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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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Memes, mashiach and ‘Torah-cyclopedias’ put a Jewish twist on the Knicks’ title hunt
Anyone living in the five boroughs has likely seen the Chabad stickers on street corners proclaiming, alongside a photo of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, that the “Messiah Is Here!”
But this week, a different kind of redemption feels imminent in New York — and there’s a new face on the “Messiah” posters.
With the hometown Knicks two wins away from their first NBA championship in 53 years, fans mocked up a t-shirt featuring an image of star point guard Jalen Brunson superimposed on the Chabad sign, black hat, beard and all. (Including Brunson’s signature cornrows.)
The Brunson memes are just one Jewish piece of an unexpected Finals run uniting the five boroughs — and perhaps, even more astonishingly, its Jewish community. There’s been a giant dreidel spinning outside Madison Square Garden, Talmud-lined shelves displayed on sports broadcasts, and a Jewish-inclusive chant going viral. The team on the court has a Jewish aspect, too: Brunson is married to a Jewish woman — and apparently signed a ketubah at his wedding.
Home to an estimated 1 million Jews (a number that nearly doubles when including the full metro area), New York probably couldn’t have had a Finals run without Jewish undertones. After all, their last title-winning team was helmed by a Jewish head coach, Hall-of-Famer Red Holzman. The team’s Jewish history goes well beyond that.
But the Jewish presence has been unmissable — and in these times, unmissably welcomed — in the city’s sports hysteria.
“I seen Hasidic Jews break-dancing with Black kids,” the rapper Fat Joe told reporters Sunday. “This is the greatest unification of the city since 9/11.”
‘People in yarmulkes, people in turbans’
Though the first two games of the NBA Finals were played in Texas, the home of the Western Conference champion San Antonio Spurs, the center of the action for Knicks fans remained Madison Square Garden — the arena known as the basketball Mecca. (OK, that part’s not so Jewish.) The Knicks faithful assemble there after each game, Midtown descending (ascending?) into full-scale revelry.
That’s where a yarmulke-wearing teenager wearing a Brunson jersey was caught breaking it down like a 1970s b-boy, other fans encircling him and cheering him on. About as miraculously as a Brunson high-arcing fadeaway plunging through the net, the kippah stayed on.
Meanwhile, a fan’s improvised rallying cry was becoming an instant hit: “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish, my Christian Dior, Knicks in four!” (My colleague Mira Fox has written eloquently on the chant.)
Outside MSG — and at the Knicks watch party at Bryant Park — is also where Rami Even-Esh, the Jewish rapper known as Kosha Dillz, plans to bring his human-sized dreidel Monday night, when the Knicks take on the Spurs in Game 3 (8:30 p.m. ET on ABC.) He did a “Knicks Shabbat” outside the Garden during Friday night’s Game 2, serving challah to passersby, and recorded a Knicks music video that featured people of Jewish and non-Jewish backgrounds.
“There’s people in yarmulkes, people in turbans — there’s no ‘anti’ stuff, so that makes it very Jewish for me, and it feels very authentic,” Even-Esh said in an interview.
And let’s not forget that the arena — with President Donald Trump expected in attendance — now has the security infrastructure of an American mega-shul.
‘Torah-cyclopedias’
This Finals’ Jewish imprint also extends to the court. The architect of this team, Knicks team president Leon Rose, was born to a Jewish family in South New Jersey. He later became an NBA super-agent whose clients included Allen Iverson and LeBron James, before taking on the challenge of restoring the ill-fated Knicks to their former glory.
The franchise had long been a vehicle for Jewish hoopers to make their imprint on the game. The first basket in NBA history was scored by a Jew, Ossie Schectman; the late 1970s and early 1980s Knicks featured Ernie Grunfeld, the son of Holocaust survivors.
But the team became a punchline under Knicks owner James Dolan, whose verbal sparring with an elderly Jewish fan once made national headlines. Only after Rose executed a series of transactions both shrewd (like inking Brunson, then seen as a mere second-fiddle, in free agency) and bold (like big trades for Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges), the Knicks turned the ship around.
One of their latter-day stars, meanwhile, is Amar’e Stoudemire, who converted to Judaism after playing for the Knicks in the 2010s. Stoudemire is often seen wearing a black hat and a remote hit on a Barstool Sports talk show allowed basketball fans to see bookshelves behind him lined with seforim.
The background prompted a question from the program’s hosts: Are those encyclopedias? Stoudemire explained: “Those are my Torah-cyclopedias,” adding that the one book missing from the shelf was the one he is currently working through.
