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‘Where do I stand?’ Queer Modern Orthodox teens navigate a changing world
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
(JTA) — Until recently, Jacob Feldon considered Yeshiva University a serious candidate for his college education. As a senior at a Utah high school who has embraced Modern Orthodoxy and harbors dreams of potentially becoming a rabbi, he said he was drawn to “the idea of going to school in an observant community where I can study Torah and Talmud with some of the smartest people doing such a thing today.”
But Feldon is also bisexual and serves as a Jewish youth ambassador for Beloved Arise, a national interfaith support organization for queer youth. So Feldon took notice when Yeshiva University declined to officially recognize a Pride Alliance group on campus, and then pressed its case to the U.S. Supreme Court when mandated to do so.
“As a queer man I can’t see going into that environment right now with everything happening,” Feldon told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I’m getting a pretty clear message that I won’t be welcomed, authentically welcome.”
Feldon is not the only high school student who identifies as Modern Orthodox to have complicated feelings about Yeshiva University at the moment. As the main Modern Orthodox university, the school blends secular and religious instruction and values. Its attempt to navigate a balance between being welcoming and inclusive and fighting for the right to control LGBTQ students’ official expression on campus has made national headlines — and caused some Modern Orthodox teens to question whether they would feel comfortable attending.
For LGBTQ teens, the lawsuit and other controversies around gender and sexuality in Modern Orthodoxy have created “a little hopelessness,” said Rachael Fried, executive director of the support nonprofit Jewish Queer Youth.
Fried described the mindset of Modern Orthodox LGBTQ adolescents as, “I’m trying to live an Orthodox life. I’m trying to build my future as a queer Orthodox person, and this is what the main, flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy thinks about me. Then where is my future and what’s the hope for me and what are my dreams?”
For queer teens, the Y.U. saga is just one high-profile touchpoint in an ongoing grappling with their place within Modern Orthodoxy. Modern Orthodox communities range widely in many ways depending on their history, geography and leadership, meaning that some queer Orthodox teens say they have found acceptance and support while others say they’ve had more challenging experiences.
Rachael Fried is the executive director of the support nonprofit Jewish Queer Youth. (Courtesy JQY)
Often teens say they experience both. Like many of the queer teens interviewed for this article, Rivka Schafer and their parents first thought it best to keep their queer identity private due to the repercussions they feared with being LGBTQ in a Modern Orthodox community. When they did come out in middle school, Schafer said they received mixed reactions in their Jewish day school.
“The kids had a lot of stigma and the administration did too, but they tried to be really accepting and really supportive which was also really, really beautiful,” Schafer told JTA.
“Currently I identify as Modern Orthodox because Judaism is a really important part of my identity and I find Judaism to be really meaningful to me,” said Schafer, who is nonbinary, from their home in Teaneck, New Jersey. “So although I struggled a lot with the acceptance in the Jewish community, and stigma within the Orthodox community, I really ultimately believe it is and should be a strong part of who I am.”
But while Schafer has remained committed to their religious identity, Fried, of Jewish Queer Youth, said the Pride Alliance lawsuit and other LGBTQ-related controversies sometimes “pushes people away from Orthodoxy in a really unfortunate way.”
This is what happened to Mattie Schaffer. “I would describe it as [having] a religious identity crisis,” said Schaffer, a student at Lev Miriam Learning Studio in Passaic, New Jersey who uses he/they pronouns and identifies as queer. Schaffer, 16, said their neighborhood is a more right-wing Modern Orthodox community, colloquially called yeshivish, though his family is not.
“A part of all the alienation and isolation comes from a feeling of not having a place anywhere,” Schaffer said. “And as much as you try to conform, there just isn’t really a place for you to fit unless you want to be sticking out or be bending yourself in half.”
Modern Orthodox queer teens’ feeling “of not having a place” can be quite literal, particularly for those teens that are non-binary or transgender, said Schafer, the teen from Teaneck.
Schafer finds their nonbinary identity sometimes at odds with even the most basic rules of the Hebrew language, which assigns a gender to nearly all words, and of their synagogue. “Where do I stand? On the mechitza?” they asked, referring to the divider separating men and women in Orthodox synagogues.
