Berkeley, she noticed the long ritual fringes worn by some observant Jews — historically men — dangling below a friend’s short shorts.
“That was the first time I really realized how feminine just having tassels dangling off you can look and be,” recalled Kóatz, an artist and activist based in the Bay Area. “That is both deeply reverent and irreverent all at once, and there’s a deep holiness of what’s happening here.”
Since that moment about seven years ago, Kóatz has been inspired to wear tzitzit every day. But she has been less inspired by the offerings available in online and brick-and-mortar Judaica shops, where the fringes are typically attached to shapeless white tunics meant to be worn under men’s clothing.
So in 2022, when she was asked to test new prototypes for the Tzitzit Project, an art initiative to create tzitzit and their associated garment for a variety of bodies, genders and religious denominations, Kóatz jumped at the chance. The project’s first products went on sale last month.
“This is a beautiful example of queers making stuff for ourselves,” Kóatz said. “I think it’s amazing that queers are making halachically sound garments that are also ones that we want to wear and that align with our culture and style and vibrancy.”
Jewish law, or halacha, requires that people who wear four-cornered garments — say, a tunic worn by an ancient shepherd — must attach fringes to each corner. The commandment is biblical: “Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout the ages” (Numbers 15:37-41) When garments that lack corners came into fashion, many Jews responded by using tzitzit only when wearing a tallit, or prayer shawl, which has four corners.
But more observant Jews adopted the practice of wearing an additional four-cornered garment for the sole purpose of fulfilling the commandment to tie fringes to one’s clothes. Called a tallit katan, or small prayer shawl, the garment is designed to be worn under one’s clothes and can be purchased at Judaica stores or online for less than $15. The fringes represent the 613 commandments of the Torah, and it is customary to hold them and kiss them at certain points while reciting the Shema prayer.
“They just remind me of my obligations, my mitzvot, and my inherent holiness,” Kóatz said. “That’s the point, you see your tzitzit and you remember everything that it means — all the obligations and beauty of being a Jew in this world.”
The California-based artists behind the Tzitzit Project had a hunch that the ritual garment could appeal to a more diverse set of observant Jews than the Orthodox men to whom the mass-produced options are marketed. Julie Weitz and Jill Spector had previously collaborated on the costumes for Weitz’s 2019 “My Golem” performance art project that uses the mythical Jewish creature to explore contemporary issues. In one installment of the project focused on nature, “Prayer for Burnt Forests,” Weitz’s character ties a tallit katan around a fallen tree and wraps the tzitzit around its branches.
“I was so moved by how that garment transformed my performance,” Weitz said, adding that she wanted to find more ways to incorporate the garment into her life.
The Tzitzit Project joins other initiatives meant to explore and expand the use of tzitzit. A 2020 podcast called Fringes featured interviews with a dozen trans and gender non-conforming Jews about their experiences with Jewish ritual garments. (Kóatz was a guest.) Meanwhile, an online store, Netzitzot, has since 2014 sold tzitzit designed for women’s bodies, made from modified H&M undershirts.
The Tzitzit Project goes further and sells complete garments that take into account the feedback of testers including Kóatz — in three colors and two lengths, full and cropped, as well as other customization options related to a wearer’s style and religious practices. (The garments cost $100, but a sliding scale for people with financial constraints can bring the price as far down as $36.)
Spector and Weitz found that the trial users were especially excited by the idea that the tzitzit could be available in bright colors, and loved how soft the fabric felt on their bodies, compared to how itchy and ill-fitting they found traditional ones to be. They also liked that each garment could be worn under other clothing or as a more daring top on its own.
To Weitz, those attributes are essential to her goal of “queering” tzitzit.
“Queering something also has to do with an embrace of how you wear things and how you move your body in space and being proud of that and not carrying any shame around that,” she said. “And I think that that stylization is really distinct. All those gender-conventional tzitzit for men — they’re not about style, they’re not about reimagining how you can move your body.”
Artist Julie Weitz ties the knots of the tzitzit, fringes attached to the corners of a prayer shawl or the everyday garment known as a “tallit katan.” (Courtesy of Tzitzit Project)
For Chelsea Mandell, a rabbinical student at the Academy of Jewish Religion in Los Angeles who is nonbinary, the Tzitzit Project is creating Jewish ritual objects of great power.
