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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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5 important questions for Abdul El-Sayed
Abdul El-Sayed’s narrow victory in the Michigan Democratic primary means he’s going to have to work hard to persuade skeptical liberal Michigan voters.
I’m not from Michigan, but I am liberal. And I am skeptical.
I appreciate El-Sayed’s political skills and his relentless focus on the health and economic disparities that undermine the American dream for so many.
But while many Jewish Michiganders supported El-Sayed, his narrow victory over Rep. Haley Stevens has many other Michigan Democratic voters worried. It’s “ridiculous” that Democratic Jews wouldn’t vote for El-Sayed based on his positions on Israel, former Rep. Andy Levin told the Forward, but I’m not sure El-Sayed’s views on Israel are the main concern.
“If he wants to be senator of a state that has such a large Jewish population,” Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, told JTA, “he must demonstrate an ability to stand with that community as we face the rise of antisemitism.”
Many of El-Sayed’s comments and actions during the primary cast that support into doubt. Here are the five questions I’d like to see Michiganders put to him:
You said, “Hurt people hurt people.” Do you also believe that enraged people hurt people?
After a man whose family members were killed in an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon attacked children at a West Bloomfield, Michigan synagogue, you said, “Hurt people hurt people.” You said you were explaining the act of terror, not excusing it. But we know too that incendiary rhetoric also foments violence. The Egyptian man who attacked Jews at a peaceful march in Boulder, Colorado, in June 2025 screamed anti-Israel political phrases and said he targeted the group because he believed they were “Zionists.” You have called Israel “evil” like Hamas, “bloodthirsty,” and you singled out AIPAC as uniquely nefarious and powerful among all influence groups in the country. Doesn’t such rhetoric endanger the lives of constituents you claim you want to protect? After extremists attempted to kidnap Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer in 2020, you accused President Donald Trump of inciting them via tweet. Will you cool your own rhetoric?
Is there any circumstance you would vote to send military aid to Israel?
Oct. 7, 2023 was supposed to be an all-out war. Hamas along with Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iran and the Houthis discussed striking Israel in unison, and could have. In such a scenario, as in the October 1973 war, Israel would have faced many thousands of casualties if not an existential threat as it quickly exhausted its defensive shield. Now imagine you were in the Senate during such a scenario. Would you have voted to send help to an ally? You said you supported sending military aid to Ukraine when it faced invasion. Why not Israel in a similar scenario?
How would you work toward a two-state solution?
You told CNN that every definition of a Jewish state “ends up in some articulation of illiberal values, every single one.” You told The New Yorker that you support a two-state solution with equal rights and self-determination for Israeli Jews and Palestinians — which is a mainstream liberal Zionist position. So explain: What’s so illiberal about a Jewish-majority state you support? And do you believe in it enough to work toward one?
Is money really the only reason politicians and others support Israel?
You accused Israel’s supporters in Congress of being motivated solely by money. Is there really no other possible reason? Until Israel’s post-Oct. 7 destruction of Gaza, a majority of Americans and the vast majority of American Jews supported Israel. Couldn’t congressional support reflect their constituents’ support or their own religious or political beliefs? Could they believe in Jewish self-determination, especially post-Holocaust? Or is support for a Jewish state only a function of Jewish money (see #1)?
Which do you care about more, the Jewish vote, or Hasan Piker?
The Twitch streamer Hasan Piker said Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel. He called a Jewish man a “bloodthirsty violent pig dog.” You defended your appearance with Piker by saying you needed to reach his three million followers. I get that: Hillary Clinton and Kamala Harris helped tank their campaigns by refusing to engage young voters wherever they could. But you continued to campaign with Piker, and refused to disavow his extreme rhetoric, saying you wouldn’t be distracted by “cancel culture.” No one is asking you to cancel him. But why won’t you, at least, confront him on his rhetoric?
There is, as you and countless pundits have pointed out, a lot at stake in this election. Right now too many American Jews feel that one of those things is their own safety. Please answer these questions, Dr. El-Sayed.
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The post 5 important questions for Abdul El-Sayed appeared first on The Forward.
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Sing to me, Muse, of two Moshes and their Odysseys!
If you have read any one of the at least 60 English translations of Homer’s Odyssey or have seen Christopher Nolan’s new Odyssey movie, then you are probably aware that Odysseus leads a more active life than the average person. As if living through the Trojan War weren’t hard enough, he blinds the cyclops Polyphemus and gets cursed by Poseidon with epically bad weather. His men are regularly transformed into pigs, picked off by Laestrygonian giants, and drowned in storms. The nymph Calypso detains him on her island for seven years and forces him to be her lover, (although whether this counts as a hardship depends on your perspective). The man of twists and turns has seen a lot. But he probably never predicted his story would be translated into Yiddish. Or Ladino.
