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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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University of Nebraska Considers BDS Resolution Pushed by Anti-Israel Group
Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) participating in a “Liberated Zone” encampment at University of Nebraska, Lincoln in November 2025. Photo: Screenshot
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) student government was scheduled to vote Wednesday on a resolution calling on the institution to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement, which seeks to isolate Israel from the international community as a step toward its eventual elimination.
According to The Daily Nebraskan, the UNL Association of Students (ASUN) introduced the measure at the request of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a group which analysts have cited as being an outsized factor in the campus antisemitism crisis which followed the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
The resolution, “Senate Bill 14,” aims to undermine Israeli national security by demanding divestment from armaments manufacturers, describing the measure as an effort to block “weapons complicit in the genocide and atrocities worldwide.”
Leaders of the BDS movement have repeatedly stated their goal is to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
UNL’s SJP chapter has praised Hamas terrorists as “our martyrs,” promoted atrocity propaganda which misrepresented Israel’s conduct in the war against Hamas, accused Israel of targeting “Palestinian Christians,” and distributed falsehoods denying Jewish indigeneity to the land of Israel. Since the Oct. 7 attack, the group has denounced UNL’s alleged ties to Israel, which includes a partnership in agricultural research, as investments in “death” even as it accuses the institution of Islamophobia.
The UNL student government’s agreeing to introduce the BDS resolution marks a major achievement for SJP, as the body has previously blocked the group’s attempts to promote its agenda through the campus legislative process. The decision to put it up for a vote is being widely criticized by political candidates, as well as lawmakers and officials in the federal government participating in a concerted effort to combat campus antisemitism.
“Antisemitism has NO place on college campuses,” Leo Terrell, chairman of the US Department of Justice’s Task Force to Combat Antisemitism, wrote on the X social media platform. “I’m calling on the Association of Students…to VOTE NO on the antisemitic BDS resolution pushed by SJP, a group that has celebrated attacks by terrorist organizations and is now targeting AMERICAN companies through its BDS campaign. The university, including UNL President Jeffrey P. Gold, must publicly reject this hateful agenda.”
US Sen. Pete Ricketts (R-NE) lambasted the school’s decision even to consider the resolution.
“The BDS movement and Students for Justice in Palestine are fueling antisemitism on college campuses,” he said in a statement shared with The Algemeiner. “Endorsing this movement would make UNL less safe for Jewish students. We will not normalize antisemitism in Nebraska. I encourage UNL students to stand up for our Jewish neighbors and reject antisemitism.”
Nebraska Gov. Jim Pillen, a Republican, joined the chorus of voices calling for the resolution’s defeat, saying on X that he joined Terrell in “condemning this move by the radical Students for Justice in Palestine to pass a resolution to boycott and divest from Israel, our closest ally.”
As The Algemeiner has previously reported, the national SJP group, which has been linked to Islamist terrorist organizations, has publicly discussed its strategy of using the anti-Zionist student movement as a weapon for destroying the US.
“Divestment [from Israel] is not an incrementalist goal. True divestment necessitates nothing short of the total collapse of the university structure and American empire itself,” the organization said in September 2024. “It is not possible for imperial spoils to remain so heavily concentrated in the metropole and its high-cultural repositories without the continuous suppression of populations that resist the empire’s expansion; to divest from this is to undermine and eradicate America as we know it.”
The tweet was the latest in a series of revelations of SJP’s revolutionary goals and its apparent plans to amass armies of students and young people for a long campaign of subversion against US institutions, including the economy, military, and higher education. Like past anti-American movements, SJP has also been fixated on the presence and prominence of Jews in American life and the US’s alliance with Israel, the world’s only Jewish state.
On the same day the tweet was posted, Columbia University’s most strident pro-Hamas organization was reported to be distributing literature calling on students to join the Palestinian terrorist group’s movement to destroy Israel during the school’s convocation ceremony.
“This booklet is part of a coordinated and intentional effort to uphold the principles of the thawabit and the Palestinian resistance movement overall by transmitting the words of the resistance directly,” said a pamphlet distributed by Columbia University Apartheid Divest (CUAD), an SJP spinoff, to incoming freshmen. “This material aims to build popular support for the Palestinian war of national liberation, a war which is waged through armed struggle.”
Other sections of the pamphlet were explicitly Islamist, invoking the name of “Allah, the most gracious” and referring to Hamas as the “Islamic Resistance Movement.” Proclaiming, “Glory to Gaza that gave hope to the oppressed, that humiliated the ‘invincible’ Zionist army,” it said its purpose is to build an army of Muslims worldwide.
In October, SJP called for executing Muslim “collaborators” working with Israel in retaliation for the death of Palestinian influencer Saleh Al-Jafarawi during a brewing conflict between the Hamas terrorist group and a rival clan, Doghmush.
