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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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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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US Lawmaker Introduces Bill to Deport Immigrants With Extremist Ideologies

US Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) leaves the House Republican Conference caucus meeting in the US Capitol on April 15, 2026. Photo: Bill Clark/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect

US Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX) has introduced sweeping legislation aimed at expanding the federal government’s authority to deport, denaturalize, deny US citizenship, and refuse entry to immigrants tied to extremist ideologies, including socialism, communism, and Islamic fundamentalism.

The legislation, titled the MAMDANI Act, short for Measures Against Marxism’s Dangerous Adherents and Noxious Islamists, is a direct political reference to New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and what conservatives describe as a growing alliance between far-left anti-Israel activism and Islamist extremism.

Mamdani, a far-left democratic socialist and avowed anti-Zionist, has made anti-Israel activism a cornerstone of his political career and been widely accused of promoting antisemitic rhetoric.

In a statement, Roy argued that the legislation would increase the government’s capability to filter out potential immigrants with anti-American, anti-Western ideologies.

“Not just for the last six years, but for the last 60 years, our immigration system has been cynically used to disadvantage American workers’ competitiveness in favor of mass-importing the third world,” Roy added. “This has not just led to higher crime and lower wages, but also the promulgation of hostile ideologies fundamentally opposed to American values.”

Roy said the bill is intended to confront what he called a “Red-Green Alliance” between far-left and Islamist extremists that has fueled antisemitism, anti-American radicalism, and support for terrorist organizations under the guise of progressive politics.

“By targeting the Red-Green Alliance, this legislation deploys new tools to fight back against the Marxist and Islamist advance that has devastated Europe and has now arrived on our doorstep, especially in my home state of Texas,” Roy continued. 

Under the proposal, non-citizens affiliated with socialist parties, communist parties, the Chinese Communist Party, or organizations deemed to promote Islamic fundamentalism could be denied entry or deported. The bill would also expand grounds for denying naturalization and, in some cases, allow denaturalization for individuals found to have concealed ideological affiliations or to be actively advocating for violent anti-democratic movements.

Supporters of the bill argue that the measure is necessary amid rising antisemitic incidents across the United States following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, amid the ensuing war in Gaza. They point to pro-Hamas rhetoric on some college campuses and among far-left activist circles as evidence that immigration enforcement should include stronger scrutiny of extremist ideological affiliations.

In recent years, conservatives have drawn attention to the massive surge in antisemitic protests on American soil, pointing to an increase of foreign migration as the culprit. In the immediate aftermath of the Oct. 7 slaughters in Israel, protests erupted on US campuses and streets. Many of these demonstrations, many of which devolved into riots, were spearheaded by either foreign nationals or recent migrants from the Middle East or southeast Asia.

US Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines warned in 2024 that “actors tied to Iran’s government” have encouraged and provided financial support to many of these protests.

Critics, however, say Roy’s legislation raises serious constitutional concerns, particularly around First Amendment protections, religious liberty, and due process rights. Civil liberties advocates have warned that broad ideological tests for citizenship or deportation could be vulnerable to court challenges and used too broadly against political dissent.

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Orthodox Jews Harassed in Brooklyn as Antisemitic Hate Crimes Surge in New York City Under Mamdani

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani delivers a speech during his inauguration ceremony in New York City, US, Jan. 1, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Kylie Cooper

Multiple videos which emerged this week captured in vivid detail the surge of antisemitic hate crimes that have proliferated under New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s leadership.

On Monday, Williamsburg News shared a 36-second video depicting two young males riding bicycles on Williamsburg Street & Lee Avenue in Brooklyn. The first swerves his bike in front of an elderly Jewish man, leading the victim to turn and address his assailant. Then the second perpetrator comes from behind on his bike and knocks off the Jewish man’s black hat.

Officers from the New York City Police Department (NYPD)’s 90th precinct responded to the assault and opened a hate crime investigation.

Also on Monday, the Boro Park Shomrim, a Jewish organization that monitors antisemitism and also serves as a neighborhood watch group, released a 37-second clip of young males driving a white SUV into a crosswalk before stopping to address a Jewish man with payot wearing traditional Hasidic attire. He begins to walk away, provoking a teenager in the back seat to leap out, chase after him, and yell, “Come here! Come here!”

