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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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Tucker Carlson on Israeli TV: US, Israel Are ‘Not Democracies,’ Israel ‘Most Violent Country in the World’
Tucker Carlson speaks on first day of AmericaFest 2025 at the Phoenix Convention Center in Phoenix, Arizona, Dec. 18, 2025. Photo: Charles-McClintock Wilson/ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Far-right podcaster Tucker Carlson came under fire after appearing on prime-time Israeli television and accusing both Israel and the US of betraying democracy, calling Israel “probably the most violent country in the world” and saying Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had dragged President Donald Trump into the war with Iran.
In an interview with Channel 13 anchor and senior political analyst Udi Segal aired on Tuesday night, Carlson also repeated his claim that Israel’s actions in Gaza amounted to “genocide,” while saying the wording mattered less than what he described as the killing of civilians. The country had “definitely lost its morality,” he said.
When Segal pushed back, Carlson responded, “Israel has murdered all these children, thousands of children in Gaza. But the real criminal is me because I describe that as genocide. OK, it’s not genocide. It’s killing innocents. It’s wrong. You can call it genocide or ethnic cleansing. You can call it a crime, a sin, an atrocity. I don’t really care.”
Israel treats “Arabs like animals or sub-humans,” he added, not mentioning that Arabs, who comprise about 20 percent of Israel’s population, hold full political and civil rights and regularly serve at the highest levels of the government.
“That is not an attack on Jews,” Carlson continued. “Israel does not represent all Jews, despite its claims. It does not. That is factually incorrect, and you know it.”
The vast majority of Jews globally support Israel’s right to exist, with polls consistently showing that roughly 70% to 90% of Jewish adults feel an emotional attachment to the country and believe it has a right to exist as a Jewish state. A recent Washington Post survey found that 76% of American Jews believe Israel’s existence is vital for Jewish survival.
The full, exclusive interview: @TuckerCarlson speaks with @usegal on Israel’s @newsisrael13
– What’s behind his retreat from supporting Trump?
– Responding to antisemitism claims (and why did he host Nick Fuentes?)
– The war in Iran & Gaza
– Does he think Israel is trying to… pic.twitter.com/tnFcxJmYYC— Yosef Yisrael (@yosefyisrael25) May 19, 2026
Carlson said he believed both the US and Israel were failing their own citizens.
“I would like a democracy in the United States like I’d like one in Israel. Israel is not a democracy; the United States apparently is not a democracy either. Our government keeps doing things that people don’t want, so that’s not democracy; it’s the opposite of democracy.”
“Of course, Israel is not a democracy in any sense. There are millions of people who live under Israeli control who cannot vote,” he told Segal. “These places which Israel has controlled since 1967 have people living in them who have no control over the government that controls their lives, which is true, it’s not a democracy.”
Israel “is probably the most violent country in the world,” he said.
When Segal said Israel was acting in self-defense, Carlson responded that “no country has boasted more about killing its political opponents than Israel.”
“Israel makes a public relations campaign out of boasting about killing its opponents.”
Carlson also accused Trump of yielding to Netanyahu over Iran.
“Why did Trump let a nation of 9 million people drag a nation of 350 million people into a war that would change its future, and that is bad for the United States?”
“It’s wrong that I’m paying for Israel’s actions,” he said. “There’s no reason the United States should be sending any money at all to Israel and particularly not to its military.”
The Israeli prime minister pushed the US president, he said, “who turned out to be far weaker than I understood, into a war that hurts the United States.”
The White House issued a statement to Israel’s Channel 13 on Wednesday saying Carlson “is a low-IQ person who spreads fake news for cheap publicity.”
“Long before he was elected, President Trump has been consistent in his belief that Iran can never be allowed to possess a nuclear weapon,” the statement said. “Israel has always been a great ally to the United States, especially through Operations Midnight Hammer and Epic Fury that obliterated Iran’s nuclear facilities and destroyed their defense industrial base. President Trump took bold, decisive action to protect the American people — something presidents have talked about for 47 years, but only this president has had the courage to address.”