The Knicks’ success has presented a challenge for Jews like Stoudemire who observe Shabbat, as Game 2 of the Finals fell on Friday night.
It’s a common occurrence for Orthodox fans of teams like the Yankees and Dodgers — and one Knicks fans hope to get used to.
The post Memes, mashiach and ‘Torah-cyclopedias’ put a Jewish twist on the Knicks’ title hunt appeared first on The Forward.
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What exactly did Israel gain from striking Beirut and provoking Iran?
On Monday morning, Israelis — my family and me among them — awoke to a day of sirens, confusion and suspended normalcy.
Flights had been canceled. Schools had closed. Businesses across parts of the country had shut their doors. Once again, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had led Israel into a widening regional confrontation — and the question of what exactly Israel had gained from striking Beirut’s Dahiyeh district amid a Israel-Lebanon ceasefire suddenly stood at the center of public debate.
Iran had retaliated with airstrikes against Israel after the Sunday strikes; Israel launched strikes on Iran in response; fears of a broader regional escalation rose; and, after President Donald Trump posted warnings to both parties on social media, the conflict thankfully appeared to have halted by Monday afternoon.
In one version of events, the region had merely stumbled into another familiar spiral of action and reaction. Israeli cynics see something else entirely: a prime minister who once again appeared to need a war, and was determined to restart the conflict with Iran.
“I understand neither the strategy nor the tactics,” said Nir Dvori, the military affairs analyst of the leading Channel 12 station.
Had the strike in Dahiyeh — Hezbollah’s stronghold — fundamentally altered the strategic balance, one could at least have argued there was a cold logic behind it. Had it prevented an imminent attack, saved soldiers’ lives, or significantly degraded Hezbollah’s operational capacity, perhaps the gamble could have been justified.
Yet the attack seemed to change nothing. Hezbollah was not going to collapse because another building in Beirut had been hit. Nor did the operation appear likely to prevent the kinds of attacks that had continued killing Israeli soldiers. If anything, civilian casualties only risked providing Hezbollah with renewed legitimacy.
The strikes seemed to involve great risks and few rewards. They came at an extraordinarily delicate moment in the American negotiations with Iran, as Trump has been trying desperately to lower tensions in Lebanon — including by privately cursing at and humiliating Netanyahu over Lebanon policy last week. And they threatened one of the most important strategic assets Israel had in Lebanon in years: a broad Lebanese consensus that Hezbollah has become a disaster for Lebanon and needed to be disarmed.
The Trump-Netanyahu divergence
Israel was already in an extraordinarily delicate position vis-à-vis Washington.
Despite impressive military successes in the early days of the Iran campaign, there was no clear exit strategy, nor any serious solution for Iran’s clamp down on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
The war amped up political pressure on Trump, with rising energy prices and mounting public anger threatening the Republican outlook in looming midterm elections. A prolonged regional war risked transforming him within months into a weakened president facing congressional investigations and political paralysis should his party lose control of Congress.
Which means Trump and Netanyahu increasingly appear to be moving in opposite directions. Trump needs stability. Netanyahu, facing dismal polling numbers and growing public exhaustion, needs disruption.
At this point in Netanyahu’s tenure, large segments of the Israeli public no longer dismiss the possibility that political considerations influence national security decisions. As the week opened with the threat of renewed war, many openly speculated that the government had an interest in raising the temperature yet again by provoking an emergency severe enough to argue for postponing elections.
But tension between American and Israeli leaders leaves Israel’s strategic interests imperiled. Israel continues to rely on American airlifts, munitions, diplomatic protection at the United Nations, and broader strategic backing against European and international pressure. And as Trump and Netanyahu’s political interests clashed, ordinary Israelis once more found themselves in shelters, with children out of school and flights grounded.
Net strategic negatives
Meanwhile, every strike that harms Lebanese civilians or damages infrastructure risks reviving Hezbollah’s preferred narrative: that it alone stands between Lebanon and Israeli aggression.
That makes each such strike a lost strategic opportunity. Under President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, a new Lebanese leadership had begun cautiously presenting Hezbollah not as a defender of the state but as an obstacle to Lebanese sovereignty itself.
Rather than helping isolate Hezbollah politically inside Lebanon, Israel’s strikes risk helping it regain relevance and legitimacy.
Many Israelis are maddened by the sense that Jerusalem simply refuses to think two moves ahead.
