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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.”

—
The post Embracing their place on ‘the fringes,’ queer artists reimagine Jewish ritual garments for all bodies appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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The BBC Tried to Blame Israel — but Exposed Hezbollah Instead

Men carry Hezbollah flags while riding on two wheelers, at the entrance of Beirut’s southern suburbs, in Lebanon, Nov. 27, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Thaier Al-Sudani

It is well established that Hezbollah has not only turned southern Lebanon into a base for terrorism targeting Israel but also embedded itself deep within Beirut’s civilian suburbs.

Yet when the BBC reports from those same areas, it appears determined to obscure that reality.

That may not be surprising. As HonestReporting previously documented, Hezbollah tightly controls access and information available to foreign journalists. What reporters see — and therefore what international audiences are shown — is often filtered through Hezbollah’s interests.

When a Sky News crew reported from Lebanon earlier this year, journalists openly acknowledged the restrictions imposed on them. Hezbollah limited where they could go and what they could film following Israeli airstrikes, likely to conceal evidence of terrorist activity.

So, when BBC reporters arrive in Lebanon two months later and somehow fail to find evidence of Hezbollah’s presence, it is hardly coincidental.

The “BBC traces how 10 minutes of Israeli bombing brought devastation to Lebanon” investigation attempts to portray Israel as deliberately targeting Lebanese civilians. But the report itself repeatedly undermines that narrative.

The very case study the BBC highlights gives the game away.

In Beirut’s Hay el Sellom suburb, a BBC journalist interviews Mohammed, whose son Abbas was killed in an Israeli airstrike on an apartment building in April 2026.

Mohammed claims that, had he known Hezbollah operatives were nearby, he would have left. But that admission directly undermines the BBC’s broader framing. It reinforces the reality that Israel’s operations are linked to Hezbollah’s presence, not random or indiscriminate attacks against civilians.

Another interviewee claims Israel is bombing Lebanon in an attempt to “take over” the country. Yet the report’s own details point to something else entirely: a campaign directed at Hezbollah infrastructure and operatives in an effort to restore security along Israel’s northern border.

According to the IDF, the April 8 strikes that reportedly killed Abbas also targeted more than 250 Hezbollah terrorists.

Ironically, while touring the suburb, the BBC journalist also filmed martyr posters of Ali Mohammed Ghulam Dahini, reportedly killed in the same strikes — corroborating Israeli media reports identifying him as a Hezbollah operative.

Yet the BBC still avoids acknowledging the obvious implication: these strikes were targeting Hezbollah personnel embedded within civilian areas.

Civilian deaths in war are tragic. But tragedy alone does not determine intent.

Under the laws of armed conflict, counterterrorism operations require assessing proportionality — weighing anticipated military advantage against potential civilian harm. In each example highlighted by the BBC, evidence of Hezbollah’s presence at the strike locations is difficult to ignore.

The report itself notes that Mohammed expressed support for Hezbollah in Arabic-language interviews, praising the group for “defending Lebanon.” But Lebanon would not require “defending” from repeated wars had Hezbollah not transformed civilian neighborhoods into military infrastructure.

The BBC acknowledges that Mohammed gave pro-Hezbollah views when speaking to local media. Yet Mohammed presents himself differently to international English-speaking audiences. That discrepancy raises an obvious question: why?

The answer may lie even closer to home.

Investigative journalist David Collier revealed that Mohammed’s son, Abbas Khair al-Din, was himself affiliated with Hezbollah, citing martyr posters and Hezbollah imagery at his grave.

Had the BBC acknowledged these Hezbollah ties, its central framing — that Israel was recklessly targeting civilians — would have become far more difficult to sustain.

This is not the first time the BBC has minimized or erased Hezbollah’s presence in Lebanon.

By omitting Hezbollah’s systematic use of civilian infrastructure, the outlet constructs a narrative in which responsibility falls almost exclusively on Israel while Hezbollah’s role fades into the background.

