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Queer yeshiva to publish first-ever collection of Jewish legal opinions written by and for trans Jews
(JTA) — In the midst of writing a 13-page analysis of a complex area of Jewish law, Rabbi Xava De Cordova found something she wasn’t expecting to see in the medieval-era sources: flexibility.
De Cordova is transgender and had long wondered whether she could feel a sense of belonging while studying reams of rabbinic writings on halacha, or Jewish law, which stretch back thousands of years and often prescribe different practices for men and women.
The laws of ritual purity, for example, prescribe specific behaviors for women on the assumption that they all menstruate. Trans women do not. De Cordova said that gap and others had her thinking, “I don’t really know if I can find a place for myself in this literature.”
But after digging into Jewish texts on the topic, De Cordova realized she’d sold the sages short: Medieval European rabbis were asking many of the same questions she was — and their answers reflected real-world complexity.
“I just found that the rabbis and the early halachic authorities’ understanding of niddah was so much more conceptual and vague and fluctuating than I ever realized before I started this particular work,” De Cordova said, using the Hebrew term for purity laws. Her conclusion: “Wow, there’s so much space for me within this literature.”
De Cordova’s realization is one of many that a dozen Jewish scholars and rabbis have had over the last year as they have scoured Jewish texts for guidance on how transgender Jews can adapt traditional rituals to their lived experience. Now, the group is preparing to release a batch of their essays, analyses of Jewish law called teshuvot, in hopes that they can inform the experiences of trans Jews who seek to live in accordance with traditional Jewish law.
The release of the essays comes at a time when lawmakers in dozens of states are targeting trans people and their rights, in some cases instigating fights that have heavily involved rabbis and their families.
In that climate, writing trans Jews into Jewish tradition “becomes an act of resistance because it’s about celebrating lives that are being demeaned and celebrating people who are being dehumanized in the public sphere,” said Rabbi Becky Silverstein, co-director of the Trans Halakha Project at Svara, the yeshiva founded in Chicago two decades ago to serve the queer community. The dozen rabbis and scholars are based at Svara and collectively form the Teshuva Writing Project.
Among the questions they have tackled: How could a trans man converting to Judaism have a bris, required for male converts? Is the removal of body tissue after gender-affirming surgery a ritual matter, given Jewish legal requirements for burying body parts? And is there a Jewish obligation, in certain cases, to undergo gender transition?
Just how widely their answers will be consumed and taken into account is a question. Most Jews who consciously adhere to halacha throughout their daily lives are Orthodox, and live in communities that either reject trans Jews or are reckoning with whether and how to accept them. Non-Orthodox Jewish denominations have made efforts to embrace trans Jews, but halacha is less often the starting point for most of their members. The Reform movement, the largest in the United States, expressly rejects halacha as binding.
Still, a growing number of Jews and Jewish communities strive to be inclusive while staying rooted in Jewish law and tradition. There are also a growing number of trans Jews who are connected to traditional communities, or who want to live in accordance with Jewish law.
“I think individual trans Jews who are not part of communities could use these teshuvot to guide their own decision-making,” said Silverstein, who was ordained at the pluralistic Hebrew College seminary. “We live in a time of religious autonomy in Jewish life, and where trans Jews actually are hungry for connection to tradition. And so they could use these teshuvot to help inform their own conversations.”
Organizations and initiatives such as the Jewish LGBTQ group Keshet; Torah Queeries, a collection of queer commentaries on the Bible; and TransTorah.org have created rituals, readings, blessings and customs for trans Jews, and Svara runs a Queer Talmud Camp as well as intensive Jewish study programs throughout the year. But until now, no collection of Jewish legal opinions has been published by and for trans people.
“Halacha has to be informed by the real lived experiences of the people about whom it is legislating,” said Laynie Soloman, who helps lead Svara and holds the title of associate rosh yeshiva, in an approach that they said the group had adopted from the disability advocacy community. “That is a fundamental truth about halacha that we are holding as a collective and taking seriously in the way we are authoring these teshuvot.”