“It deepens the meaning and it just feels more radically spiritual to me, when it’s handmade by somebody I’ve met, aimed for somebody like me,” said Mandell, who was a product tester.
Whether the garments meet the requirements of Jewish law is a separate issue. Traditional interpretations of the law hold that the string must have been made specifically for tzitzit, for example — but it’s not clear on the project’s website whether the string it uses was sourced that way. (The project’s Instagram page indicates that the wool is spun by a Jewish fiber artist who is also the brother of the alt-rocker Beck.)
“It is not obvious from their website which options are halachically valid and which options are not,” said Avigayil Halpern, a rabbinical student who began wearing tzitzit and tefillin at her Modern Orthodox high school in 2013 when she was 16 and now is seen as a leader in the movement to widen their use.
“And I think it’s important that queer people in particular have as much access to knowledge about Torah and mitzvot as they’re embracing mitzvot.”
Weitz explained that there are multiple options for the strings — Tencel, cotton or hand-spun wool — depending on what customers prefer, for their comfort and for their observance preferences.
“It comes down to interpretation,” she said. “For some, tzitzit tied with string not made for the purpose of tying, but with the prayer said, is kosher enough. For others, the wool spun for the purpose of tying is important.”
Despite her concerns about its handling of Jewish law, Halpern said she saw the appeal of the Tzitzit Project, with which she has not been involved.
“For me and for a lot of other queer people, wearing something that is typically associated with Jewish masculinity — it has a gender element,” explained Halpern, a fourth-year student at Hadar, the egalitarian yeshiva in New York.
“If you take it out of the Jewish framework, there is something very femme and glamorous and kind of fun in the ways that dressing up and wearing things that are twirly is just really joyful for a lot of people,” she said.
Rachel Schwartz first became drawn to tzitzit while studying at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem in 2018. There, young men who were engaging more intensively with Jewish law and tradition than they had in the past began to adopt the garments, and Schwartz found herself wondering why she had embraced egalitarian religious practices in all ways but this one.
“One night, I took one of my tank tops and I cut it up halfway to make the square that it needed. I found some cool bandanas at a store and I sewed on corners,” Schwartz recalled. “And I bought the tzitzit at one of those shops on Ben Yehuda and I just did it and it was awesome.”
Rachel Schwartz stands in front of a piece of graffiti that plays on the commandment to wear tzitzit, written in the Hebrew feminine. (Courtesy of Rachel Schwartz)
Schwartz’s experience encapsulates both the promise and the potential peril of donning tzitzit for people from groups that historically have not worn the fringes. Other women at the Conservative Yeshiva were so interested in her tzitzit that she ran a workshop where she taught them how to make the undergarment. But she drew so many critical comments from men on the streets of Jerusalem that she ultimately gave up wearing tzitzit publicly.
“I couldn’t just keep on walking around like that anymore. I was tired of the comments,” Schwartz said. “I couldn’t handle it anymore.”
Rachel Davidson, a Reconstructionist rabbi working as a chaplain in health care in Ohio, started consistently wearing a tallit katan in her mid-20s. Like Kóatz, she ordered her first one from Netzitzot.
“I would love to see a world where tallitot katanot that are shaped for non cis-male bodies are freely available and are affordable,” Davidson said. “I just think it’s such a beautiful mitzvah. I would love it if more people engaged with it.”
Kóatz believes that’s not only possible but natural. As a trans woman, she said she is drawn to tzitzit in part because of the way they bring Jewish tradition into contact with contemporary ideas about gender.
“Queers are always called ‘fringe,’” she said. “And here you have a garment which is literally like ‘kiss the fringes.’ The fringes are holy.”
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How Black music brought me closer to Judaism
Once, while my parents were away, my Grandma Min woke my three siblings and me at five in the morning to lecture us on the proper way to squeeze a toothpaste tube. Funny how effective that was. To this day, I can’t pick up a tube of Crest without thinking about how to squeeze it properly.