Carlson’s appearance came after a lightning trip to Israel in February for an interview with US Ambassador Mike Huckabee, part of an escalating feud in which Carlson has increasingly singled out evangelical Christian Zionists as a political target. The visit drew further criticism after Carlson used it to amplify a series of conspiracy claims, saying he was mistreated by Israeli authorities, while never actually leaving Ben-Gurion International Airport.
Commentators on social media pointed out that Carlson’s posting “Greetings from Israel” from an airport logistics zone, then flying out, does not amount to visiting the country in any ordinary sense.
Carlson’s brief trip to Israel contrasts with his interview of Russian President Vladimir Putin in 2024, when he spent multiple days in Russia praising the country on video and infamously marveling at the use of locks on shopping carts — a common feature in Europe.
The podcaster’s visit to Israel also differed from his trip to Doha in December, when he interviewed Qatari Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani and revealed his plans to purchase a home in the country. Qatar has been a long-time backer of the Muslim Brotherhood, including its Palestinian offshoot Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.
Carlson has ramped up his anti-Israel content over the last year, according to a study released in December by the Jewish People Policy Institute (JPPI), which tracked the prominent far-right podcaster’s disproportionate emphasis on attacking the Jewish state in 2025.
In September, for example, the podcaster appeared to blame the Jewish people for the crucifixion of Jesus and suggested Israel was behind the assassination of American conservative activist Charlie Kirk.
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Slain Security Guard of California Mosque Engaged Gunmen in Shootout, Hailed as Hero
A man places a candle on the ground as he pays his respects in front of the Islamic Center of San Diego after the vigil in a park, the day after a fatal shooting incident, in San Diego, California, US, May 19, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Daniel Cole
The security guard slain at the Islamic Center of San Diego was hailed on Tuesday as a fallen hero who sacrificed his life to keep 140 school children inside the mosque safe by engaging two gunmen in a shootout that deterred the teenage suspects and helped thwart their attack.
Authorities also disclosed that the 17- and 18-year-old assailants, who took their own lives shortly after Monday’s shooting, were believed to have met online and were apparently “radicalized” in hate-related ideology on the internet.
Late on Tuesday, CNN reported that it had obtained and reviewed graphic video purported to be footage of the mosque shooting recorded and livestreamed by the two suspects, including a final clip that appears to show one of the gunmen shooting his companion and then himself.
A day after the gun violence, police, FBI, and other officials held a news conference focused on the three victims, all men affiliated with the mosque, who were slain in the attack and credited with putting themselves in harm’s way to save others.
The security guard, Amin Abdullah, 51, also known to friends as Brian Climax, immediately recognized the two youths as a threat and opened fire on them as they ran past him outside the mosque, according to San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl. The suspects then paused to return fire, Wahl said.
Abdullah wound up fatally shot in the parking lot, along with two other men who distracted the suspects after they stormed into the building, drawing their attention through a window, thus luring the two teens back outside, Wahl said.
TWO MEN LURED GUNMEN OUTSIDE
The two other victims, mosque elder Mansour Kaziha, 78, and Uber driver Nadir Awad, 57, a neighbor whose wife worked as a teacher at the school there, were cornered and shot to death in the parking lot by the gunmen when they re-emerged.
In the midst of the confrontation, it was Abdullah who transmitted the radio call that activated a security lockdown, which Wahl said also prevented further bloodshed there.
The gunfight and the security alert gave others in the building time to take shelter behind locked doors, Wahl said, while Kaziha and Awad coaxed the suspects out of the building. Kaziha also was the first person to call 911 emergency before he was shot, police said.
Minutes before officers from around California‘s second-most-populous city converged on the mosque, the two suspects fled by car. They were found dead in their vehicle a short time later several blocks away, apparently from self-inflicted gunshot wounds, police said.
Wahl singled out Abdullah for special praise of his “heroic action,” adding that at first, “I had no idea how heroic those actions were.”
