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Queer yeshiva to publish first-ever collection of Jewish legal opinions written by and for trans Jews
(JTA) — In the midst of writing a 13-page analysis of a complex area of Jewish law, Rabbi Xava De Cordova found something she wasn’t expecting to see in the medieval-era sources: flexibility.
De Cordova is transgender and had long wondered whether she could feel a sense of belonging while studying reams of rabbinic writings on halacha, or Jewish law, which stretch back thousands of years and often prescribe different practices for men and women.
The laws of ritual purity, for example, prescribe specific behaviors for women on the assumption that they all menstruate. Trans women do not. De Cordova said that gap and others had her thinking, “I don’t really know if I can find a place for myself in this literature.”
But after digging into Jewish texts on the topic, De Cordova realized she’d sold the sages short: Medieval European rabbis were asking many of the same questions she was — and their answers reflected real-world complexity.
“I just found that the rabbis and the early halachic authorities’ understanding of niddah was so much more conceptual and vague and fluctuating than I ever realized before I started this particular work,” De Cordova said, using the Hebrew term for purity laws. Her conclusion: “Wow, there’s so much space for me within this literature.”
De Cordova’s realization is one of many that a dozen Jewish scholars and rabbis have had over the last year as they have scoured Jewish texts for guidance on how transgender Jews can adapt traditional rituals to their lived experience. Now, the group is preparing to release a batch of their essays, analyses of Jewish law called teshuvot, in hopes that they can inform the experiences of trans Jews who seek to live in accordance with traditional Jewish law.
The release of the essays comes at a time when lawmakers in dozens of states are targeting trans people and their rights, in some cases instigating fights that have heavily involved rabbis and their families.
In that climate, writing trans Jews into Jewish tradition “becomes an act of resistance because it’s about celebrating lives that are being demeaned and celebrating people who are being dehumanized in the public sphere,” said Rabbi Becky Silverstein, co-director of the Trans Halakha Project at Svara, the yeshiva founded in Chicago two decades ago to serve the queer community. The dozen rabbis and scholars are based at Svara and collectively form the Teshuva Writing Project.
Among the questions they have tackled: How could a trans man converting to Judaism have a bris, required for male converts? Is the removal of body tissue after gender-affirming surgery a ritual matter, given Jewish legal requirements for burying body parts? And is there a Jewish obligation, in certain cases, to undergo gender transition?
Just how widely their answers will be consumed and taken into account is a question. Most Jews who consciously adhere to halacha throughout their daily lives are Orthodox, and live in communities that either reject trans Jews or are reckoning with whether and how to accept them. Non-Orthodox Jewish denominations have made efforts to embrace trans Jews, but halacha is less often the starting point for most of their members. The Reform movement, the largest in the United States, expressly rejects halacha as binding.
Still, a growing number of Jews and Jewish communities strive to be inclusive while staying rooted in Jewish law and tradition. There are also a growing number of trans Jews who are connected to traditional communities, or who want to live in accordance with Jewish law.
“I think individual trans Jews who are not part of communities could use these teshuvot to guide their own decision-making,” said Silverstein, who was ordained at the pluralistic Hebrew College seminary. “We live in a time of religious autonomy in Jewish life, and where trans Jews actually are hungry for connection to tradition. And so they could use these teshuvot to help inform their own conversations.”
Organizations and initiatives such as the Jewish LGBTQ group Keshet; Torah Queeries, a collection of queer commentaries on the Bible; and TransTorah.org have created rituals, readings, blessings and customs for trans Jews, and Svara runs a Queer Talmud Camp as well as intensive Jewish study programs throughout the year. But until now, no collection of Jewish legal opinions has been published by and for trans people.
“Halacha has to be informed by the real lived experiences of the people about whom it is legislating,” said Laynie Soloman, who helps lead Svara and holds the title of associate rosh yeshiva, in an approach that they said the group had adopted from the disability advocacy community. “That is a fundamental truth about halacha that we are holding as a collective and taking seriously in the way we are authoring these teshuvot.”
