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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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Despite Rule Changes, Israel Proved the Haters Wrong at Eurovision
Noam Bettan, representing Israel, performs “Michelle” during the Grand Final of the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest in Vienna, Austria, May 16, 2026. REUTERS/Lisa Leutner
The crowd in Austria booed when it was announced that Israel was in the lead, with only several countries remaining to receive audience votes, in this year’s Eurovision competition.
Noam Bettan’s song “Michelle” — in Hebrew, French, and English — was without a doubt the best song in the competition. But The New York Times had written a disgusting hit piece about how Israel spends a lot of money on its Eurovision entry, while not mentioning anything about the efforts and spending of other countries in the competition. Spain, Slovenia, Iceland, Ireland, and the Netherlands boycotted the competition.
It also made Jew-haters nervous that traditionally, the country that wins hosts Eurovision the next year — meaning that if Israel won, the competition could have come to Jerusalem or Tel Aviv.
Ultimately, Bulgaria was the surprise winner with the nonsense song “Bangaranga!” performed in English by Dara. It’s fun in a campy way, but seems more like a sketch song from a comedy show than a song that should win Eurovision.
Bettan’s “Michelle” showed off his powerful voice, and the song got bigger and better as it went on.
I thought that Finland had the second best song after Israel, with “Liekinheitin” performed by Pete Parkkonen with Linda Lampenius on violin. The country finished sixth. Australia’s Delta Goodrem impressed with “Eclipse,” in what was the third best song of the competition, though the country was awarded fourth place.
Countries in the grand finale were awarded a jury vote (by a panel of professionals) and the televote-countries got 12 votes if they were the top vote getter from another country, with other points if they were in a country’s top 10.
Those voting on their phone or online could not vote for someone from their own country. The rules changed from last year so that each person could vote 10 times, as opposed to last year’s 20. Some critics of Israel online hoped this rule change might limit Israel’s ability to have a strong finish. There was also a “Rest of The World Vote” factored in.
Israel was in the lead with a total of 343 points, 220 from the public and 123 from the jury. With Bulgaria getting 204 jury points, the announcer noted that Bulgaria would need 140 points from the public to be the winner. It received an inexplicable 312 public votes. The jury gave France 144 points, Poland 133 points, Denmark 165 points, and Italy 134 points — which some saw as possible bias against Israel, though Australia’s 165 points and Finland’s 141 points, may have been due to the actual merit of the songs.
With rumors flying that Bulgaria can’t afford to have the Eurovision show in their country, there was speculation online asking if Israel would host it next year — but that sadly will never happen.
Even though Bettan finished second, it was a clear victory, as the song was great, and Israel thrived despite the new rule changes that were put in place because the public complained about last year’s pro-Israel results.
Will Bettan’s strong finish change anyone’s mind about Israel? One never knows exactly, but it doesn’t hurt to have a handsome amazing singer shine on the global stage.
This marks the third consecutive year that Israel has had a great song and performer, and finished in the top 5. Last year, Israel came in second with Yuval Raphael’s “New Day Will Rise.” She received 297 public votes, the most of any competitor, but only 60 jury points, the fewest of any in the top seven. In 2024, Israel finished fifth with Eden Golan’s “Hurricane.” She received 323 points from public votes, the second most in the competition, but only 50 from the jury, the lowest number of any in the top 10.
Israel finishing second for the second consecutive year once again shows a country that beats the odds and shows greatness.
The author is a writer based in New York.
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Even After a Terrorist Attack and Royal Commission, Australia Doesn’t Take Antisemitism Seriously
Demonstrators gather outside Flinders Street Station during a protest against Israeli President Isaac Herzog’s state visit to Australia, following a deadly mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach on Dec. 14, 2025, in Melbourne, Australia, Feb.12, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Tracey Nearmy
This is not only an Australian story. Jewish communities across the diaspora are living through the same reality. People have been murdered. Jews have been attacked in the streets. Jewish institutions have been threatened and forced to operate under continuously heightened security. Students have been targeted on campus. Families have been made to think twice before being visibly Jewish in public.
The details differ, but the pattern is painfully familiar. Australia is part of a broader failure across the world to confront antisemitism with the seriousness it demands.
For more than two years, Jewish Australians have been told that antisemitism has no place here. We have heard statements of concern and promises that hatred will not be tolerated. But it is being tolerated.
This is no longer theoretical. Jewish children are continuing to hide who they are. Students continue to be intimidated. Synagogues, schools, and community institutions are operating under continuously heightened security. Families are asking whether Australia is still a place where Jews can live openly and safely.
