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Queer Jews fought to join the Celebrate Israel Parade. This year, I marched in drag.
(JTA) — “Look mom, he’s a beautiful butterfly,” a child shouted, pointing at me, as I marched up Fifth Avenue in drag on June 4 at the Celebrate Israel Parade.
I could only imagine how meaningful it would have been for me as a kid to see drag included as part of this annual Jewish communal celebration on Fifth Avenue. I didn’t know that boys were allowed to be beautiful. Worse, I thought that there was something shameful about my own longing to embrace my femininity. Certainly, growing up, there were many who seemed only too happy to reinforce that shame. Now, strutting proudly in the parade in a fabulous pink sundress and 9-inch heels is my way of creating a Jewish world where one’s whole self belongs.
Drag helps me find joy in not fitting neatly into boxes or binaries. As a queer Jew who grew up in an Orthodox family, non-binary identity is not just a helpful framing for my gender, it also best captures my approach to religion and my relationship with Israel. Not quite a man and not quite Orthodox, I am equally not quite a woman and kind of Orthodox. While I may not label myself a Zionist, I most certainly celebrate Israel and consider the nation central to my Judaism.
For me, these internal conflicts create the tension that energizes my art. The ability to hold seemingly opposing identities at once provides an authenticity that is both thrilling and freeing. Perhaps this is why I am so drawn to drag. What better art form to express the full spectrum of identity with all its contradictions, complications, and kaleidoscopic colors? I find drag the most exciting and self-actualizing way to fully show up in a parade that celebrates the complexity of Jewish heritage and homeland.
My drag also pays homage to the unapologetic fighting spirit that allowed queer Jews into the parade in the first place. Today, the Jewish Community Relations Council-NY (the parade’s producers) fully embraces the LGBTQ marching cluster and makes us feel like valued members of the Jewish community. But queer organizations were not always welcome at this event. When New York’s gay synagogue attempted to March in the early 1990s, its invitation was rescinded when Orthodox day schools (which still appear to make up the majority of marching schools) threatened to pull out from a parade with an LGTBQ contingent.
As a closeted teen in yeshiva, I remember feeling crushed when I read about the parade’s gay ban. The internalized message was clear: I’m not wanted and there is no place for me in this Jewish community. I recall feeling angry that it seemed like queer Jewish organizations just gave up and gave in to homophobia without a fight. This fury became a drive that helped create JQY (Jewish Queer Youth), the organization I co-founded whose mission is to support LGBTQ youth from Orthodox homes.
It was not until years later, in 2012, when a 16-year-old JQY member named Jon asked if we could march in the Celebrate Israel parade, that I knew it was time to reopen the fight for queer inclusion. That year JQY organized a cluster of queer Jewish organizations and applied to march as an official LGBTQ contingent. At first there was little resistance and our application was accepted. But two weeks before the parade, I was contacted by the parade’s director, informing me that the banner for our marching group must have “no reference to a LGBT or Gay and Lesbian community.” Apparently, once again Orthodox schools were threatening to boycott the parade if queers were to be allowed to march under an LGBT banner.
This time, however, JQY would not back down. I made it clear to the parade director that his request to erase our community identity is unacceptable and that we intended to show up on parade Sunday ready to march with a banner that read “Gay, Lesbian, Bi, Trans Jewish Community.” I told the director that he was welcome to call the police and deal with the optics of arresting queer Jews attempting to celebrate Israel.
Soon after, I began getting phone calls from leaders of the largest queer Jewish organizations. To my surprise, instead of being encouraging, they pressured me to stand down and compromise. Their concern was that my position made queer Jews seem “divisive.” I nearly gave in to these calls for appeasement until I spoke with Larry Kramer, the gay activist, playwright and personal hero of mine. Larry’s words still ring true today. “They were wrong then and they are wrong now,” he said. “The pressure to not be divisive is just a convenient and cowardly device for professionals to hang their internalized homophobia [on].”
The JQY team devised a plan. Prior to the parade’s pushback, we had already received an invitation to a pre-parade wine-and-cheese reception hosted by Fox TV, which was televising the parade that year. I would attend the event with Jon, the JQY member who inspired this parade advocacy, and we would speak to every journalist in the room, letting them know how excited and thankful we were that, for the first time ever, there would be an LGBTQ marching cluster.
When we approached the parade director who was flanked by Fox TV execs, we shook his hand and loudly congratulated him on the incredible milestone for queer inclusion. Cornered and in the spotlight, his response could not have been more perfect. “Yes, we are so proud to have an LGBTQ cluster this year,” he said. We had won.
