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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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In the Michigan Senate race, Jews should (and will) vote for democracy
Michigan Jews are feeling the ground shifting beneath us. For the first time, the Democratic candidate to represent Michigan in the United States Senate is not an advocate of unconditional support for Israel’s government. And he is one of a growing number of progressive leaders pushing the Democratic establishment to fight for the values it claims to stand on.
Many in our communities hoped for a different outcome in yesterday’s primary and feel destabilized by the shifting political terrain. Others feel hopeful, for the first time, of being represented on the electoral stage. Moving into the general election, when the stakes are so high, I would like to refocus the conversation on our shared values.
When I cast my ballot Tuesday, and when I cast it again in November, I do so with the wisdom of Pirkei Avot 1:18 in mind: on three things does the world stand — on justice, on truth, and on peace, as it is said: “execute the judgment of truth and peace in your gates” (Zechariah 8:16). Rabban Shimon ben Gamaliel and others of his generation were building communities out of the rubble of the Temple’s destruction. They asked themselves, as they rebuilt: what are our core principles? What values need to sit at the center of this new order? Out of the wreckage, what new world will we create?
Let those three pillars be our voting guide.
Din — Judgment. Who will fight for fairness? Who is beholden to corporate interests and who will stand for economic equality? A candidate’s record on wages, on housing, on the right to organize — these will show commitment to justice.
Emet — Truth. Who tells us the truth, even when it costs them? In the words of former Rep. Andy Levin, we are looking for “authenticity, bravery, and truth-telling.” Who can help to rebuild trust in our public servants and institutions?
Shalom — Peace. Which candidate will challenge the military-industrial complex? Who will work to reduce war and violence in our world, rather than fund more of it? At home and abroad.
In this election, we have an unusually clear lens for understanding a candidate’s values: immigration enforcement. Immigration and Customs Enforcement — ICE — is where our society’s authoritarian drift is most visible and most violent. So as we lean on the pillar of Shalom to consider candidates, we can ask a direct question: is this someone who will bakesh shalom v’radfehu — seek peace and pursue it — for the people in ICE’s crosshairs? Or will they support the expansion of a paramilitary force into our schools and neighborhoods?
Justice, Truth and Peace — these are the values upon which “the world stands.” But what does it mean for the world to stand? A classic rabbinic commentary interprets this as the preservation of human society. Which candidate will protect the environment, will put people over profit, will choose the survival of our communities over the balance sheet of the insurance, arms and oil industries? By this measure, the idea that Jews who want unconditional aid for Israel should therefore vote for a candidate who would strip away abortion rights, gut health care, and undermine the basic machinery of democracy is, to use a technical term, cuckoo banana-cakes.
And then there is the issue of antisemitism. My teacher Rabbi Mordechai Liebling explains that on the left, antisemitism is a bug and not a feature — a problem that can be and must be addressed. On the right, antisemitism is a foundational worldview. The real threat to American Jews is the far right. It’s they who promulgate conspiracy theories and it’s they who deploy ICE into our communities to kidnap our neighbors.
I personally think that Dr. El-Sayed is not antisemitic — certainly not any more than the general population. But I don’t need to convince you of that. What I hope you’ll hear is that Abdul is someone with whom we share core values — that he is someone the Jewish community can work with. What I hope you’ll hear is that a liberal-fascist coalition is out of the question, and that a liberal-left coalition is the only path forward. In November, we will elect a politician who will work with the people and not against us. Our loyalty is not to any party, but to the movement for a true democracy — and to the leaders who will work with us to advance it.
The ground doesn’t have to shift beneath us; we can be a part of moving that ground, of redrawing the politics of the possible. May Zechariah’s vision of justice, truth and peace come to pass, speedily and in our days, and may we merit to help make it so.
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On El-Sayed, Michigan’s Jewish Democrats aren’t all ready to unite behind nominee
Following Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow win of the Democratic nomination for Michigan’s open Senate seat, the state’s Jewish Democrats are reflecting on whether the divisions El-Sayed’s candidacy brought to the fore can be bridged before November.
Jewish voters make up just 1.4% of the electorate in Michigan. But the community had become deeply invested in the race, with Jews both in fierce opposition and fiery support of El-Sayed in an election that had become a proxy fight over the Gaza war and the U.S.-Israel relationship.
Jewish former Michigan congressman Andy Levin, who had endorsed El-Sayed, believes Democrats will get behind the nominee in the interest of defeating Republican Mike Rogers — a race that could determine which party controls the Senate. Pre-primary polls found Rogers leading El-Sayed by single digits.
“Shame on any Jewish Democrat if they’re going to go vote for Mike Rogers and put our democracy at risk because they can’t find their way to supporting Abdul El-Sayed, who is such a brilliant person, just because he doesn’t share their exact beliefs on Israel and Palestine,” Levin told the Forward. “That’s ridiculous.”
Levin lost his Senate seat to Rep. Haley Stevens after heavy spending against him by AIPAC, the campaign fundraising group advocating for unrestricted U.S. aid to Israel. An AIPAC-associated super PAC spent some $32 million in a failed attempt to get Stevens the Senate nomination.
