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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 post Queer yeshiva to publish first-ever collection of Jewish legal opinions written by and for trans Jews appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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What Hailey Bieber smoothies and instant matzo ball soup reveal about American Jewish taste
It has become exceedingly difficult to get a bowl of kosher matzo ball soup in my L.A. neighborhood. I’m reminded of this every few months, when a cold or a craving reminds me what we lost when Pico Kosher Deli, established in 1968 about a mile from my apartment, closed for good early in the pandemic. It’s not just the soup, of course. It’s the whole kosher deli experience — bulging pastrami sandwiches, a waitress with a notepad, frilly toothpicks.
The traditional kosher deli is dying, if not dead, and not just in L.A. Kosher Ashkenazi fare is officially passé, a cuisine category today’s balabustas — at least my millennial Modern Orthodox cohort — have abandoned. At the kosher markets, Manischewitz products are relegated to a dusty corner, the “kosher aisle” of the kosher grocer. And at surviving delis like Katz’s and Canter’s, kosher is not a religious certification. It is, simply, a nostalgia cue immediately preceding the word “style.”
Fortunately, a wave of new, smartly packaged foodstuffs capitalizing on that nostalgia has arrived to restore my Ashkenazi birthright, or at least my former sodium levels. In the years since my neighborhood deli closed, direct-to-consumer brands have launched to hawk kosher potato latke crisps, kosher matzo chips and kosher jarred charoset (lovingly named Schmutz). The newcomer that I sprung for was a kosher instant matzo ball soup called Nooish. A box of four stout, colorful soup cups arrived about a week after I ordered them online.
To find out why these shelf-stable products have taken off while delis languish, I called Nate Rosen, whose official title — creator of the consumer brands newsletter Express Checkout — obscures the coolness of his job, which largely consists of reviewing new snacks on TikTok. According to Rosen, the kosher renaissance was part of a broader surge of food startups during the pandemic, when free time and disposable income were suddenly in abundance. It was inevitable someone would find the Jewish angle on the trend.
“There’s a market for it,” Rosen said. “There’s dedicated spots for it [on shelves]. And I think especially now, people are proud to be Jewish and proud to show that off a little bit.”
Nooish’s instant soup, ready in just a couple minutes, doesn’t come with booth seating. But taste-wise, comfort-wise and deli-wise, it’s a worthy adaptation of the experience. The kneidlach — three to a cup, each a bit larger than a Ping-Pong ball and floating in a salty brown broth, hold their form but obey your spoon. (There’s no chicken, and the soup is certified pareve.) At four-for-$36, the instant soup is probably too pricey for your kid’s lunchbox, and not substantial enough for an adult meal. But in a pinch — say, a cold or a craving — it can be transporting.
If the kosher deli is out, what’s in? The answer awaited me at Hatch Kitchen, a new kosher meat restaurant, where earlier this week I watched a barista prepare a fancy smoothie. Elaborate, astonishingly expensive and often named after celebrities, fancy smoothies are an L.A. institution, the lifeblood of the influencer class. The most notorious of these drinks, the upscale grocery chain Erewhon’s Hailey Bieber smoothie, contains strawberries and dates but also vanilla collagen powder and something called sea moss gel. It costs $20.
Hatch, I was told, makes something similar, the strawberry-based “Or-gan-ic” (the middle syllable also the Hebrew word for garden), which the restaurant calls its “most viral smoothie.” No sea moss gel, but the menu touts “anti-inflammatory” ingredients that include flax seeds and hibiscus. It’s $12, which sounds like a lot if you’ve never spent $20 on a smoothie before, and like a bargain if you just did, and for that one you’d had to look a cashier in the eye and utter the name of Justin Bieber’s wife. (At Hatch, you order from an iPad.)
Hatch’s fancy smoothie — which is also a photogenic one — models the dominant trend in contemporary kosher dining: pop-culture mimicry. Across from where the Pico Kosher Deli once stood, you can order a kosher crunchwrap supreme — a Taco Bell menu item — from a Mexican street food place called Lenny’s Casita. Kosher cafes still serve bagels, but people go for the avocado toast. It’s kosher dining’s hypebeast era, if you can afford it; Lenny’s crunchwrap with beef runs $30. I’m not sure how close the knockoff is to the real thing, or whether proximity really matters. Most customers will never taste the alternative.
There’s a tension inherent in these appropriated menu items — affirming both the desirability of secular culture and the Jewish laws forbidding it. Cultural diffusion and communal retreat. Assimilation and resistance. Meanwhile, the ancestral cuisine, which emerged out of kosher dietary laws, has been simultaneously rejected and idealized. You can’t find too many kosher delis, but TikTok has popularized pickle fountains. (Wait until they find out about hamantaschen.)
