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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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‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
Perhaps you, like me, have had a very specific earworm for the last week. It’s not a song, though there is a sing-song-y element to it. It’s a chant: “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish. My Christian Dior — Knicks in four!”
If you hadn’t heard, the New York Knickerbockers are in the finals for the first time since 1999, on a 13-game streak and looking good to win a championship NBA title they haven’t gotten since 1973. The city is going nuts. I am not a big sports fan, but even I have been caught up in the fever, watching the first two games of the best-of-seven finals pitting the Knicks against the San Antonio Spurs at sports bars where fire codes are being flagrantly broken and attendees have brought drums to assist in leading chants.
The newest chant was born from the mouth of a rabid fan featured in a surreal supercut of fan reactions that went viral. (The video also features a dancing robot wearing a jersey emblazoned with the Kalshi logo, the online predictions market that lets users bet on the NBA, sure, but also on what day the U.S. will bomb Iran.)
It pretty much instantly caught fire; my city councilman Chi Ossé posted a video with the slogan, while watching the second game’s nail-biter of a win. Shekar Krishnan, a city councilman from Queens, walked onto the main stage at Gov Ball to lead the crowd in a rousing rendition of the chant.
Beyond the rhyme scheme — which, if we’re being honest, is a little bit difficult to nail — what made this chant catch on so fast is its ability to capture a certain ineffable quality of New Yorkiness. There’s diversity, there’s humor — I’m sorry but it is very funny to name two of the major Abrahamic religions with pride and then ignore the one practiced by the majority of Americans in favor of a fashion designer — and there’s a sense of unity as the city rallies behind its long-losing sports team.
And, at a time of rising antisemitism and just generally bad PR for the Jews, I am heartened to see the city embrace its Jewishness.
Bagels have long been a metonym for the city, and a source of great pride and snobbery for its residents, a food not incidentally rooted in Jewish history. Jews run some of the city’s most beloved neighborhood institutions. They have represented New York on the page and the screen — think Nora Ephron, Fran Drescher, Leonard Bernstein and Woody Allen (for better or for worse). Jews have imparted a Jewish humor, sensibility and even accent that have so shaped the city that they are now basically synonymous. I cannot tell you how many people I’ve met who are not Jewish, but feel as though they are by virtue of growing up in the city.
This hasn’t always been a positive thing. Sometimes equating New York with Jewishness has been used as a sort of racist dogwhistle; Mitch McConnell, for example, asked voters whether they really wanted “somebody from New York” to “set the agenda” as a way of signalling that Chuck Schumer is too Jewish, too liberal, too out of touch with real Americans — in short, the same antisemitic “rootless cosmopolitan” stereotype that has long motivated hatred against Jews.
Of course, the chant isn’t magical, and many of the now-familiar political dynamics came into play. Some communities of Jews are at odds with the way the city is shifting, particularly with the election of Zohran Mamdani, and some posts of the chant have comments from Jews annoyed at being lumped into the same cultural moment as a mayor they see as their enemy. (“Hi, we’re actually humans, not baked goods,” wrote one user. “We’re currently experiencing the highest rate of hate crime in the city. This isn’t cute.”) And, on the flip side of the political spectrum, other commenters accused those spreading the chant of doing “full on genocide rehab,” seemingly for merely mentioning Jews in a positive context.
But however online commentators want to spin the chant, the reality on the street is pure hype. As the rapper Fat Joe put it when interviewed at Madison Square Garden after the game: “I seen Hasidic Jews break dancing with Black kids. This is the greatest unification of the city since 9/11.” (Video proof bears this out.) Somehow, even the local Hare Krishna gathering got in on the Knicks mania.
That’s the true beauty of the city’s diversity — everyone lives together regardless of their political disagreements. And they can still unite in a common cause: the Knicks.
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West Point graduated more Jewish cadets this year than ever before, official says
The very first class at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in 1802 consisted of two graduates, one of whom was a Jew named Simon Levy who served briefly in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers before passing away at the age of 33. Levy was accepted into the academy based on his skill in mathematics and the strength of his ”good conduct” at the Battle of Maumee Rapids, one of the last skirmishes in the Indian War in Ohio in 1794.
This year on May 23, according to Col. Benjamin Wallen, a lay Jewish leader involved in the West Point Hillel chapter and the academy’s Jewish choir, 30 Jewish cadets graduated from the academy. Though West Point’s Public Affairs Office said it couldn’t confirm the number of Jewish cadets because the military academy “does not track or maintain official data on cadets’ religious affiliations, Col. Wallen said the Class of 2026 had the most Jews in West Point’s 224-year history.
Asked what accounted for the upsurge in Jews at West Point, Wallen said the Oct. 7 Hamas attacks and the rise in antisemitism are likely factors.
