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Embracing their place on ‘the fringes,’ queer artists reimagine Jewish ritual garments for all bodies
(JTA) — Binya Kóatz remembers the first time she saw a woman wearing tzitzit. While attending Friday night services at a Jewish Renewal synagogue in Berkeley, she noticed the long ritual fringes worn by some observant Jews — historically men — dangling below a friend’s short shorts.
“That was the first time I really realized how feminine just having tassels dangling off you can look and be,” recalled Kóatz, an artist and activist based in the Bay Area. “That is both deeply reverent and irreverent all at once, and there’s a deep holiness of what’s happening here.”
Since that moment about seven years ago, Kóatz has been inspired to wear tzitzit every day. But she has been less inspired by the offerings available in online and brick-and-mortar Judaica shops, where the fringes are typically attached to shapeless white tunics meant to be worn under men’s clothing.
So in 2022, when she was asked to test new prototypes for the Tzitzit Project, an art initiative to create tzitzit and their associated garment for a variety of bodies, genders and religious denominations, Kóatz jumped at the chance. The project’s first products went on sale last month.
“This is a beautiful example of queers making stuff for ourselves,” Kóatz said. “I think it’s amazing that queers are making halachically sound garments that are also ones that we want to wear and that align with our culture and style and vibrancy.”
Jewish law, or halacha, requires that people who wear four-cornered garments — say, a tunic worn by an ancient shepherd — must attach fringes to each corner. The commandment is biblical: “Speak to the Israelite people and instruct them to make for themselves fringes on the corners of their garments throughout the ages” (Numbers 15:37-41) When garments that lack corners came into fashion, many Jews responded by using tzitzit only when wearing a tallit, or prayer shawl, which has four corners.
But more observant Jews adopted the practice of wearing an additional four-cornered garment for the sole purpose of fulfilling the commandment to tie fringes to one’s clothes. Called a tallit katan, or small prayer shawl, the garment is designed to be worn under one’s clothes and can be purchased at Judaica stores or online for less than $15. The fringes represent the 613 commandments of the Torah, and it is customary to hold them and kiss them at certain points while reciting the Shema prayer.
“They just remind me of my obligations, my mitzvot, and my inherent holiness,” Kóatz said. “That’s the point, you see your tzitzit and you remember everything that it means — all the obligations and beauty of being a Jew in this world.”
The California-based artists behind the Tzitzit Project had a hunch that the ritual garment could appeal to a more diverse set of observant Jews than the Orthodox men to whom the mass-produced options are marketed. Julie Weitz and Jill Spector had previously collaborated on the costumes for Weitz’s 2019 “My Golem” performance art project that uses the mythical Jewish creature to explore contemporary issues. In one installment of the project focused on nature, “Prayer for Burnt Forests,” Weitz’s character ties a tallit katan around a fallen tree and wraps the tzitzit around its branches.
“I was so moved by how that garment transformed my performance,” Weitz said, adding that she wanted to find more ways to incorporate the garment into her life.
The Tzitzit Project joins other initiatives meant to explore and expand the use of tzitzit. A 2020 podcast called Fringes featured interviews with a dozen trans and gender non-conforming Jews about their experiences with Jewish ritual garments. (Kóatz was a guest.) Meanwhile, an online store, Netzitzot, has since 2014 sold tzitzit designed for women’s bodies, made from modified H&M undershirts.
The Tzitzit Project goes further and sells complete garments that take into account the feedback of testers including Kóatz — in three colors and two lengths, full and cropped, as well as other customization options related to a wearer’s style and religious practices. (The garments cost $100, but a sliding scale for people with financial constraints can bring the price as far down as $36.)
Spector and Weitz found that the trial users were especially excited by the idea that the tzitzit could be available in bright colors, and loved how soft the fabric felt on their bodies, compared to how itchy and ill-fitting they found traditional ones to be. They also liked that each garment could be worn under other clothing or as a more daring top on its own.
To Weitz, those attributes are essential to her goal of “queering” tzitzit.
“Queering something also has to do with an embrace of how you wear things and how you move your body in space and being proud of that and not carrying any shame around that,” she said. “And I think that that stylization is really distinct. All those gender-conventional tzitzit for men — they’re not about style, they’re not about reimagining how you can move your body.”
Artist Julie Weitz ties the knots of the tzitzit, fringes attached to the corners of a prayer shawl or the everyday garment known as a “tallit katan.” (Courtesy of Tzitzit Project)
For Chelsea Mandell, a rabbinical student at the Academy of Jewish Religion in Los Angeles who is nonbinary, the Tzitzit Project is creating Jewish ritual objects of great power.
“It deepens the meaning and it just feels more radically spiritual to me, when it’s handmade by somebody I’ve met, aimed for somebody like me,” said Mandell, who was a product tester.
Whether the garments meet the requirements of Jewish law is a separate issue. Traditional interpretations of the law hold that the string must have been made specifically for tzitzit, for example — but it’s not clear on the project’s website whether the string it uses was sourced that way. (The project’s Instagram page indicates that the wool is spun by a Jewish fiber artist who is also the brother of the alt-rocker Beck.)