Toothpaste incident notwithstanding, I loved my Grandma Min. She was a rule-breaker and a rebel. Among the first Jewish women in Minneapolis to march for civil rights, she regularly hosted Black community leaders in her apartment and served them her own brand of soul food: blintzes, kugel, borscht, and mandelbrot. Everyone she touched — including me — was changed for the better. She’s the one who introduced me to the world’s greatest guitar teacher.
One Sunday afternoon, in the midst of a brilliant sun-shower, Lester Williams pulled up to our house in his pale-yellow Fleetwood Brougham. There’s little question that he was the first Black man to park a Cadillac on our block and walk to the door of a Jewish kid’s house for a guitar lesson.
It was Grandma Min’s idea. She’d seen Lester perform at a Hadassah luncheon, singing songs from Fiddler on the Roof with a big archtop Gibson and a tambourine balanced on his shoe. Afterwards, she asked if he’d teach me.
Lester, who was in his mid-70s at the time, wore a high-rise Don King hairdo and played in a style that was equal parts Texas blues and Yiddish theater. He taught me Sam Cooke’s ”You Send Me” and Lightning Hopkins riffs. When he sang, his eyes closed like he was singing for the Lord.
To this day, I’ve never opened my guitar case without thinking of Lester.
Back then, Jewish felt dorky; Black felt cool. In the early ’70s, a newly bar-mitzvahed kid playing funk and blues was an anomaly. Now, of course, the pop charts are built on it, but in the day it was the Eagles and Jethro Tull, not Kanye and Kendrick Lamar.
I was drawn to the groove and gravitas of Black music — Marvin Gaye, Curtis Mayfield, John Lee Hooker. It wasn’t only sound; it was a worldview. There was truth in that rhythm: sophisticated, sardonic, somehow sacred. It hovered between sex and Godliness. You could put a record on the stereo and feel righteous about reproducing the human species to it. To play that music, you had to become it, not just imitate it. I developed a lilting accent that slipped in naturally when I sang, like a thing that made down-in-the-bones sense. Every rock musician had done it in some form — Jagger, Van Morrison, the whole British Invasion.
It was a bridge to something larger, a way to escape the confines of white suburbia and begin what would become a lifelong expansion of my creative and spiritual boundaries. In retrospect, it may have been the first step on the path that led me to become an observant Jew.
Most of the kids around me seemed content inside their circumscribed worlds of hockey, keggers and Sadie Hawkins dances. I wanted to erase the margins someone else had drawn around my life. The times I could do that were rare, but they happened most powerfully when I was making music. It was then that the world lost its edges. The interplay between musicians could feel like one spirit inhabiting separate bodies. That’s how it felt when I first played with Wynston Robyns.
At my cousin Jeff’s house near Cedar Lake, we jammed in the basement — low ceiling, unused shuffleboard court in the floor, winter coats piled on the Ping-Pong table. Some older Black guys from the North Side brought their gear, a little weed, and some Ripple wine. I’d never tried Ripple before. I drank to excess.
Soon the room came alive: guitars tuned, reeds moistened, drums whacked, a few tentative chords tossed out. First rhythm, then flight. Jeff on the Fender Rhodes, me on guitar, all of us tearing it up. After an hour, the alto sax player, Jimmy, said, “You boys gotta meet Wynston Robyns.”
With Jeff’s parents away and my parents asleep and dreaming back at my house, we piled into Jimmy’s car and drove north, well past the safety of our suburb. By the time we reached Wynston’s place it was close to one in the morning. Dim light spilled from the basement windows, bass and drums rumbled from below. When Wynston finally opened the door, he filled its frame: barrel-chested, magnetic, with a half-smile suspended between welcome and menace.
We smoked more weed and played until God knows when. Some Stevie, some Lou Rawls. It was nearly dawn when Jeff and I became the new members of Wynston Robyns and Soul SearchLyte.
Rehearsals were constant — four nights a week, sometimes after school, sometimes before. Neither of us was old enough to have a driver’s license, so we took the city bus.
It took months for Soul SearchLyte to land just two gigs. The first was a corporate lunch my dad attended in a suit and tie. “Wynston seems like a really nice guy,” he said afterward, which was true…mostly. The second was New Year’s Eve at the Holiday Inn downtown. We were the “headliners,” scheduled for 1:00 a.m. — which everyone in the business knows means the time everybody has gone home to party. The real headliners went on at midnight. It was another North Side band, Champagne, featuring Morris Day, André Simone, and a diminutive guy with a large afro.
