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Jewish drag performers inspire a history of the art form in New York
(New York Jewish Week) — In the 1960s, a drag queen named Flawless Sabrina arrived in New York City during a time when drag performances were not only stigmatized in mainstream society, but within LGBTQ circles as well.
But Flawless Sabrina had a plan: Her welcoming demeanor — which she described as a “bar mitzvah mother” — helped her popularize the art form, and over the next few decades she became one of the country’s first well-known drag performers, a prominent LGBTQ activist and a mentor to young queer New Yorkers.
The person behind the drag, the activism and the inspiration was Jack Doroshow, a Jewish boy from Philadelphia who organized his first drag pageant in 1959 as a freshman at the University of Pennsylvania.
Doroshow’s death in late 2017, at age 78, prompted writer Elyssa Maxx Goodman to think seriously about how to document the history of drag in New York City, a lifelong passion of hers. After more than five years of work, her debut book, “Glitter and Concrete: A Cultural History of Drag in New York City,” is out this week.
Goodman told the New York Jewish Week that it was her Jewish upbringing that made her particularly attuned to recording the stories of these artists and performers over the last 150 years.
“One of the things we learn about as Jews from very young is how our stories either were destroyed or faced many attempts at destruction. That’s something that I kind of took with me throughout my life,” Goodman, 34, told the New York Jewish Week. “I wanted to preserve the stories that aren’t being preserved, which is how I approached my relationship to drag history.”
The New York Jewish Week caught up with Goodman ahead of her book’s launch to talk about how her childhood, New York City and her cultural Jewish identity inspired the book.
This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.
The 2021 Drag March at Tompkins Square Park, 27 years after its first iteration in 1994. (Elyssa Maxx Goodman)
What inspired you to write this book?
What pushed me to write this book was that it didn’t exist and it was a book I wanted to read. When the very famous New York drag queen Flawless Sabrina, who was also Jewish, passed away in November 2017, I wanted to make sure that there were no stories that got lost. I started to think about what other books had been written that chronicle the life of drag artists in New York City. There wasn’t a book that was really a written-through history. I knew that these artists deserve that and I wanted to make sure that their stories are remembered. That was definitely the driving force in wanting to do the book.
I first was exposed to drag when I was about 7 years old. I saw the movie “To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar” and I was taken with it ever since then. I had grown up watching 1950s movie musicals with my mother, which were these very vibrant technicolor explosions with lots of swirling dresses and beautiful costumes. Drag is a natural extension of that. So for me, at first, it was just another phase of that interest in costume design and glamor. As I got older, I learned more about the very powerful, rebellious nature of drag and how it is a force to be reckoned with on its own, as an art form and as a life force. What can draw you in is the glamour, but as you get older what keeps you there — at least what kept me there — is the appreciation for its spirit of “Glamour as Resistance,” as the artist Justin Vivian Bond says.
How is your Jewish identity or upbringing connected to your interest in drag?
My relationship to Judaism is deeply cultural — that’s the way that I connect to it most strongly. The first people who brought me to a drag show in real life were my parents and throughout my life, they encouraged my interest in drag.
Everything that we learn about ourselves as a culture, whether it is intentional or not, comes through in creating a book like this, or at least it did for me. We’re taught to question — I arrived at this place because I questioned why the book didn’t exist. Then I just kept asking questions: Where did this come from? Why don’t people know about it? How can I teach it to them? The desire for knowledge and desire for education are all things that I took from Judaism.
The Jewish drag artists I encountered in the book, among them Jack Doroshow, aka Flawless Sabrina, as well as Harvey Fierstein and a drag king named Buddy Kent all came from backgrounds where, in some way or another, they had to fight to be themselves. In some ways, that was fighting to take up space as a Jewish person and in other ways as a queer person. For all of them, it was both. The book contains selections of stories about making space for yourself in the world and the way that you want to live in it — I think that that is something that a lot of Jews had to reckon with as they came to this country in a multitude of ways.
Why did you choose to focus only on the drag history in New York?
New York is one of the cultural epicenters of the world. Because it holds all these different kinds of cultures, it draws the people who are drawn to that. That includes drag artists. There’s amazing drag in other cities, but New York is the city that I know best and it has a history all its own.
