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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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Major Body of University Professors Targets Antisemitism Prevention Policies at University of Pennsylvania
Anti-Israel encampment at University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA, USA in May 2024. Photo: Robyn Stevens via Reuters Connect
The American Association of University Professors (AAUP), the largest and oldest US organization for defending faculty rights, is picking a fight over the University of Pennsylvania’s efforts to combat antisemitism, arguing that a range of faculty speech and conduct considered hostile by Jewish members of the campus community are key components of academic freedom.
In a letter to the administration regarding antidiscrimination investigations opened by Penn’s Office of Religious and Ethnic Interests (OREI), the group charged that efforts to investigate alleged antisemitism on campus and punish those found to have perpetrated can constitute discrimination. Its argument reprises recent claims advanced by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) group, notorious for its defense of Sharia law and alleged ties to jihadist groups such as Hamas, in a lawsuit which aims to dismantle antisemitism prevention training at Northwestern University.
“Harassing, surveilling, intimidating, and punishing members of the university community for research, teaching, and extramural speech based on overly broad definitions of antisemitism does nothing to combat antisemitism, but it can perpetuate anti-Arab, anti-Muslim, and anti-Palestinian racism, muzzle political criticism of the Israeli government by people of any background, and create a climate of fear and self-censorship that threatens the academic freedom of all faculty and students,” the AAUP said, threatening to scrutinize the university. “AAUP-Penn will continue to monitor reports related to OREI.”
Additionally, the AAUP described Penn’s efforts to protect Jewish students from antisemitism as resulting from “government interference in university procedures” while arguing that merely reporting antisemitism subjects the accused to harassment, seemingly suggesting that many Jewish students who have been assaulted, academically penalized, and exposed to hate speech on college campuses across the US are perpetrators rather than victims. The group also argued that other minority groups from “protected classes,” such as Arabs and African Americans, are disproportionately investigated for antisemitism.
Despite the AAUP’s claims, some University of Pennsylvania faculty have played an outsized role in organizing antisemitic activities on campus, as previously reported by The Algemeiner.
In 2023, professor Huda Fakhreddine helped organize the “Palestine Writes Festival,” a gathering of anti-Zionists which featured Gaza-based professor Refaat Alareer, who said in 2018, “Are most Jews evil? Of course they are,” and Salman Abu Sitta, who once said in an interview that “Jews were hated in Europe because they played a role in the destruction of the economy in some of the countries, so they would hate them.” Roger Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman, was also initially scheduled as a speaker, despite a documentary exposing his long record of anti-Jewish barbs. In one instance, a former colleague recalled Waters at a restaurant yelling at the wait staff to “take away the Jew food.”
That event prompted a deluge of antisemitic incidents at the University of Pennsylvania, including Nazi graffiti and a student’s trailing a staffer into the university’s Hillel building and shouting “F–k the Jews” and “Jesus Christ is king!” overturning tables, podium stands, and chairs. Fakhreddine, who days after the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel attended an on-campus rally in which a speaker castigated what he called “the Israeli Jew,” later sued Congress to halt its investigation of campus antisemitism at Penn.
The professor’s civil complaint brimmed with classic antisemitic tropes, describing efforts to eradicate antisemitism as a conspiracy by “billionaire donors, pro-Israel groups, other litigants, and segments of the media” to squelch criticism of Israel and harm Arab students and academics. It also disparaged the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, calling it a tool of a “militant minority which believes that Israel can do no wrong” and alleging that it is “unconstitutional” and the bedrock of a larger plan of a “social engineering movement” to abolish the First Amendment of the US Constitution. A federal judge ultimately threw the case out of court.
The following year, the University Pennsylvania pledged in a report on antisemitism that it would never again confer academic legitimacy to antisemitism and formally denounced the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel as “discriminatory” and “anti-intellectual.” The university also passed other policies aimed at protecting academic freedom and free speech from attempts to invoke them as justification for uttering hate speech and founded the Office of Religious and Ethnic Interests, which the AAUP is now accusing of breaking the law.
The AAUP has defended antisemitic speech before.
In 2014, it accused the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign of violating the tenets of academic freedom when it declined to approve the hiring of Steven Salaita because he uttered a slew of antisemitic, extramural comments on social media, such as “Zionists transforming ‘antisemitism from something horrible into something honorable since 1948,” “Every Jewish boy and girl can grow up to be the leader of a murderous colonial regime,” and “By eagerly conflating Jewishness and Israel, Zionists are partly responsible when people say antisemitic s—t in response to Israeli terror.”