I was sort of sad about this state of affairs until I spoke to David Sax, who was dismayed enough about the decline of delis to write a book about it. He explained that Jewish deli food developed as a way of transforming European deli methods and flavors, which were more often made with pork, into kosher adaptations. The corned beef sandwich was the original fancy smoothie, which means our kosher crunchwrap might become tomorrow’s matzo ball soup. The comfort food changes, but the people endure.
The post What Hailey Bieber smoothies and instant matzo ball soup reveal about American Jewish taste appeared first on The Forward.
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Hamas, Hezbollah, Terror Allies Vow to Keep Fighting Israel, Reject Regional Peace Initiatives
Hamas terrorists carry grenade launchers at the funeral of Marwan Issa, a senior Hamas deputy military commander who was killed in an Israeli airstrike during the conflict between Israel and Hamas, amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in the central Gaza Strip, Feb. 7, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
Hamas and allied terrorist groups on Friday hailed the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel as a “landmark victory,” rejecting disarmament and vowing to continue fighting the Jewish state even as international efforts push to implement a regional peace plan.
Leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and several other Islamist terrorist groups gathered at the 34th Arab National Conference in Beirut, where speakers called for “resistance against the Israeli occupation and its expansionist projects in Palestine and the region,” Arabic-language Lebanese news outlet Al Mayadeen reported.
During the summit, terrorist leaders rejected efforts to compel them to disarm and pledged to continue fighting against Western influence across the Middle East, emphasizing the central role of weapons “in protecting national sovereignty and securing the region’s future.”
“On Oct. 7, an extraordinary act of heroism unfolded across Palestine and its borders, as people everywhere contributed in their own way to support us,” Hamas chief Khalil al-Hayya said during the conference, referring to the group’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel in 2023.
“Gaza is wounded today, but it remains steadfast, calling on everyone to stay united in the pursuit of our legitimate national goals,” the terrorist leader continued.
“Palestine will endure, just as Gaza has, despite the aggression — its land, its people, men, women, and children — and eventually, injustice will be overcome,” al-Hayya said.
” طوفان الأقصى كان رداً على محاولات طمس القضية الفلسطينية وبناء شرق أوسط جديد”
رئيس حركة حماس في #غزة خليل الحية #الميادين pic.twitter.com/tsSAc44KXY
— قناة الميادين (@AlMayadeenNews) November 7, 2025
At the Beirut gathering, Hamas and its terrorist allies praised the Oct. 7 atrocities, calling them a turning point in their fight against the “Zionist occupation.” They also opposed any attempt to divide Gaza and reaffirmed their commitment to unity.
“We emerged from this battle against the occupation with our weapons in hand. All resistance factions stood united against the aggression, and that same solidarity extended to the political front,” Palestinian Islamic Jihad chief Ziad al-Nakhala said during the conference.
“[US President Donald] Trump’s plan has set numerous obstacles and conditions that cannot be implemented,” al-Nakhala continued, referring to the US-backed peace plan aimed at ending the war in Gaza.
“لقد كانت كل فصائل المقاومة يداً واحدة في وجه العدوان وكذلك كان الحال على الصعيد السياسي ولولا ذلك لما صمدنا شهراً واحداً”
الأمين العام لحركة الجهاد الإسلامي زياد النحالة في افتتاح الدورة الـ34 للمؤتمر القومي العربي في بيروت pic.twitter.com/w71U1GNkZx
— قناة الميادين (@AlMayadeenNews) November 7, 2025
Amid international efforts to mediate the Gaza conflict and bring peace to the Middle East, Hamas and its allies said they opposed all such initiatives, opting instead to escalate violence and advance their own agenda.
At the summit, Jamil Mazhar, deputy secretary general of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), called for “rejecting plans to place the Palestinian people under tutelage and opposing any attempt at demographic change” — a clear rebuke of the Gaza peace plan.
Under Trump’s plan, an International Stabilization Force (ISF) will oversee the Gaza ceasefire between Israel and Hamas and train local security forces
The ISF would include troops from multiple participating countries and would be responsible for securing Gaza’s borders with Israel and Egypt, while also protecting civilians and maintaining humanitarian corridors.
“We have gathered to renew our commitment against the Zionist enemy and its allies, and to reaffirm that the fight continues,” Mazhar said during his speech at the conference.
“Today, we must move beyond mere solidarity and slogans, and put them into practical action,” the terrorist leader continued.
During the summit, Hezbollah international relations official Ammar al-Moussawi reaffirmed the Lebanese terrorist group’s commitment to defending and supporting the “resistance in Gaza.”