The teshuvot will be published later this month, and follow a long tradition of rabbis setting halachic precedent by answering questions from their followers. Those answers are traditionally based on an analysis of rabbinic texts throughout history. They can address questions ranging from whether smoking cigarettes is permissible to the particulars of making a kitchen kosher for Passover.
Some Jewish legal questions tackled by the group at Svara had not previously been answered, such as how to mark conversion for someone who is male but does not have a penis. In other cases, accepted Jewish law pertaining to gender can be painful for those who are nonbinary or trans, either because the answer is not clear or because the law does not match up with contemporary understandings that gender and sex are distinct.
“[Those are] areas where trans people are sort of most likely to either feel lost themselves or be interrogated by their community. … And so they’re sort of these urgent halachic needs,” said De Cordova, who was privately ordained by a rabbi from the Renewal Judaism movement. “And 99.9% of the literature about them so far has been written by cis people, about us.”
De Cordova concluded that trans women are obligated in niddah, the ritual purity laws. In her teshuva, she provides several approaches to emulate the complicated counting cycle that tallies the days a woman is considered ritually impure following menstruation. She suggests using a seven- and 11-day cycle originally proposed by Maimonides, the 12th-century scholar and philosopher. De Cordova also suggests that the imposition of a cycle not based in biology means ancient and medieval rabbis had some understanding of womanhood as a social construct.
“There’s many cases in which the rabbis sort of choose to orient niddah around their understanding of women, which I would call the social construction of womanhood by rabbis, rather than observable physical phenomenon or actual women’s experience,” she said.
For De Cordova, the experience of writing about niddah provided her with new insights about some of the oldest Jewish legal texts on the subject.
“They’re flexible enough and sort of responsive enough that I can really find a lot of freedom and space in working with them,” she said of the ancient sources. “And that was just a really sort of wonderful and freeing transition to go through.”
Last year, the Conservative Movement approved new language for calling up a nonbinary person to various Torah honors. The rabbis behind the opinion consulted with groups serving LGBTQ Jews and synagogues centered on them, but acknowledged that they were imperfect authors.
“When my coauthors and I published the teshuva, we wrote in it that we are all cisgender rabbis and that we hope that, increasingly, halachic work dealing with nonbinary and trans and queer Jewish life and identity and practice will… come from queer rabbis and scholars themselves,” said Guy Austrian, the rabbi of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center, a synagogue in upper Manhattan. “And I think the publication of the first batch of teshuvot from the Trans Halakha Project shows that that process is underway, and I think that that can only be a good thing for the Jewish world.”
Scholars at Svara, the queer yeshiva based in Chicago, have served the Jewish LGBTQ community for two decades and are now creating the first written set of Jewish law by and for trans Jews. (Jess Benjamin)
Adding to the question-and-answer tradition of Jewish legal opinions means trans Jews will now have new texts to guide their religious practice, Silverstein said. Trans Jews, the writers of the opinions acknowledge, already have their own ways of performing Jewish ritual that accords with their lived experience. But they say that when it comes to Jewish law, informal custom without a sourced legal opinion is not enough.
“I want cis[gender] clergy to realize that there are resources written by and for trans people that they can turn to when they’re trying to help a member of their congregation,” De Cordova said.
The authors of the legal opinions applied to be part of the collective and come from a religiously pluralistic group, ranging in affiliation from Orthodox to Conservative to Jewish Renewal. They have varying expectations for how far-reaching the impact of the new legal opinions will be.
Mike Moskowitz, an Orthodox rabbi and the scholar-in-residence for trans and queer Jewish studies at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, which serves the LGBTQ community, said the teshuvot could provide a model for observant Jews who are also trans.
“I think it’s significant in modeling what an informed conversation can look like, which hasn’t really happened in Orthodox publications,” said Moskowitz, who was not part of the collective that composed the teshuvot on trans Jews’ practice. “I hope this models what can be done in other movements. What’s been tricky is that every movement has a different understanding of what halacha means.”
