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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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Hungary is poised to topple an authoritarian leader. American Jews have something to learn
An aspiring authoritarian, who has spent more than a decade shaping his country through a political project of popularist grievance and personal enrichment, may soon meet his electoral end.
That elected leader is not President Donald Trump, but Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who has ruled Hungary consecutively since 2010 (and who previously served as prime minister between 1998 and 2002). Hungarians will go to the polls on April 12, and Orbán’s Fidesz party is polling well behind the conservative, pro-European Tisza. That Trump, who is closely allied with Orbán, this week dispatched Vice President JD Vance to Budapest to campaign for Orbán may not be enough. (While there, Vance baselessly claimed EU interference in Hungary’s elections, turning back to the same old Trump playbook.)
There is much that Americans can learn from the Hungarian experience of years spent under the governance of someone accused of dismantling rule of law, a person whose inner circle has grown rich during his time in office. But American Jews in particular should pay attention. Because Orbán’s administration has used antisemitism as a political tool throughout his time in power, and is desperately turning to this hatred once again on its way, possibly, out the electoral door.
Examining the different purposes for which Orbán has employed antisemitism is instructive. The essential lesson: Antisemitism deployed by powerful people is often an attempt to evade accountability for their own bad actions.
The Orbán administration has tried to rewrite history so as to paint Hungary as a perpetual victim or victor — never a country responsible for misdeeds like, say, allying with Nazi Germany prior to being occupied by it. Orbán, like other politicians interested in historical revisionism, has tried to make adherence to his specific retelling of Hungarian history synonymous with being a true Hungarian. Anyone who challenges his vision is, in it, an enemy of the state.
For no one has that been more true than Hungarian-born Jewish billionaire philanthropist George Soros. In past elections, Orbán has inflated Soros to the status of a political adversary, campaigning against a spectral version of him instead of his actual political opponents. This approach, rife with antisemitic dog whistles, has been alarmingly effective.
“We are fighting an enemy that is different from us. Not open, but hiding; not straightforward but crafty; not honest but base; not national but international; does not believe in working but speculates with money; does not have its own homeland but feels it owns the whole world,” he said of Soros in the 2018 campaign, invoking any number of longstanding antisemitic tropes.
When Orbán’s authoritarian efforts extended to cracking down on liberal institutions and civil society, he turned again to antisemitism in the form of Soros conspiracy theories.
Under attack by Orbán, Central European University, the university that Soros founded, has mostly been pushed out of its original home of Budapest. When the Hungarian government passed legislation to criminalize helping those who wanted to claim asylum in the country, it was called “Stop Soros” legislation. NGOs in Hungary have long been smeared for receiving money from Soros’ Open Society Foundations, accused of being proxies through which Soros is “targeting” Hungary.
Recently, Orbán has pivoted, making Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy the new scapegoat of his antisemitic conspiracy theories.
He has charged that support for Ukraine is expensive and even dangerous, and pushed the idea that Orbán and Fidesz are all that prevents such support from leading Hungary to disaster. Orbán and Fidesz have erected billboards showing Zelenskyy smirking with an outstretched hand, in a pose reminiscent of the antisemitic “happy merchant” meme. Perhaps most tellingly and menacingly, Fidesz has put up posters with Zelenskyy’s face, blazoned with nearly the same words that, almost a decade ago, accompanied campaign posters with Soros’s visage on them: “Let’s not let Zelenskyy have the last laugh.”
As Hungarians are asking what, exactly, the last decade and a half of autocracy have accomplished for them, their governing party appears to be suggesting that it is the only thing standing between them and the machinations of a nefarious Jew. Antisemitism can be many things, but in Hungary, again and again, it has been an attempt to trick citizens out of asking what good Orbán’s government has done for them.
This playbook has clear resonances in that deployed by Trump.
When threatened, Trump and his allies repeatedly turn to blaming Soros. They have used the idea of Soros as a sort of universal bogeyman to try to explain away Trump’s felony charges and to justify violence against citizens protesting ICE. The Department of Justice has tried to find ways to push for prosecutions of Soros and his allies, on far-fetched charges possibly including material support of terrorism.