(Noam Gilboord, the chief operating officer of JCRC-NY, confirmed this account. He said he had not been aware of the pushback against JQY at the time and noted that a highlight of his parade experience this year was handing an Israeli flag to a friend’s trans daughter, who was marching with her community.)
That Sunday our LGBTQ Community cluster had more than 100 marching participants made up of queer Jews of all ages and denominations, as well as friends, family, and allies. We received an overwhelmingly supportive reaction from the crowd, made up of mostly Orthodox Jews. We felt like we were healing old wounds and breaking new ground. Most importantly, we demonstrated that Jewish unity means including the LGBTQ Jewish community by name.
The organizers of the parade were so impressed with our contingent that they awarded us the Most Enthusiastic Participation Award. With subsequent yearly participation, our LGBTQ cluster has become a parade staple and highlight for onlookers. It is one of JQY’s proudest accomplishments.
JQY leads the first-ever LGBTQ contingent in the Celebrate Israel parade in 2012. (Robert Saferstein)
I believe that it is precisely JQY’s focus on uplifting complex identities that made our case to join the parade so strong. For most of our teens, celebrating Israel is part of what it means to both be Jewish and part of the Jewish community (the nation of Israel). Participation in the parade for them is about belonging, not support for any political structure or agenda. It makes sense that Jewish queer youth want to experience communal belonging in an LGBTQ-affirming way. Yet there are still those on the extreme political right and left who refuse to see this nuance and put our participants at risk.
In 2017 our LGBTQ contingent was targeted, infiltrated and sabotaged by members of Jewish Voice for Peace, an anti-Israel activist group. The protesters physically pushed, surrounded and blocked terrified queer Jewish minors who were bravely marching in front of their Orthodox families. Little did our teens know that it was bigotry from the left that would come for them that day.
This year we were particularly wary of marching among a predominantly Orthodox crowd — not because the Orthodox community has gotten more religious or pious, but because of reports that the Orthodox community has become more influenced by a political right that increasingly targets the LGBTQ community. One of the most influential public figures on the right is Ben Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew who, besides being fixated on canceling companies that work with trans people, recently published an article blaming LGBTQ acceptance for the “failure of modern Orthodox Judaism.”
Our contingent this year was mostly met with smiles, cheers and applause. However, it was difficult to ignore the handful of people on nearly every block who covered their children’s faces, displayed angry thumbs down signs and even shouted homophobic or transphobic slurs as we passed. Over the last few years I have noticed an uptick in these kinds of negative responses. It would be negligent not to connect this change to the recent nation-wide scapegoating of trans youth, drag artists, and LGBTQ acceptance.
This week, for the first time ever, the Human Rights Campaign declared an LGBTQ state of emergency in the United States, after lawmakers in 45 states proposed anti-trans bills in 2023. Of those, 24 have proposed “Don’t Say Gay” laws that criminalize discussion of LGBTQ issues in public schools, and lawmakers in 14 states have proposed anti-drag laws. Politicians and pundits with huge platforms are openly describing queer advocates as “groomers,” conveying that there is a pedophilic sexual agenda to the call for LGBTQ human rights and dignity.
This is the environment that LGBTQ Jewish youth live in today and experienced while marching in front of the Jewish community at this year’s parade. This is why I chose to march in drag. Marching is an exercise in building resilience and self-esteem in the face of adversity. My message is to not be afraid, to never back down and to be as magnificent as possible. These principles are the foundations of drag.
Drag is a queer art form that empowers us to express ourselves with every color imaginable. Drag elicits joy and entertainment by subverting expectations and turning gender expression into theatrical performance. It is an artistic genre that can be innocent or scandalous. The form ranges from family-friendly fun like “Mrs. Doubtfire” and Drag Queen Story Hours, to hit TV shows like “RuPaul’s Drag Race” and the more adult fare found in late night bars.
At the Celebrate Israel parade, drag is as natural an aesthetic for queer marchers as Bukharan music and garb are to the Russian-speaking Jewish community cluster. For many LGBTQ Jews, drag is as much a part of our culture and heritage as the celebration of Israel. This year, I was the first participant to march in drag. Next year, I hope many more will follow. Because let’s face it, nothing lights up a parade quite like a fabulous drag queen.
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Oct. 7 spurred this secular private school in Manhattan to start holding an annual Shabbat gathering
(New York Jewish Week) — A new Jewish tradition has taken hold at a private, non-Jewish school in Manhattan.