It’s also the place that I have the most personal connection to. I’m from South Florida originally and I went to my first drag shows in South Florida, but the drag histories that I learned growing up came from New York. So I moved to New York in July 2010. My primary motivation for moving to New York was to be a writer and to be able to easily access all of the things that I wanted to write about, and drag certainly was one of them. There were these deep-seated histories that had been a passion of mine for a very long time and I wanted to keep telling those stories and learning those stories. New York was a place where I wanted to make myself a student as well as to share my knowledge.
Drag performing has been a major target of right-wing circles this year — as someone who has been involved with and written about the community, how do you respond to the backlash?
I do see it as an opportunity for people to learn more about it. Like I mentioned, drag has been an art form for thousands of years. It’s at least as old as the history of theater. The people who do it are artists and deserve to be respected in such a way. My hope is that with a book that can show the breadth of drag’s involvement in our culture, it can help show that this is an art form with an extended history that can’t just be suppressed and isn’t going anywhere. The struggles the drag is facing are not new, but that doesn’t mean that it should be devalued as an art form, or as a form of self-expression at all.
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The post Jewish drag performers inspire a history of the art form in New York appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Letter from Vancouver: A monument draws on Jewish tradition to remember victims of Oct. 7
The garden of Temple Sholom Synagogue in Vancouver is a serene and contemplative place to remember the horrific events of Oct. 7, 2023—and the Israeli civilians, soldiers and foreign nationals who […]
The post Letter from Vancouver: A monument draws on Jewish tradition to remember victims of Oct. 7 appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Israel-Lebanon Ceasefire Deal ‘Tantamount to a Hezbollah Defeat,’ Says Leading War Studies Think Tank
Israeli tanks are being moved, amid cross-border hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel, in the Golan Heights, Sept. 22, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Jim Urquhart
The terms of the newly minted ceasefire agreement to halt fighting between Israel and Hezbollah amounts to a defeat for the Lebanese terrorist group, although the deal may be difficult to implement, according to two leading US think tanks.
The deal requires Israeli forces to gradually withdraw from southern Lebanon, where they have been operating since early October, over the next 60 days. Meanwhile, the Lebanese army will enter these areas and ensure that Hezbollah retreats north of the Litani River, located some 18 miles north of the border with Israel. The United States and France, who brokered the agreement, will oversee compliance with its terms.
The Institute for the Study of War (ISW), in conjunction with the American Enterprise Institute’s Critical Threats Project (CTP), explained the implications of the deal on Tuesday in their daily Iran Update, “which provides insights into Iranian and Iranian-sponsored activities that undermine regional stability and threaten US forces and interests.” Hezbollah, which wields significant political and military influence across Lebanon, is the chief proxy force of the Iranian regime.
In its analysis, ISW and CTP explained that the deal amounts to a Hezbollah defeat for two main reasons.
First, “Hezbollah has abandoned several previously-held ceasefire negotiation positions, reflecting the degree to which IDF [Israel Defense Forces] military operations have forced Hezbollah to abandon its war aims.”
Specifically, Hezbollah agreeing to a deal was previously contingent on a ceasefire in Gaza, but that changed after the past two months of Israeli military operations, during which the IDF has decimated much of Hezbollah’s leadership and weapons stockpiles through airstrikes while attempting to push the terrorist army away from its border with a ground offensive.
Additionally, the think tanks noted, “current Hezbollah Secretary General Naim Qassem has also previously expressed opposition to any stipulations giving Israel freedom of action inside Lebanon,” but the deal reportedly allows Israel an ability to respond to Hezbollah if it violates the deal.
Second, the think tanks argued that the agreement was a defeat for Hezbollah because it allowed Israel to achieve its war aim of making it safe for its citizens to return to their homes in northern Israel.
“IDF operations in Lebanese border towns have eliminated the threat of an Oct. 7-style offensive attack by Hezbollah into northern Israel, and the Israeli air campaign has killed many commanders and destroyed much of Hezbollah’s munition stockpiles,” according to ISW and CTP.
Some 70,000 Israelis living in northern Israel have been forced to flee their homes over the past 14 months, amid unrelenting barrages of rockets, missiles, and drones fired by Hezbollah in Lebanon. Hezbollah began its attacks last Oct. 8, one day after the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel. The Jewish state had been exchanging fire with Hezbollah but intensified its military response over the past two months.
