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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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Mamdani’s Oct. 7 statement draws Israeli rebuke, as anniversary bares divides among NYC mayoral candidates
In New York City, the second anniversary of Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack on Israel fell against the backdrop of a mayoral election that brought Israel and Gaza to the fore of local politics.
Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic nominee and frontrunner, attended a vigil hosted by Israelis for Peace in Union Square on the anniversary of the attack. The anti-occupation activists have rallied weekly for two years to demand a ceasefire, the release of hostages and an end to Israel’s military campaign in Gaza.
Mamdani’s pro-Palestinian advocacy and staunch criticism of Israel are central to his swift ascent in politics, and his opponents in the race have latched onto his views, accusing him of fanning antisemitism at a time when anti-Jewish attacks are on the rise.
Now, the race enters its final stretch as a tentative peace dawns on the Middle East, with President Donald Trump announcing that Israel and Hamas agreed to a hostage deal and an initial phase to end the two-year war on Wednesday night.
Mamdani attended the Tuesday vigil with Brad Lander, the city comptroller and a close Jewish ally, and held a lit candle while listening to Israeli and Palestinian speakers, as well as local rabbis. One of the speakers, Tamar Glazerman — whose aunt was killed by Hamas on Oct. 7 — decried Israel’s retaliation in Gaza, saying, “War crimes cannot justify other war crimes.” A banner behind her read, “Stop the Genocide. Save Gaza. Free All Hostages.”
These sentiments echoed a statement that Mamdani released to mark the anniversary. “Two years ago today, Hamas carried out a horrific war crime, killing more than 1,100 Israelis and kidnapping 250 more,” he said. He called for the return of the remaining hostages and said he mourned the dead.
He went on to say that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government “launched a genocidal war,” killing more than 67,000 Palestinians and reducing swaths of Gaza to rubble. He criticized the U.S. government for being “complicit” and reiterated his long-held view that “the occupation and apartheid must end.”
The statement gathered over 20 million views on X and rebukes from many, including the Israeli government, who said he was wrong to focus on Gaza on a day anchored in Israeli tragedy.
“Two years after Hamas launched its barbaric massacre against Israel and the Jewish people, Mamdani has chosen to act as a mouthpiece for Hamas propaganda — spreading Hamas’s fake genocide campaign,” the Israeli Foreign Ministry said, adding that Mamdani “normalizes antisemitism” and “stands with Jews only when they are dead.”
Mamdani also drew criticism from Jews who said he only paid lip service to their mourning. Zachary Braiterman, a professor of modern Judaism at Syracuse University who supports the Israeli movement to end the war, said Mamdani “speaks quickly past NYC Jews as we stop and mark the 2 year anniversary of 10/7.”
Other critiques came from pro-Palestinian activists who said his statement undermined their cause. Nerdeen Kiswani, founder of the group Within Our Lifetime, accused Mamdani of erasing “the decades of siege, occupation, and systematic killing that led to that day.”
The double-sided critique drew the attention of Adam Carlson, head of the polling firm Zenith Research. “The fact that everyone on both extremes is up in arms over this statement means that he absolutely nailed it,” tweeted Carlson.
Former Gov. Andrew Cuomo, Mamdani’s closest competitor, focused his own comment on the Hamas attack and did not mention Israel’s retaliation or the fate of Palestinians.
“To the Jewish people — I stand with you. I mourn with you and I will forever be by your side in the fight against evil and anti-semitism in all forms,” said Cuomo, who lost to Mamdani in the Democratic primary and relaunched his campaign as an independent.
Cuomo has centered an appeal to Jewish New Yorkers in his bid for mayor, touting his pro-Israel record as governor. He recently collected a slew of endorsements from Jewish groups and leaders, largely representing Orthodox communities, after incumbent Mayor Eric Adams dropped out and the field narrowed to Cuomo, Mamdani and Republican nominee Curtis Sliwa.
Jewish voters are divided over this election, with many younger, more progressive Jews backing Mamdani and many aligning with his views on Israel and Gaza. A recent Marist poll conducted before Adams quit found the same proportion of Jewish voters — 35% — breaking for both Cuomo and Mamdani.
Sliwa said that Oct. 7 was “a dark day” and called for the release of hostages. He also acknowledged the ensuing devastation without explicitly naming Palestinians in Gaza.
“The death and destruction that has followed in the region is deeply disheartening, and my prayers are with all families here in New York and abroad who continue to feel this pain,” he said.