An individual sitting in the front seat’s passenger side applauds the act of intimidation before the young man rushes back into the SUV which speeds away, tires squealing.

While evidence of these antisemitic incidents emerged from security footage, the perpetrators of a separate incident from last week chose to film their harassment targeting a Jewish pizzeria proprietor themselves.

Operatives of the so-called Palestine News Network (PNN) conducted one of their pseudo-interviews of Isaac Garson, owner of Slices Pizza in Hastings-on-Hudson, a community roughly 20 miles north of New York City.

The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) describes the group’s modus operandi of choreographed hostility, explaining that members “have a history of entering neighborhoods with significant Jewish populations, or approaching those attending Jewish or Israel-related events, where they shoot videos that walk the line between ‘interview’ and provocation.”

The 47-second video appears in a vertical format, indicating filming on a phone. In the lower right corner, the video bears a red and white PNN logo intended as a parody of the traditional CNN logo. Garson emerges from the restaurant, gestures his hands, and says, “I’m going to be calm. I want peace around the world.”

The man filming the encounter then goads, “What about Palestine? Can you say Palestine, specifically?”

The video cuts to footage of a man outside the restaurant who appears to be affiliated with PNN and carries a fractured placard that says, “End US AID to Israel.” However, the word “Israel” was originally at the bottom of the sign but snapped off, requiring the activist to carry along the broken piece to complete his political proclamation.

The next 20 seconds of the video focus on the men harassing a woman wearing a black baseball cap and black sunglasses walking by on the sidewalk. They demand to know “what’s your opinion?” The video cuts off her answer and jumps to them insulting her as “a textbook case of white mediocrity. Mediocre aesthetics, no stances, this is what we call ‘white mediocrity.’ You’re a shining example of mediocrity.”

The woman, taken aback by being insulted by eccentric activists carrying a dilapidated sign on the street, says, “Oh. Well, that’s also your opinion.”

The conclusion of the video returns to Garson, who asks the men: “What happened to Israel in 1948?”

The cameraman then yells, “Oh, it came out! It came out!”

Garson asks, “What happened?”

The cameraman then chants proudly, “The Nakba! The Nakba!”

The Arabic term “Nakba” translates as “catastrophe,” and anti-Zionists regularly deploy it to signify the founding of the modern State of Israel. In 2023, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas issued a decree defining the “Nakba” as “the crime against humanity committed against the Palestinian people in 1948.”

Garson then asks in the video: “How many people were killed on Oct. 7?” referring to the Palestinian terrorist group’s 2023 invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.

The cameraman shoots back, “We support Oct. 7!”

Beginning to walk back into his restaurant, Garson says, “OK, great, you support a murder.”

Hastings-on-Hudson Mayor Tom Drake released a statement on Wednesday condemning PNN’s harassment.

“I am sorry that this type of conduct has reached our amazing and tolerant village,” Drake said. “Today, the strength exhibited by our friend and business owner, who I have been in communication with, makes me proud to be your mayor and do everything to support our businesses and residents, even when faced with such a gross display of hate.”

Drake added, “As a community, we cannot let stickers placed on signs or other forms of hate become normal. While they may seem small in some cases, they are intended to cause fear and intimidation. These actions have targeted a specific population of our village, and I urge all Hastings residents to join me in condemning such actions of hate and come together and support one another.”

The ADL names the leaders of PNN as Ramsey Aburdene and David Wolf, explaining they chose to found the group following the Oct. 7, 2023, terrorist attacks in southern Israel. Aburdene says that he has urged people for years to “stop condemning Hamas.”

Wolf is Jewish and described by the ADL as “an extreme anti-Zionist” who “had his Star of David tattooed over with a Palestinian flag.”

PNN has amassed more than 100,000 followers on the X social media platform and has seen its videos shared by prominent anti-Zionist influencers such as British rapper Lowkey and “anti-imperialist journalist” Benjamin Rubenstein.

The incidents come amid continued criticism and scrutiny over the Mamdani administration’s approach to countering antisemitism.

Earlier this month, NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch revealed that “confirmed hate crimes increased nearly 12 percent this quarter citywide. We continue to see that the vast majority of our hate crimes are antisemitic in nature.”

Tisch added that “in fact, in the first quarter of 2026, more than half of all confirmed hate crimes, or 55 percent, were antisemitic, despite Jews only making up approximately 10 percent of the population of New York City.”