What, exactly, was the long-term plan? Hezbollah remains deeply entrenched across Lebanon. No Israeli slogan about “relying only on ourselves” can change the basic strategic reality. Israel cannot permanently occupy large parts of Lebanon, nor sustain endless military operations. A peaceful future requires a stronger Lebanese state and a Lebanese public that views Hezbollah as a burden rather than a protector.
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of Israeli life in 2026 is that millions of citizens no longer consider suspicions that the state is acting against their interest in order to favor Netanyahu’s to be implausible. The notion of “ulterior motives” had become normalized in Israeli political discourse in a way unimaginable under earlier prime ministers. That erosion of public trust may have been the bleakest development of all.
The post What exactly did Israel gain from striking Beirut and provoking Iran? appeared first on The Forward.
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‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
Perhaps you, like me, have had a very specific earworm for the last week. It’s not a song, though there is a sing-song-y element to it. It’s a chant: “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish. My Christian Dior — Knicks in four!”
If you hadn’t heard, the New York Knickerbockers are in the finals for the first time since 1999, on a 13-game streak and looking good to win a championship NBA title they haven’t gotten since 1973. The city is going nuts. I am not a big sports fan, but even I have been caught up in the fever, watching the first two games of the best-of-seven finals pitting the Knicks against the San Antonio Spurs at sports bars where fire codes are being flagrantly broken and attendees have brought drums to assist in leading chants.
The newest chant was born from the mouth of a rabid fan featured in a surreal supercut of fan reactions that went viral. (The video also features a dancing robot wearing a jersey emblazoned with the Kalshi logo, the online predictions market that lets users bet on the NBA, sure, but also on what day the U.S. will bomb Iran.)
It pretty much instantly caught fire; my city councilman Chi Ossé posted a video with the slogan, while watching the second game’s nail-biter of a win. Shekar Krishnan, a city councilman from Queens, walked onto the main stage at Gov Ball to lead the crowd in a rousing rendition of the chant.
Beyond the rhyme scheme — which, if we’re being honest, is a little bit difficult to nail — what made this chant catch on so fast is its ability to capture a certain ineffable quality of New Yorkiness. There’s diversity, there’s humor — I’m sorry but it is very funny to name two of the major Abrahamic religions with pride and then ignore the one practiced by the majority of Americans in favor of a fashion designer — and there’s a sense of unity as the city rallies behind its long-losing sports team.
And, at a time of rising antisemitism and just generally bad PR for the Jews, I am heartened to see the city embrace its Jewishness.
Bagels have long been a metonym for the city, and a source of great pride and snobbery for its residents, a food not incidentally rooted in Jewish history. Jews run some of the city’s most beloved neighborhood institutions. They have represented New York on the page and the screen — think Nora Ephron, Fran Drescher, Leonard Bernstein and Woody Allen (for better or for worse). Jews have imparted a Jewish humor, sensibility and even accent that have so shaped the city that they are now basically synonymous. I cannot tell you how many people I’ve met who are not Jewish, but feel as though they are by virtue of growing up in the city.
This hasn’t always been a positive thing. Sometimes equating New York with Jewishness has been used as a sort of racist dogwhistle; Mitch McConnell, for example, asked voters whether they really wanted “somebody from New York” to “set the agenda” as a way of signalling that Chuck Schumer is too Jewish, too liberal, too out of touch with real Americans — in short, the same antisemitic “rootless cosmopolitan” stereotype that has long motivated hatred against Jews.
Of course, the chant isn’t magical, and many of the now-familiar political dynamics came into play. Some communities of Jews are at odds with the way the city is shifting, particularly with the election of Zohran Mamdani, and some posts of the chant have comments from Jews annoyed at being lumped into the same cultural moment as a mayor they see as their enemy. (“Hi, we’re actually humans, not baked goods,” wrote one user. “We’re currently experiencing the highest rate of hate crime in the city. This isn’t cute.”) And, on the flip side of the political spectrum, other commenters accused those spreading the chant of doing “full on genocide rehab,” seemingly for merely mentioning Jews in a positive context.
But however online commentators want to spin the chant, the reality on the street is pure hype. As the rapper Fat Joe put it when interviewed at Madison Square Garden after the game: “I seen Hasidic Jews break dancing with Black kids. This is the greatest unification of the city since 9/11.” (Video proof bears this out.) Somehow, even the local Hare Krishna gathering got in on the Knicks mania.
That’s the true beauty of the city’s diversity — everyone lives together regardless of their political disagreements. And they can still unite in a common cause: the Knicks.
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