Even within Orthodoxy, conflicting opinions already exist, in a reflection of how halacha has always operated. For example, Talia Avrahami, a transgender Orthodox woman, follows the opinion of the late Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, known as the Tzitz Eliezer, who ruled that a trans woman who undergoes gender affirmation surgery is a woman according to Jewish law. But Avrahami was told she could not sit in the women’s section of her synagogue, because the rabbi who the synagogue follows does not accept Waldenberg’s opinion. Months earlier, Avrahami had also been asked to leave her teaching job at an Orthodox day school after students and parents learned that she was transgender.
Avrahami declined to comment on the new teshuvot, citing restrictions set by her current employer.
Silverstein says some Conservative rabbis have expressed interest in using the opinions to guide practice in their own congregations. But he is less sure if they will be adopted in the Orthodox community, which is the target audience for most traditional literature on Jewish law.
“When it comes to the Orthodox community, I’m not sure I am bold enough to dream that these teshuvot specifically are going to be adopted,” Silverstein said. “I’m not even sure I know what that means. But it is my hope that they will permeate throughout the Jewish community, at least through the Modern Orthodox community.”
The scope of the opinions written by the collective extends beyond the trans community. The first batch of answers, for example, includes an opinion about how to increase physical accessibility to a mikvah, ritual baths used to fulfill some requirements of Jewish law.
“Judaism thrives and Torah thrives when people are bringing their life experiences to the text and asking their questions of the text,” Silverstein said. “That’s how new Torah is uncovered in the world. And that’s how Judaism and Torah has stayed alive through so much of Jewish history.”
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Progressive Jews are trying out post-Zionism. There’s one big flaw in their approach
The data is clear: American Jews are feeling increasingly alienated from Zionism. But a new progressive coalition is failing to reckon with why the Zionist ideology their members mostly reject was so powerful in the first place.
On May 18, more than 40 Jewish organizations launched the Jewish Diaspora Movement, which, in their words, rejects “the vision of Judaism that is state-centric, militarist, ethno-nationalist.” The organizations declared on their website they want to build “an ethical future for Jews, Jewishness, and Judaism” and that they “joyfully view wherever we are in the entire world as our home.” They charge the Jewish establishment with “conflating antizionism with antisemitism” and “refusing to engage in meaningful dialogue with dissenters.”
JDM is right that too many Jewish spaces exclude thoughtful criticism of Israel. But even as it seeks to build new Jewish spaces, where Jews can live freely and practice their version of Judaism without hindrance, JDM isn’t reckoning with the fact that Zionism itself sprang out of exactly this kind of desire for Jewish self-determination — or the clear historical explanations for why it did.
What the movement is
Rabbi Alissa Wise, one of JDM’s organizers, has said the rollout was meant to be “an agitation.”
The founding members of the Jewish Diaspora Movement include Jewish Voice for Peace, IfNotNow, Rabbis for Ceasefire, the American Council for Judaism and the magazine Jewish Currents, as well as synagogues and prayer groups in Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Hartford, Minneapolis, New York, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.
JDM has no executive, no paid staff, and no physical location. It says it will be run horizontally, through a referendum of member organizations, under the fiscal sponsorship of a project called Beloved Garden, supported by the Fetzer Institute and Henry Luce Foundation.
Whatever one makes of its aims, JDM is a serious attempt to build parallel Jewish institutions, based on an old argument made new again.
The flawed argument of ‘hereness’
As the First Zionist Congress convened in Basel, Switzerland in 1897, a different vision for the Jewish future was emerging in Vilnius, Lithuania.
The Jewish Labor Bund emphasized doikayt, or “hereness,” the idea that a Jew’s future belongs to the place where they already live. The Bundist theorist Vladimir Medem argued in 1920 that “a national home in Palestine would not end the Jewish exile.” The Jewish Diaspora Movement makes the same point: that “all Jews live in diaspora.”
The Bund was right that Jews should be able to live freely in whatever community they were already in, whether it’s Vilnius or Warsaw, Baghdad or Tehran, Paris or Amsterdam, Buenos Aires or New York. But the reason Jews so intensely debated questions of home and future was largely because of forces outside of their control.
My late grandfather did not choose to be deported from Lithuania, the birthplace of the Bund, to a Soviet gulag. My grandmother did not choose, as a young child, to run away from her Polish neighbors who chased her and other Jews in her town with sticks and knives. The Jews who had lived across the Islamic world for centuries did not choose to be expelled after the creation of the State of Israel. Whether they believed in “hereness” as an ideology turned out not to matter.
