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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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The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel
A war that began with immense ambition has ended with profound setbacks for both the United States and Israel.
With an emerging U.S.-Iran peace agreement, what initially appeared to be a historic demonstration of military dominance evolved into a vivid illustration of the limits of both Israeli and American power. The conflict also exposed profound failures in strategic competence within that alliance. Washington and Jerusalem planned effectively for the initial decapitation strikes, but were unprepared for the economic and geopolitical consequences that followed.
The result is a war that may ultimately strengthen the Iranian regime politically, despite the damage it suffered militarily; has weakened international perceptions of American military might; and has diminished both Israel’s own strategic circumstances and its most important alliance.
The opening phase of the war appeared spectacularly successful. Israeli intelligence and airpower decapitated large portions of Iran’s military and security leadership with astonishing speed, including by assassinating Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei. Key military infrastructure suffered major damage, and for a brief moment, it seemed plausible that the Iranian regime might genuinely face collapse or surrender on terms dictated by Washington and Jerusalem.
That perception proved short-lived.
Iran shifted the battlefield away from conventional military confrontation and toward economic coercion. Its closure of the Strait of Hormuz exposed the extraordinary vulnerability of the global economy to relatively inexpensive forms of pressure. Energy markets panicked almost immediately. Governments across Europe, Asia, and the Gulf pushed urgently for de-escalation.
The central strategic reality became impossible to ignore: the U.S.could not tolerate sustained economic disruption, and the Iranian regime has a strong stomach for suffering. The overwhelming military superiority of the U.S. and Israel effectively ceased to matter.
That asymmetry changed the balance of the conflict. And the resulting agreement appears to preserve much of Iran’s architecture of mischief, which the regime’s many critics had hoped to see dismantled.
Iran’s ballistic missile capabilities have been harmed but can be rebuilt; long-term reductions to that firepower are reportedly not on the table in a planned 60-day negotiation. The regime’s regional proxy network — including Hezbollah, the Houthis, Iraqi militias, Hamas, and Islamic Jihad — survives, even though Hezbollah and Hamas have been battered.
And as Israel is not a party to the ceasefire, it cannot advocate for more stringent terms on this front.
The regime itself remains firmly in power and may receive enormous sanctions relief and renewed economic access. Demands for democratic reforms seem to have been set aside, as has any kind of punishment for the regime’s massacre of thousands — and by some reports tens of thousands — of domestic protestors in January.
The latter aspect is especially galling given that President Donald Trump was driven to intervene because of the January massacre, after he promised Iranians that “help is on its way.” Upon launching the war, he declared that it would enable Iranians to “take your country back.”
Ironically, Trump in his first term pulled out of former President Barack Obama’s 2015 nuclear deal over objections that it provided funds for the regime while allowing it to run riot. Now, he is settling for an effective reconstitution of that deal — except one with substantially less American leverage.
The implications extend far beyond Iran itself. The war demonstrated that Tehran can generate immediate global economic panic through relatively cheap tools and can leverage that panic into diplomatic concessions. Before the war, fears about Iran’s ability to blackmail the world economy remained somewhat theoretical. After the war, those fears became a demonstrated geopolitical reality.
There is little evidence that either the American or Israeli governments understood in advance the degree to which the global economy had become vulnerable to this form of coercion. This, even though the blocking of the Strait of Hormuz was completely predictable and indeed expected by every strategist I’ve spoken to for decades.
This outcome may be most devastating for the Iranian people themselves. Many Iranians who despise the regime interpreted the opening phase of the conflict as evidence that the dictatorship might finally face genuine collapse. Instead, the regime not only survived but also regained leverage. The machinery of repression remains intact.
But this result is damaging for every party to this war aside from the Iranian regime.
The war has transformed perceptions of American power. For decades, the U.S. has anchored a global system built on the assumption that Washington could manage regional crises with some strategy in mind. That strategy wasn’t always brilliant, but it was rarely clueless. With the Hormuz confrontation, the world watched the U.S. confront a regional adversary with vastly inferior capabilities and fail to control events.
