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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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Looming large over Israel’s 78th Independence Day celebrations: Argentina’s Javier Milei
(JTA) — During his three days in Israel this week, Argentinian President Javier Milei made a strong impression.
There he was, weeping again at the Western Wall. There he was, receiving the Presidential Medal of Honor for his leadership and support for Israel. And there he was, lighting a torch for the Independence Day festivities as the first foreign leader ever to do so.
There Milei was, grabbing a microphone and dancing raucously on stage to the Spanish-language song “Libre” at both the rehearsal for the national ceremony and the live event on Tuesday.
And there he was, ostensibly the reason that the far-right Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir left the ceremony before it began. Ben-Gvir left after being asked to vacate his seat to make way for Milei, in an arrangement that some speculated was meant to prevent Ben-Gvir from being photographed in the same frame as Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Milei’s presence in Israel Sunday through Tuesday offering a powerful symbol of his continued support for Israel even as so many other world leaders have distanced themselves. Milei is a longtime philosemite who has said he aims one day to convert to Judaism.
“In life there are partners and there are friends,” Milei said in Spanish during the Independence Day ceremony. “Partners come together for a moment of shared interest. Friends forge unbreakable bonds for life. I am pleased to say that Argentina and Israel are not merely partners, but friendly nations.”
The Independence Day ceremonies projected an image of resilience at a challenging time for Israel, where wars on two fronts are currently in ceasefires announced by U.S. President Donald Trump. Among the others chosen as torch-lighters, seen as one of Israel’s most significant honors, were soldiers who have participated in the years of war that followed Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
Two of the chosen torch-lighters drew sharp criticism. One was Rabbi Avraham Zarbiv, a rabbinical judge who has drawn scrutiny for publicly praising demolition operations in Gaza. In February, the Ombudsman of the Israeli Judiciary ruled that Zarbiv had violated a code of ethics by expressing his views on controversial issues.
“I light this torch in honor of the bulldozer and excavator operators, the trailblazers, destroyers of the enemy and the dismantlers of terrorist infrastructure who protect the lives of our soldiers,” he said at the ceremony.
A cousin of a woman killed in captivity also also denounced the selection of Gal Hirsch, Israel’s coordinator for hostages and missing persons, who faced calls for his resignation in February after telling Haaretz that demonstrations demanding the release of hostages were aiding Hamas. Gil Dickmann, a cousin of Carmel Gat, wrote in a post on Instagram that his selection was “spitting in the faces of families” of the hostages.
Last year, torchlighters for the ceremony included former Israeli hostage Emily Damari, NBA player Deni Avdija and the American Jewish conservative pundit Ben Shapiro, whose appointment was criticized by some Israeli leaders as inappropriately political.
The day’s official programming will end with a ceremony awarding the Israel Prize, the nation’s top civilian honor. Among those receiving the prize this year are the artist Yaacov Agam and Chantal Belzberg, the CEO of a nonprofit that aids the families of fallen soldiers.
Trump was also invited to receive the prize, getting a public invitation in February following an earlier announcement by Netanyahu. He will not be present.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Marx Brothers fans rejoice: There’s a recording of Harpo speaking
Harpo Marx’s wife, Susan Fleming, once remarked that, when you got him talking, you couldn’t shut him up.
The proof was there for those who chanced to see him in the 1930s and ‘40s, screening clips of the films he made with his brothers. If a crowd was good, he’d deliver what was known as “Red’s Speech,” a reference to the red wig he wore on stage.
The speech grew more verbose with each recitation, with input by Harpo’s friend, the critic Alexander Woollcott, a fount of $5 dollar words. It got so long, in fact, that Harpo would take it out in the form of a long script that spilled off the stage down the aisle.
“There’s always been this fallacy that Harpo never spoke on stage,” said Marx historian Robert S. Bader, author of Four of the Three Musketeers: The Marx Brothers on Stage and Zeppo: The Reluctant Marx Brother. When he did, he would often make a joke about the mute persona he adopted in 1914, opening his remarks with “as I was about to say in 1915.”
In 1964, Harpo was hitting the speaking circuit. He spoke at events for the United Jewish Appeal, having grown more connected to his Jewishness after a 1963 trip to Israel. On these occasions, Bader said, Harpo “might have looked like a local councilman, just wearing a business suit,” and would sneak in a line from his bar mitzvah speech: “For 13 long years, I have toiled and labored for your happiness.”
Advised to retire from performing after a number of heart attacks, Harpo reasoned that, so long as it was for charity and he didn’t get paid, it couldn’t count as work.
That rationale led to Harpo’s appearance at benefits for a number of symphony orchestras. On March 20, 1964, he gave his final performance at a concert for the Riverside Symphony Orchestra in California, playing a suite of songs about the moon, an original composition and conducting a particularly manic take on Haydn’s “Toy Symphony.”
This time, Harpo not only spoke, giving a lively recitation of Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf, he did something unprecedented by allowing himself to be recorded with the understanding the public might someday hear it.