Even today, emigration to Israel is frequently driven not by idealistic Zionism or a rejection of the diaspora, but by the cold calculus of safety. Many contemporary French and British Jews, for example, describe the sense that they have no future in the place where they grew up. They are not dismissing “the joy of intermixing and learning from our non-Jewish friends and neighbors,” which JDM describes as one of its core values. Rather, they are increasingly — and justifiably, amid an upsurge in violent antisemitic attacks — scared of their neighbors.
It’s telling that across a lengthy FAQ and thousands of words on their site, the single mention the Jewish Diaspora Movement makes of antisemitism appears to be an objection to conflating it with anti-Zionism.
A flawed reaction to a real issue
JDM is right to point out the ways in which establishment Jewish spaces have shut off criticism of Israel, including foundations who cut off funding for Jewish organizations that speak in favor of Palestinians and rabbis who have been fired for talking about Gaza.
Years ago, while interning at a legacy Jewish institution, I pressed its leadership on their silence about Palestinian casualties during Israel’s 2021 Guardian of the Walls Gaza operation. The head of the organization told me that he held his tongue because there was enough criticism out there already — even as he allowed that people inside the organization might privately object to some of Israel’s actions.
Mainstream Jewish leaders increasingly recognize, however, that shutting down criticism risks creating alienation. Yehuda Kurtzer of the Shalom Hartman Institute warned on a podcast this past January that narrowing the bounds of acceptable dissent threatens “to irreparably change the boundaries of Jewish identity itself.”
For many counter- and anti-Zionists, opposing Zionism offers the clearest way to stand against the things Israel does wrong. But JDM, at least in one domain, risks taking things too far.
To say that “all Jews live in diaspora, even those who live in Jerusalem” as JDM does, is to tell nearly half the world’s Jews that the place they live is not really home — even if JDM may view diaspora as a theological or spiritual condition rather than a geographic one.
It’s one thing to say Jewish people don’t need to center Israel to live a full Jewish life. It’s quite another thing to tell Israelis themselves that the place they see as home isn’t. Just as it’s fair to say that legacy Jewish organizations shouldn’t get to define a single diaspora attitude toward Israel, it’s fair for Israelis to say this new diaspora organization shouldn’t get to define them.
Rather than seek to redefine, JDM might follow the example of someone like the progressive Zionist author Joshua Leifer, who resigned as a contributing editor from Jewish Currents after Oct. 7. In his book Tablets Shattered, Leifer writes that the “ethical task of global Jewish life is now to make the modern experiment in Jewish sovereignty a just one.” Or like Rabbi Sharon Brous, a progressive Zionist, who has described the war in Gaza as a spiritual catastrophe.
Neither of these figures loosened their attachment to Israel to make room for their criticism.
Escalating Alienation
American Jewish life is being driven to the extremes by escalating alienation. Each side increasingly acts as if to acknowledge the other’s valid points is a concession they cannot afford. And each such refusal becomes the next side’s alibi for digging in.
Many Jews live somewhere in the middle. They might believe a Jewish state has a right to exist, and be critical of the Israeli government.
I count myself among them. I’m an American Israeli who is furious at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s far-right coalition and those who ignore the state’s misconduct. But I’ve simultaneously become estranged from former friends and colleagues on the political left who have engaged in Hamas apologism and crossed the line into antisemitism.
So I understand JDM’s impulse to create a communal space for those who feel excluded, even if I wouldn’t feel at home in their framework.
When you feel you cannot live your Judaism freely in the institutions you have, you make your own. But the act of building parallel Jewish spaces concedes that Jews do not simply get to define how we live. It’s a tacit acknowledgement that the terms are sometimes set by others, and that the freedom to practice on our own terms must be deliberately built.
That is the animating spirit of Zionism, bubbling up in a movement trying to leave it behind.
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It’s time for Jews who love Israel to give up on Zionism
Why have I, a longstanding democratic Zionist who lived in Israel for five years and loves the country passionately, abandoned my belief in a democratic Jewish state?
