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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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UK Jewish leaders demand answers after Muslim police group paper calls Zionism a form of hatred
(JTA) — British Jewish groups say they are alarmed about revelations that a fraternal society for Muslim police officers published a policy paper that described Zionism as a form of anti-Muslim hatred and called the Israeli army a “Zionist terrorist group.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews called the paper posted by the National Association of Muslim Police “disturbing” in its presentation of Jewish identity, history and the nature of antisemitism.
“If this is being circulated among officers, it poses a direct challenge to the integrity of policing and it should be withdrawn immediately,” the group said.
NAMP has distanced itself from the report and, in a statement, rejected any allegation that the group “supports Hamas.”
The 39-page paper titled “From Past Prejudices to Present Policies: Confronting anti-Muslim hatred and Promoting Human Rights,” was written by NAMP’s then-vice president, Khaldoun Kabbani, and published in July 2025. It says “Zionism represents one of the manifestations of anti-Muslim hatred”; likens the war in Gaza to the Holocaust; and disputes facts about Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, including that Israeli children were killed.
The Spectator, a right-wing British newspaper, drew attention to the report in a piece published on Friday that said the report illuminated “the disturbing truth about the National Association of Muslim Police.” The group has a formal affiliation with 16 of 43 police departments in the U.K. and says it represents more than 20,000 officers.
Kabbani, a forensics officer, was briefly the chair of the Scottish Muslim Police Association but planned to move abroad after retiring earlier this year, according to a post by the group on LinkedIn.
The revelation of the NAMP report comes at a time of heightened tension over policing in the U.K., amid both a surge in anti-Jewish crimes and a renewed uproar over a December murder that has fueled allegations of “two-tier policing” that treats some victims differently from others. The Spectator referenced the victim, Henry Nowak, in the column about NAMP.
The NAMP report has spurred distress for many British Jews who are on edge amid a string of violent incidents targeting Jewish communities. The Campaign Against Antisemitism, a watchdog group, said its polling shows that 83% of British Jews do not think the police are doing enough to protect them — and that the report suggested their concerns were well founded.
“The people responsible for publishing this extremist screed on the official police.uk web domain are unfit to be police officers and must be immediately investigated by their respective forces’ professional standards departments and dismissed,” Steven Silverman, CAM’s director of investigations and enforcement, said in a statement.
“British Jews have long suffered two-tier policing that sees antisemitic crime go unpunished,” he said, adding that CAM would press the British government “ensure a clear message is being sent. This cannot pass with the document being quietly deleted.”
The report was removed from NAMP’s website over the weekend. The group distanced itself from the report in a statement published on Tuesday, saying that it had removed the report “immediately” after learning about its existence and emphasizing that the author was “no longer associated” with NAMP.
“We understand that the publication of this document has affected several communities, and we regret any concern, discomfort, or misunderstanding it may have caused,” the group said.
It added, “NAMP categorically does not ‘defend’ Hamas or any other proscribed organisation. We condemn all forms of terrorism and extremism.”
The document is “deeply troubling,” a spokesperson for the Jewish Leadership Council, which coordinates British Jewish groups, said in a statement.
“This document appears to falsely associate an ideology held by the majority of Jewish people as a threat to Muslims. It also engages in deeply troubling Holocaust inversion and denial of some of the worst atrocities carried out by Hamas on October 7th,” the spokesperson said. “At a time of rising antisemitism including violent attacks on British Jews, this document further threatens community cohesion and police forces should be clear in distancing themselves from it.”
The Board of Deputies of British Jews said it plans to speak with the “relevant” government and police departments to discover the paper’s provenance, how it’s being used and “how to ensure that the valued relationships of trust between British Jews and the police are not being undermined.”
The Metropolitan Police of London, the largest police department in the U.K. and a formal NAMP affiliate, declined to comment on the report. The department has recently stepped up policing in Jewish communities in an effort to stem antisemitic violence.
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Jacob Reses, Vance’s Jewish chief of staff, to leave administration
(JTA) — Jacob Reses, the Jewish chief of staff to Vice President JD Vance, is leaving the administration at the end of the summer, a source confirmed to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Thursday.
Reses, who’s been in his role since Vance and President Donald Trump took office in January 2025, is perhaps the closest Jewish official in Vance’s orbit. He has had a close relationship with the vice president since Vance’s 2022 Senate campaign in Ohio.
A source familiar with the matter confirmed NBC News’ initial report that Reses informed Vance of his decision months ago, after his wife became pregnant. Vance said in a statement on Thursday that he will “miss him dearly, but he won’t be far, and I plan to keep his counsel close until our paths cross again.” Reses’ plans for his next role are currently unknown.
Vance has recently drawn the ire of some Jewish Republicans who say that he has refused to confront antisemitism on the right, including from former Fox news host Tucker Carlson. (Carlson’s son is also a Vance staffer.) A New York Magazine profile published in March suggested that Reses was on board with Vance’s approach, and revealed that Reses used his private X account to amplify voices calling on Jews to embrace, rather than resist, the Christian nationalist current surging within the GOP.
Reses has been “by my side for my whole career in public life,” Vance said in a statement.
“I can’t imagine having been on this life-changing journey without him,” Vance said. “From day one of my time as a Senator-elect, I could not have asked for a more loyal and discerning advisor and friend as my chief of staff.”