On a recent Friday, about 240 students, parents and educators from the Town School, located on the Upper East Side, stayed late to eat matzah ball soup, recite blessings over challah and candles, and sing Hebrew songs.
It was the third time in as many years that the school had held a Shabbat celebration, and more than half of the students and parents in attendance weren’t Jewish.
“I think there is a real enthusiasm and excitement for families who are not Jewish to come into their first Shabbat or learn more about it again,” said Pierangelo Rossi, the Town School’s director of equity and community action.
Originally from Peru, Rossi is not Jewish. His first Shabbat experience ever was at the Town School in 2024, after Jewish parents organized a gathering in the wake of the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel.
For years, the school had special “affinity groups” and spaces for students and parents of color, for “white anti-racist” students, and for queer students and their allies. The attack, and the surge of antisemitism that followed, spurred Jewish students and parents to work with the school to create their own.
While the Town School does not collect information about students’ religion, officials estimate that at least a quarter of the student body is Jewish.
“After Oct. 7, we knew — and it became clear to all of us — that our Jewish community was looking for that sense of affirmation in a way they hadn’t before,” said Head of School Doug Brophy.
Brophy, who has led the Town School since 2018, understood how they felt. He is also vice president of the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue on the Upper West Side.
Affinity groups have emerged as a hot-button issue in the debate over DEI, or diversity, equity and inclusion. While their proponents say the groups give minority and marginalized populations desperately needed spaces of their own, critics of DEI say the groups can reinforce divisions and inappropriately inject progressive ideologies into schools and other institutions.
Jewish “anti-woke” advocates have particularly criticized the affinity group framework for too often forcing Jewish students into a binary framework about race and privilege that does not recognize the complexity of Jewish identity.
At the same time, tensions amid the aftermath of Oct. 7 roiled some New York City private schools. The head of one elite private school stepped down last summer after members of the school community clashed over identity, antisemitism, Islamophobia and the Gaza war.
At the Town School, officials and parents say, those tensions have been absent. Instead, the entire school community has embraced the Shabbat celebrations alongside the other special events held to honor students’ traditions, such as a lion parade on the school’s block to mark Lunar New Year and a Persian New Year observance led by parents.
“Whether it’s coming from a vulnerability or a difference, it’s [about] wanting to be part of something bigger than yourself, and not just our Jewish families and colleagues feeling a sense of identity, but everyone else developing a greater sense of empathy,” Brophy said.
The Town School is not the only non-Jewish private school in the city to hold Shabbat celebrations in recent years: Riverdale Country Day School in the Bronx says 700 people attended its November 2024 gathering. But it has committed to annual gatherings, which are growing in attendance.
That first Shabbat in 2024 was led by Rabbi Bradley Solmsen from the Conservative Park Avenue Synagogue; in 2025, by Rabbi Rena Rifkin from Stephen Wise; and this year, by Ana Turkienicz, an educator from the Upper West Side’s Rodeph Sholom School and the Pelham Jewish Center.
“For me, it was really a very different context where you have non-Jews that are interested in learning about what is it that Jews do and are open,” Turkienicz said. “And it was beautiful.”
To create an educational plan that was still engaging for children of all ages, she narrowed the focus of the event to two words: “Shabbat” and “shalom,” meaning “Sabbath” and “peace.”
“I need to use vocabulary, and I need to work with the room only, with those with concepts that are universal,” Turkienicz added. “And there is a lot. There’s a lot in ‘Shabbat’ and ‘shalom’ that are universal.”
She taught the guests the songs “Bim Bam” and “Salaam” — the latter being the Arabic word for “shalom” — and recited the blessings over the candles and challah, and the younger children decorated placemats, while the older children hung out with their classmates.
14-year-old Daniel Rybak stuck around near the school after his last class of the day got out so he could attend the after-school Shabbat service for his second time.
Rybak, whose mother is Catholic and whose father is Jewish, has attended the Town School for nine years.
“Just talking about the greater world at this point, with all the troubles in the Levant, with Israel and Gaza, as well as just the general sense, I suppose, that things are getting a little more violent around the world — it’s just a nice thing that brings people back to that sense of, ‘Hey, we’re here, we’re family, we’re OK, we’re getting through this,’” Rybak said. “It just shows that even throughout all that that’s happened everywhere, there’s still pockets of community and of real hope.”
This year, the Shabbat gathering took on added meaning for some attendees as some of New York’s Jews feel increasingly alienated or afraid following the election of Zohran Mamdani, a longtime and staunch critic of Israel, to the mayor’s office.