At first, the parallel lives of the two men who translated The Odyssey into Yiddish and Ladino sound like the makings of a sphinx’s riddle, or a cryptic prophecy from the Oracle at Delphi: both men would be called “Moshe”; both would be alive at the beginning of the Holocaust; only one would survive to the end. Their names were Moshe Leyb Pitshenik (1895 – 1941) of the Odiseye (אָדיסייע) and Moshe Ha-Elion (1925-2022) of La Odisea.
The two men never met, yet there are unexpected rhymes between the lives of the Moshes, as if their lives were composed in the same meter. Not even a photo survives of scholar, writer and translator Moshe Leyb Pitshenik, but the Congress for Jewish Culture records that he was born in Zlotshev, eastern Galicia, now Ukraine. He spent his whole life traveling various pathways to erudition. As a child, he attended a religious elementary school and a small synagogue study hall before working as a bank employee in Vienna. The corporate life must not have been for Pitshenik, for he soon moved back to Poland and enrolled in a teachers’ seminary. He spent the rest of his life as a teacher and director at the local Jewish high school in Loyvitsh (Łowicz), writing ferociously on the side.
His poems, articles, short stories, and translations appeared in publications in Krakow, Warsaw, Łodz, and Vilna. Occasionally he would publish under pen names like “A Zaytiker,” an outsider, and “Nekhed Mohel,” which translates to “the grandson of the mohel (ritual circumciser),” but sounds suspiciously like something else.
In 1937, he pulled off his translational tour de force: the Odiseye, so literally epic an achievement that he won an award from the Yiddish PEN Club, the Yiddish branch of the PEN international network with epicenters in Warsaw, Vilnius and New York City. In the book’s introduction, fellow poet and translator Shloyme Shaynberg gave Pitshenik a hearty mazal tov for “anchoring one of Homer’s magical ships on our shores.”
But the time to celebrate ran short. Just two years after the Odiseye’s publication, the Nazis invaded Poland, confining Pitshenik and thousands of other Jews in the Łowicz ghetto. He had been working on an original epic poem in ancient Greek at the time of the invasion. Had he been allowed to finish it, the poem would have been the first original ancient Greek epic to be published since the 5th century C.E. In 1941, he was led into the Kazimierz Forest and murdered, leaving the poem unfinished.
Pitshenik was already 30 years old when Moshe Ha-Elion, his Sephardic counterpart, was born in Thessaloniki in 1925. Like Pitshenik, Ha-Elion studied at a Jewish primary school before receiving a secular education, discovering The Iliad and The Odyssey in ancient Greek during junior high. Ha-Elion was 16 when the Nazis invaded Thessaloniki, he recounts in his oral history for the United States Holocaust Museum. Two years later, in 1943, Ha-Elion and his mother, sister, and grandparents boarded freight wagons believing that they would be resettled in Poland. But these wagons were headed for Auschwitz. On arrival, every member of Ha-Elion’s immediate family was sent to the gas chambers but him.
For the next 21 months, Ha-Elion labored in Auschwitz. Teaching became his lifeline: He gave Greek lessons to a Christian prisoner with special privileges in exchange for food. In 1945, as the Allies approached, the Nazis transferred Ha-Elion and thousands of other prisoners to concentration camps in Austria. The hunger, Ha-Elion recalled later in an interview with El Mundo, was so unbearable that he ate train coal to survive.
After the liberation of the camps, Ha-Elion entered mandatory Palestine on a refugee ship. He fought in the 1948 Arab-Israeli War and earned a B.A. and an M.A. in Humanities at the University of Tel Aviv. Like Pitshenik, he spent the rest of his life stirring up a tornado of writing across genres: He wrote a memoir of his time in the camps, a book of autobiographical poems in Ladino entitled En Los Kampos de la Muerte, or In the Death Camps, and even music to accompany one of these poems, La Djovenika al Lager (The Young Girl in the Lager), about the murder of his sister Nina.
But it was not until the end of his life that Ha-Elion undertook his translation of The Odyssey. When Ha-Elion was 90, he and the Israeli poet Avner Peretz published a Hebrew and Ladino dual translation of The Odyssey. He even managed to keep the poem in dactylic hexameter, a line-for-line Ladino mirror of the ancient Greek epic.
There are strange reflections of each Moshe in the Odysseys that they translated. For Pitshenik, the story seems omen-like: In the poem’s first line, Pitshenik translates the first adjective to describe Odysseus, polútropon, as the Yiddish word farvoglt, or “far from home.” This is unusual. English translators usually style Odysseus as “cunning” or a “man of twists and turns” or just downright “complicated.” It is as if Pitshenik read the signs of his own coming displacement in Odysseus before he read them in himself. But the translation’s strange prescience deepens just a few words later. Odysseus, Pitshenik says, participated in the “khurboynes” of holy Troy. At the time Pitshenik wrote this, a “khurbn” meant a total, cataclysmic destruction. It was reserved to describe horrors like the destruction of the first and second Temples and pogroms in Russia during World War I. But Pitshenik could not have known then that the word “Khurbn” would one day be used as a metonym for the approaching Holocaust. In Pitshenik’s translation, far-from-home Odysseus would survive a “khurbn” and find his way back. But Pitshenik himself never did.