An AAUP report that chronicled the incident, which mushroomed into a major controversy in academia, listed those tweets and others but still concluded that not hiring Salaita “acted in violation of the 1940 Statement of Principles of Academic Freedom and Tenure” and “cast a pall of uncertainty over the degree to which academic freedom is understood and respected.” At the same time, the AAUP said that it was “committed to fighting systemic racism and pursuing racial justice and equity in colleges and universities, in keeping with the association’s mission to ensure higher education’s contribution to the common good.”
Other actions have moved the AAUP further into the world of left-wing anti-Zionism, tarnishing its image as a bipartisan guardian of scholarship and inquiry.
Following Hamas’s massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, two and a half weeks passed before the AAUP commented on the ensuing conflict between Israel and Hamas, and when it did, the group said nothing about the Palestinian terrorist group’s atrocities, instead discussing the importance of academic freedom. At the time, many professors cheered Hamas’s violence and encouraged extreme anti-Zionist demonstrations in which masses of students and faculty called for the elimination of the Jewish state “from the river to the sea,” which is widely interpreted as a call for genocide.
In August 2024, the AAUP issued a statement in support of academic boycotts, a seismic decision which reversed decades of policy and cleared the way for scholar activists to escalate their efforts to purge the university of Zionism and educational partnerships with Israel.
Coming amid a bitter debate about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict on college campuses and Israel’s war to eradicate Hamas from the Gaza Strip, the statement did not mention the Jewish state specifically, but its countenancing the anti-Israel BDS movement was made clear, according to Jewish and pro-Israel leaders, by a section of the statement which said that boycotts “can legitimately seek to protect and advance the academic freedom and fundamental rights of colleagues and students who are living and working under circumstances that violate that freedom and one or more of those rights.”
In March, the AAUP held a webinar which promoted false claims about Israel’s conduct in the war with Hamas in Gaza.
Titled “Scholasticide in Palestine,” the virtual event accused Israel of “scholasticide” and “exterminationist” tactics of war. Such accusations cite damages sustained by education institutions and loss of life in Gaza, but rather than describing those misfortunes as inevitable consequences of a protracted war that Hamas started by launching the surprise Oct. 7 massacre, those leading the AAUP event argued that Israel’s aim was to murder educators and erase Palestinian history and culture.
“We are very concerned that AAUP, whose stated mission includes representing all academics and ensuring ‘higher education’s contribution to the common good’ continues to act in ways that demonize Israel, marginalize Jewish and Israeli members, and promote policies and events that portray a one-sided, politicized view of complex issues,” Jonathan Greenblatt, chief executive officer of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), said at the time.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Trump nominee for Kuwait ambassador, grilled at confirmation hearing, loses support over Israel views
After Amer Ghalib became the most prominent Muslim politician in the country to endorse Donald Trump for president last year, he did so on pro-Palestinian grounds. And he was rewarded with a plum position: the administration’s ambassadorship to Kuwait.
But the mayor of Hamtramck, Michigan, had to get through Senate approval first. And at Thursday’s confirmation hearing before the foreign relations committee, multiple Republicans broke rank and took Ghalib to task for his past social media posts and actions about Jews and Israel.
“It appears you have a deep-felt and passionate view about the Middle East,” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz told Ghalib. “But it is a view that is in direct conflict with the policy positions of President Trump and this administration.”
Cruz grilled the Yemen-born mayor on Hamtramck becoming the first American city to adopt a boycott, divestment and sanctions policy against Israel; on his previous “liking” of Facebook posts comparing Jews to monkeys; and on his past stances opposing the Abraham Accords.
He wasn’t the only Republican to take issue with Ghalib. Sens. David McCormick of Pennsylvania and Pete Ricketts of Nebraska also harshly questioned the mayor on his views on Jews and Israel.
Ghalib did not disavow any of his past stances or posts. The BDS resolution, he said, had been drafted by the anti-Zionist group Jewish Voice for Peace and approved unanimously by the city council. “It wasn’t my idea,” he said. “We don’t have any companies that deal with Israel in our city.” He said he had no power to remove a city council official who had said the Holocaust was advance punishment for Israel.
He “liked” the Facebook post about monkeys, he said, because he used to “like” every post on his feed before becoming mayor. “The person who wrote it is mentally challenged in our community,” he said of the post, later adding, “It’s definitely antisemitism, but clicking on it doesn’t mean I endorse that.”
“Actually, ‘like’ means exactly that,” Cruz retorted.
In response to a question from McCormick about whether he would “accept President Trump’s view that Israel is and should be the national home of the Jewish people,” Ghalib dodged. “I think we can coexist in the region and that’s the answer, that everybody has the right to exist now,” he said. “I trust the president’s policies and I will support his policies.”