On June 5, 2026 a record of the evening will be released as Harpo Speaks! The Riverside Symphony Concert. It was announced on April 1, but it was no April Fools joke. It’s an outstanding artifact, and it was discovered quite by accident.
John Tefteller, the foremost collector of rare, Marx-related records, was looking for a copy of a 1963 concert with Harpo and comedian-musician Allan Sherman, recorded by Sherman’s son Robert. Looking in the tape box for Pasadena, Sherman instead found the Riverside tape. Oddly enough, Robert Sherman had no memory of recording — or even attending — the Riverside concert.
Bill Marx, Harpo’s son and the arranger of much of his music, says the man on the recording, telling the tale of “Peeduh,” the “boid” and the “huntahs,” is the one he grew up with.
“It was very, very low key,” said Bill Marx, now a celebrated pianist and Juilliard-trained composer, recalling his father’s voice. “I think I would have to say that he was about five or six notes lower than Groucho’s. It was easy to hear him speak. I suppose you could call him soft-spoken. He rarely if ever raised his voice in our house with my two brothers and sisters.”
Instead, he would do something like wake his daughter in the middle of the night to play jacks.
Peter and the Wolf, written for young audiences, was a natural fit for Harpo, and it was his idea to do it. The version of the libretto, co-written by Harpo and Groucho, also features a topical joke for that election year of 1964: “Imagine the triumphant procession. Peeduh at the head, after him the huntahs leading the wolf, then Goldwatuh, Rockefelluh and Nixon.”
That Harpo was a patron of the symphony is no great surprise. He practiced the harp three hours a day and Bill Marx remembers his father’s love of French impressionist composers like Debussy and Ravel and Fauré. When Bill played records in his bedroom, without fail his father would knock on the door, ask what he was listening to, and commit to learning it — which he did.
“He just had a great learning thirst, and I had the privilege of watching this man appear in everybody’s life by doing things that he was compelled to do,” Bill Marx said.
As the narrator of Peter and the Wolf, Harpo is wonderfully expressive, evoking the storytelling of an old-time New York-born Zayde (dressed in his traditional costume at the concert, he donned a new accessory: reading glasses). He sounds quite a lot like Chico, his closest brother in age.
Restoring the tape took major work from audio restorer Joel Tefteller (John’s son) and audio engineer Nick Bergh. At one point, in his closing speech, Harpo walked away from the mic, making the original tape almost inaudible.
“He wasn’t used to looking for a microphone,” said Bader. “He didn’t have a lot of time in front of microphones. I don’t think anybody ever had to say ‘Harpo get closer to the microphone’ ever.”
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UCLA student government condemns campus Hillel for hosting former hostage
A campus event featuring freed Israeli hostage Omer Shem Tov drew the condemnation of UCLA’s student government on Tuesday. In an open letter, the UCLA Students Associated Council said that bringing Tov to speak to students “served to legitimize and normalize” atrocities in Gaza and Lebanon.
Shem Tov, 23, was kidnapped from the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and held hostage in Gaza until his release in a prisoner exchange in February 2025. UCLA hosted him on April 14 for a Yom HaShoah event.
“While we affirm the humanity of all people impacted by violence, we reject the selective platforming of narratives that obscure the broader reality of ongoing state violence,” the student government letter wrote in the letter, which was addressed to the UCLA administration and UCLA Hillel among others. “Israel is currently continuing to carry out what has been widely identified by human rights advocates as a genocide in Gaza, while also expanding its illegal military campaign into Lebanon.
“In this context, elevating a single narrative, absent of critical political and humanitarian framing, serves to legitimize and normalize these ongoing atrocities.”
Rabbi Chaim Seidler-Feller, UCLA Hillel’s director emeritus, called the statement “completely ridiculous.”
“You can’t present the narrative of your experience without it being called ‘one sided,’” Seidler-Feller said. “There has to be a counter-story to persecution. Is there a counter-story to killing people?”
UCLA Hillel executive director Daniel Gold dismissed the criticism in Tuesday’s letter as antisemitic.
“Hillel at UCLA and Students Supporting Israel UCLA would like to apologize…for absolutely nothing,” he wrote in a statement. “Members of UCLA student government have once again shown they are anti-dialogue, anti-learning, anti-truth, anti-student and antisemitic.”
The USAC did not respond to a request for comment.
As college campuses across the country became a hotspot for pro-Palestinian activism following the Oct. 7 attack, UCLA, with an activist history and a large Jewish population, stood out as a major flashpoint. Its student encampment was the site of a riot in April 2024 and eventually cleared by police in riot gear.
The USAC has sided with pro-Palestinian protesters throughout. In a Feb. 2025 letter titled “We Are All SJP,” the USAC, which is democratically elected by the roughly 30,000-member UCLA student body, condemned Chancellor Julio Frenk’s suspension of Students for Justice in Palestine. The letter referred to Israel only as “the Zionist state” or put the country’s name inside quotation marks.
The University of California has since been sued by the Department of Justice, which said that UCLA created a hostile work environment against Jewish and Israeli faculty in violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.
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