Jeff and I watched them in awe. André’s bass ran through a Mu-tron Funk Box that made every note sound like it came from the world’s best wah-wah. Morris Day’s drumming was tight, crisp, unstoppable. Wynston leaned toward me and shouted over the groove, “You see that guy? The way he chops out that rhythm? His name’s Prince. They say he’s got a record deal on Warners. Peter, that’s what you need to do if you wanna be more than just a basement guitar player.”
No offense to Soul SearchLyte, but Champagne was a brutal act to follow. By the time we went on at 3:00 a.m., only my Uncle Sonny and the bar staff were still around, mopping the floor while we played our hearts out.
A few weeks later, during rehearsal, our lead guitarist, Larry Crags, announced he was quitting.
“Wynston, I’m afraid I’m gonna have to leave the snap,” he said.
Wynston stared at him. “What the fuck did you just say?”
Larry shifted his weight. “My wife thinks it’s not a good idea — all this practice when we haven’t got any gigs lined up.”
Wynston stepped forward and jabbed his finger into Larry’s chest. “You sayin’ I’m not a man?”
It was strange. Larry hadn’t said anything of the sort.
Before Larry could answer, Wynston swung and caught him square in the face. Larry, who’d once told me in strictest confidence he was a Kung Fu master, fell hard, then rose, bloodied, into a fighting stance. Having been an ardent viewer of Kung Fu, the TV series, I waited for the mystical retaliation. It never came. Wynston hit him again, a clean right hook that sent him flying into my amplifier.
Larry crawled away, whimpering, up the stairs and out of the house. Jeff, maybe out of shock, started playing ”Rock-A-Bye Baby” on the high keys of his electric piano. From behind the drum kit someone said flatly, “Why don’t somebody shut off that amplifier?”
Wynston, panting hard, looked at me. “Peter, I suppose you wanna quit this snap too, since you’ve just seen a Black man beat up on a white dude.”
“No, Wynston,” I said. “I love being in this band.”
Hell yes, I did. I just became the lead guitarist.
Those nights in North Minneapolis — half teachable moment, half transcendence — were my first real taste of faith: the moment when music, spirit and belonging coalesced into one sound, one rhythm, one funky-ass pulse of Creation.
I’m positive Grandma Min would approve.
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In ‘Nuremberg,’ a potent warning about our current politics of denial
“You want to know why it happened here?” asks Howie Triest — a German Jew serving as a U.S. military translator — in the new film Nuremberg. “Because people let it happen. They didn’t stand up until it was too late.”
Triest’s words, as uttered by actor Leo Woodhall, serve as an implicit plea to the film’s contemporary audience: We must stand up against the advancing collapse of our own democracy, before it is too late. Dark resonances appear between scenes in the film and scenes unfolding in today’s United States.
As Hermann Göring, the highest-ranking Nazi not to commit suicide at the war’s end — that is, until after his sentencing — Russell Crowe gives us a deposed and vainglorious charmer still able to exert something of his vanished power, even from his specially constructed prison. And, as in life, the Reichmarschall has a remarkable ability to evade and deflect: He is proud of the work he did for the German people and would do it again, but claims that once the war started, he knew nothing about what went on in the concentration camps — and nor did Adolf Hitler.
Today, Göring’s various lines of defense are striking as the ur-text for Holocaust deniers, as well as for contemporary leaders who strive everyday to re-write reality by lying about it. It is impossible to hear his arguments and not be struck by parallels to the rhetorical devices we see all around us now.
Göring’s arguments relied heavily on “what-aboutism”: He argued many other countries, including the U.S., had also committed crimes against civilian populations. The Nazis were no different. Likewise, President Donald Trump and his defenders have turned to “what-aboutism” over and over. Did Trump refuse to return classified documents upon leaving office after his first term? What about Hillary Clinton’s 33,000 deleted emails? Insurrection on January 6 ? What about the Black Lives Matter protests? Family-separation policy? Well, Barack Obama’s administration built the cages.
Such comparisons serve to obfuscate vast differences in intent and magnitude. They also erode the very idea that justice exists, or should exist.