My short response is that I did not abandon democratic Zionism. Democratic Zionism abandoned me.
More than two-and-half years after Hamas slaughtered close to 1,200 people in the Oct. 7, 2023 attack, after Israel’s subsequent destruction of Gaza, growing numbers of liberal Zionist American Jews like me have reached a crossroads. Cognitive dissonance over Israel has left us feeling homeless and bereft.
In our horror at the indiscriminate killing of civilian Palestinians, we are alienated from the mainstream American Zionist echo-chamber, dominated by the likes of the Anti-Defamation League and AIPAC, which rejects almost all criticism of Israel as antisemitic. Yet we also cannot make common cause with stridently anti-Zionist groups like Jewish Voice for Peace, which demonize Israel and Israelis, with no distinctions, as the enemy.
Fortunately, there is a little known but compelling third way, known as post-Zionism.
Post-Zionism focuses on supporting efforts to build a shared society in which all the people residing between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea — Israelis and Palestinians alike — can live side by side in peace and security. It sees the structure of this shared society as less important than ending the mentality of “us against them” that has animated both Jewish and Palestinian national movements for more than a century. Such counter-productive ideologies must give way now to a true sharing of the Holy Land, in which the rights of all people are cherished and protected.
A return to principles
Israel’s 1948 Declaration of Independence contains a promise: the new country would “ensure complete equality of social and political rights to all its inhabitants irrespective of religion, race or sex.”
Yet successive Israeli governments led by both left and right-wing Zionist parties have, in the decades since the 1967 Six-Day War, sabotaged the dream of a democratic Jewish state by deliberately building Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories. By prioritizing settlements over peace, Israel has worked to ensure that there will be no Palestinian state alongside a democratic Jewish Israel, but instead an apartheid Jewish state ruling over millions of Palestinians without rights.
That means in short, the only morally acceptable form of Zionism has been effectively taken off the table by Israel itself.
Instead, a return to post-Zionism — which emerged in the 1980s, and went into abeyance with the collapse of the Oslo peace process — is called for. Difficult debates over definitions of Zionism aren’t changing anything. To ensure that Israel survives and inspires generations of diaspora Jews to come, a new way forward is needed.
A common land
Roughly equivalent numbers of Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs live between the river and the sea. The path down which they are presently hurtling leads directly to mutually assured destruction, and must be abandoned.
The present Israeli course of action — oppressing and seeking to again disperse our Palestinian neighbors in the name of Jewish security — has led to a state of perpetual if unofficial war, which places the security and well-being of Israelis and diaspora Jews at ever-graver risk. The strategy of Palestinians and their supporters around the world — holding out some vague hope that Israel will somehow cease to exist — is similarly dysfunctional.
Post-Zionism, in contrast to both current strategies, advocates acceptance between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, and a shared embrace of our common land.
In adopting a post-Zionist perspective, I’ve found a route out of paralysis. And I think it could provide an avenue for Jews like me — who feel alienated from what Israel has become but retain deep ties to it — to contribute to building a shared Israel-Palestine. That coexistence could look like one state, two states, or my personal favorite possibility, an Israeli-Palestinian confederation with two states bonded together by a European Union-like structure. Post-Zionism also allows its adherents to maintain our abiding love for and spiritual connection to the land of Israel; as opposed to anti-Zionist Jews’outright rejection of “next year in Jerusalem.”
Ideological change comes slowly. Substituting the vision of a safe home for Jews in the Middle East for that of an explicitly Jewish state will take time. Right now, the key post-Zionist priority looks much like that of left-Zionism: convincing the Israeli public that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s expansionist agenda of Jewish-supremacism is morally and politically unsustainable, and to bring about the beginnings of change by ousting his coalition in upcoming elections.
On the domestic front, post-Zionist American Jews must work together to strengthen ties with interfaith allies, including the Muslim community, to combat antisemitism and Islamophobia, and to defend democracy and pluralism. We cannot work for a truly democratic Middle East without a truly democratic government of our own.