“It is not obvious from their website which options are halachically valid and which options are not,” said Avigayil Halpern, a rabbinical student who began wearing tzitzit and tefillin at her Modern Orthodox high school in 2013 when she was 16 and now is seen as a leader in the movement to widen their use.
“And I think it’s important that queer people in particular have as much access to knowledge about Torah and mitzvot as they’re embracing mitzvot.”
Weitz explained that there are multiple options for the strings — Tencel, cotton or hand-spun wool — depending on what customers prefer, for their comfort and for their observance preferences.
“It comes down to interpretation,” she said. “For some, tzitzit tied with string not made for the purpose of tying, but with the prayer said, is kosher enough. For others, the wool spun for the purpose of tying is important.”
Despite her concerns about its handling of Jewish law, Halpern said she saw the appeal of the Tzitzit Project, with which she has not been involved.
“For me and for a lot of other queer people, wearing something that is typically associated with Jewish masculinity — it has a gender element,” explained Halpern, a fourth-year student at Hadar, the egalitarian yeshiva in New York.
“If you take it out of the Jewish framework, there is something very femme and glamorous and kind of fun in the ways that dressing up and wearing things that are twirly is just really joyful for a lot of people,” she said.
Rachel Schwartz first became drawn to tzitzit while studying at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem in 2018. There, young men who were engaging more intensively with Jewish law and tradition than they had in the past began to adopt the garments, and Schwartz found herself wondering why she had embraced egalitarian religious practices in all ways but this one.
“One night, I took one of my tank tops and I cut it up halfway to make the square that it needed. I found some cool bandanas at a store and I sewed on corners,” Schwartz recalled. “And I bought the tzitzit at one of those shops on Ben Yehuda and I just did it and it was awesome.”
Rachel Schwartz stands in front of a piece of graffiti that plays on the commandment to wear tzitzit, written in the Hebrew feminine. (Courtesy of Rachel Schwartz)
Schwartz’s experience encapsulates both the promise and the potential peril of donning tzitzit for people from groups that historically have not worn the fringes. Other women at the Conservative Yeshiva were so interested in her tzitzit that she ran a workshop where she taught them how to make the undergarment. But she drew so many critical comments from men on the streets of Jerusalem that she ultimately gave up wearing tzitzit publicly.
“I couldn’t just keep on walking around like that anymore. I was tired of the comments,” Schwartz said. “I couldn’t handle it anymore.”
Rachel Davidson, a Reconstructionist rabbi working as a chaplain in health care in Ohio, started consistently wearing a tallit katan in her mid-20s. Like Kóatz, she ordered her first one from Netzitzot.
“I would love to see a world where tallitot katanot that are shaped for non cis-male bodies are freely available and are affordable,” Davidson said. “I just think it’s such a beautiful mitzvah. I would love it if more people engaged with it.”
Kóatz believes that’s not only possible but natural. As a trans woman, she said she is drawn to tzitzit in part because of the way they bring Jewish tradition into contact with contemporary ideas about gender.
“Queers are always called ‘fringe,’” she said. “And here you have a garment which is literally like ‘kiss the fringes.’ The fringes are holy.”
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University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court
A civil rights attorney who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court and made social media posts viewed as pro-Hezbollah and antisemitic, has won his bid for the University of Michigan Board of Regents.
Michigan is one of a few states in which voters play a direct role in choosing university overseers. As a regent, Amir Makled (D) will help oversee expenditures at the university where his clients, the student protesters, were arrested. The position is unpaid and carries an eight-year term. Democrat Paul Brown won the other seat up for election, maintaining the board’s 6-2 Democratic majority.
Makled beat out Republican challenger Lena Epstein, who is Jewish and previously identified as a “Jewish Messianic believer of Christ,” but recanted the statement and later said she was “100% Jewish.” Mainstream Judaism does not accept Messianic Jews because they believe in the divinity of Christ and try to convert Jews to Jesus.
Epstein told the Forward in an April interview that the Democrats had handed her an opportunity to win the seat by endorsing Makled, who was facing intense scrutiny. In one of his controversial posts, Makled called Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah a “martyr” after he was killed by Israeli strikes in 2024. He lost an endorsement from Service Employees International Union for the posts and later deleted them.
In the regents race, voters picked up to two of six candidates, with the top two winning. Makled received 25.6% of the vote while Brown received 27.2%. Epstein received 22.2% while her fellow Republican Michael Schostak received 22.6%.
Makled’s election comes as part of a wave of Democratic Party wins, including in Michigan, which elected as Senator Abdul El-Sayed (D), who also faced severe backlash for statements related to Israel and Gaza and for appearing alongside streamer Hasan Piker, who has been accused of antisemitic rhetoric.
Israel played a major role in the rhetoric surrounding Michigan’s midterms. But voters, including 60% of Jewish voters that voted for El-Sayed according to early exit polls, favored sharp critics of the Jewish state to candidates in support of it.
The post University of Michigan will have a leader who defended pro-Palestinian protesters in court appeared first on The Forward.