Stevens endorsed El-Sayed for the general election Wednesday morning. But some Jews who voted for Stevens see no possibility for reconciliation. Rabbi Asher Lopatin of the modern Orthodox synagogue Kehillat Etz Chayim in suburban Detroit had endorsed Stevens in the primary, alarmed by El-Sayed’s association with the controversial Twitch streamer Hasan Piker and condemnation of Israel as a genocidal and apartheid state.
In a TV interview Wednesday, El-Sayed used the term “bloodthirsty” to describe Israel.
“To have so many people vote for someone who is so hurtful to the Jewish community, the things that the Jewish community values — I think it’s depressing,” Lopatin told the Forward.
Lopatin has made up his mind that he will not vote for El-Sayed in the general election, but he also isn’t yet sold on Rogers, the Republican nominee.
“I have to study him more,” Lopatin said. “But I will not vote for Abdul El-Sayed, definitely, and I would tell people they should not.”
Lopatin said he wishes Stevens would condemn El-Sayed rather than endorse him.
Still, others see El-Sayed as the best candidate to face Rogers in the general — and don’t want him to pull back on the issues that won him the nomination. Barbara Weinberg Barefield, a photographer outside Detroit who helped organize the group Jews for Abdul, said she has confidence El-Sayed will win the general — attributing the close primary race partly to the influence of outside money supporting Stevens.
“He was able to win this election in the face of close to $70 million of outside funding going to bolster his opponent,” Weinberg Barefield said. “This election is showing us, and elections around the country are showing us, that elections are not to be bought — they’re to be earned.”
Roslyn Schindler, a retired professor who taught Holocaust studies at Wayne State University, was also among El-Sayed’s Jewish supporters, even as she disagreed with him on his lack of support for a two-state solution. She stressed the importance of beating Rogers in November irrespective of disagreements on Israel.
“My motto is and will be: vote blue, no matter who,” Schindler told the Forward. “I am hoping that all Democrats realize that to do otherwise will be self-destructive and just plain wrong.”
Others are taking a wait-and-see approach. Decky Alexander, chair of the Michigan Democratic Jewish Caucus — which endorsed Stevens in the primary — isn’t issuing an endorsement in the general election yet.
She said the close margin El-Sayed won by, about 15,000 votes, gives her hope that El-Sayed will see the need to unify his party. A start, she said, would be focusing less on AIPAC during his general election campaign.
“There’s a lot of opportunity on Abdul’s side to be a better bridge maker versus kind of a bridge burner,” Alexander told the Forward. “The cards are his. It’s his responsibility to initiate.”
In his election night speech, El-Sayed didn’t mention AIPAC by name, instead speaking more generally about getting money out of politics.
On Wednesday, he addressed Jewish Michiganders directly: “I want you to know that my commitment to your safety, my commitment to Jewish safety, is the same commitment that I have to the safety of my own daughters.”
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‘The Yiddish Teacher’ (Poem)
One thing about the late Forverts staff writer and critic Miriam Hoffman — she cooked a heavenly eggplant in tomato sauce.
And why do I know this about one of our writers? Hoffman, a veritable lexicon-caldron of Yiddish sayings and terms she’d archived from her own mother’s distinct poylish dialect, was many things: A distinguished long-term professor of Yiddish at Columbia University; a theater critic turned playwright who turned the New York Public Theatre’s founding director Joseph Papp into a serious supporter of Yiddish culture; a child survivor of Siberian exile, and so much more.
As she encountered immigrant American life in da Bronx, the tiny dynamo that was Hoffman delighted in becoming American, freely advising everyone on the best consumer goods this country had to offer. A country that was a home and refuge to her, her parents, her husband and so many in her vast circle of Yiddishist friends, students, fellow writers, educators and chosen family. And then, once upon a time, she welcomed me into her Florida home for an overnight stay, so that I could record her jaw-dropping tales of how she and her beloved mameloshn Yiddish both survived the khurbn, the Holocaust. And talk into the video camera she did.
But first, there was lunch.
Rest in all your ferocious deliciousness, Miriam Hoffman, and thank you. For the eggplant, the advice on the best toothpaste, the stories — and for doing everything, everything, everything possible, to transmit your Yiddish to another generation.
The Yiddish Teacher
The Yiddish teacher bending saying:
In my book you’ll learn
the alefbeys through pictograms like so:
The gimel is a camel
The beys a house
You see?
The Yiddish teacher has an archive
in her bedroom closet
The folding doors open revealing:
shoeboxes filled with
stories and
poems and
songs she
wrote as a child
in the displaced persons camp
on paper donated to Jewish refugees
The Yiddish teacher was once
seated in back
of a transport truck
with all the other refugees
Trying to go over the Swiss Alps
to Mandate Palestine
The Yiddish teacher was born
in a Siberian prison camp
“people were starving, sure,
but there was sex”
The Yiddish teacher was the only
woman writer on staff
at the Forverts Yiddish newspaper
The Yiddish teacher remembers
the first time her family ate
Chef-Boy-Ar-Dee spaghetti and
meatballs
from a can
in the Bronx
We go shopping together
The Yiddish teacher loves Rao’s tomato sauce
“it’s the best”
The Yiddish teacher recommends
“Mavis Toothpaste”
It’s the best
The Yiddish teacher loves to
go fly fishing
The Yiddish teacher is short and slim
and round
I think
if I cup my hands together
I can
carry her around always
— Chana Pollack
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