Northern Israelis told The Algemeiner this week that they were concerned the new ceasefire deal could open the door to future Hezbollah attacks, but at the same time the ceasefire will allow many of them the first opportunity to return home in a year.
ISW and CTP also noted in their analysis that Israel’s military operations have devastated Hezbollah’s leadership and infrastructure. According to estimates, at least 1,730 Hezbollah terrorists and upwards of 4,000 have been killed over the past year of fighting.
While the deal suggested a defeat of sorts for Hezbollah and the effectiveness of Israel’s military operations, ISW and CTP also argued that several aspects of the ceasefire will be difficult to implement.
“The decision to rely on the Lebanese Armed Forces (LAF) and UN observers in Lebanon to respectively secure southern Lebanon and monitor compliance with the ceasefire agreement makes no serious changes to the same system outlined by UN Security Council Resolution 1701, which ended the 2006 Israel-Hezbollah war,” they wrote.
Resolution 1701 called for the complete demilitarization of Hezbollah south of the Litani River and prohibited the presence of armed groups in Lebanon except for the official Lebanese army and the UN Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL).
This may be an issue because “neither the LAF nor the UN proved willing or able to prevent Hezbollah from reoccupying southern Lebanon and building new infrastructure. Some LAF sources, for example, have expressed a lack of will to enforce this ceasefire because they believe that any fighting with Hezbollah would risk triggering ‘civil war,’” the think tanks assessed.
Nevertheless, the LAF is going to deploy 5,000 troops to the country’s south in order to assume control of their own territory from Hezbollah.
However, the think tanks added, “LAF units have been in southern Lebanon since 2006, but have failed to prevent Hezbollah from using the area to attack Israel.”
The post Israel-Lebanon Ceasefire Deal ‘Tantamount to a Hezbollah Defeat,’ Says Leading War Studies Think Tank first appeared on Algemeiner.com.
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What Nutmeg and the Torah Teach Us About Securing a Long-Term Future
A Torah scroll. Photo: RabbiSacks.org.
Here’s a fact from history you may not know. In 1667, the Dutch and the British struck a trade deal that, in retrospect, seems so bizarre that it defies belief.
As part of the Treaty of Breda — a pact that ended the Second Anglo-Dutch War and aimed to solidify territorial claims between the two powers — the Dutch ceded control of Manhattan to the British.
Yes, that Manhattan — the self-proclaimed center of the universe (at least according to New Yorkers), home to Wall Street, Times Square, and those famously overpriced bagels.
And what did the Dutch get in return? Another island — tiny Run, part of the Banda Islands in Indonesia.
To put things in perspective, Run is minuscule compared to Manhattan — barely 3 square kilometers, or roughly half the size of Central Park. Today, it’s a forgotten dot on the map, with a population of less than 2,000 people and no significant industry beyond subsistence farming. But in the 17th century, Run was a prized gem worth its weight in gold — or rather, nutmeg gold.
Nutmeg was the Bitcoin of its day, an exotic spice that Europeans coveted so desperately they were willing to risk life and limb. Just by way of example, during the early spice wars, the Dutch massacred and enslaved the native Bandanese people to seize control of the lucrative nutmeg trade.
From our modern perspective, the deal seems ridiculous — Manhattan for a pinch of nutmeg? But in the context of the 17th century, it made perfect sense. Nutmeg was the crown jewel of global trade, and controlling its supply meant immense wealth and influence. For the Dutch, securing Run was a strategic move, giving them dominance in the spice trade, and, let’s be honest, plenty of bragging rights at fancy Dutch banquets.
But history has a funny way of reshaping perspectives. What seemed like a brilliant play in its time now looks like a colossal miscalculation — and the annals of history are filled with similar trades that, in hindsight, make us scratch our heads and wonder, what were they thinking?
Another contender for history’s Hall of Fame in ludicrous trades is the Louisiana Purchase. In 1803, Napoleon Bonaparte, who was strapped for cash and eager to fund his military campaigns, sold a vast swath of North America to the nascent United States for a mere $15 million. The sale included 828,000 square miles — that’s about four cents an acre — that would become 15 states, including the fertile Midwest and the resource-rich Rocky Mountains.