For Israel, the alliance Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has spent years cultivating with the American right and with Trump personally has become dangerously fragile. As pressure mounted to stabilize energy markets and prevent wider regional escalation, Trump increasingly presented himself not as a partner coordinating with Israel but as a superior authority managing Israeli actions. He repeatedly framed Israeli military action as dependent on his approval. He cursed Netanyahu in public. He presented Israel as a vassal doing his bidding — something no U.S. president has previously done.
This will destabilize Israel, where much of the governing right previously viewed Trump as a uniquely reliable ally who would support Israeli military objectives without hesitation or conditions.
Previous American presidents pressured Israel privately while still preserving the outward presentation of a relationship between sovereign allies. Trump discarded much of that convention. The new perception weakens Israel’s deterrence dramatically. Plus, with bipartisan support for Israel in Washington even more completely collapsed than after the deleterious war in Gaza, and relations with much of Europe — Israel’s top trading partner — similarly deteriorated, Israel finds itself at a new peak of dangerous international isolation.
This strategic shipwreck bears no resemblance to the sweeping regional transformation that supporters of the war — myself included — initially envisioned. I assumed, partly because of the first days’ successes, that Trump and Netanyahu had a plan. This is not a mistake serious people are likely to make again.
The post The Iran war ended terribly for the US, and even worse for Israel appeared first on The Forward.
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Would Judaism have an issue with ‘Disclosure Day?’
Steven Spielberg is in his aliens exist era — but in truth, he’s been there since at least 1977. That’s when the director said NASA sent him a 20-page letter objecting to the release of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, fearful the public might take to watching the stars the way they did beaches after Jaws. Did this indicate there was something to hide?
“I really found my faith when I heard that the Government was opposed to the film,” he said.
Spielberg’s fascination with UFOs goes back even further. In 1964, five years before the moon landing, he made the 8 millimeter alien invasion flick Firelight, a 17-year-old’s dry run at the topics he’d later handle with Roy Neary and his mesa-like mound of mashed potatoes and the world’s loudest game of Simon.
He’d return to aliens again, with E.T., War of the Worlds and the critically reviled Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. But the 79-year-old director has never been so forthcoming with his views on alien life as he has been on this current press tour for Disclosure Day, where he made the controversial claim that first contact might pose a problem for the faithful.
“Is God, our God only on this planet, or is God a God for every system where there’s civilization, intelligent life, and even developing life?” Spielberg asked on CBS Sunday Morning. This is one of the questions posed by Disclosure Day, which is about the tug of war between a group dedicated to broadcasting the truth about intelligent extraterrestrial beings, and the shady agency determined to keep it under wraps.
Many in the church — meaning Christians, who are represented in the film by ex-novitiate Jane (Eve Hewson) — have said such a disclosure would be a nonissue for their belief. But what of Spielberg’s own coreligionists?
“Within the classic Jewish perspective is the idea that to embrace reality is to embrace our creator,” Rabbi Josh Breindel, whose teachings on speculative fiction earned him the moniker “sci-fi rabbi,” said in an interview. “So, if we were to have irrefutable proof of alien life, then that’s an opportunity for us to celebrate our creator in whose image we were made, and then maybe to probe and say, ‘Where do we see echoes or resonances of that image in this other life form in their sentient discourse?’”
We need not only take Rabbi Breindel’s word for it. The question pops up as early as the Middle Ages.
Writing in the 14th Century, the Spanish philosopher Hasdai Crescas claimed life on other planets wouldn’t be an issue for Jewish faith. Our texts feature many apparent allusions to other worlds in which God has dominion.
A place called Meroz, mentioned in the Book of Judges, has been interpreted as being another planet. The school of Merkabah mysticism, inspired by Ezekiel’s vision of the wheel, is a sort of Judaism-forward UFO watcher group. If we’re talking biblically accurate angels, or even the revelation at Sinai, there’s plenty in the Hebrew Bible that appears otherworldly.