The teshuvot will be published later this month, and follow a long tradition of rabbis setting halachic precedent by answering questions from their followers. Those answers are traditionally based on an analysis of rabbinic texts throughout history. They can address questions ranging from whether smoking cigarettes is permissible to the particulars of making a kitchen kosher for Passover.
Some Jewish legal questions tackled by the group at Svara had not previously been answered, such as how to mark conversion for someone who is male but does not have a penis. In other cases, accepted Jewish law pertaining to gender can be painful for those who are nonbinary or trans, either because the answer is not clear or because the law does not match up with contemporary understandings that gender and sex are distinct.
“[Those are] areas where trans people are sort of most likely to either feel lost themselves or be interrogated by their community. … And so they’re sort of these urgent halachic needs,” said De Cordova, who was privately ordained by a rabbi from the Renewal Judaism movement. “And 99.9% of the literature about them so far has been written by cis people, about us.”
De Cordova concluded that trans women are obligated in niddah, the ritual purity laws. In her teshuva, she provides several approaches to emulate the complicated counting cycle that tallies the days a woman is considered ritually impure following menstruation. She suggests using a seven- and 11-day cycle originally proposed by Maimonides, the 12th-century scholar and philosopher. De Cordova also suggests that the imposition of a cycle not based in biology means ancient and medieval rabbis had some understanding of womanhood as a social construct.
“There’s many cases in which the rabbis sort of choose to orient niddah around their understanding of women, which I would call the social construction of womanhood by rabbis, rather than observable physical phenomenon or actual women’s experience,” she said.
For De Cordova, the experience of writing about niddah provided her with new insights about some of the oldest Jewish legal texts on the subject.
“They’re flexible enough and sort of responsive enough that I can really find a lot of freedom and space in working with them,” she said of the ancient sources. “And that was just a really sort of wonderful and freeing transition to go through.”
Last year, the Conservative Movement approved new language for calling up a nonbinary person to various Torah honors. The rabbis behind the opinion consulted with groups serving LGBTQ Jews and synagogues centered on them, but acknowledged that they were imperfect authors.
“When my coauthors and I published the teshuva, we wrote in it that we are all cisgender rabbis and that we hope that, increasingly, halachic work dealing with nonbinary and trans and queer Jewish life and identity and practice will… come from queer rabbis and scholars themselves,” said Guy Austrian, the rabbi of the Fort Tryon Jewish Center, a synagogue in upper Manhattan. “And I think the publication of the first batch of teshuvot from the Trans Halakha Project shows that that process is underway, and I think that that can only be a good thing for the Jewish world.”
Scholars at Svara, the queer yeshiva based in Chicago, have served the Jewish LGBTQ community for two decades and are now creating the first written set of Jewish law by and for trans Jews. (Jess Benjamin)
Adding to the question-and-answer tradition of Jewish legal opinions means trans Jews will now have new texts to guide their religious practice, Silverstein said. Trans Jews, the writers of the opinions acknowledge, already have their own ways of performing Jewish ritual that accords with their lived experience. But they say that when it comes to Jewish law, informal custom without a sourced legal opinion is not enough.
“I want cis[gender] clergy to realize that there are resources written by and for trans people that they can turn to when they’re trying to help a member of their congregation,” De Cordova said.
The authors of the legal opinions applied to be part of the collective and come from a religiously pluralistic group, ranging in affiliation from Orthodox to Conservative to Jewish Renewal. They have varying expectations for how far-reaching the impact of the new legal opinions will be.
Mike Moskowitz, an Orthodox rabbi and the scholar-in-residence for trans and queer Jewish studies at Congregation Beit Simchat Torah, which serves the LGBTQ community, said the teshuvot could provide a model for observant Jews who are also trans.
“I think it’s significant in modeling what an informed conversation can look like, which hasn’t really happened in Orthodox publications,” said Moskowitz, who was not part of the collective that composed the teshuvot on trans Jews’ practice. “I hope this models what can be done in other movements. What’s been tricky is that every movement has a different understanding of what halacha means.”