“This is one place that none of that has reared its ugly head,” Wallen said of the ubiquitous campus demonstrations against Israel. “Not a hint of it. Because that’s just not who we are. There’s no place for hate of any kind at West Point.”
Wallen, a Jewish officer with 30 years in the Army, is a civil and environmental engineering professor at West Point and also serves as Associate Dean for Faculty Development. He called West Point “a wonderful place to be Jewish and to serve your country.”
Two of the grads in the Class of ’26 are twin sisters from Millburn, NJ. Catherine Brodsky is headed to Duke Medical School to become an Army surgeon. Her sister Claudia is bound for Anchorage, Alaska, where she’ll serve as a logistics officer.
“I had the most amazing time at West Point,” Brodsky told me over the phone from Budapest, where she and her sister are visiting. “I’m very grateful for it. I think it was really instrumental in challenging me and making me grow as a person and as a leader.”
The newly minted second lieutenant said the Jewish cadets had a deep sense of community.
“We had a lot of events that kept us close-knit, like choir and various trips,” she said. “Celebrating the holidays together was really important.”
Rabbi Lawrence Hajioff, a professor of Judaic Studies at Stern College for Women in Manhattan who conducts extra-curricular classes at West Point, hosted the Jewish cadets at his home in nearby Monsey during Jewish holidays and Shabbat.
“They really are the most remarkable bunch of men and women,” Hajioff said. “From my talking to the students, I’d say there’s definitely been a shift of young men and women wanting to protect this country.”
Rabbi Hajioff posted photos on Instagram of the baccalaureate service for Jewish cadets at which the Jewish choir performed. One photo showed him standing next to Ron Chajmovic of Chagrin Falls, Ohio, in his dress whites.
Lt. Chajmovic, who attended Georgia Military College before arriving at West Point, is headed to helicopter flight school, Hajioff said. His older brother Yoni is in the Israel Defense Forces and is currently stationed in Gaza according to their grandfather, Paul Chajmovic. The elder Chajmovic, who is about to turn 80, served in the Israeli air force during the Six-Day War.
“I miss it, believe it or not,” he told me. “I would volunteer again but I’m too old.”
Chajmovic’s other grandfather came from Israel to West Point for the graduation ceremony.
West Point’s Class of ‘27 and Class of ‘28 both have 27 Jewish cadets, according to Col. Wallen, though he said that Jewish representation is down in the Class of ’29, which he said has 17 or 18 Jews.
The Class of ‘30 will include an 18-year-old graduate of a Jewish day school in Nevada. Yonah Mowery arrives at West Point on June 29 to start six weeks of basic training. Mowery is a graduate of the Adelson School in Las Vegas, which was started by the late Sheldon Adelson, the Jewish casino billionaire and Netanyahu supporter. Mowery ran cross country, played basketball and swam on his school team. He took 10 advanced placement classes and participated in Moot Beit Din, a student competition based on rabbinical court.
“I know that by being in the American military, I will be defending not just Jews in Israel but Jews around the world because the United States is a major world power,” Mowery told me in a telephone interview.
The Mowery family has a long history of military service. His paternal grandfather served in the U.S. Navy during the Vietnam War. His grandfather’s uncle, Mowery said, was among the American soldiers who helped liberate Dachau. And there were 13 Mowery men who fought for the Union and perished at Gettysburg.
“The more Jews we have in the American military, the less alone we all feel,” Mowery said. “It’s an honor to be in the United States military as a Jewish kid, especially since this country is founded on Jewish and Christian values.”
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The visionary Jewish poet who survived the Holocaust but not its aftermath
Paul Celan: A Life
By Anna Arno
Translated by Soren Gauger
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 416 pages, $35
During a 1969 poetry reading in Israel, Paul Celan’s audience requested “Deathfugue,” his most famous poem. With its hypnotic images of death as “a master from Deutschland,” prisoners drinking the “black milk of dawn” and smoke rising to “a grave in the clouds,” it remains one of the most powerful artifacts of the Holocaust.
But like a rock star weary of endlessly repeating his greatest hits, Celan declined. Instead, he offered other poems, scorned by some commentators as “hermetic, esoteric, divorced from reality.”
So we learn from Anna Arno’s intelligent, intricate biography, Paul Celan: A Life, ably translated from the Polish by Soren Gauger. Interweaving literary criticism with Celan’s life story, Arno quotes liberally from Pierre Joris’ English translations. Even so, she can’t quite do the work justice. In translation and wrenched from their poetic context, Celan’s innovative verses, credited with a radical remaking of the German language, come across as cryptic and impenetrable.