The question of LGBTQ individuals in gender-separated prayer spaces recently reared up at Y.U., when one of its leading rabbis decreed that a transgender woman could not pray in either the women’s or men’s section of her university-affiliated synagogue.
But while recent months have been abundant in controversy, the last decade has shown tremendous progress for LGBTQ Modern Orthodox teens, according to multiple people in and around the community.
Rabbi Steve Greenberg, who was ordained by Yeshiva University before coming out as gay in 1999, heads the Orthodox queer advocacy group Eshel. His organization surveyed approximately 240 Orthodox synagogues and rabbis and found that 74% of interviewees were “high welcoming,” meaning that “inclusion is explicit, principled and broadly acknowledged” and queer families’ life cycle events other than marriage are celebrated. Another 22% offered “moderate welcome,” while 4% were “low welcoming/inattentive.”
Nadiv Schorer, right, married Ariel Meiri in 2020 with Orthodox rabbi Avram Mlotek officiating. (David Perlman Photography)
Approximately 10 rabbis said they were willing to perform same-sex marriages, according to Eshel’s research.
“They do their best to make it possible for LGBTQ folks to belong to Orthodox environments,” said Greenberg. “And it’s grown.”
The head of school at North Shore Hebrew Academy on Long Island, Rabbi Jeffery Kobrin, said he believed that growing conversations about LGBTQ issues in Orthodox communities has had benefits.
“I think it’s easier to be a queer teen now than it was in 2012, just because it’s more out there,” Kobrin said. “People talk about it more, people try to be more accepting of it, and people, community-wise, seem to less feel this contradiction between Orthodoxy and alternative lifestyles.”
Some teens say they have witnessed change in just the last couple of years. Benjamin Small, a gay teen who graduated from SAR High School last year and now attends Yeshivat Ma’ale Gilboa in Israel, said his rabbi, Chaim Poupko, of Congregation Avahath Torah in Englewood, New Jersey, has advocated for queer members of the Orthodox community in his synagogue.
“That would be unheard of two or three years ago,” Small said.
Few Modern Orthodox schools in the New York area have an LGBTQ support club. But Fried, JQY’s executive director, said students are learning how to organize and build community independently, in the absence of recognition from their schools and synagogues.
“That comes with people choosing themselves, feeling empowered to build their own communities and to step-up and create the groups that others are not creating for them,” she said.
Before the Y.U. court case, “the messaging that I heard from the Modern Orthodox community was ‘your identity is not wrong, and we want to support our queer members of the community,’” said Fried, whose organization gave grants to student groups affected by the Y.U. case.
But now, she said, the message that queer Modern Orthodox teens are hearing has shifted.
“Actually, your queer identity is what is problematic. It’s not just the sentence in the Torah that is about behavior, but actually your identity,” she characterized Modern Orthodox institutions as saying. “You want to gather and build community that is based around identity and that, in and of itself, is problematic, and it’s inherently a threat.”
For its part, Yeshiva University has tried to thread a narrow needle.
A person walks by the Wilf Campus of Yeshiva University in New York City, Aug. 30, 2022. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
“We love all of our students including those who identify as LGBTQ,” Y.U. said in a FAQ after it launched a school-sanctioned LGBTQ club. “Through our deep personal relationships and conversations with them, we have felt their struggles to fit into an orthodox world that could appear to them as not having a place for them.” (The YU Pride Alliance called the new club “a feeble attempt” at compromise and said they were not involved in its formation.)
There was no consensus among teens who spoke to JTA about how much the Y.U. saga would affect inclusion in other spaces. It’s also unclear the degree to which queer Modern Orthodox teens and their allies are incorporating the situation in their decision-making about college.
Y.U. declined to share student enrollment and admissions data, saying that the university does not generally release that information. But according to a recent Y.U. advertisement, last fall the school had “the largest incoming undergraduate class in over 20 years.”