“His actions, without a doubt, delayed, distracted, and ultimately deterred those two individuals from gaining access to the greater areas of the mosque where as many as 140 kids were within 15 feet of these suspects,” Wahl said.
Taha Hassane, the imam and director of the Islamic Center, called all three of the victims “our martyrs and our heroes.”
Addressing a separate news conference at a local park, the security guard‘s daughter, Hawaa Abdullah, offered prayers and paid a tearful tribute to her father as a man who doted on his family and was so dedicated to his job that he would not break for meals when he was on duty.
She called on people of all faiths to honor him by coming together and being kind. “He stood against any form of hate,” she said.
PURPORTED LIVESTREAMED VIDEO OF SHOOTING
Police and FBI have said that they are investigating the attack as a hate crime but have declined to offer details about a possible motive.
“What I can say is [the suspects] definitely had a broad hatred towards a lot of folks,” FBI special agent Mark Remily told reporters.
Although authorities have not officially named the two suspects, the gunmen have been identified as Caleb Vasquez, 18, and Cain Clark, 17, a Department of Justice official told Reuters.
Remily said one of the gunmen left behind a manifesto, but he declined to characterize it in detail.
CNN reported that a 75-page manifesto from the gunmen citing racist, Islamophobic and antisemitic ideology, as well as “incel” culture, was under scrutiny by investigators.
The cable network said it had obtained a copy of the document from the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which studies extremism, along with a video the two gunmen appeared to have recorded during their attack and posted to the internet in real time.
Summarizing the video in writing according to an AI-generated description of the footage, CNN said White supremacist symbols were visible on the two attackers’ guns and clothing as they are seen moving through the Islamic Center, with one firing a rifle before they walk back outside, fire a pistol, and then appear to stand over someone lying in a pool of blood.
CNN said it geolocated the final moment of the video to the neighborhood where police found two teens dead from gunshot wounds inside the getaway car. The footage ends with the driver stopping the vehicle, then appearing to shoot his passenger before shooting himself, according to the network.
A copy of a video that appears to match CNN’s written summary began circulating online on Tuesday.
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Israel Takes Step Toward Snap Election as Knesset Votes to Dissolve
Israeli politicians react following a vote to dissolve the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, before the end of its term, at the Knesset, in Jerusalem, May 20, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun
Israel moved closer on Wednesday to a snap election after lawmakers gave an initial nod to dissolve parliament, with opinion polls showing Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would lose the first national vote since the 2023 Hamas attacks.
Lawmakers voted almost unanimously for an early ballot in a preliminary reading of a bill to disband the 120-seat Knesset. If it receives final approval, a process that could take weeks, Israel could hold an election several weeks ahead of an Oct. 27 deadline.
Netanyahu’s own coalition submitted the bill to dissolve parliament after an ultra-Orthodox faction traditionally close to the Israeli leader accused him of failing to deliver on a promise to pass a law exempting their community from mandatory military service.
NETANYAHU BEHIND IN POLLS
Some 110 members of parliament voted in favor of the bill to dissolve, with no opponents or abstentions. It now heads to committee where an election date is agreed, before going back to the Knesset for final approval.
The vote comes at a pivotal time for Netanyahu, Israel‘s longest-serving prime minister who leads the most right-wing government in his country’s history.
Israel has been at war with Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Iran, fronts that remain volatile and could have an impact on the election.
Netanyahu still faces a long-running corruption trial. Israel‘s President Isaac Herzog is mediating talks to broker a plea deal in the case, which could see the 76-year-old Netanyahu retiring from politics as part of the deal.
Netanyahu’s health could also be an issue. He recently disclosed that he was successfully treated for prostate cancer and in 2023 he was fitted with a pacemaker.
Since the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel, polls have consistently shown Netanyahu’s governing coalition falling far short of a parliamentary majority.
However, there is also a chance that opposition parties will fail to form a coalition, leaving Netanyahu at the head of an interim government until the political stalemate is broken.