Most remarkably, despite the evidence presented throughout the report, the BBC still repeats Hezbollah’s denial that it embeds itself among civilians.

The contradiction is striking: the BBC’s own reporting repeatedly points to Hezbollah activity within civilian areas, yet the outlet still amplifies Hezbollah’s denials with minimal scrutiny.

Not all Lebanese civilians support Hezbollah. But the BBC’s inability — or unwillingness — to feature meaningful Lebanese criticism of the terrorist organization reveals how selective the report truly is.

Hezbollah has effectively held Lebanon hostage, exploiting civilians while dragging the country into repeated cycles of conflict.

There is genuine dissent within Lebanon. Many Lebanese are exhausted by Hezbollah’s dominance and want a future free from perpetual war. Yet those voices are almost entirely absent from the BBC’s report.

The BBC intended its report to portray Israel as conducting a campaign against Lebanese civilians.

Instead, it inadvertently documented something else entirely: Hezbollah’s deep entrenchment within civilian infrastructure.

The report repeatedly presents evidence of Hezbollah activity, Hezbollah support, and Hezbollah-linked individuals in the very locations Israel targeted — while simultaneously attempting to deny or downplay the implications.

When media outlets obscure Hezbollah’s use of civilian areas, they do more than distort the story. They sanitize the conditions Hezbollah itself created.

And in this case, the BBC’s own reporting ultimately undermines the narrative it set out to build.

The author is a contributor to HonestReporting, a Jerusalem-based media watchdog with a focus on antisemitism and anti-Israel bias — where a version of this article first appeared.

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Miss Israel Melanie Shiraz Says Mamdani’s Wife Snubbed Her Because She’s From Jewish State

Melanie Shiraz being crowned Miss Israel 2025. Photo: Simon Soong | Edgar Entertainment

Melanie Shiraz, who represented Israel in the 2025 Miss Universe pageant, said on Wednesday that the wife of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani refused to take a photograph with her because the beauty queen is from the Jewish state.

Shiraz posted on Instagram a video that features a short clip of herself with Rama Duwaji, the first lady of New York City. The Israel native said in the video’s voice-over that she met Mamdani’s wife by chance in a coffee shop in New York City and the two sat next to each other. Duwaji was willing to take a photo with the beauty queen “until she found out that I was Miss Israel; until I told her that as an Israeli, I was disappointed in seeing the kind of rhetoric she was promoting online,” Shiraz said.

“I told her as part of my ideology as an Israeli is to have productive dialogue in which not one side is constantly dehumanized. But despite that, despite the setting being calm, the moment she found out I was Israeli, she refused to have a conversation with me,” continued the graduate of the University of California, Berkeley.

“If you can publicly apologize for dehumanizing Israelis, but you can’t get yourself to humanize one when you come face-to-face with them in real life, what does that say about you and what does that say about the state of our politics considering that is the wife of the mayor of New York City?” Shiraz added.

A Texas-born illustrator with Syrian roots, Duwaji has previously uploaded or “liked” numerous anti-Israel posts on social media. She has also “liked” several online posts that celebrated the deadly Hamas-led terrorist attack against Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, and even defended the largest single-day massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, describing it as Palestinian “resistance.”

It was discovered that Duwaji shared social media posts praising female Palestinian terrorists who participated in plane hijackings and bombings in the 1960s and early 1970s. In 2015, she shared a post in which someone else wrote that Tel Aviv was occupying Palestinian land and “shouldn’t exist.” Duwaji also illustrated an essay co-edited by a Palestinian-American activist author who described the Oct. 7 attack as “spectacular” and called Jewish Israelis “rootless soulless ghouls.”

In April, Duwaji apologized for “harmful” social media posts she made as a teenager, which included anti-gay and anti-Black language, but did not directly address her more recent anti-Israel social media activity.

Mamdani, who has faced his own share of criticism for anti-Israel comments and actions, has previously defended his wife by saying she is a “private person.”

In the caption of her Instagram video, Shiraz said she was “not particularly” surprised by her interaction with Duwaji at the coffee shop in New York City.

