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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.”
—
The post ‘Where do I stand?’ Queer Modern Orthodox teens navigate a changing world appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Jewish Sites in New York City Struck With Antisemitic Graffiti as Police Report Jews Targeted in 60% of Hate Crimes
Members of the Rego Park Jewish Center flanking swastika graffiti that was sprayed on the building on Sunday, May 3, 2026. Photo: Screenshot
Jewish residents of the Queens borough of New York City were outraged on Monday following an overnight spree of vandalism which left at least four Jewish properties — private homes and synagogues — marked with the swastika and other antisemitic graffiti.
The incidents were discovered as the New York City Police Department (NYPD) released its latest figures showing that Jews continued to be the target of the majority of all hate crimes across the five boroughs last month, despite comprising a small fraction of the total population.
The perpetrators of the latest wave of vandalism struck the Rego Park Jewish Center, the Congregation Machane Chodosh, as well as two private homes late Sunday night, according to local lawmakers and Jewish leaders. Police are still searching for the suspects. At least one lead has surfaced so far in the form of surveillance footage taken by the Rego Park Jewish Center near the site of one of the crimes.
The suspects allegedly responsible for drawing swastikas outside of the Rego Park Jewish Center. pic.twitter.com/VJBGzI4EgZ
— Dean_Moses (@Dean_Moses) May 4, 2026
Meanwhile, the graffiti remains a scourge on the buildings — appearing in one case next to a memorial to German Jews who survived Kristallnacht, a November 1938 pogrom when Nazi paramilitary forces launched a coordinated nationwide attack on the German Jewish community. The vandals left no doubt regarding their allusion to that period, graffitiing “Heil Hitler” at the Rego Park location.
“When rabbis and congregants arrive to pray this morning, they expected to be met with their usual loving community. When a family woke up, they were prepared to begin an otherwise normal week. Instead, they were me with terrifying signals of hatred and threats of violence,” New York City Council Speaker Julie Menin said in a social media post which addressed the incidents. “With antisemitism on the rise here and across the globe, we will always stand up for our Jewish community and fight back against hate.”
Multiple synagogues and private homes in Queens were vandalized overnight with swastikas and other antisemitic graffiti. @Lynn4NYC, @PhilWongNYC and I are at one of the sites, Congregation Machane Chodosh, in Forest Hills now.
When rabbis and congregants arrived to pray this… pic.twitter.com/s38TXvFHQt
— Speaker Julie Menin (@SpeakerMenin) May 4, 2026
Mark Treyger, CEO of the Jewish Community Relations Council of New York, noted on social media that one of the targeted sites houses a pre-K program for young children.
“This is not normal, and we need city leaders to act NOW,” he posted.
The vandalism was discovered as the New York City Police Department (NYPD) reported on Monday the surge in antisemitic hate crimes across the city had continued unabated.
According to the newly released data, Jews were targeted in 60 percent of all confirmed hate crimes last month, despite making up just 10 percent of the city’s population.
In April, the police confirmed 30 antisemitic incidents out of 50 total hate crimes in the city. As for all reported/suspected hate crimes, 38 out of the total of 65 targeted Jews.
The NYPD had previously reported suspected, but unconfirmed, hate crime incidents. In February, the police began reporting confirmed incidents instead. And then after receiving scrutiny, the department began reporting both suspected and confirmed hate crimes in March.
Regardless of the methodology, the majority of all hate crimes in New York City this year have targeted Jews, especially the Orthodox community, continuing a surge in antisemitism that has swept the city after the start of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza in October 2023.
In just eight days between the end of October and the beginning of November 2024, for example, three Hasidim, including children, were brutally assaulted in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. In one instance, an Orthodox man was accosted by two assailants, one masked, who “chased and beat him” after he refused to surrender his cellphone in compliance with what appeared to have been an attempted robbery. In another incident, an African American male smacked a 13-year-old Jewish boy who was commuting to school on his bike in the heavily Jewish neighborhood. Less than a week earlier, an assailant slashed a visibly Jewish man in the face as he was walking in Brooklyn.
In November, just days after the election of Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, hundreds of people amassed outside a prominent synagogue and clamored for violence against Jews.
“We don’t want no Zionists here!” the group chanted in intervals while waving the Palestinian flag outside the Park East Synagogue in the Upper East Side section of the borough of Manhattan. “Resistance, you make us proud, take another settler out.”