“In the face of hundreds of thousands of martyred Palestinians these past two years alone, collaborators and informants maintain their spineless disposition as objects of Zionist influence against their own people,” the group said in a statement posted on social media, continuing on to volley a series of unfounded charges alleging that anti-Hamas forces are “exploiting Gaza’s youth for money” and pilfering “desperately needed aid to the killing of their own people in service of Zionism.”
SJP concluded, “Death to the occupation. Death to Zionism. Death to all collaborators.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Orthodox Jewish Man Attacked in Switzerland as Surge in Antisemitism Prompts Authorities to Boost Security
A pro-Hamas demonstration in Zurich, Switzerland, Oct. 28, 2023. Photo: IMAGO/dieBildmanufaktur via Reuters Connect
An Orthodox Jewish man was physically assaulted in Zurich on Monday in the latest outrage of a surging wave of antisemitic incidents across Switzerland, sparking outcry within the Jewish community as authorities moved to bolster protections for Jews and Israelis nationwide.
According to local media, a 26-year-old Jewish man was brutally attacked late Monday night in northern Switzerland by an unknown individual, sustaining light injuries, including scratches and abrasions to his neck and other parts of his body.
Zurich police reported that the attack occurred without any provocation while the victim was standing in the street, with the assailant repeatedly punching him and shouting antisemitic slurs.
“The attack was not random, but specifically targeted at a Jewish individual,” local authorities said in a statement.
Before police arrived, bystanders intervened to help the victim, restraining the suspect, who continued hurling antisemitic slurs even after officers reached the scene.
The assailant, a 40-year-old Kosovo resident with no fixed address in Switzerland and a prior record for unrelated offenses, was arrested at the scene and transferred to the Zurich public prosecutor’s office following an initial police interrogation.
The Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities (SIG) strongly condemned the attack, urging authorities to step up protections for Jewish communities amid a surge of relentless antisemitism in the country.
“This incident is part of a series of antisemitic attacks that have increased sharply in Switzerland since October 2023,” SIG wrote in a post on X, referring to the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
“Jewish people have become targets of insults and physical violence simply because of their appearance and their Jewish identity,” the statement read.
The Foundation Against Racism and Antisemitism (GRA) also denounced the incident, warning of the alarming rise of hatred and the increasing normalization of antisemitism in society.
“Antisemitic narratives are becoming increasingly commonplace in some sections of society,” GRA wrote in a statement. “They are relativized and trivialized in political debates, on social media, and in everyday life.”
The European Jewish Congress (EJC) joined the local Jewish community in condemning the attack, emphasizing the urgent need to combat antisemitism and protect Jewish communities across the continent.
“No one should be attacked, insulted, or made to feel unsafe simply because of their Jewish identity,” EJC said in a post on X.
We are deeply concerned by the antisemitic assault against a young Orthodox Jew in Zurich.
No one should be attacked, insulted or made to feel unsafe simply because of their Jewish identity.
As the Swiss Federation of Jewish Communities – @SIGFSCI rightly stated, this incident… pic.twitter.com/ONAtOYbwLO
— European Jewish Congress (@eurojewcong) February 4, 2026
Like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, Switzerland has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of the Oct. 7 atrocities.
According to EJC, 23 antisemitic incidents have recently been reported in Zurich schools, ranging from antisemitic remarks in public spaces and far-right symbols like swastikas carved into desks to direct provocations, threats, and assaults on students.
In 2024, Switzerland recorded 221 “real-world,” or non-online, antisemitic incidents, including an attempted arson attack at a Zurich synagogue and a stabbing in which a 15-year-old Swiss teenager seriously injured an Orthodox Jew, claiming the attack on behalf of the Islamic State.
As part of a broader initiative to strengthen security for Jewish institutions, Zurich’s city parliament last month decided to double funding for the protection of synagogues and other Jewish sites, increasing it from $1.3 million to $2.6 million.
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When Society’s Good Intentions for Jews Replace Equal Citizenship
An empty classroom. Photo: Wiki Commons.
A secular Manhattan school responded to October 7 by holding a Shabbat gathering. The head of school spoke with moral seriousness. Jewish families felt seen. Non-Jewish families showed up in solidarity. By any reasonable measure, this is a success story.
And that is precisely what makes it worth examining.
A Jerusalem Post report describes Town School’s response as sincere, generous, and embraced by the entire community. It is all of those things. But it also reflects a logic that deserves scrutiny — not because the intent is bad, but because the structure is fragile. What Town School offers is care. What it cannot offer is civic security. The difference matters more than most people realize.