“We joined the battle to support Gaza out of our conviction in the justice and righteousness of this cause, and we do not regret our decision,” al-Moussawi said.
“History shows that the resistance in Lebanon and Palestine has endured crises far graver than today’s, and the same resistance that produced those martyred leaders is fully capable of producing new ones,” he continued.
Houthi leader Abdul-Malik al-Houthi also said at the conference that “the support fronts have played a key role throughout this important two-year round.”
“Hezbollah’s role is at the forefront of the support fronts, thanks to its steadfastness, pioneering and significant contributions, and immense sacrifices,” the leader of the terrorist group in Yemen said.
“The Israeli enemy, in alliance with the United States, seeks to impose a permissive formula and always place the blame on the victim,” he added.
“The Israeli enemy is attempting to disarm the weapons that protect Lebanon and the arms that have prevented it from controlling Gaza for the past two years,” al-Houthi said.
“العدو الإسرائيلي يحاول نزع السلاح الذي يحمي لبنان والسلاح الذي يُعيقه عن السيطرة على غزة على مدى عامين”
قائد حركة أنصار الله السيد عبد الملك الحوثي في افتتاح الدورة الـ34 للمؤتمر القومي العربي في بيروت pic.twitter.com/utTs6S26Wc
— قناة الميادين (@AlMayadeenNews) November 7, 2025
Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis are all backed by Iran, which provides the Islamist groups with weapons, funding, and training.
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US Rep. Elise Stefanik, Outspoken Pro-Israel Supporter, Jumps Into New York Gubernatorial Race
US Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) spoke at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) on Feb. 22, 2025. Photo: Zach D Roberts/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect
Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY), one of Israel’s staunchest allies in the US Congress, officially announced on Friday that she will run for governor of New York in the 2026 election, a move that could reshape the political landscape in the Empire State.
In a campaign video released early Friday morning, Stefanik declared that she would fight to make “New York affordable and safe for families all across our great state.” She took aim at incumbent Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul’s leadership, declaring her the “worst governor in America.”
The campaign announcement video lambasted Hochul’s “failed policies” and depicted New York as a wasteland overrun by “migrant crime.”
“Our campaign will unify Republicans, Democrats, and independents to fire Kathy Hochul once and for all to save New York,” Stefanik said in a statement.
Stefanik, 41, has represented New York’s 21st Congressional District since January 2015 and has risen to national prominence as chair of the House Republican Conference. A close ally of US President Donald Trump, she has also emerged as one of the most outspoken defenders of Israel in the US House of Representatives.
During the Israel-Hamas war, Stefanik earned praise across Jewish communities for her unequivocal condemnation of Hamas’s terrorism and her efforts to hold American universities accountable for antisemitic incidents on campus. Her fiery December 2023 questioning of Ivy League presidents during a congressional hearing, in which she pressed them on their refusal to denounce calls for genocide against Jews, went viral and cemented her reputation as a defender of American Jewry.
In March, Trump withdrew Stefanik’s nomination to serve as US ambassador to the United Nations due to the Republican Party’s razor-thin margins in the House of Representatives and concerns over passing legislation.
Though most polls indicate that Hochul maintains a lead over Stefanik, a recent survey by the Manhattan Institute, a conservative think tank, shows the conservative firebrand leading Hochul 43 percent to 42 percent in a head-to-head matchup.
Hochul issued a pithy retort to Stefanik’s attacks.
“My message to Trump’s ‘top ally’ – bring it on,” Hochul said on X.
Though New York remains a heavily Democratic state, her candidacy could energize conservatives across upstate and suburban regions, particularly amid voter discontent over crime, migration, and the state’s economy. However, skeptics suggest that her status as a close Trump ally could capsize her candidacy in a historically blue state.
Pro-Israel groups have long considered Stefanik one of their strongest allies on Capitol Hill. The American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and other advocacy organizations have praised her leadership on anti-BDS legislation and support for US military aid to Israel. In April, she introduced the Countering Hate Against Israel by Federal Contractors Act, which would bar entities that boycott Israel from doing business with the US federal government.
Stefanik’s quest to become governor comes as Zohran Mamdani, an anti-Israel activist and member of the far-left Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), prepares to become mayor of New York City following his election victory on Tuesday. Stefanik lambasted Hochul recently after the governor issued a formal endorsement of Mamdani, claiming that Hochul aligned herself with Mamdani’s alleged antisemitism. If Stefanik were to become governor, she could potentially serve as a critical bulwark in thwarting any anti-Israel policies from Mamdani’s office.
If elected, Stefanik would become the first female Republican governor of New York.