Antisemitism has moved into ordinary life. It appears on campuses, in workplaces, online, in public spaces, and in the constant expectation that Jews explain themselves, apologize for themselves or remain silent.
Australia’s Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion was established to examine the rise of antisemitism and its impact on Jewish Australians. A Royal Commission is one of Australia’s most serious public inquiries, with the power to hear evidence and make recommendations that should shape national policy.
That is why this moment matters. Jewish Australians are asking to be heard through the very process Australia has created. They are asking to be protected, and to see existing laws, standards and institutional policies enforced. They are asking for proof that the country understands what is being exposed, including when antisemitism makes Jewish life smaller, more guarded, and less secure.
But the Royal Commission is revealing something deeply uncomfortable. Even as Jewish Australians give evidence, much of the broader community is not paying attention. Worse, the process itself has drawn more antisemitism online and in person. When Jews speak about hatred and the response is more hatred, the problem is being demonstrated in real time.
This should alarm every Australian. When Jews describe antisemitism, they are accused of inventing it. When they report intimidation, they are told they are exaggerating. When they ask for protection, they are accused of seeking special treatment. When they call out hatred disguised as politics, they are told they are trying to silence debate.
Australia now faces a clear choice. It can keep speaking about antisemitism as a regrettable social issue, or treat it as the serious threat to public safety, social cohesion, and democratic values that it has become.
Universities remain one of the clearest examples of institutional failure. Too many Jewish students have had to walk past slogans that glorify violence, sit in classes where Israel is demonized beyond any reasonable academic standard, and navigate complaint systems designed to exhaust them rather than protect them.
The same applies beyond campus. Councils, schools, workplaces, sporting bodies, cultural institutions, and public venues all have a responsibility to ensure antisemitism is not normalized under the banner of politics.
Anti-Zionism, when it denies Jewish people the same right to self-determination afforded to others, or holds Jews collectively responsible for Israel, is not legitimate criticism. Israel can be criticized. But when that criticism becomes a demand that the Jewish state alone should not exist, uses Nazi comparisons, justifies terrorism, or treats every Jew as a proxy for Israel, it crosses a line too often ignored.
The test is whether Australia can stop enabling antisemitism. That means policing hate speech and intimidation, online accountability, proper security support for vulnerable Jewish institutions, and consequences for institutions that fail to protect Jewish Australians.
For too long, Jewish communities across the diaspora have been asked to explain the problem while others debate whether it is real. It is real. It is not only a Jewish problem. It is a warning sign for every democratic society.
Because in Australia, as across the diaspora, the question is no longer whether antisemitism exists. Jewish communities know it does. A Royal Commission now exists because the problem has become impossible to ignore. The question is whether our leaders, institutions and society have the courage to act before even more damage is done.
Michael Gencher is Executive Director of StandWithUs Australia, an international nonpartisan education organization that supports Israel and fights antisemitism.
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Amid Conspiracy Theories, Eurovision Proves Ordinary People Are Still Willing to Treat Israel Fairly
Noam Bettan, representing Israel, performs “Michelle” during the dress rehearsal 2 of the Grand Final of the 2026 Eurovision Song Contest, in Vienna, Austria, May 15, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Lisa Leutner
For many Americans, Eurovision requires a brief explanation. It is a massive annual international music competition involving dozens of countries across Europe and nearby regions, watched by hundreds of millions of people. And because much of the Arab world boycotted Israel culturally and politically after 1948 — excluding it from most regional sporting and cultural frameworks — Israel was integrated into European competitions instead.
Much like the situation where Israeli soccer teams must qualify for the World Cup through Europe rather than through the Middle East, Israel competes in Eurovision through the European broadcasting system.
For years now, Eurovision has followed the same ritualized choreography when it comes to Israel.
There are protests outside the arena. Activists demand Israel’s exclusion. Broadcasters openly question whether Israel should even participate. Some performers posture about morality and “complicity.” Social media floods with denunciations. Major media outlets, like The New York Times, publish innuendo-filled pieces implying Israel is somehow manipulating the contest through “soft power,” aggressive promotion, or shadowy mobilization campaigns.
And then the public votes for Israel at — or near — the top anyway.
The pressure campaign against Israel exploded after October 7, 2023, but the politicization predates October 7 by years.
Israel historically performed extremely well at Eurovision, winning in 1978, 1979, 1998, and again in 2018 with Netta Barzilai’s “Toy.” For decades, Israel was treated largely as a normal — if occasionally controversial — participant.