Arno covers Celan’s schooling, wartime experiences, work history, travels, friendships, psychiatric ordeals and overlapping romantic interests, at times departing from strict chronology. Though defensible, the narrative strategy renders the book somewhat convoluted.
One thread is Celan’s intermittent, decadeslong involvement with the accomplished Austrian poet and novelist Ingeborg Bachmann. That relationship, more passionate and enduring for Bachmann, preceded his mostly happy marriage to the French artist Gisèle Lestrange and continued during it. In an odd twist, Bachmann and Lestrange, bonded by both their love for Celan and their anxiety about his well-being, developed “a kind of impossible sisterly friendship.”
Despite Celan’s devotion to his wife, “other women,” Arno writes, “were always drifting through his life.” A chapter toward the end of the biography details some of Celan’s most important romantic relationships. Other chapters focus on his inventiveness as a translator and his worsening mental illness.
Celan was born Paul Antschel in 1920 in Czernowitz, Romania (officially Cernăuți, and now Chernivtsi, Ukraine) on the fringes of the recently defunct Austro-Hungarian Empire. The French-sounding Celan is a pen name, an anagram of Ancel, a Romanian version of Antschel.
Celan’s parents were German-speaking Jews, and German was Celan’s native language. But he was a polyglot, a talent that shaped his poetry and enabled his career as a translator. Along with Romanian, in which he wrote some early poems, and French, the language of his postwar life in Paris, he learned Russian (under Soviet occupation) and English. He had at least “a passive knowledge of Yiddish,” picked up enough Hebrew for his Bar Mitzvah and studied Italian, Latin and Greek. “His intellectual ease gave him a sense of superiority,” Arno writes.
World War II interrupted Celan’s medical studies in France, and back home he enrolled in Romance language courses. The Soviet occupation was brutal but, for Jews, the Romanian fascist regime that succeeded it was worse. Celan’s parents were deported and died in a Nazi labor camp. Celan, separated from them, survived forced labor, but remained “wracked with grief” over his parents’ fate. He would describe “Deathfugue,” written in 1945, as his mother’s epitaph and grave. The poem may have influenced Theodor Adorno, who famously described poetry after Auschwitz as “barbaric,” to modify his views.
After leaving a ruined Czernowitz for Bucharest, where Celan translated, wrote poetry, flirted with Surrealism and “bounced from one relationship to the next,” he traveled to Vienna. “Young, dashing, full of charm,” he eventually settled in Paris and became a naturalized French citizen. But he chose German as his poetic language, despite the emotional dissonance that entailed.
Over the years, he traveled to Germany to read his work and accept prizes. In the process, he developed relationships with leading postwar German writers, including Heinrich Böll, Hans Magnus Enzensberger and Günter Grass. But the 1950s were a tricky time. “He could have crossed paths with a murderer at every step,” Arno writes.
Celan recoiled viscerally at what he saw as persistent antisemitic currents in German culture, which hadn’t yet reckoned with the magnitude of Nazi crimes. He interpreted bad reviews as instances of antisemitism, and Arno suggests that he wasn’t always wrong.
Even more traumatic were accusations of plagiarism leveled against him by Claire Goll, the widow of Yvan Goll, whose poetry he had translated. Arno describes the charges as both malicious and baseless, and “probably an act of revenge for her spurned advances.”
They nevertheless affected Celan’s reputation and threatened his health. “Claire Goll’s smear campaign was to become the main cause of the poet’s mental breakdown,” Arno asserts. It’s a strong statement. Certainly, he had endured other losses: the murder of his parents, the death of his day-old infant son, François, after a botched delivery.
On the cusp of middle age, Arno reports, Celan experienced bursts of paranoia. “He could not always separate justified precautions from obsessive mistrust, vigilance from a fit of persecution mania,” she writes. “His deeply buried despair, moral severity, and tempestuous personality all caused sudden and violent fits.”
In 1962, he had what Arno calls “his first bout of psychosis,” which included hallucinations and violent episodes. He was hospitalized and medicated and underwent psychotherapy. Insulin injections, a since-discredited treatment, damaged his motor skills. Even during his hospitalizations, he continued to write poetry. (His productivity in the throes of mental health crises calls to mind Sylvia Plath.)
Arno, noting that Celan’s medical records remain sealed and his journals unavailable, doesn’t offer a diagnosis. The hallucinations and paranoia suggest schizophrenia, but Arno also mentions mania and depression, along with numerous suicide attempts. He tried his best to stay connected to his only child, Eric. But his instability cost him many friendships and ultimately his marriage.
In 1970, the 49-year-old poet drowned himself in the Seine, joining a sad company of writers who survived the Holocaust but not its emotional aftermath. What exactly triggered Celan’s suicide is impossible to know. Arno says only: “He was no longer capable of supporting the weight of the past as it flushed to the surface.”
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