“The whole time I was thinking: 20 blocks north from here, there is a new mayor that we don’t know what [he’s] going to be for the Jewish community in New York,” Turkienicz said. “Twenty blocks south of his mansion, we have a private, non-Jewish school doing a Kabbalat Shabbat.”
Katy Williamson, a Jewish parent who helped organize the last two Town School Shabbats and attended this year’s, said she was “really blown away by the sense of community” and surprised by how many people attended.
“I read the news. Obviously, we live in New York City. I’m very aware of what’s going on outside of this, just in the world right now,” she said. “There was just this really warm feeling. … So many people from the school community joined and wanted to be a part of it.”
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Trump’s antisemitism envoy rebukes European rabbi, drawing praise from Elon Musk
(JTA) — A disagreement over how to define the sources of rising antisemitism in Europe escalated into a public clash this week between two prominent Jewish leaders, with tech billionaire Elon Musk intervening to back the U.S. government’s antisemitism envoy over a prominent European rabbi.
The dispute centers on remarks made Wednesday at the World Economic Forum by Rabbi Pinchas Goldschmidt, the president of the Conference of European Rabbis, during a panel discussion on antisemitism, extremism and social cohesion.
Responding to a question about the surge of antisemitism in Germany and beyond, Goldschmidt said the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attack on Israel had triggered a dramatic global rise in antisemitic incidents, including what he described as organized and state-sponsored activity on university campuses and in public spaces.
Goldschmidt then linked broader political developments in Europe to immigration-related anxieties.
“I think the rise of the extreme right in many European countries is a response to the insecurity felt by the so-called old Europeans regarding the new immigrants who came from the Middle East,” he said.
He went on to argue that combating antisemitism and Islamophobia together was in the shared interest of Jewish and Muslim communities, pointing to past interfaith initiatives he said had helped promote social cohesion.
Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, publicly criticized Goldschmidt’s remarks on X, calling them a misreading of the drivers of contemporary antisemitism in Europe. The intervention marked one of Kaploun’s first major public statements since his Senate confirmation in December.
“Blaming ‘old Europe’ for the present surge in antisemitism is disgraceful,” Kaploun wrote, arguing instead that mass migration has played a significant role in recent antisemitic violence and threats to Jewish safety.
“I am proud to serve in an administration that understands that mass migration is a huge driver of antisemitism,” Kaploun wrote. “It creates dramatic social changes and threatens the safety of all citizens. This administration, led by President Trump and Secretary Rubio, recognizes and confronts today’s challenges with clarity. Mass migration itself threatens the safety of Jews and all communities.”
Musk, the owner of X, amplified Kaploun’s critique by reposting his comments and replying, “Exactly. Thank you for speaking up,” a move that quickly broadened the dispute beyond Jewish communal circles.
Goldschmidt responded within hours, rejecting the characterization of his remarks and saying they had been taken out of context. He said he did not blame European culture for antisemitism and reiterated that he views antisemitism as stemming from multiple ideological sources, including the far right, the far left and radical Islamist violence.
“I never blamed ‘old Europe’ for the current rise in antisemitism,” Goldschmidt wrote, adding that his Davos comments were intended to explain political reactions to immigration, not to excuse antisemitic attacks.
The exchange highlights a growing divide among Jewish leaders over how to frame antisemitism amid polarized debates about immigration, integration and public safety — debates that have increasingly spilled into partisan politics in the United States.
Kaploun’s emphasis on migration echoes language used by Vice President JD Vance, who said in December that reducing immigration was “the single most significant thing” the United States could do to curb antisemitism, while dismissing claims of rising antisemitic sentiment within the Republican Party.
The dispute also reflects longstanding institutional tensions. Kaploun is affiliated with the Chabad-Lubavitch movement, which has grown into a dominant force in Jewish communal life in Russia and parts of Europe. Goldschmidt, a former chief rabbi of Moscow who left Russia after refusing to endorse the war in Ukraine, represents a European rabbinic establishment that has at times clashed with Chabad over authority and representation.
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Rabbi among dozens arrested in faith leaders’ anti-ICE protest in Minnesota
(JTA) — At least one local rabbi was arrested Friday in Minneapolis as hundreds of faith leaders from around the country gathered to protest Immigration and Customs Enforcement activity in the Twin Cities.
Rabbi Emma Kippley-Ogman, the Jewish and interfaith chaplain at Macalester College in St. Paul, was briefly detained by police alongside leaders of other faiths while staging a protest at the airport.