“It is easy to apologize without meaningfully changing one’s behavior,” Shiraz explained. “It is easy to claim opposition to dehumanization in principle, but far more difficult to embody that in practice. She was polite throughout. But the shift in demeanor was evident, and the lack of willingness to engage even more so.”

“I approached the interaction with openness to a genuine, respectful conversation. That openness was not reciprocated,” Shiraz added. “And that, perhaps, is the more telling point: how often this disconnect appears, and how normalized it has become.”

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Rubio Questions Allies’ Support on Iran Following Italy Talks

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio speaks to the press at the US Embassy in Rome, Italy on May 8, 2026. Photo: STEFANO RELLANDINI/Pool via REUTERS

US Secretary of State Marco Rubio met Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni on Friday and afterwards questioned why allies including Italy were not backing Washington’s efforts to confront Iran and re-open the Strait of Hormuz.

“I don’t understand why anybody would not be supportive,” Rubio told reporters, adding that countries needed “something more than just strongly worded statements” if they opposed Iran‘s actions.

Rubio was wrapping up a two-day trip aimed at easing ties with Pope Leo after attacks on the pontiff by President Donald Trump, while also addressing Washington’s frustration over Italy‘s refusal to support the US-Israeli war on Iran.

Meloni had been one of Trump’s firmest allies in Europe, cultivating close ties with him and presenting herself as a natural bridge between Washington and other EU states that had no natural political affinity with the Republican US leader.

But that alignment has come under increasing strain in recent months, as the Iran war has forced her to balance loyalty to the United States against Italian public animosity to the war and the growing economic cost of the conflict.

Meloni and Rubio met for 1-1/2 hours, in what she described in a post on social media platform X as “an extensive and constructive discussion,” saying the talks included the Middle East, Libya, and the peace processes in Lebanon and Ukraine.

“It was a frank dialogue between allies who defend their own national interests while fully recognizing the value of western unity,” Meloni said.

Rubio declined to give full details. However, he warned that Tehran’s claim to control access to Hormuz risked setting a dangerous precedent.

“The fundamental question every country, not just Italy … needs to ask themselves is, are you going to normalize a country claiming to control an international waterway? Because if you normalize that, you’ve set a precedent that’s going to get repeated in a dozen other places,” he said.

‘THE UNITED STATES NEEDS EUROPE AND ITALY‘

Italy and other European allies have said they would be willing to help keep the strait open once there was a lasting ceasefire or the conflict ends, but have refused to be drawn into direct confrontation with Iran.

Before seeing Meloni, Rubio met Italy‘s Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani, who said he hoped the visit had helped calm tensions with the United States.

“I am convinced Europe needs America, Italy needs America, but also that the United States needs Europe and Italy,” Tajani told reporters.

Besides the war in the Gulf, Meloni and Rubio had also been expected to discuss Russia’s war on Ukraine, US tariffs on European goods, and the outlook for Cuba, which Washington is seeking to isolate both diplomatically and economically.

The Italians were also keen for a readout on Rubio‘s meetings at the Vatican. Trump’s recent attacks on Pope Leo crossed a sensitive line in overwhelmingly Catholic Italy and prompted Meloni to call them “unacceptable.”

Her criticism in turn drew a sharp rebuke from Trump, who said she lacked courage. He subsequently threatened to withdraw US troops from Italy.

Rubio said he didn’t get into specifics about US bases, saying it was a decision for Trump to make.

Italy last month refused to allow US aircraft to use the Sigonella air base in Sicily for combat operations linked to the Iran conflict. Italian officials said Washington had not sought prior authorization from Rome for the use of the site.

Rubio did not mention this incident, but pointed to Spain’s decision not to allow its bases or airspace to be used to attack Iran. He said one of the main attractions of NATO for the US was to have forces in Europe that could be swiftly deployed elsewhere.

“Now that’s no longer the case, at least when it comes to some NATO members, that’s a problem and has to be examined,” he said.

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