The personal bond between the two men was on display in January, when Vance took part in Reses’ wedding to Rachel Altman at a synagogue in Rockville, Maryland, delivering a Jewish prayer under the chuppah. Chabad of Princeton University, Reses’ alma mater, posted a photo of the couple with the vice president, celebrating the occasion as an expression of Jewish pride.
https://www.instagram.com/p/DTrUKXEDOQE/?img_index=3
That closeness, and Reses’ reported alignment with Vance’s stance on right-wing antisemitism, have not spared Reses from becoming a target of antisemites. In one instance, a white-nationalist website ran an article about him headlined, “Another Nail in the Coffin — Jew Runs J. D. Vance.”
A Jewish Telegraphic Agency profile published in 2024, when Vance was selected as Trump’s running mate, traced Reses’ Jewish identity and his journey from a Democratic-leaning Jewish teenager in southern New Jersey, whose grandfather escaped the Holocaust in Lithuania, to one of the most influential conservatives in Washington. His trajectory included internships for Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, a political conversion at Princeton and stints at the Heritage Foundation and in the office of Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley.
On Thursday, Republican leaders and Trump administration officials sang Reses’ praises in statements shared with JTA.
“Jacob Reses has been an invaluable, loyal, and trusted hand to Vice President Vance and President Trump,” said Matt Brooks, CEO of the Republican Jewish Coalition. “As a proud Jewish American, whose own family story carries the weight of our people’s history, Jacob brought both conviction and clarity to one of the most consequential roles in Washington.” Brooks added that the RJC has “no doubt he will continue to play a critical role moving forward.”
Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who’s seen as a possible challenger to Vance for the 2028 presidential nomination, said that Reses served Vance and the entire administration “with distinction,” and that he “understands the moment we’re in and he spent every day fighting to deliver results for the President.”
Steve Witkoff, Trump’s special envoy to the Middle East, said he was proud to have Reses “by my side in negotiating some of the toughest deals for the President.”
“Don’t let Jacob fool you — beneath his kind exterior he’s a killer,” Witkoff said. “It’s been a delight to get to know him through the Vice President, and our foreign adventures from Israel to Pakistan have been historic.”
He added, “We haven’t seen the last of him.”
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Helen Mirren criticizes Israel at film festival after being called ‘evil Zionist’ in viral video
(JTA) — British actor Helen Mirren criticized Israel at a film festival in Italy, in her first public comments since security footage of a November incident where she was accused by a stranger of being an “evil Zionist b—h” went viral late last month.
“Evil forces are rising everywhere, even in a country like Israel,” Mirren said in an interview with journalists at the Taormina Film Fest in Sicily, according to reports in entertainment media. “How could you possibly repeat the actions of what was done to you as people to other people? Crimes against humanity, it’s called.”
The Academy Award-winning actor, who is 80, is being honored with a lifetime achievement award from the festival on Friday. Her many roles have included playing former Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir in the 2023 biopic “Golda,” which she premiered in Jerusalem.
Mirren is not Jewish but has a long history of connection to Israel, dating back to 1967, when she traveled with a Jewish boyfriend to work for a month on a kibbutz in the country’s north.
She referenced that period in her comments at Taormina.
“I saw it from the inside and I saw some things that disturbed me from the inside in Israel at that time,” she said, according to Deadline. “I’m talking about six months after the Six Day War.”
Mirren has previously criticized the Israeli government. While promoting “Golda” in early 2023, she said she believed that Meir would be “utterly horrified” by Israel’s current leadership, which she referred to as a “dictatorship.”
But she also spoke favorably about Israel during the promotional events, which shortly preceded the Hamas attack that began the war in Gaza.
“I believe in Israel, in the existence of Israel, and I believe Israel has to go forward into the future, for the rest of eternity,” she told the country’s Channel 12 in August 2023. “I believe in Israel because of the Holocaust.”
During the November incident, the person who accosted Mirren and her husband Taylor Hackford appeared to reference those comments, saying, “She said Israel should last forever because of the Holocaust, and she was very happy that Palestinians’ houses were gone.”
Hackford responded, “F–ck off,” and Mirren did not say anything in the video.
At Taormina, the actor offered a more nuanced characterization of her beliefs while also praising Israel’s creative and intellectual communities.
“I grew up in Europe post-Second World War and the realization in my parents’ generation of what had happened in the Holocaust was so profound, so important,” Mirren said. “Therefore, the creation of Israel was a very important moment, although maybe it was done in completely the wrong way, in the wrong place, I don’t know. But something had to happen after the horror.”
According to Variety, she also said, “The evil is always lurking, waiting to take over, even in a place like Israel. I played Golda Meir and worked in a country that was the idealistic Israel, and I always thought it was a country that would never do wrong, but of course they were doing wrong, even then.”
About the viral video showing her being accosted, Mirren told journalists at the festival she believes she was “attacked by mistake by a man who was maybe a little over passionate or maybe mentally not quite stable.”
She added, “I don’t know whether he read things on the Internet or thought he read something which he hadn’t read, I don’t know.”
Though London’s Metropolitan Police initially said it was possible for an incident to be investigated as an antisemitic hate crime even if the victim is not Jewish, it will not be investigating further, as Mirren and Hackford have decided not to press charges.
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