What Orbán and Trump have both bet on is that dog whistling about all-powerful Jews will distract enough voters from noticing while they help themselves to their country’s rights and riches. If Orbán is defeated on Sunday, his loss will send an essential message to Americans: that strategy can only sustain a leader for so long.
Flailing about and sowing the seeds of antisemitic conspiracies cannot change the stubborn fact that neither Soros nor Zelenskyy is in charge in Hungary: Orbán is. Hungarians seem to see, now, that all that talk about Soros didn’t make their lives any better. Neither will going after Zelenskyy.
We can hope Hungarians remember that as they go to the polls. We, American Jews, should remind others, and ourselves, of it here, too. We often focus on trying to communicate that antisemitism is hateful and unfair toward American Jews. Perhaps, in addition, we should try to point out that Trump’s antisemitism, like Orbán’s, is not only hateful, but a hateful deflection.
The post Hungary is poised to topple an authoritarian leader. American Jews have something to learn appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel Expels Spain From US-Backed Gaza Coordination Center as Diplomatic Rift Deepens
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez speaks during a press conference after attending a special summit of European Union leaders to discuss transatlantic relations, in Brussels, Belgium, Jan. 23, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
Israel has expelled Spain from the United States’ Civil-Military Coordination Center (CMCC) in Kiryat Gat, a hub established to coordinate humanitarian operations in the Gaza Strip, marking a sharp escalation in an already deteriorating diplomatic rift between the two countries.
On Friday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Spain’s expulsion from the CMCC, framing the move as a response to Madrid’s increasingly anti-Israel stance and what he described as continued hostility toward the Jewish state.
“Spain has defamed our heroes, the soldiers of the [Israel Defense Forces], the soldiers of the most moral army in the world,” Netanyahu said during a press conference. “Anyone who attacks the State of Israel instead of the terrorist regimes … will not be our partner in the future of the region.”
“I am not willing to tolerate this hypocrisy and this hostility,” the Israeli leader continued. “I do not intend to allow any country to wage a diplomatic war against us without paying an immediate price for it.”
In a press release, Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar confirmed that the United States had been informed ahead of time, adding that the decision followed Spain’s serious harm to the interests of both Jerusalem and Washington.
The Spanish government has also been informed of the decision, though it has yet to issue any public statement or official response.
“Spain’s obsessive anti-Israel bias under [Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez]’s leadership is so egregious that it has lost all capability to serve a constructive role in implementing US President Donald Trump’s peace plan and the center operating under it,” the top Israeli diplomat wrote in a post on X.
For a long time, the government of Spain under @sanchezcastejon has been operating against the State of Israel in every way possible. Sánchez and his ministers level false blood libels against Israel and its army, defame and incite against Israel and Prime Minister Netanyahu. The…
— Gideon Sa’ar | גדעון סער (@gidonsaar) April 10, 2026
Established in October 2025 as part of US Central Command, the CMCC was set up to coordinate and manage the flow of humanitarian, logistical, and security assistance from the international community into Gaza under Trump’s peace plan for the enclave.
Since the start of the war in Gaza, and increasingly amid the war with Iran and broader regional escalation, Spain has launched a fierce anti-Israel campaign aimed at undermining and isolating the Jewish state on the international stage.
Earlier this week, Sánchez publicly condemned Israeli strikes in Lebanon and the widening regional escalation tied to the Iran conflict, renewing calls for the European Union to suspend its association agreement with Israel and urging an end to “impunity for [Israel’s] criminal actions.”
The Spanish leader also accused Netanyahu of breaching basic humanitarian norms, saying his “contempt for life and international law is intolerable.”
Spanish Foreign Minister José Manuel Albares has also publicly condemned Israel’s military campaign, describing the conflict as “the greatest assault on the civilization built upon the humanist ideals of reason, peace, understanding, and universal law over the abuse of power, brute force, and arbitrariness.”
In a phone call with his Spanish counterpart on Friday, Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi praised Spain’s “principled and honorable” stance on what he called “US-Israeli aggression against Iran,” urging countries to take a firmer stand against what he described as war crimes.
“Spain’s valuable stances in defending international law and human values have been noted and praised by the Iranian nation and the international community, and will never be forgotten,” the top Iranian diplomat said.
Even though Spain welcomed the recently announced US–Iran ceasefire, Albares said, “Madrid will not applaud those who set the world on fire just because they show up with a bucket to put out that fire.”