For Ha-Elion, The Odyssey is like another form of autobiography. Like Odysseus, he was flung far from home by war, and spent the rest of his life trying to find his way home — or some place that felt like it. If translation is the process of rendering something foreign into something familiar, then perhaps translation is an attempt at homecoming in itself. Pitshenik and Ha-Elion never returned to their homes again after the War. But in the Odiseye and La Odisea, a piece of home survives. And it sounds like this:
Kontame, Muza, del ombre astuto…
O Muze! Bazing mir di maysim fun farvogltn gvir…
Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns!
The post Sing to me, Muse, of two Moshes and their Odysseys! appeared first on The Forward.
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‘Uncommitted’ founder who pushed Democrats to vote against Biden over Gaza wins primary
(JTA) — Abbas Alawieh, a founder of the Uncommitted movement that pressured former President Joe Biden to change his Israel policy, is the projected winner of a Democratic primary for Michigan’s state Senate.
Alawieh rose to national prominence as a key architect of the campaign to withhold votes from Biden during Michigan’s presidential primary in 2024, a protest against the administration’s support for Israel as it inflicted mounting casualties in Gaza.
Alawieh defeated state representative Erin Byrnes in Tuesday’s primary to represent Michigan’s 2nd Senate District, a heavily Arab-American area covering Dearborn and parts of Detroit — and the epicenter of the Uncommitted effort. He won 59% of the vote to Byrnes’ 41% after more than 95% of votes were counted, according to the Associated Press, and is now almost certain to win the solid-blue state Senate seat in November.
Alawieh, who was born in Lebanon and grew up in Dearborn, acknowledged his victory without giving a speech on Wednesday. His staff announced that Alawieh’s maternal grandfather, Hajj Kassem Bazzi, died Tuesday night as they awaited the election results.
“Please keep Abbas’s family in your prayers as they take needed time together,” Alawieh’s team said in a statement. “Abbas will share his own thoughts on the race soon. For now, thank you to every community that made this win possible.”
Alawieh was backed by Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders and Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer. He previously worked as a staffer for congressional Democrats, including Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, former Michigan Rep. Andy Levin and former Missouri Rep. Cori Bush, who lost a primary against Rep. Wesley Bell on Tuesday.
Alawieh, alongside Layla Elabed, co-founded the campaign urging Michigan Democrats to vote “uncommitted” in the 2024 Democratic presidential primary. The movement attracted a groundswell of support, including from some Jews, and won more than 100,000 votes, or 13% of the overall vote. Biden was beaten by the uncommitted vote in Dearborn, where Arab Americans make up more than half the population.
The Uncommitted movement also spread to other states, rallying more than 650,000 voters nationwide, and crystallized a lack of enthusiasm for Biden, who eventually stepped off the presidential ticket.
Alawieh served as one of the Uncommitted delegates at the 2024 Democratic National Convention, where he and other delegates unsuccessfully lobbied to place a Palestinian speaker on the agenda.
Alawieh did not make Israel and Gaza a central part of his campaign for the state Senate seat, instead focusing on supporting working families and investing in healthcare, housing, public transit and education. Still, he told the Michigan Advance in February that his role in the Uncommitted movement resonated with people in his district.
“For the people in real life — not on Twitter — it is clear to them that parties’ focus on prioritizing funding for war crimes was out of touch with what voters wanted,” he said. “The party was undoubtedly wrong about Gaza in 2024.”
While some Democrats blamed the Uncommitted campaign for contributing to President Donald Trump’s defeat of former Vice President Kamala Harris, who lost Michigan in her 2024 presidential run, Alawieh and Harris have mended fences enough to recently sit down for a meeting.
Harris “initiated” the meeting after months of phone calls, Alawieh said in July. “I urge VP Harris and all of our party’s leaders to side with peace-loving Americans against endless wars, in opposition to the Israeli military’s genocide in Gaza, and against the ethnic cleansing campaign in Lebanon.” Alawieh has said that he voted for Harris against Trump in the 2024 general election, while Elabed did not.
The centrality of Israel in Michigan’s primaries has spawned bitter divides between Jewish Democrats and others in the party concerning the threat of antisemitism. In one incident that shook Detroit-area Jews earlier this year, Temple Israel in the suburb of West Bloomfield was rammed by a truck laden with explosives. The man who drove the truck, a U.S. citizen from Lebanon, had recently lost several family members in an Israeli airstrike on Lebanon.
Alawieh responded to the attack by declaring his support for Jewish Michiganders.
“We must stand in unequivocal defense of the humanity and safety of our Jewish siblings and denounce this heinous act,” he said in a statement. “My family and I are praying for safety for communities across our state who are feeling afraid right now, and we are holding our Jewish community members extra close.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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