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This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record.
The election of Daniel Biss, a Jewish critic of Israel, to an Illinois congressional seat Tuesday has sparked a public feud between the Anti-Defamation League and the liberal Zionist group J Street over whether the ADL remains a credible voice in the fight against antisemitism.
After Biss, the former Jewish mayor of Evanston, Ill., won his seat Tuesday night, the ADL Midwest took to social media to express “serious concerns” about Biss’ “approach to antisemitism.”
J Street, which had endorsed Biss, hit back, noting that Biss is the grandson of Holocaust survivors and calling the ADL’s statement “a shanda,” the Yiddish word for disgrace.
“It is hard to read this statement without wondering how far the ADL has drifted from the organization it once was – a gold standard in our community for standing up against bigotry, hatred and discrimination,” J street wrote on X.
Biss, who speaks Hebrew and spent childhood summers in Israel, was elected with 75% of the vote in a district where 11% of the electorate is Jewish.
“It saddens me to watch the ADL, once a preeminent civil rights organization, devolve into an entity that traffics in fear, intimidation and extremism,” Biss wrote in a statement to the Forward. “This kind of rhetoric does nothing to keep the Jewish people safe—in fact, it undermines that very cause.”
The ADL has long faced scrutiny from critics who view the watchdog group as labeling too broad a swath of Israel criticism as antisemitic, while less forcefully condemning antisemitism when it comes from the political right.
“Our statement speaks for itself,” an ADL spokesperson wrote in an email to the Forward.
In its statement, the ADL pointed to a specific set of concerns involving Biss’ record as mayor of Evanston, Illinois, the college town home to Northwestern University.
Biss did not provide Evanston police support that Northwestern requested after reported “antisemitic conduct” at the Gaza war encampment on campus in April 2024, the ADL said, “raising serious questions about whether the safety, dignity, and equal access of Jewish students were treated with the urgency they required.”
Biss has defended his decision not to dispatch police to the encampment, writing in response to a congressional inquiry that forcibly clearing the protest would have gone against police department advice and suppressed “constitutionally protected speech.”
The ADL also said that Biss “dismissed scrutiny of his response as a politically motivated attack fueled by AIPAC, rather than substantively addressing the concerns raised by Jewish students and community members.”
Biss made opposition to AIPAC a central theme of his primary campaign for Congress after the hardline pro-Israel lobbying group spent millions opposing him and supporting another candidate, state Sen. Laura Fine.
In an interview with the Forward in March, Biss said it was “absurd” that AIPAC opposes imposing any conditions on U.S. military aid to Israel. “And then try to enforce it with millions of dollars of dark money, is certainly bad for democracy and bad for our politics here in America,” Biss added.
At the same time, Biss faced pressure to his left on Israel in the primary, defeating Kat Abughazaleh, a Palestinian-American who has characterized Israel’s conduct in Gaza as a genocide. Biss, who has described himself as a progressive Zionist, declined to use the word genocide, despite repeated calls from Abughazaleh to do so.
In a March op-ed in The Nation, Biss wrote that he believed he was one of AIPAC’s top targets partly because “I’m the grandson of Holocaust survivors. My mother is Israeli. My extended family lives in Israel. AIPAC knew that they couldn’t dismiss me as anti-Israel or antisemitic.”
The ADL also criticized Biss for supporting the repeal of an anti-BDS law, which bars Illinois from investing public pension funds in companies that boycott Israel. That position, the ADL said, “raises additional concerns about his willingness to stand against efforts to isolate and delegitimize the Jewish state.”
In an April Substack post explaining his position, Biss said that he personally opposes the global movement to boycott Israel, but he does not believe the government should “stop people from using their economic agency to advocate for their values.”
Biss will succeed Rep. Jan Schakowsky, a Jewish lawmaker who represented the district for nearly three decades and was also an outspoken critic of AIPAC.
The post This grandson of Holocaust survivors is headed to Congress. The ADL has concerns about his antisemitism record. appeared first on The Forward.
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At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration
On Wednesday, two senior citizens, Robert Zimmerman, 85, a Jew originally from Minnesota, and Robert Prevost, 71, a Catholic of Chicago, had a brief meeting at the younger man’s office in central Italy.
Sources on the scene report that Zimmerman was in town for business and Prevost, who goes professionally by Leo, had recently cited Zimmerman’s work in the preface to a book about nuclear disarmament.
Both men dressed in uniform, looking a bit Spy Vs. Spy, with Zimmerman in a black hoodie and Prevost in white with a small white skull cap. The confab was brief, a bulletin from Prevost’s workplace reported, consisting of “greetings and a few lighthearted exchanges.”
Prevost gifted Zimmerman with prayer beads, and Zimmerman presented Prevost with a copy of his memoir, published under his pen name, Bob Dylan.
While Zimmerman was raised in a Jewish home, he had, for a time in the late 1970s to early 1980s, converted to born-again Christianity, confounding many.
The post At the Vatican, two elderly men — one Jewish, one Catholic — exchange gifts and mutual admiration appeared first on The Forward.