That changed during the 2010s, alongside the rise of intersectional activist politics, the normalization of BDS rhetoric in cultural spaces, and the growing effort to frame Israel as not merely controversial, but as uniquely illegitimate.
Netta’s 2018 victory was an early warning sign. The backlash quickly escalated from criticism of the song itself to claims that Israel should not host Eurovision (as all winners do) because the contest was supposedly “laundering apartheid.”
After October 7, the situation became impossible to ignore.
Israel increasingly received weak jury scores while performing dramatically better with the public vote. Ordinary viewers and elite opinion were diverging sharply.
That pattern repeated this year with Israel’s multilingual ballad “Michelle,” performed by Noam Bettan.
Last year, Israel’s “New Day Will Rise,” performed by Yuval Raphael — herself a survivor of the Nova massacre — triggered a frenzy of insinuations about “manipulated” voting after she finished second despite ranking only 15th with the professional juries.
This year, “Michelle” briefly surged into the overall lead during the public vote reveal but ultimately finished second as Bulgaria secured the win with far stronger professional jury support.
And once again, the reaction was not: “perhaps the public genuinely liked the song.”
Instead, Israel’s success is cast as both suspect and suspicious.
Apparently, Israel promoting its Eurovision entry is now evidence of sinister “soft power” — despite Eurovision itself being essentially one giant soft-power competition.
Countries spend heavily promoting themselves through Eurovision. The contest has always been part music competition, part tourism campaign, part national branding exercise, and part geopolitical theater in sequins.
Host countries market tourism and national identity through the contest. Governments support contestants. National broadcasters campaign aggressively. Diaspora and regional voting blocs have existed for decades and are openly joked about every year.
None of this becomes scandalous unless Israel succeeds.
Because increasingly, Israel is not treated as a normal country participating in international cultural life, but as a uniquely illegitimate presence whose success must always be explained away as manipulation, coercion, propaganda, or hidden influence — an impulse that mirrors classic antisemitic patterns.
In fact, many journalists now deploy this double standard so reflexively they no longer even recognize it.
But the deeper issue here is not really the Eurovision itself. It is the widening divide between institutional opinion and public sentiment.
The Eurovision voting system makes this unusually visible. Countries award separate “professional jury” votes and public televotes. Under Eurovision rules, countries cannot televote for themselves. Meanwhile, countries like Britain, France, Ukraine, Poland, and Romania possess diaspora populations vastly larger than the global Jewish population.
Yet when Israel performs strongly with the public vote, conspiracy theories immediately emerge.
The global Jewish population is roughly 15 million people — about half living in Israel, with much of the diaspora concentrated in the United States, where Eurovision remains relatively niche in mainstream culture. The notion that diaspora Jews are secretly overpowering Europe’s vastly larger voting populations through coordinated televoting campaigns collapses under minimal scrutiny.
The problem for many activists is not Israel’s Eurovision strategy. It is that the public itself keeps refusing to behave correctly.
The public keeps voting for the Israelis anyway — likely because Israeli entries are often among the competition’s strongest. And because many ordinary viewers probably recoil from the increasingly hysterical effort to turn Israeli artists into untouchables.
That effort has increasingly backfired.
Several left-wing European broadcasters and political actors spent years trying to pressure Eurovision organizers to ban Israel entirely. When that failed, some shifted toward symbolic boycotts and public distancing campaigns.
Yet despite the protests, the media pressure, the activist intimidation, and despite professional juries that increasingly appear politically or socially pressured not to reward Israel too generously, Israel still finished second again this year — propelled overwhelmingly by ordinary viewers.
That is the real story.
This does not mean European publics are uniformly pro-Israel. They are not. But many appear to recognize that the obsession with Israel is wildly disproportionate and often reflects something deeper than policy disagreement: hostility toward Jewish national legitimacy itself.
That distinction mattered even more after October 7.
Because while large segments of the Western media rapidly attempted to reframe Israelis from massacre victims into primary villains almost immediately after the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust, millions of ordinary people watched what actually happened.
They saw civilians butchered in homes. Families burned alive. Young people massacred at a music festival. Women dragged into Gaza. Babies kidnapped. Holocaust survivors taken hostage.
And despite relentless efforts afterward to flatten chronology, causation, and moral categories, many people never fully accepted the demand that Israelis immediately cede to an assigned role as uniquely illegitimate global pariahs. That, for parts of Europe’s activist and media class, is the real scandal.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.