Even within Orthodoxy, conflicting opinions already exist, in a reflection of how halacha has always operated. For example, Talia Avrahami, a transgender Orthodox woman, follows the opinion of the late Rabbi Eliezer Waldenberg, known as the Tzitz Eliezer, who ruled that a trans woman who undergoes gender affirmation surgery is a woman according to Jewish law. But Avrahami was told she could not sit in the women’s section of her synagogue, because the rabbi who the synagogue follows does not accept Waldenberg’s opinion. Months earlier, Avrahami had also been asked to leave her teaching job at an Orthodox day school after students and parents learned that she was transgender.
Avrahami declined to comment on the new teshuvot, citing restrictions set by her current employer.
Silverstein says some Conservative rabbis have expressed interest in using the opinions to guide practice in their own congregations. But he is less sure if they will be adopted in the Orthodox community, which is the target audience for most traditional literature on Jewish law.
“When it comes to the Orthodox community, I’m not sure I am bold enough to dream that these teshuvot specifically are going to be adopted,” Silverstein said. “I’m not even sure I know what that means. But it is my hope that they will permeate throughout the Jewish community, at least through the Modern Orthodox community.”
The scope of the opinions written by the collective extends beyond the trans community. The first batch of answers, for example, includes an opinion about how to increase physical accessibility to a mikvah, ritual baths used to fulfill some requirements of Jewish law.
“Judaism thrives and Torah thrives when people are bringing their life experiences to the text and asking their questions of the text,” Silverstein said. “That’s how new Torah is uncovered in the world. And that’s how Judaism and Torah has stayed alive through so much of Jewish history.”
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Jonah Hill’s cancel culture dramedy makes an antisemitism exception — all about Kanye
Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, is having an interesting April.
Fans are hailing his new album Bully as a return to form. (Critics are more mixed.) He reportedly made $33 million from two sold-out shows in Los Angeles, but he was also banned from entering the U.K. owing to a pressure campaign by Jewish groups over a scheduled headlining performance at the Wired music festival, even as the artist, who recently attributed his antisemitic behavior to a brain injury and bipolar disorder, offered to have “meet and listen” sessions with the Jewish community.
On top of this mixed reception, add a movie premiere. Ye has a memorable cameo in Jonah Hill’s new AppleTV+ film The Outcome, about an A-list actor’s teshuvah tour. And that moment has something to say about what to do with the artist’s outbursts.
Hill’s character, a crass crisis lawyer named Ira, assembles a dream team to protect his client, Reef Hawk (Keanu Reeves), who is awaiting the release of an incriminating video. The nature of this video is unknown beyond its potential to derail his comeback after a five-year sabbatical to treat a secret heroin addiction. Among Reef’s potential defenders are a Gloria Allred-style lawyer (Laverne Cox), a Black minister legendary for his work on civil rights (Roy Wood Jr.) and an ambassador from the Asian-American community (Atsuko Okatsuka). Ira notes someone missing from the mix, one “Moshe, from the Antisemitism Committee,” perhaps a poorly-named stand-in for the ADL.
“We ran the numbers,” Ira’s assistant says by way of explanation. “It turns out that hating Jews doesn’t negatively affect a person’s career. In fact, it could help.”
And we cut to a black-and-white headshot of Ye, occupying the whole screen.
Hill explained this choice in an interview with TMZ, saying the scene wasn’t just there to score a cheap shot at Ye, who publicly (and compellingly) apologized in an ad in the Wall Street Journal in January.
“In the midst of all this Jew stuff, he did Instagram a picture of me in the 21 Jump Street poster,” Hill recalled. “And he said something along the lines of ‘I don’t hate Jews anymore because I love Jonah Hill.’”
“Me and him got no beef,” Hill continued.” I just put that in there like, ‘Yo, you’re gonna f—ing put the 21 Jump Street poster up there and say you don’t hate Jews anymore. That’s pretty wild. I’m gonna put a picture of you saying that like, hating Jews helps your career.’”
Clearly a sight gag and a bit of an inside joke. But is it true?
Running my own numbers, and not even accounting for this last week of ups and downs, Ye took a major hit to his net worth when he lost his Adidas partnership, backsliding all the way from billionaire to mere multimillionaire. Fans still turn up for Ye, and some even seem to like what I’ll call his Hitler catalogue. That said, it’s hard to imagine him making a full recovery, once again gracing the stage at the Grammys or headlining a major festival or getting a shot at the Super Bowl halftime show.