Disclosure Day, written by David Koepp from a story by Spielberg, is a chase film about Danny Kelner (Josh O’Connor), a whistleblower for a U.S. government-aligned group called Wardex, intent on studying alien life and technology and keeping their findings suppressed. Danny is a math genius, and in a relationship with Jane, the ex-nun played by Hewson. He’s carrying sacred cargo: a backpack full of flash drives with evidence of spacecrafts and a weird rod made by the alien life forms whose precise capabilities include, but are not limited to, letting you turn invisible or allowing you to control someone else’s body and swap eye colors with them in the process.
In an effort to explain why men in black SUVs are chasing them, Danny shows Jane footage of an alien interrogation. Her response to seeing a small creature tortured by humans is an odd one: She thinks people will worship them as deities.
Here the film stumbles. Jane’s concern about a breakdown in belief may be justified in the realization that we’re not alone, but her leap to calling extraterrestrials “supreme beings” feels unwarranted. Yes, they have impressive technology. Also yes, a human can wield their magic baton MacGuffins, provided they’re wearing surgical gloves.
The faith subplot takes a backseat in the end to a familiar Spielbergian preoccupation: his parents and what he’s inherited from them. We learn the aliens taught Danny math, “the language of the book of the universe,” and made Emily Blunt’s character, Margaret, a Kansas City weatherperson, into a supreme empath, like Star Trek’s Deanna Troi cranked up to 11. As established in The Fabelmans, Spielberg, a product of his engineer father and musician mother, is naturally both. (Gilding the lily of the parental metaphor, there’s a sequence with a train that’s hauling pianos.)
On their phones and on TV, the world will bear witness to “disclosure,” including scenes of emaciated and disemboweled little green men, recalling both images from the Holocaust and current conflicts including Gaza. (Spielberg made it so the coverup for these cruel experiments began in 1947, probably just to align with the year of the Roswell incident, but before that was explained, I was thinking of the UN partition plan.)
Sometime before, Jane makes a call to the abbess at her old nunnery.
Paraphrasing Genesis, she says God made humans his supreme creation, to which the Abbess (Elizabeth Marvel), applies a close reading: “his supreme creation on Earth.”
This view is consistent with rabbinic thought, and the Abbess’ subsequent line, “why would He make such a vast universe, yet save it only for us,” is essentially what the Lubavitcher Rebbe told microbiologist Velvl Greene: “for you to sit here and say there is no life outside of planet Earth is to put limitations on the Creator, and that is not something any of His creatures can do!”
A better question for Jews, perhaps, is if these aliens have a separate covenant with the creator.
If one is interested in the Catholic view, know that Pope Francis said he’d baptize aliens. As for how other sci-fi writers have treated on Jews in Space, Dune scribe Frank Herbert seems to believe the faith was uniquely durable, having made it the only religion from an Earthbound society to survive in an intergalactic reality.
One thing that’s striking about Spielberg’s latest foray into the galaxy is its implications for geo-politics.
The backdrop of Disclosure Day is one of military escalation said to rival the Cuban Missile Crisis. Colin Firth’s foppish Brit bad guy warns that the truth would “tip the balance in an already destabilized world.” This runs counter to works like Watchmen and Independence Day, which posit a great common cause when people are confronted with life forms from outer space.
The difference is that these aliens are no invaders. They come in peace to teach us a lesson in empathy. That, the film seems to say, is the true threat to the world order: that humans behave with humanity.
In the final minutes of the film, the truth comes out and we are given a simple message, conveyed first through click consonants, then a math equation, and finally a single English word: “Listen.”
“I saw that, and I was like, ‘Oh, that’s Shema,’” Breindel said. “If you get it you get it.”
The post Would Judaism have an issue with ‘Disclosure Day?’ appeared first on The Forward.
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14 arrested during rival protests outside Israeli real estate event held at London synagogue
(JTA) — LONDON — Fourteen people were arrested following clashes between pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian groups on Sunday outside an event promoting Israeli real estate being held at a London synagogue.