Mamdani has dismantled key parts of the civil rights architecture his predecessor built to combat antisemitism in the city. Former Mayor Eric Adams adopted the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, enforced a ban on awarding government money to adherents of the movement to boycott Israel, and established as a governing principle the idea that Zionism is central to Jewish peoplehood even as it remains a target of antisemitic activism.
“The connection between Jewish identity and the Land of Israel is not political preference but religious and cultural foundation extending back millennia,” Adams said in one of his final communications as mayor. “The practical consequence of anti-Zionist rhetoric is the dehumanization of Zionists (the vast majority of Jewish people) and the dehumanization of all Jewish people. When Zionism itself is characterized as racist or illegitimate, Jewish people become targets for hostility and violence. This dynamic helps explain why attacks on Israel’s legitimacy correlate with increased antisemitic incidents in the diaspora, targeting all Jewish people regardless of their politics.”
The change in New York City’s climate since Mamdani’s election is palpable, Jewish advocacy groups have said. One his first day in office in January, he voided the city government’s adoption of the IHRA definition, lifted the ban on contracts with companies boycotting Israel, and modified key provisions of an executive order directing law enforcement to monitor anti-Israel protests held near synagogues.
“Mayor Mamdani pledged to build an inclusive New York and combat all forms of hate, including antisemitism,” a coalition of leading Jewish groups said in a statement addressing the new administration. “But when the new administration hit reset on many of Mayor Adams’ executive orders, it reversed … significant protections against antisemitism.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Venice Biennale Jury Resigns Amid Israel, Russia Controversy; Organizers Announce New Awards, Ceremony
A poster for the 61st Venice Biennale running from May 9 to November 22. Photo: IMAGO/Frank Ossenbrink via Reuters Connect
The jury for the 2026 Venice Biennale announced their resignation mere days before the 61st edition of the show is set to open to the public on May 9.
The move comes after the five members of the jury, which selects the winners for the exhibition’s top prizes, said on April 22 that they would not consider giving awards to artists from countries accused by the International Criminal Court (ICC) of crimes against humanity, which include Israel and Russia. Both countries are participating in this year’s Venice Biennale, a fact that has caused controversy in light of the Israel-Hamas war and the Russia-Ukraine war.
The ICC issued an arrest warrant in 2023 for Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has been accused of war crimes in Ukraine, and an arrest warrant in 2024 for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu due to his country’s military actions in the Gaza Strip during its war against Hamas terrorists. Israel, which launched its military campaign in response to Hamas’s invasion and massacre of Israelis on Oct. 7, 2023, has strongly denied the ICC’s allegations, with officials saying the Israeli military has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties.
“As of April 30, 2026, we, the international jury selected by Koyo Kouoh, artistic director of the 61st edition of La Biennale di Venezia ‘In Minor Keys,’ have resigned,” the jurors said in a released statement. “We do so in acknowledgment of our Statement of Intention issued on 22 April 2026.” No further information was provided regarding the resignation.
The Venice Biennale did not respond to The Algemeiner‘s request for comment about the decision but acknowledged the jury’s resignation in a released statement on April 30. Organizers announced in a separate statement that the event’s awards ceremony will be moved from May 9 to Nov. 22, which is the last day of the show. The decision to reschedule the awards ceremony was made in light of the jury’s resignation “as well as the exceptional nature of the current international geopolitical situation,” the Venice Biennale said.
The jury for the Venice Biennale typically selects the winners for the highly coveted Golden and Silver Lion prizes. With no jury this year, the Venice Biennale said it will instead establish two “Visitors’ Lions” awards. Visitors will be able to vote for “the Best Participant in the 61st Exhibition ‘In Minor Keys’ by Koyo Kouoh” and “the Best National Participation in the 61st Exhibition.”
Each Venice Biennale ticket holder who visited both of the exhibition’s venues during this year’s show will be eligible to cast one vote for each of the two new awards. All participants n the 2026 Venice Biennale, including those from Israel, will be eligible for the Visitors’ Lion award for Best National Participation “following the principle of inclusion and equal treatment among all participants.”
“This is consistent with the founding spirit of La Biennale, based on openness, dialogue, and the rejection of any form of closure or censorship,” organizers said. “La Biennale seeks to be — and must remain — a place of truce in the name of art, culture, and artistic freedom.”
An open letter calling for Israel to be banned from the 61st Venice Biennale exhibition was published in March and signed by 178 Biennale participants. Romanian artist Belu-Simion Fainaru is representing Israel in this year’s show and recently criticized the jury’s April 22 decision not to consider awarding artists from the country.