Still, the school’s lawsuit and rhetoric has been a turnoff for 19-year-old Penny Laser, a queer student at a secular college who had envisioned possibly pursuing graduate studies in Talmud at Y.U. and grew up in a non-Orthodox household. (Laser asked to be identified using a pseudonym because she is seeking a giyur lechumra, a conversion for Jewish individuals to remove any doubt of their Orthodox Jewish legal status, and feared the Rabbinical Council of America would not grant her one if she was quoted in this article.)
“I’m not sure how I can trust or engage with Y.U. in the future,” said Laser. “A. I don’t know if it’s going to be a safe place for me, and B. I don’t want to align myself with an institution that has values like this.”
Schafer, from Teaneck, and Schaffer, from Passaic, are both not considering Y.U.
And the consequences of the Y.U. litigation goes beyond influencing the decisions of individual students, according to Fried.
“What the Y.U. situation is doing right now is forcing this conversation into the spotlight,” she said. “So different institutions and leaders are forced into having this conversation, or even thinking about where they stand. People are asking them to communicate where they stand.”
Feldon, from Utah, has hope. He thinks that the Modern Orthodox world needs queer rabbis to lead the conversation on inclusion from a halachic perspective — and he thinks that can still happen, despite the push by Modern Orthodoxy’s flagship university to block the Pride Alliance.
“I choose to believe,” said Feldon, “that we’ll get there. My dream life is where I can bring my boyfriend to minyan [prayer services] three times a day. And I choose to believe that we are on that path.”
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The post ‘Where do I stand?’ Queer Modern Orthodox teens navigate a changing world appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Dan Bilzerian wants to ‘kill Israelis’ and thinks Judaism is ‘terrible.’ Now he’s running for Congress.
(JTA) — Dan Bilzerian, the mega-influencer who’s spread conspiracy theories about Jews and said he wants to “kill Israelis,” is running for Congress.
Bilzerian registered this week to run in the Republican primary against the Jewish far-right firebrand Rep. Randy Fine in Florida’s sixth district. Bilzerian initially gained fame for his Instagram photos alongside bikini-clad women but has since become a vocal critic of Israel and Jews — and has repeatedly called Fine a “fat Jew” in the lead-up to his campaign launch.
In a TMZ interview after Bilzerian announced his candidacy, the outlet’s Jewish founder, Harvey Levin, questioned the influencer on whether his use of the phrase “fat Jew” was antisemitic.
“[Fine] literally talks about how Muslims are lower than dogs, so, is that Islamophobic?” Bilzerian shot back. Fine drew bipartisan criticism for his comments earlier this year.
“Yes,” TMZ’s Levin and Charles Latibeaudiere responded. (Bilzerian added that Fine “tweets that, and he’s a senator,” though Fine is actually a member of the U.S. House of Representatives who was formerly a state senator.)
Bilzerian responded to a follow-up question by denying that he’s antisemitic — and questioning the term “antisemitism” altogether, saying it’s been “hijacked to only talk about Jews.”
“No, I’m not antisemitic. I think that that’s kind of a made-up term, I think the Palestinians are the real Semites,” Bilzerian said.
“Was Hitler antisemitic?” Levin asked.
Bilzerian did not say.
“Like I said, the term is focused solely on Jews, but actual Semites are the Arabs,” he answered. “And Palestinians are Semites as well. They actually have more DNA lineage to that region than any of the Eastern European Ashkenazi Jews that have taken it from them.”
The comments were nothing new for Bilzerian, who has 30 million followers on Instagram and 2 million on X. He regularly tweets opinions like “Jewish supremacy is the greatest threat to the world today,” questions the accuracy of the statistic that 6 million Jews died in the Holocaust, and reposts clips of avowed antisemite Nick Fuentes.
But now, Bilzerian’s foray into electoral politics could serve as a test of the popularity of an emerging, anti-Israel faction within the Republican party headlined by figures like Tucker Carlson and Fuentes, who’ve espoused conspiracy theories about Jews.
Those figures’ opposition to the war in Iran have sped up their dissent from President Donald Trump. During the TMZ interview, Bilzerian said Fine should be tried for treason for putting “Israel before America,” and also criticized Trump for being “Israel first.” He has tweeted that Trump “needs to be impeached.”