Seven of those arrested came from pro-Israel groups, while six were affiliated with pro-Palestinian groups, the Metropolitan Police told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Monday.
“The Great Israeli Real Estate Event” had drawn controversy for weeks, with multiple organizations including Amnesty International claiming the event organizers were selling “stolen” Palestinian lands in West Bank settlements and politicians including the mayor of London expressing opposition to the event.
The event organizers, meanwhile, told the Jewish News that all the properties being presented were located within Israel’s internationally recognized borders.
The event took place a day before a U.K. appeals court ruled that last year’s ban of a prominent anti-Israel group, Palestine Action, was legal.
The confrontation on Sunday followed similar ones in New York City and beyond over Israeli real estate events in recent months. A demonstration outside a Manhattan synagogue that was hosting such an event in November during which pro-Palestinian activists threatened violence spurred a new law constraining protests there.
London’s Metropolitan Police estimated that 1,000 people showed up to demonstrate outside Edgware United Synagogue, in northwest London. The department said it had coordinated with the Jewish Community Security Trust and deployed officers to deal with any disruptions. It also set up barriers to separate pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel groups.
During the confrontation, 14 arrests were made, including five for violent disorder, six for racial/religiously aggravated offenses, one for assault on an emergency worker, one for Public Order Act-related offenses, and one for common assault.
The Board of Deputies of British Jews’ acting president, Adam Cohen, said the group was “deeply disturbed at the wholly unjustified protest” outside a synagogue in a statement that reiterated that the event organizers had “publicly refuted claims that the event is marketing real estate over the Green Line” separating Israel from the West Bank.
The “false pretenses seems to be little more than an excuse to harass and intimidate members of the Jewish community,” Cohen said.
The protest was organized by an array of pro-Palestinian groups, including the International Centre of Justice for Palestinians, which issued a public letter criticizing the synagogue, and Jewish anti-Zionist groups. At least one Jewish anti-Zionist was arrested while protesting, according to a post by the groups on Instagram.
Under pressure ahead of the event, the original venue set to host it pulled out on Friday, the Jewish News reported. Registered attendees were sent messages via email and WhatsApp on Friday informing them of the change and learned about the new venue via an email at 11 p.m. Saturday that told them there would be ID checks and metal detectors at the doors.
The change in venue came following criticism from not just anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian organizations, but national politicians. Close to 100 members of parliament wrote a letter to Foreign Secretary Yvette Cooper calling on her to investigate what they said was event at which “land in cities and towns built on the forced displacement of Palestinian people including properties in Israeli settlements across the occupied West Bank will be available for purchase.”
They also argued allowing the sale of these properties would contribute to settlement expansion, which the U.K. government regards as a violation of international law.
London Mayor Sadiq Khan also expressed “concerns” about the event on Friday after Green Party leader Zack Polanski, a prominent critic of Israel, asked him about it during a public availability.
“I condemn any attempt to sell property in the settlements, be that in London or anywhere else in the world,” Khan said. “I share concerns about the Great Israeli Real Estate taking place in our city, which I oppose.”
The Board of Deputies said it was “very disappointing” that public figures had not acknowledged the event organizers’ claims about no West Bank properties being presented “and instead inflamed tensions through partial and misleading commentary.”
This latest confrontation with anti-Israel demonstrators comes at a time of heightened tension in the U.K. Jewish community, and particularly in Jewish neighborhoods in London, where many residents feel unsafe after a string of incidents including the arson of four Hatzola ambulances in March; attempted attacks on three synagogues; and the stabbing of two Jewish men in the Orthodox neighborhood of Golders Green in late April. Dozens of people have been arrested in connection with the incidents.
As part of a crackdown meant to protect Jewish communities, the British government has adopted policies that give law enforcement new latitude to constrain protests.
“New measures under the Crime and Policing Act, called for by the Board and community partners, will from the end of the month give police new powers to impose conditions on protests near places of worship,” Cohen said. “We are calling on the police to ensure such protests are kept a significant distance from places of worship to prevent intimidation to members of the Jewish community.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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