But to Napoleon, this was a strategic no-brainer. He even called the sale “a magnificent bargain,” boasting that it would “forever disarm” Britain by strengthening its rival across the Atlantic. At the time, the Louisiana Territory was seen as a vast, undeveloped expanse that was difficult to govern and defend. Napoleon viewed it as a logistical burden, especially with the looming threat of British naval power. By selling the territory, he aimed to bolster France’s finances and focus on European conflicts.
Napoleon wasn’t shy about mocking his enemies for their mistakes, once quipping, “Never interrupt your enemy when he is making a mistake.” But in this case, it’s tempting to imagine him swallowing those words as the United States grew into a global superpower thanks, in no small part, to his so-called bargain.
While he may have considered Louisiana to be a logistical headache — too far away and too vulnerable to British attacks — the long-term implications of the deal were staggering. What Napoleon dismissed as a far-off backwater turned out to be the world’s breadbasket, not to mention the backbone of America’s westward expansion.
Like the Dutch and their nutmeg gamble, Napoleon made a trade that no doubt seemed brilliant at the time — but, with hindsight, turned into a world-class blunder. It’s the kind of decision that reminds us just how hard it is to see past the urgency of the moment and anticipate the full scope of consequences.
Which brings me to Esav. You’d think Esav, the firstborn son of Yitzchak and Rivka, would have his priorities straight. He was the guy — heir to a distinguished dynasty that stretched back to his grandfather Abraham, who single-handedly changed the course of human history.
But one fateful day, as recalled at the beginning of Parshat Toldot, Esav stumbles home from a hunting trip, exhausted and ravenous. The aroma of Yaakov’s lentil stew hits him like a truck. “Pour me some of that red stuff!” he demands, as if he’s never seen food before.
Yaakov, never one to pass up an opportunity, doesn’t miss a beat.
“Sure, but only in exchange for your birthright,” he counters casually, as if such transactions are as common as trading baseball cards. And just like that, Esav trades his birthright for a bowl of soup. No lawyers, no witnesses, not even a handshake — just an impulsive decision fueled by hunger and a staggering lack of foresight.
The Torah captures the absurdity of the moment: Esav claims to be “on the verge of death” and dismisses the birthright as worthless. Any future value — material or spiritual — is meaningless to him in that moment. All that matters is satisfying his immediate needs.
So, was it really such a terrible deal? Psychologists have a term for Esav’s behavior: hyperbolic discounting — a fancy term for our tendency to prioritize immediate rewards over bigger, long-term benefits.
It’s the same mental quirk that makes splurging on a gadget feel better than saving for retirement, or binge-watching a series more appealing than preparing for an exam. For Esav, the stew wasn’t just a meal — it was the instant solution to his discomfort, a quick fix that blinded him to the larger, long-term value of his birthright.
It’s the classic trade-off between now and later: the craving for immediate gratification often comes at the expense of something far more significant. Esav’s impulsive decision wasn’t just about hunger — it was about losing sight of the future in the heat of the moment.
Truthfully, it’s easy to criticize Esav for his shortsightedness, but how often do we fall into the same trap? We skip meaningful opportunities because they feel inconvenient or uncomfortable in the moment, opting for the metaphorical lentil stew instead of holding out for the birthright.
But the Torah doesn’t include this story just to make Esav look bad. It’s there to highlight the contrast between Esav and Yaakov — the choices that define them and, by extension, us.
Esav represents the immediate, the expedient, the here-and-now. Yaakov, our spiritual forebear, is the embodiment of foresight and patience. He sees the long game and keeps his eye on what truly matters: Abraham and Yitzchak’s legacy and the Jewish people’s spiritual destiny.
The message of Toldot is clear: the choices we make in moments of weakness have the power to shape our future — and the future of all who come after us. Esav’s impulsiveness relegated him to a footnote in history, like the nutmeg island of Run or France’s control over a vast portion of North America.
Meanwhile, Yaakov’s ability to think beyond the moment secured him a legacy that continues to inspire and guide us to this day — a timeless reminder that true greatness is not built in a moment of indulgence, but in the patience to see beyond it.
The author is a rabbi in Beverly Hills, California.
The post What Nutmeg and the Torah Teach Us About Securing a Long-Term Future first appeared on Algemeiner.com.