Embracing post-Zionism does not mean refusing to work together with Zionists who also want freedom, safety and self-determination for Israelis and Palestinians alike. But it means thinking about the course of history that brought us to this point differently. I and so many post-Zionists have come to understand that the ideology of Zionism, while representing genuine liberation for Jews, had within it a fatal flaw: forcing the structure of a Jewish state on a land that was only partly Jewish. The idea that this could somehow have worked out was, from the beginning, a form of self-delusion.
Right now, post-Zionists and left-Zionists are working together fruitfully in collaboration with Palestinians in a variety of movements and NGOs dedicated to peace and reconciliation, including through increasingly prominent groups like Standing Together.
We must continue to open our minds to a broader range of better futures for the Middle East. Every civilian in Israel, Gaza and the West Bank deserves peace, security, justice and equal rights. That possibility may feel far off, but to paraphrase Theodore Herzl himself, if we will it, it is no dream.
Walter Ruby, formerly a Forward correspondent in Moscow, is co-author with Sabeeha Rehman of We Refuse to Be Enemies: How Muslims and Jews Can Make Peace, One Friendship at a Time.
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Majority of House Democrats vote to defeat Lebanon war powers measure
(JTA) — A House resolution aimed at preventing U.S. involvement in hostilities in Lebanon failed Thursday.
Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a Michigan Democrat and fierce critic of Israel, forced a vote on the House floor Thursday. It was defeated 324 to 92, with 91 Democrats voting in favor. The sole Republican vote came from Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie, who will be departing Congress next year after losing his primary.
The resolution, which would have ordered President Donald Trump to remove U.S. troops from Lebanon within seven days, was defeated after Democratic Party leaders noted in a joint statement that there are “no U.S. servicemembers involved in combat operations or hostilities in Lebanon.”
The statement issued by House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, Minority Whip Katherine Clark and Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar continued: “We stand with the Lebanese people, the government of Lebanon and the Lebanese Armed Forces in their efforts to live peacefully and defeat Hezbollah, a violent terrorist organization that is a sworn enemy of the United States.”
Jewish Democratic Reps. Jerrold Nadler and Dan Goldman of New York also voted “no” on the resolution, writing in a joint press release that their opposition “should not be taken as an approval of Prime Minister Netanyahu’s prosecution of Israel’s military action in Lebanon.”
“To the extent that American armed forces are present in Lebanon, it is to support the current Lebanese government, which deserves our assistance,” the statement continued.
But Tlaib defended her resolution in a post on X Thursday ahead of the vote. “The people of Lebanon can’t wait another month for Congress to act,” Tlaib wrote. “Every day that we do nothing, 11 more Lebanese children are killed or injured by the Israeli military in this U.S.-supported invasion. Congress must pass today’s Lebanon War Powers Resolution.”
Tlaib was citing a UNICEF report of data from Lebanon’s Ministry of Public Health last month that found 77 children in Lebanon had been killed over the course of a week as Israeli strikes continued to pummel the country.
Some of those who opposed Tlaib’s resolution, including Nadler and Goldman, said they would vote for an alternative version of the resolution that would preserve cooperation with the Lebanese Armed Forces in their fight against Hezbollah.
The defeat of the resolution came the same day that Hezbollah rejected the latest ceasefire agreement brokered between Israel and Lebanon, as fighting between the Iranian proxy and Israel has intensified in recent weeks.
On Wednesday, the House narrowly passed a resolution for the first time that would limit President Donald Trump’s power to continue the war in Iran. While the development was largely symbolic, it marked a rebuke of the president’s increasingly unpopular strategy in Iran.
On Friday, 85 members of Congress also signed onto a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio calling on the Trump administration to “use every available diplomatic tool to halt imminent settlement construction in the E-1 area of the West Bank,” a corridor east of Jerusalem.
Citing Israeli Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich’s orders to demolish a Palestinian Bedouin village in the West Bank last month, the letter, which was led by Democratic Reps. Mark Pocan and Jan Schakowsky, who is Jewish, argued that the issue of settlements in the area had reached a “critical and final inflection point.”
“The window for meaningful diplomatic intervention is closing rapidly, and we believe it is not too late for the United States to act,” read the letter, which was also signed by Nadler and Jewish Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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