In photos and video from the protest just before the arrest, Kipley-Ogman can be seen delivering brief remarks while wearing a rainbow tallit and standing in a line at the airport’s arrivals gate with several other faith leaders who hold hands and pray. Kipley-Ogman did not immediately return a Jewish Telegraphic Agency request for comment.
Rabbi Aaron Weininger, who leads the Conservative Adath Jeshurun Congregation in Minnetonka, was also demonstrating at the airport and witnessed Kippley-Ogman’s arrest. He said the rabbi “was in the lineup of clergy being prepared to get arrested.”
“The goal was to disrupt operations because [the airport] is being used to deport folks, like three flights a day,” Weininger told JTA. He described the overall mood of the protest as “very peaceful.” In photos from the event, he is wearing a tallit and holding a sign reading “ICE Out of Minneapolis.”
He continued, “The clergy brought out the best of what faith does, which is lifting people up, building community and speaking up for justice. There was song, there was prayer, a lot of relationship-building. The crowd was calm but also very clear, calling to the end of the atrocities that ICE is committing.”
In an Instagram video from the airport, Rabbi Daniel Kirzane of the Reform KAM Isaiah Israel in Chicago, wearing a beanie from the Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, said he had come to the protest because “the Torah teaches us that society and government are meant to protect people, not to scare them and not to brutalize them.”
The three were among an estimated 100 rabbis and Jewish leaders on the ground for “ICE Out” events across the Twin Cities Friday, after local clergy issued a broader call for a show of strength to combat the region’s intensified ICE activity over the past few weeks. Many local Jewish institutions, including the federation, the JCC, Jewish day schools and Jewish social services groups, have condemned ICE’s presence.
While mainstream Jewish groups say they are not opposed to responsible immigration enforcement, a steady stream of distressing incidents in Minnesota — including including the shooting death of Renee Good by an ICE agent, the detention of a 5-year-old child, and agents reportedly forcing open the door of a U.S. citizen — have galvanized a faith-based response in starkly moral terms.
“What did we learn from the Holocaust? We have to act and we have to resist,” one visiting rabbi, Diane Tracht of Reform-affiliated Temple Israel near Gary, Indiana, told Religion News Service while patrolling a heavily Hispanic and Somali region looking for ICE activity. “If I’m not going to act and resist now, then I shouldn’t call myself a rabbi and I can’t be a proud Jew.”
Dozens of the rabbis on the ground Friday were activated through T’ruah, the Jewish social justice network. Also present were Rabbi Jonah Pesner, head of the Union for Reform Judaism’s religious action center; Avodah CEO Cheryl Cook; Bend the Arc CEO Jamie Beran; and members of Conservative Judaism’s social justice commission, among others.
“It’s all rooted in the biblical commandment that we were slaves in Egypt, and we’re to love the stranger,” Pesner told TC Jewfolk, a local Jewish news site. “The biblical text repeats that 36 different times in 36 different ways, and it really calls our clergy to action.”
The airport protest was just one of several anti-ICE events that local and national clergy staged in the Twin Cities area Friday, amid frigid temperatures that saw wind chill as low as 40-below. Temple Israel, a prominent Reform congregation in Minneapolis, also hosted an interfaith prayer service.
“Each and every one of our traditions believes in the dignity of every human being,” Temple Israel Senior Rabbi Marcia Zimmerman told the gathered crowd Friday morning, to applause.
After extolling the virtues of the region’s diversity, Zimmerman added, “When I began this work, and I was ordained in 1988, I said these words. But it wasn’t against the reality that we have today. Now we have to walk these words. We have to live these words. And it is, in my mind, the moment that history will define us. And guess what, history is on our side.”
Another local Jewish leader took a different protest tactic, urging a day of fasting on Friday.
“In Jewish tradition, when a community faces crisis, violence, injustice or moral collapse, we do not look away. The Talmud describes an ancient custom of instituting communal fast days,” Rabbi Tamar Magill-Grimm, senior rabbi at the Conservative Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, said during an interfaith press conference earlier in the week. “Fasting is not about self-affliction. It is about clarity. It is about refusing to numb ourselves to suffering.”
Vice President JD Vance visited Minneapolis on Thursday, where he sought to defend the Trump administration’s immigration policies while also hoping to “turn down the temperature.”
Faith communities have emerged as a crucial dimension of the protests, with Attorney General Pam Bondi announcing Thursday the arrests of three anti-ICE protesters who had been involved in disrupting a church service over the weekend. A planned anti-ICE rally in New York City Friday afternoon was set to feature Rabbi Stephanie Kolin, of Congregation Beth Elohim in Brooklyn, as one of the speakers.
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