At the end of the hearing, Cruz said he would vote no on confirming Ghalib, putting the mayor’s appointment on shaky ground.
Ghalib had endorsed Trump after previously siding with the “Uncommitted” movement that had targeted President Joe Biden’s support for Israel. In a meeting with Trump prior to his endorsement, the mayor said the two had discussed the possibility of a ceasefire in Gaza. Michigan, which has a large Arab population, wound up swinging to Trump.
A separate nominee at the same hearing, South Africa ambassador hopeful Leo Bozell, pledged to push the country to end its genocide charge against Israel in front of the International Court of Justice.
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My Jewish studies students aren’t talking about Israel or antisemitism. They told me why.
(JTA) — I first noticed something was off on the first day of class. I had given my students in my “Sociology of American Jewish life” course at Tulane University blank index cards, asking them to write five words they associate with American Jews. The word antisemitism didn’t appear once, and neither did Israel.
Last week, it happened again. When I asked students to choose topics from the 2020 Pew report on American Jews for small group discussions, no one chose antisemitism or Israel.
What was going on? Antisemitism dominates conversations among lay leaders, philanthropists and academics. Universities are launching new antisemitism studies centers. Yet here were 20 Jewish studies students avoiding the subject. The Hillel director confirmed he’d seen the same pattern: low attendance at events on these topics.
So I turned to my students — almost all Jewish themselves — and asked them to write anonymous reflections on this pattern. I wanted them to help me understand what felt like a significant shift from previous years, when these topics dominated classroom discussions.
Here is what I learned:
My students are exhausted. Not physically tired, but soul-weary from the constant barrage of antisemitism they encounter online. “Seeing constant antisemitism and antizionism has just made me so tired of it that it’s easier to ignore,” one wrote. “When I’m in Jewish spaces, I prefer to focus on the positive things … because it feels like antisemitism is a battle we’re already losing.”
They see antisemitism everywhere on social media — on Instagram, TikTok, even in comment sections barely related to Jewish topics. It’s become so normalized that one student admitted they “don’t even get surprised anymore when I see crazy antisemitism.” Another described it as being talked about “on the news so much as well as talked about in everyday life” that bringing it down further in class feels redundant.
But perhaps most revealing was this: They want their Jewish studies classroom to be different. “When I am in class, I enjoy learning about new topics and not about topics that I already talk about and experience every single day,” one student explained. Another put it more bluntly: “I don’t want the thing I bring up when talking about Judaism to be antisemitism in a class setting, where it is something we deal with all the time outside of it.”
The Israel conversation has become even more fraught. Students described being paralyzed by the fear of “saying the wrong thing by accident.” The topic has become so contentious that it’s “a very sensitive time period because of October 7th,” making people hesitant to speak up even in Jewish spaces. One student noted that discussing Israel has become “a dividing point even within the Jewish community,” creating rifts with family members and friends.
The pressure to be perfectly informed weighs heavily on them. ‘I don’t feel as educated on that, and in most contexts, I don’t want to bring it up because I don’t want to say the wrong thing by accident,’ one student confessed. They feel caught between the expectation to have authoritative opinions as Jews and their honest uncertainty about complex issues. Another described finding it ‘hard to delve into’ topics when unsure if they’re conveying accurate information. This burden of representation — the unspoken expectation that every Jewish student must be an articulate defender of their people — has become another silencing force.
I don’t take this silence as apathy, but rather about self-preservation. My students are keenly aware that even among close friends, there might be hidden antisemitism. They’ve learned to perform constant risk assessments about when and where it’s safe to express their views. As one observed, people are either intensely engaged with these topics or “have little to no interest talking about it … and don’t feel comfortable sharing their opinions.”
What struck me most was their desire to reclaim Jewish identity from being primarily defined by hatred against Jews. These young Jews want to explore their heritage, culture, and traditions without every conversation circling back to those who despise them. They’re not in denial — they know antisemitism exists. They’re just tired of it taking up so much space in their Jewish lives.
This generational shift matters. While Jewish institutions pour resources into combating antisemitism and defending Israel — crucial work, to be clear — our young people are signaling they need something more. They need spaces where being Jewish isn’t synonymous with being embattled. They need opportunities to engage with Jewish life, learning, and culture on its own terms.
My classroom revelation taught me this: If we want to engage the next generation, we need to balance necessary vigilance with joyful exploration of what makes Jewish life meaningful. Our students aren’t abandoning the fight — they’re asking for the chance to remember what we’re fighting for.
The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of JTA or its parent company, 70 Faces Media.
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