As part of its broader anti-Israel campaign, Spain had recently closed its airspace to aircraft involved in what officials described as a “reckless and illegal confrontation” – another move welcomed by Iran’s Islamist government.
In one of its most controversial recent moves, Madrid also announced this weej the reopening of its embassy in Tehran.
According to data from Spain’s Ministry of Trade reported by Servimedia, the Spanish government exported more than €1.3 million worth of dual-use materials to Iran in 2024 and the first half of 2025, including explosive components, laboratory reagents, and specialized control software.
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DNC Fails to Pass Resolutions Condemning AIPAC, Pushing for Conditioning Aid to Israel
Crews prepare the stage at the annual AIPAC Policy Conference in Washington, DC, March 6, 2018. Photo: Reuters / Brian Snyder
A panel at the Democratic National Committee (DNC) on Thursday voted down a resolution to condemn the influence of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), the foremost pro-Israel lobbying group in the US, in Democratic primary elections. The panel also deferred a decision on resolutions to push for conditioning military aid to Israel and to recognize a Palestinian state.
The resolutions, which were considered within the newly created Middle East Working Group, were introduced into the agenda by Florida DNC member Allison Minnerly, who saw it as an opportunity to bring those who have not been “seeing their party support Palestinian rights or stand against military conflict” back into the fold of the Democratic Party, she told The Intercept.
Minnerly’s effort comes as the gap continues to widen between the official stance of the Democratic Party, which has largely supported aid to Israel in recent decades, and the views of the Democratic base, which now has an overwhelmingly unfavorable view of Israel, according to recent polling.
In recent months, a number of potential Democratic presidential hopefuls — including some who were former donors and speakers at AIPAC conferences — have been distancing themselves from AIPAC, saying they would not take money from the bipartisan group in the future.
Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, for example, recently said he abandoned his support for AIPAC when it “began to lean much more to the right and much more pro-Trump.” Another prominent Democrat, US Sen. Cory Booker (NJ) told Politico in March that he is no longer going to receive funds from AIPAC.
Others who have made sure to have no association with AIPAC include California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Chicago Mayor Rahm Emmanuel.
Aside from the fact that Israel is now seen less favorably by Democratic voters, AIPAC has also become a hot topic on the left as its allied super PACs have become increasingly influential in Democratic primaries, spending millions to back candidates aligned with their positions. Critics within the party argue that this influx of money, including donations from Republican-aligned contributors, risks distorting Democratic contests and elevating outside influence.
Even so, the resolutions specifically calling out AIPAC, aiming to condition aid to Israel, and pushing to recognize a Palestinian state did not pass. Meanwhile, a separate resolution calling out all dark money went through.
“Let’s be clear on what really happened: Today, the Resolutions Committee voted to pass a resolution condemning the corrosive influence of ALL dark money in Democratic primaries,” DNC chair Ken Martin posted on X. “We had various resolutions that focused on different industries and groups, and instead of going one-by-one, we passed a blanket repudiation.”
Meanwhile, Democratic Majority for Israel President & CEO Brian Romick said in a statement that the Democratic pro-Israel group was “pleased” with the outcome of the vote.
“We’re pleased that the DNC Rules Committee rejected a set of divisive, anti-Israel resolutions,” he said. “These measures would be a gift to Republicans, would further fracture our party, and do nothing to bring Israelis and Palestinians closer to peace.”
“DMFI will continue to stay engaged with the DNC and its Task Force on the Middle East as it relates to these harmful resolutions,” he added. “The DNC and party advocates need to keep focus where it belongs — on building a united Democratic Party that can win back Congress this November.”
AIPAC spokesperson Deryn Sousa said in a statement to Politico that the DNC “made clear today that all Democrats, including millions who are AIPAC members, have the right to participate fully in the democratic process. And we plan to do just that.”
Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America — an organization that aims to bring Jews into the Democratic Party — told Politico that the DNC “as a whole has not shifted from where it has been … which is an organization that is inclusive of Jewish Americans and is supportive of the US-Israel security relationship, as well as Israel’s future as a Jewish and Democratic state.”
She argues that “misconceptions” about this have been driven by “a vocal, far-left faction of our party.”
“But they are in no way leading here,” Soifer said.