Because of backlash over Russia’s participation, the Venice Biennale announced on April 28 that the Russian Pavilion in this year’s show will be only open to the public during the four-day preview. The European Union has already decided to withdraw $2.3 million in funding from the Venice Biennale because of Russia’s inclusion this year.
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All Major Jewish Organizations in Norway Criticize Holocaust Center for Repeatedly ‘Relativizing the Holocaust’
A drone view of the “Arbeit macht frei” gate at the former Auschwitz concentration camp ahead of the 80th anniversary of its liberation, Oswiecim, Poland, Jan. 10, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Kacper Pempel
Representatives from the largest Jewish organizations in Norway collectively published an open letter on Monday that accused the Norwegian Center for Studies of Holocaust and Religious Minorities (HL-Center) of repeatedly “relativizing the Holocaust.”
The open letter, which addressed the board and director of the HL-Center, accused the institution of using the Holocaust “in direct or indirect connection with the wars in the Middle East and other historical events.” The signatories noted that for “several years” there have been “repeated incidents” of the institution promoting “Holocaust revitalization.”
“When the Holocaust is systematically placed in parallel with other conflicts, there is a risk of relativizing its unique historical status. Over time, we have come to view this not as isolated judgments, but as a pattern,” wrote those representing the majority of Jewish life in Norway. They called on the HL-Center to “exercise far greater scholarly and institutional caution in how the Holocaust is discussed and contextualized.”
On April 30, the HL-Center hosted an event that drew parallels between the Holocaust and the Palestinian “Nakba” and how “they have functioned as competing cultural traumas.” “Nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe,” is used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
Israel’s Embassy in Norway said the center’s decision to host the event was a “grotesque distortion of Holocaust memory.”
The open letter on Monday mentioned the April 30 event and also expressed concerns by Norway’s Jewish community about an upcoming event on June 3, titled “Holocaust Memorial after Gaza,” which will discuss Holocaust remembrance in relation to contemporary politics, specifically the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza.
“We wish to emphasize that it is both legitimate and necessary to acknowledge the suffering of civilians in armed conflicts, including the experiences of Palestinians after 1948,” Jewish community leaders wrote in the open letter, before noting “this is a subject that can be addressed without bringing the Holocaust into it.”
“A more natural parallel would be the consequences for the more than 1 million Jews who suffered in, and were forced to flee from, Arab countries after the establishment of Israel,” they added. “It is essential to maintain that the Holocaust represents a historical event without parallel: an industrial, ideologically driven genocide whose aim was the total extermination of the Jewish people.”
The letter was signed by B’nai B’rith Norway Lodge, The National Council for Jewish Communities in Norway, Kos & Kaos The Nordic Jewish Network, Chabad Lubavitch of Norway, Det Mosaiske Trossamfund (congregation) in Oslo, The Jewish Community of Trondheim, and The Jewish Community of Bergen, as well as The Jewish Community of Norway.
The groups asked the HL-Center board to issue a clarification about its role and mandate, “particularly with regard to comparisons between the Holocaust and contemporary conflicts.” They also want the center to establish clear guidelines about how its leadership and events will reflect “ongoing political conflicts,” most likely referring to the Israel-Hamas war.
“We expect the board to take this communication seriously. Our goal is to ensure that the HL Center remains a unifying and academically credible institution — also for the Jewish minority it was founded to protect and serve,” they noted. “We also wish to remind you of several previous communications concerning this matter, including the open letter from descendants of Holocaust victims and B’nai B’rith’s thorough report on the shortcomings we are again raising here. None of these has been answered in a satisfactory manner.”
Representatives from Norway’s major Jewish organizations said they previously reached out to the board of the HL-Center with their concerns regarding Holocaust trivialization, the director’s public statements, the center’s role in political conflicts, and how “Holocaust memory has been connected to contemporary wars during central commemorative events” at the center. Their concerns “appear to have led to little change,” they noted.
“The center has a particular responsibility to preserve the memory of the millions of Jews who were murdered, and to ensure that this memory is not relativized or instrumentalized for political purposes,” they added, after pointing out that the institution was established partially with funds from a restitution settlement following the liquidation of Jewish property during the Holocaust.
“The point is not to preclude criticism of Israeli policy, but to make clear how easily such parallels can contribute to trivializing the particular character of the Holocaust, and that such rhetoric can contribute to increased antisemitism,” the open letter pointed out.
Norway is a part of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA). According to the IHRA definition of antisemitism, drawing a comparison between Israel and the Nazis is a contemporary example of antisemitism.