(Ironically, Fine introduced a bill that would ban dual citizens from serving in Congress, and Bilzerian is a dual American-Armenian citizen.)
Bilzerian is not the only anti-Israel Republican challenger to Fine, a staunch Israel supporter who’s been backed by AIPAC and the Republican Jewish Coalition.
“I appreciate @DanBilzerian‘s zeal to take @RepFine out of Congress. I’ve been working tirelessly for one year on the same goal,” wrote Aaron Baker, who’s been endorsed by the Anti-Zionist America PAC. “I would however also appreciate if Dan ran for FL-16 much closer to where he grew up. Make @AIPAC spend $ defending more seats. Divide and conquer.” FL-16’s current representative, Vern Buchanan, was endorsed by AIPAC in 2024.
But Bilzerian, with his 29.6 million followers on Instagram and 2.1 million on X, brings a larger national audience to the congressional primary.
“I’d never heard of this guy before, until a couple of days ago, but having watched your interview, it’s clear that he simply doesn’t like Jews. In America you’re allowed to do that,” Fine said on a TMZ appearance following Bilzerian’s. But, he continued, “I don’t think it’s going to work out to become a congressman, having that perspective.”
Bilzerian gained many of his followers when he was the “king of Instagram,” posting photos of himself surrounded by scantily clad women, sports cars and with large guns. In June 2015, Bilzerian said he would be running for president, though by December he’d gotten behind the candidacy of Trump.
Before that, he’d served four years in the U.S. Navy starting in 1999, and dropped out of the University of Florida to play professional poker. His father, Paul Bilzerian, is a businessman who, as a corporate takeover specialist, was sentenced to four years in prison for federal crimes including fraud and criminal conspiracy.
In the months after Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack and the ensuing war in Gaza, Bilzerian’s social media presence began taking its current shape of focusing predominantly on Israel and, eventually, Jews.
“Do you think the Israeli attacks on Gaza are justified or f–ked up?” Bilzerian asked his followers on Nov. 6, 2023. By 2024, the occasional surveys he took of his followers became pointedly focused on Jews.
“Who causes the majority of the worlds problems,” he asked, with users overwhelmingly voting for the multiple-choice option “16 million Jews.”
In January 2025, Bilzerian asked his followers whether Hitler was a “good person,” a “terrible person,” or if they didn’t know. A third of the 178,000 voters said Hitler was a “good person,” and another 23% said they didn’t know.
Bilzerian laid out his views on Jewish people in a 2024 interview with conservative commentator Patrick Bet-David, during which he said Jews “knew about 9/11” and “had JFK assassinated.”
Later that year, conservative media personality Piers Morgan asked Bilzerian how many Jews he believed died in the Holocaust.
“I don’t know, but I would bet my entire net worth that it was under 6 million,” Bilzerian said.
According to FEC filings, Bilzerian’s campaign treasurer is Patrick Krason. Krason was also the treasurer for the short-lived presidential campaign of Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, another public figure who’s spread conspiracy theories about Jews.
Bilzerian has promoted the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, claiming that Jews control the media and are using that position to push an “anti-white agenda” and replace whites with non-white immigrants.
“It started with the jewish owned news stations telling us ‘white supremacy is the greatest threat to America,’” Bilzerian wrote last year. “Whites were replaced in movies & streaming networks. Then the Jewish exec run Blackrock forced DEI on all major corps.”
Bilzerian often cites passages from the Talmud to make claims about Jewish beliefs, such as that Jews approve of stealing and raping as long as the crimes are committed against non-Jews. Other figures like Candace Owens have similarly taken passages from the Talmud, but rabbis have criticized those figures for using quotes that are mistranslated and often taken out of context from the text, which includes centuries of rabbinic debates and is not a formal code of laws.
During a stream with the influencer Sneako, who has also spread antisemitic conspiracy theories, Bilzerian said he supports “exterminating Israel” and that he “would sign up tomorrow and go f—king put boots on the ground and go f—king kill Israelis.”