The difference between Ye’s transgression and that of others is instructive. There’s plenty of arguable antisemitism in the case of celebrities whose pro-Palestinian advocacy has crossed the line into something unsavory. Rappers Bob Vylan of “death, death to the IDF” fame and Kneecap, who chanted “up Hamas, up Hezbollah,” come to mind. They have had their own brushes with cancellation and been denied visas because of their antics — but also strong support from those who believe they are simply speaking up for Palestinians. The ascendancy of Israel conspiracies, echoing age old canards, has recently produced an odd coalition between pundits on the far-left and far-right, and hasn’t put a dent in their audience.
(Hill, though Jewish, was accused of dabbling in Jewish stereotypes his last film, You People, and he will likely get some flack for this movie, both for his character — a kind of grubby fixer who calls his client “Bubbie” — and for a joke where Man’s Search for Meaning is referred to as “the most lit Holocaust book.”)
Even in this environment, Ye is toxic for mainstream consumption, because when he went “death con 3” on the Jews, his words had no agenda beyond delusion-fueled animus about Jewish control of the media. Ye’s awareness of the Middle East was best expressed on the occasion he used a fish tank net and Yoo-hoo bottle to represent the Israeli prime minister. Vylan and Kneecap’s slogans are more subtle and plausibly deniable than one of Ye’s latest tracks, literally called “Heil Hitler.”
There was no hedging it, try as Candace Owens might. It was Jew Hate Classic, the original recipe. And it wasn’t, in the case of Mel Gibson, a pattern that emerged over relatively wide gaps of time with only one incident widely known to the general public. It was an endless, often marathon torrent of invective and odd tangents care of an unmedicated bipolar insomniac. It went on for months. Then died off. Then came back swinging in the form of an album the concept of which could, charitably, be defined as spiritually Hitlerian.
The sheer concentration of vitriol seems like proof that the outburst was the result of a manic episode, which could afford the rapper some grace. Instead, he now lives in a liminal space between relevance and punchline. This strain of antisemitism doesn’t boost careers — yet — but the man behind it can sell out stadiums in spite of it.
All the while, the question of what to do with Ye’s mental health, and how it factors into his cancellation makes him a conundrum, even if it should by rights be a better excuse than Mel Gibson’s squad car in vino veritas. (Gibson is mentioned in the film, in the context of a poppers-related Weekend at Bernie’s scenario, not his own scandal.) Before we render a judgment, we need commitments he won’t repeat his tirades and so continue to influence looksmaxxers, incels and their overlapping Venn Diagram of Nazi revivalists.
Hill’s belief that Ye’s antisemitic streak was good for business is symptomatic of something fundamentally off with the director’s treatment of cancel culture. It feels out-of-touch even — or maybe because — it draws from experience. Hill himself was the victim of cancellation some years ago, when his ex leaked texts in which he weaponized “therapy talk.” Hill’s project, with a cast that includes Reeves, Van Jones, Martin Scorsese, Drew Barrymore and a rare appearance from Cameron Diaz, is itself proof of how not all cancellations are created equal or indefinite.
The Outcome is in tension with itself, part Hill’s version of Don Henley’s “Dirty Laundry” and Seth Rogen’s The Studio, part earnest penance that may or may not be coming from the director-writer himself.
One of the lines, delivered by Reef’s reality star mother (soap opera icon Susan Lucci), as a crew films their rapprochement for Bravo, sums the film up nicely: “Just because it’s performative doesn’t mean it’s not the truth.” We’ll have to take her word for it.
When it comes to Ye, there is some truth that antisemitism alone can’t crater a career — with the exception of lesser talents, it never could. We need not wonder how it has affected Ye’s popularity with Hill, who cited him on TMZ as “probably the greatest artist whoever lived.”
As Ira departs the film, we see his bumper sticker: “Honk if you can separate the art from the artist.” Hill would blow out the horn, and hopes you might too.