The Nuremberg trials marked the first time that individuals — not states — were held criminally responsible for war crimes under international law. They shaped the development of modern international criminal law and institutions such as the International Criminal Court in the Hague — a court that Trump has repeatedly described as illegitimate. They uphold the idea that nothing, including extreme nationalism, is a defense for orchestrated violence against civilians.
But the Nuremberg trials also marked the first time that, under oath, leaders adopted the excuse that they had no concept of, or power over, the injustice executed on their watch. The Nazi leaders in the dock at Nuremberg all claimed, in some way or another, that they did not know of and were not responsible for the fate of the Jews, or anyone else who fell victim to their pitiless brutality. In the film as in life, those claims caused chief prosecutor Robert Jackson (Michael Shannon) to summarize their testimony this way: “While there have been enormous crimes, there are no criminals.”
A similar phenomenon was on display earlier this year in the Oval Office, when Trump hosted Salvadorean president Nayib Bukele. Trump’s administration had just deported more than 200 chained and shackled immigrants, many with no criminal record, to an El Salvador prison made infamous by sadistic videos produced by Bukele and copied by Homeland Security head Kristi Noem.
One prisoner, Kilmar Armando Ábrego Garcia, gained particular attention after it was revealed he had mistakenly been deported in violation of a federal immigration judge’s order barring his removal to his native country. Attorney General Pam Bondi and Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller argued, without evidence, that two judges had declared Ábrego Garcia a member of the MS-13 gang.
And when Bukele visited for an Oval Office meeting, the administration’s line was clear: they did not have the power to return Ábrego Garcia. His fate, in the words of Miller, was at the “sole discretion of El Salvador.”
Heads turned to the Salvadorean president, who smiled enigmatically. “How could I smuggle a terrorist into the United States?” Bukele asked. “Of course, I’m not going to do it. The question is preposterous.”
And the situation was indeed preposterous. No one, it seemed, was responsible for Ábrego Garcia’s fate. (Ábrego Garcia was eventually returned to the U.S. in June; the Trump administration is still trying to deport him.)
There have been many previous comparisons between Trump’s government and Hitler’s. Many have focused, including in the Forward, on Hitler’s first year in power, when Hitler hollowed out the civil service and re-stocked its ranks with loyalists; cracked down on the media, the universities, the judiciary, and the military; and began a campaign of horror in which Germans began to see their neighbors brutally arrested and imprisoned.
Crucially, the seeds of Göring’s Nuremberg defense were present at that time as well. Hitler and his top men characterized all reports of their barbarity as false, exaggerations spread by foreign enemies and a hostile media. Such evasions, too, are in abundant supply today.
After only two months in power, the Nazis made it illegal to protest or oppose them in any way. The Trump administration has taken frightening steps in the same direction. After several lawmakers who served in the military or the intelligence community this week posted a video in which they spoke directly to U.S. service members, urging them to uphold the Constitution and to defy “illegal orders” amid the Trump administration’s promise to send the National Guard “and more” into democratic-leaning cities, Trump posted on social media that the video constituted “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH.”
Miller added that the video represented “insurrection — plainly, directly, without question.”
Nuremberg is based on the life of psychiatrist Douglas Kelley (Rami Malek), whose encounters with Göring form the core of the film. After the trials, Kelley wrote that he found the Nazi leaders to be by and large “commonplace people whose personalities could be duplicated in any country of the world today.” They were responding, as people always will, to the opportunities presented by serving a corrupt leader, one whose only demand is fealty.
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Trump says he and Mamdani ‘didn’t discuss’ NYC mayor-elect’s vow to arrest Netanyahu during congenial meeting
(JTA) — Donald Trump and Zohran Mamdani covered a lot of ground in their highly anticipated meeting at the White House Friday afternoon, discussing agenda items such as housing and affordability.
One topic that apparently did not come up, however, was Mamdani’s vow to arrest Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu should he step foot in New York City once Mamdani takes over as mayor on January 1.
“We didn’t discuss the second part of your question,” Trump told a reporter following the private meeting, referring to a question about whether he would stop Mamdani from arresting Netanyahu.