“Give me a rifle and send me the f–k over there,” he said, adding, “I truly believe that the majority of that country is evil.”
On Morgan’s show, Bilzerian said Judaism innately promotes “Jewish supremacy,” and pointed to the State of Israel as being the result of that ideology.
“Israel is a manifestation of that religion,” he said. “And I think that religion is terrible.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Dan Bilzerian wants to ‘kill Israelis’ and thinks Judaism is ‘terrible.’ Now he’s running for Congress. appeared first on The Forward.
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After AIPAC-backed primary loss, Tom Malinowski endorses rival who says Israel committed genocide
(JTA) — After Tom Malinowski narrowly lost a primary in which AIPAC spent $2.3 million against him, critics said AIPAC’s plan backfired as it had inadvertently boosted a candidate farther from its pro-Israel agenda.
Now, Malinowski has thrown his support behind that victor, the Bernie Sanders-backed progressive Analilia Mejia.
“A couple of months ago, Analilia and I were rivals for the Democratic nomination,” Malinowski said in a video posted on Thursday afternoon. “Together, we are here united as Democrats in common cause.”
The video, which featured a friendly Malinowski and Mejia seated next to each other, was released ahead of her special election next week, and emphasized the need for Democrats to “take back the House.” Neither politician mentioned Israel or AIPAC in the video, though both politicians slammed the lobbying group following their tight primary race.
After Mejia’s victory back in February, AIPAC brushed off criticism that its attack ads against Malinowski — who describes himself as “pro-Israel” but crossed the group’s red line of supporting conditions on military aid — inadvertently contributed to Mejia’s win. Mejia has been harsher in her criticism of Israel and, unlike Malinowski, refers to its war in Gaza as a “genocide.”
But Mejia, an AIPAC spokesperson said, was only nominated for a special election that would fill the seat vacated by Gov. Mikie Sherrill through the end of 2026.
“The real race for the full congressional term is in the June primary, and we’re going to take a close look at that,” said Patrick Dorton, spokesperson for AIPAC’s super PAC, the United Democracy Project.
But if AIPAC had its sights set on supplanting Mejia come June, those plans may have been complicated by her newfound support from Malinowski, a popular politician in New Jersey’s 11th Congressional District.
Meanwhile, on Friday morning, Mejia was endorsed by J Street, the liberal pro-Israel group that supports a growing number of candidates who back conditions on military aid to Israel. J Street’s president, Jeremy Ben-Ami, blasted AIPAC in a Substack column following the February primary. He also wrote positively about Malinowski, but did not mention Mejia in the column.
“I look forward to working in partnership in our shared commitment against antisemitism, bigotry and hate,” Mejia wrote, accepting J Street’s endorsement.
On Tuesday, Mejia appeared at Temple Ner Tamid, a Reform synagogue in Bloomfield, New Jersey, for a conversation with its rabbi about issues of Jewish concern including Israel and synagogue security. (Joe Hathaway, the Republican nominee, joined the congregation for a conversation the night before.)
“I’m running for congress to give every person in NJ-11 a voice – that’s why I’m committed to listening to folks from every corner of our community,” Mejia wrote after the event.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post After AIPAC-backed primary loss, Tom Malinowski endorses rival who says Israel committed genocide appeared first on The Forward.
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US Intelligence Indicates China Preparing Weapons Shipment to Iran
The Pentagon building is seen in Arlington, Virginia, U.S. October 9, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Carlos Barria
US intelligence indicates China is preparing to deliver new air defense systems to Iran within the next few weeks, CNN reported late on Friday, citing three people familiar with recent intelligence assessments.
The network said there are indications that Beijing is working to route the shipments through third countries to mask their origin.
The US State Department, the White House, the Chinese embassy in Washington and China’s foreign ministry did not immediately respond to Reuters requests for comment.
Beijing is preparing to transfer shoulder-fired anti-air missile systems known as MANPADs, CNN said, citing sources it did not name.
The US and Iran are set to hold high-level negotiations on Saturday in Pakistan’s capital Islamabad, seeking ways to end their six-week-old war.