Jonah Hill’s The Outcome debits April 10 on AppleTV+.
The post Jonah Hill’s cancel culture dramedy makes an antisemitism exception — all about Kanye appeared first on The Forward.
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Dollar Struggles to Rebound as Fragile US-Iran Ceasefire Keeps Markets Wary
U.S. $100 bills. Photo: Wikimedia Commons.
A fragile calm reigned across currency markets on Thursday as traders kept their eyes fixed on whether the ceasefire between the US and Iran would hold, a day after its announcement sent the dollar tumbling across the board.
The deal appeared to be on thin ice, as Israel bombed more targets in Lebanon, and there was no sign Iran had lifted its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, which has caused the worst disruption to global energy supplies in history.
Iranian negotiators were expected to set off later on Thursday for Pakistan for the first peace talks of the war, but Tehran said there would be no deal as long as Israel was striking Lebanon.
President Donald Trump said all US ships, aircraft, and military personnel would stay in place in and around Iran until it fully complied with a deal.
The uncertainty left currency markets on edge.
The euro was up 0.17 percent at $1.1683. It had gained 0.6 percent on Wednesday, but retreated late in the day having touched a one-month high of $1.1721 earlier in the session.
Sterling similarly was 0.21 percent higher at $1.342, after gaining 0.77 percent on Wednesday, but retreating from as high as $1.348.
Meanwhile, the Japanese yen lost some ground, with the dollar up 0.3 percent at 159.055 yen, having briefly dropped below 158 on Wednesday.
With the Strait of Hormuz closed, “the entire ceasefire remains tenuous,” said Derek Halpenny, head of research global markets EMEA at MUFG. But, he added, “while the US dollar has rebounded, the moves in general have been modest.”
He said the fact that further talks scheduled in Pakistan were still going ahead was keeping any retracement of Wednesday’s moves in check.
Elsewhere, new personal spending data released on Thursday showed that US inflation increased as expected in February and likely rose further in March amid the war with Iran, a trend that is expected to discourage the Federal Reserve from cutting interest rates for a while.
The personal consumption expenditures price index climbed 0.4% after an unrevised 0.3 gain in January, the Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis said on Thursday.
Japan’s consumer confidence worsened in March for the first time in three months, a government survey showed on Thursday, adding to a recent string of data pointing to the potential economic hit from the Middle East war, which would complicate the Bank of Japan’s rate-hike decision. The yen showed little reaction to the data.
Speaking in parliament, BOJ Governor Kazuo Ueda said real interest rates were clearly negative and were keeping the country’s financial conditions accommodative.
Other currencies were also broadly steady. The Australian dollar was 0.15 percent higher at $0.7054, while the New Zealand dollar was 0.46 percent higher at $0.585. In cryptocurrencies, bitcoin was last down 0.97 percent at $70,680.
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Opposition Leader Lapid Calls the Ceasefire with Iran a ‘Political Disaster’
FILE PHOTO: Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid delivers a statement at the Knesset, Israel’s parliament,, in Jerusalem, February 13, 2023. REUTERS/Amir Cohen/File Photo
i24 News – Israeli opposition leader Yair Lapid on Wednesday launched a sharp attack on the ceasefire agreement reached between the United States and Iran, calling it a “political disaster” and directly blaming Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
In a post on X, Lapid said the agreement sidelined Israel from critical decisions affecting its national security. “Never in our entire history have we experienced such a diplomatic disaster,” he wrote, adding that “Israel wasn’t even at the table when decisions were made regarding the core of our security.”
Lapid accused Netanyahu of failing to translate military achievements into strategic gains, despite praising the performance of the Israeli military and the resilience of the public during the conflict. “The army has accomplished everything that was asked of it, and the citizens have shown remarkable strength,” he said.
However, he argued that those efforts were not matched by political leadership. “Netanyahu has failed politically, failed strategically, and has not achieved any of the goals he set for himself,” Lapid added.
The opposition leader also warned of long-term consequences stemming from the agreement, saying the fallout could take years to repair. He criticized the government’s handling of the crisis, citing what he described as “arrogance, negligence, and a lack of strategic vision.”