Mamdani assumed office on Jan. 1.

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‘Another Holocaust’: Netanyahu Tells Bereaved Families on Memorial Day of Iran Plot to Destroy Israel

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu attends the opening event for the Memorial Day at the Yad LaBanim House in Jerusalem, April 20, 2026. Photo: Marc Israel Sellem/Pool via REUTERS

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the Holocaust during a Memorial Day ceremony in Jerusalem on Tuesday, saying joint US-Israeli strikes on Iran had prevented the regime from carrying out its genocidal vision. 

“The Ayatollah regime in Iran planned another Holocaust. It plotted to destroy us with nuclear bombs and thousands of ballistic missiles,” he said at the state ceremony for fallen soldiers at Mount Herzl military cemetery. “Had we not acted against the existential threat, had we not acted with determination and daring, the names of the death sites Natanz, Fordow, Isfahan might have joined the names of the death camps of the Holocaust: Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka.”

“But that did not happen because together with our great friend, the United States, we crushed the Iranian regime’s machinery of destruction in time,” he said. “We removed an immediate existential threat.”

Netanyahu ended by saluting wounded soldiers and bereaved families. “May the memory of the fallen of Israel’s wars be blessed and kept in our hearts forever,” he said.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wearing the Tefillin of IDF Golani Brigade Fighter First Sgt. Sean Carmeli, who fell in the 2014 war with Gaza. Photo: Ma’ayan Toaf (GPO)

The national Memorial Day, known as Yom Hazikaron, came as Iran poured cold water on the notion of extending the ceasefire, saying it would not send officials to Islamabad to continue negotiations with the US.  

Meanwhile, a second ceasefire brokered by US President Donald Trump with Iran’s Lebanese proxy Hezbollah was also poised to be tested, as rocket sirens sounded toward evening in northern Israeli communities near the border with Lebanon.

At a separate Memorial Day ceremony for fallen Mossad personnel, intelligence agency chief David Barnea disclosed that one of the service’s operatives was killed during the war with Iran.

The officer, whose identity remains under gag order, had served in the agency for more than three decades, Barnea said, adding that he was “filled with pride” by his actions.

“There is no other day during the year that is as difficult for us, for me, as Memorial Day for Israel’s fallen,” Barnea said, tracing a line from the defenders of the pre-state Jewish community to the soldiers fighting since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel. He said the obligation to defend the country had passed from generation to generation, with each cohort choosing to shoulder it anew.

Other commemorations took place outside the state ceremonies. On Memorial Day eve, OneFamily, a nonprofit that supports victims of terrorism and bereaved families, held a gathering centered on personal testimony.

The evening was led by two bereaved mothers, Liat Smadja and Laly Derai, whose sons were killed in the same explosion in Gaza in June 2024.

Smadja, who serves in the reserves as a casualty notifier, described the cruel inversion of learning that the task she performs for other families had come to her own door.

“I have the job of knocking on doors and delivering the worst possible news, one that changes a family’s life forever,” she said. “And then the message came for me as well.”

In Israel, “the knock on the door” has become a traumatic shorthand for one of the most feared moments in public life, the arrival of military representatives to tell a family that a loved one has been killed.

Derai said the families had forged a bond that cut across their different backgrounds.

“We come from different worlds and different backgrounds. Since [their death], we are one family, connected by something deep and unbreakable.”

Two days earlier, Derai had attended a weekend for bereaved families organized by OneFamily, spending the run-up to Memorial Day among others carrying the same loss.

Yigal Tamam, whose son Adir and daughter-in-law Shiraz were murdered on their way to the Nova music festival during the Oct. 7 attack, was also there.

As rocket fire erupted early in the morning that day, the couple pulled over and ran into a roadside bomb shelter, where they were killed by Hamas terrorists who threw grenades inside. The two were survived by their young daughters. 

“I’m breathing but I’m not alive,” Tamam said over the weekend.

He said he breaks down when he thinks about his grandchildren, Goshen, 10, and Gili, 8, growing up without their parents.

OneFamily founder Chantal Belzberg is set to receive the Israel Prize for lifetime achievement, a rare national award granted by the state for outstanding contributions to Israeli society, presented on Independence Day, which follows Memorial Day.

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