Mamdani’s promise to arrest Netanyahu is on the basis of an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court, to which the United States is not a party. Later, when asked about Mamdani’s frequent references to following international law, Trump deflected the question, saying, “I don’t know what you’re referring to in terms of, it could be covered by international law, local laws, it’s covered by a lot laws, it’s covered by U.S. law,” and ultimately allowed Mamdani to answer.
“I think what I’ve shared with the president is our desire to not only follow the laws of our own city, laws that protect New Yorkers, but also desire for consistency in our politics across the board,” Mamdani said.
The mayor-elect’s promise to arrest Netanyahu is seen as an area that could lead to conflict between the president, who considers Netanyahu an ally, and the New York City mayor-elect, who accuses Netanyahu of committing a genocide.
But there was little conflict Friday afternoon during a meeting that was viewed as crucial in ensuring that New York City retains federal funding that Trump has threatened to cut and that Mamdani can get the security clearance typically afforded to mayors.
Trump was effusive in his praise of Mamdani, who like him rose to power on populist sentiment and after overcoming traditionalists in their party. He called Mamdani “hopefully a really great mayor,” and the overall dynamic between the two leaders was chummy despite their political differences and name-calling in the lead-up to the mayoral election.
Trump has referred to Mamdani as “my little communist,” while Mamdani has called Trump a “despot” — a position he was asked about again Friday, and which Trump brushed aside.
Mamdani was asked multiple times about his accusations that Trump is a “fascist,” initially answering that “President Trump and I, we are very clear about our positions and our views.” When asked again, Mamdani began answering the question indirectly, before Trump let him off the hook with an easy out.
“That’s OK, you can just say yes,” Trump said, patting Mamdani on the arm and laughing. “It’s easier than explaining.”
“I’ve been called a lot worse than despot,” Trump also said.
Trump and Mamdani addressed questions on issues including Israel’s war in Gaza and Jewish safety in the city, following a half-hour meeting closed to the press.
“I think you feel very, very strongly about peace in the Middle East,” Trump said to Mamdani, answering a question about the region.
Mamdani replied that he’d asked Trump voters in New York why they voted for the president, and one answer he’d hear repeatedly was: “They wanted an end to forever wars. They wanted an end to the taxpayer dollars we have funding violations of human rights.”
Mamdani was later asked about his accusations that the U.S. government was committing genocide. The mayor-elect corrected the reporter, saying, “I’ve spoken about the Israeli government committing genocide, and I’ve spoken about our government funding it.”
He continued, “And I shared with the president in our meeting about the concern that many New Yorkers have of wanting their tax dollars to go to the benefit of New Yorkers, and their ability to afford basic dignity.”
The meeting came one day after a protest outside an Upper East Side synagogue that was holding an event promoting immigration to Israel drew condemnations; Mamdani’s spokesperson said he “discouraged” the language used in the protest, but suggested the event was a misuse of the “sacred space.”
A question about Jewish safety was asked immediately after the press conference concluded, which Mamdani stuck around to answer, though he did not address Thursday’s protest.
“I care very deeply about Jewish safety and I look forward to rooting out antisemitism across the five boroughs and protecting Jewish New Yorkers and every New Yorker who calls the city home,” Mamdani said.
Trump praised Mamdani’s decision to keep Jessica Tisch, who comes from a prominent Jewish family, as his police commissioner.
“He just retained a great police commissioner,” Trump said. “He retained I think somebody that is a friend of some people in my family, Ivanka, and they say she’s really good, really competent.”
While Mamdani’s appointment of Tisch has reassured some Jewish New Yorkers concerned about the community’s safety, others more critical of Mamdani were not swayed.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, who is running for governor as a Republican, has positioned herself as a bulwark against antisemitism who will prevent Mamdani from achieving the state legislative wins necessary for his democratic socialist agenda.
But Trump appeared to undercut Stefanik, disagreeing with her claim that Mamdani is a “jihadist.”
“No, I don’t,” Trump said, when asked if he believed he was seated next to a jihadist on Friday. “But she’s out there campaigning. You say things sometimes in a campaign.”
Praising Stefanik, he said, “She’s a very capable person.” Then he said about Mamdani, “I met with a very rational person. I met with a man who really wants to see New York be great again.”
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