The question is not whether warmth is preferable to hostility. It is whether a framework built on institutional affirmation can ever produce durable belonging — or whether it quietly substitutes recognition for citizenship, comfort for equality, and goodwill for rights.
The American alternative has a founding text. In 1790, George Washington wrote to the Hebrew Congregation in Newport that the new republic “gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance.” As I have written elsewhere, this was not ceremony. It was a covenant.
Belonging depended on conduct, not creed. Citizenship was the baseline. Recognition was irrelevant.
Call this the Washington model: belonging is presumed, not conferred. The government does not identify groups, affirm them, or protect them through recognition. It simply refuses to make identity the basis of civic standing.
The affirmation model works differently. Jewish belonging is validated by institutions. Jewish life is welcomed through programming. Jewish safety flows from administrative judgment. This is the logic of diversity, equity, and inclusion.
It feels compassionate. It is also a departure from the civic architecture that made America uniquely stable for Jews.
American Jews did not flourish because institutions learned to include them. They flourished because the regime limited the authority of institutions to decide who belonged at all. Jews attended public schools, served in the military, and entered professions — not because administrators welcomed them, but because the law made no provision for excluding them. That is pluralism as structure, not performance.
DEI — diversity, equity, and inclusion — inverts this. It treats belonging as something institutions must actively produce. Once belonging is conferred, it becomes conditional and, therefore, unstable.
None of this denies that schools should protect Jewish students in moments of fear, address antisemitism, enforce rules, and help manage difference. Care matters. Moral clarity matters. But short-term care does not require long-term structural dependency. The question is whether the framework makes Jewish belonging more secure over time or more fragile.
Critics of DEI often focus on excesses — ideological trainings, bureaucratic bloat, activist capture. They miss the point. The problem is not tone. It is structure. DEI replaces equal citizenship with managed identity. It reduces civic standing to recognition, safety to visibility, equality to representation. It grants institutions precisely the authority that liberal pluralism once denied them.
For Jews, this is perilous. Judaism is not simply cultural identity. It is a peoplehood and faith defined by continuity, obligation, and collective memory. America worked for Jews because the regime did not require Judaism to be translated into something thinner in order to belong.
DEI struggles with this. Jewish identity gets reframed as culture — ritual without peoplehood, heritage without permanence, symbolism without sovereignty. That version of Jewishness is easy to affirm because it makes no claims. But that ease is the warning sign.
This is not only imposed from outside. Jews have often been among the architects of DEI frameworks, usually with the best intentions. The same communal instinct that built hospitals, schools, and social agencies now sometimes builds systems that make Jewish belonging contingent rather than secure. Good faith does not neutralize structural risk.
Jews are not uniquely burdened by DEI, but they are diagnostically revealing. Any system that cannot accommodate a people simultaneously religious, ethnic, historical, and transnational will fracture under pressure from other complex identities. Jews expose the structural weakness. They are not the cause of it.
Feeling welcomed and being secure are not the same thing. Inclusion produces comfort. Citizenship produces stability. Belonging grounded in recognition depends on continued moral approval. Belonging grounded in citizenship does not. The former fluctuates with ideology; the latter endures through disagreement.
The educators at Town School appear to be acting in good faith. But no minority should rely on the personal virtue of administrators for its security. Sincerity is not a system. Good intentions do not correct for flawed design.
If Jewish security comes to depend on institutional affirmation rather than civic equality, Jews will be less secure, not more. And if this model becomes dominant, it will erode pluralism for everyone. No minority should want its standing to depend on recognition. No society should delegate belonging to administrators. No liberal order survives when citizenship is replaced by curation.
Institutions turn to DEI not out of malice but out of lost confidence. When leaders no longer trust law, equality, and restraint to hold, they substitute recognition for rights and symbolism for structure. DEI fills the vacuum left by civic uncertainty. It cannot repair it.
The American experiment succeeded not by perfecting inclusion but by constraining power. It did not ask institutions to decide who belonged. It presumed belonging and limited the authority of those who might question it.
As the United States approaches its 250th anniversary, Jews should be clear-eyed about this distinction. A pluralistic society is strongest when belonging is presumed rather than curated, and when citizenship is treated as a baseline rather than a reward.
Warmth matters. Goodwill matters. But they are not substitutes for equality under a civic order that does not ask groups to justify their place.
Jewish history is clear on this point. Societies where Jews are welcomed at the discretion of elites are less stable than those where Jewish belonging is assumed as principle. The former depends on mood and politics. The latter endures through disagreement.
Washington’s letter to Newport promised something no amount of programming can replicate: a republic that gives to bigotry no sanction because it refuses to make belonging a matter of official judgment at all. That is an inheritance worth defending. The distinction between the affirmation model and the Washington model is not only a Jewish concern. It is central to the durability of pluralism.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.