The mayoral race coincides with a dramatic shift in how New Yorkers view Israel. According to a New York Times/Siena poll last month, 44% of New Yorkers said they had greater sympathy for Palestinians, compared with 26% who sympathized more with Israel. Voters also preferred Mamdani’s approach to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — once viewed as a fringe left stance in the city’s political landscape — over the other candidates’ by a wide margin.
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The post Mamdani’s Oct. 7 statement draws Israeli rebuke, as anniversary bares divides among NYC mayoral candidates appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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In Good Faith: A Jewish/Muslim Night of Comedy and Conversation
Date and time: Wed, Oct 22, 2025 / 6:30 PM – 9:30 PM EDT
Location: Youngplace, 180 Shaw Street, Toronto, ON, M6J 2W5
In a post-Oct. 7 world, news feeds are filled with videos, podcasts and reports of Jews and Muslims talking at each other, about each other—but rarely with each other. This limited series brings together Jews and Muslims, Israelis and Palestinians, from across the country and the political divide, to sit down and have difficult conversations—in good faith.
In this live podcast recording, we’re bringing comedy sets from Adrienne Fish, Nour Hadidi, Foad HP and Dan Rosen before a panel discussion with all four about what it’s like performing as Muslim and Jewish comics in 2025—including all the pitfalls they have to navigate as they speak their minds onstage.
Included: Entrance to Koffler Arts and post-event reception.
Parking: Free and paid options available, but spots are limited.
All proceeds will go to charity
Hosted by The Canadian Jewish News, in partnership with the Canadian Race Relations Foundation and the Ronald S. Roadburg Foundation.
The post In Good Faith: A Jewish/Muslim Night of Comedy and Conversation appeared first on The Canadian Jewish News.
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Cycling team Israel–Premier Tech is ditching the ‘Israel’ brand. But was it entirely their decision?
After a tumultuous season, international cycling team Israel–Premier Tech, co-owned by Canadian-Israeli billionaire Sylvan Adams, is officially going to change its name and remove the word “Israel”. The decision comes after repeated anti-Israel protests across Europe disrupted the team—whose international roster of 31 cyclists includes just three Israelis—during their open-road events, which can last hundreds of kilometres across the continent. Several cyclists crashed due to protester intervention. The decision to remove Israeli branding from Israel–Premier Tech led co-owner Adams to announce he would step away from day-to-day involvement with the team.
There’s a lot to be said about the political ramifications of wearing the Israeli name on your shirt in 2025, but our sports podcasters have a different theory about the shift. Israel–Premier Tech enjoyed a successful season that brought them back to full status with the UCI World Tour, after being relegated down to the secondary UCI ProSeries since 2023. That means the stakes are higher, the stage is bigger, and the league’s propensity for risk and disruption may well have shrunk. Is this purely a political decision, or are UCI executives trying to prevent more bad press in the coming year?
Also on the docket: the boys talk about the Toronto Blue Jays’ run to the American League championship series, big baseball moves, early NHL impressions and a quick NFL check-in.
Transcript (excerpt)
James Hirsh: We want to talk about a recent story. There’s been some news with a cycling team, Israel Premier Tech, which is owned by Canadian billionaire Sylvan Adams. And it’s not going to be Israel Premier Tech anymore.
Gabe Pulver: They’ve been called Israel Premier Tech for, I guess it’s been around five years. They’ve been an official UCI squad, you know, for the last, I think, since 2020—
James Hirsh: Which means they compete in the big cycling races like the Tour de France and Giro d’Italia, things like that.
Gabe Pulver: Exactly. They were called Israel Start-Up Nation for a number of years and Israel Cycling Academy before that. They were a part of the Vuelta a España that had to be shut down due to anti-Israel protests going on across Spain. And for a while, they took the name off the jersey and just called themselves Premier Tech for the week. That seemed to not assuage the protesters, and they’ve decided to, as a quote, “move away from its current Israeli identity”.
James Hirsh: And part of that is Sylvan Adams, we should say, who has a pretty big job right now as president of the World Jewish Congress, has said that he can’t continue to be part of the team that’s not putting Israel in the name. It seems like they acquiesced to demands, I think, based on his statement.
Gabe Pulver: So what’s interesting is that Premier Tech is a Canadian company. They’re, you know, a Quebecois tech company, and Premier Tech and its president own a chunk of it. A good chunk of the riders are Canadian and previously have been pretty supportive of the team’s Israeli identity. Another interesting part of this is that Sylvan Adams is sort of, like you said, busy with his other job, but you wonder what the future of the team holds given that, you know, sort of the face of their team and, you know, a huge part of their Canadian connection is no longer going to be day-to-day running things, you know, with their identity. Sylvan Adams is a pretty proud guy, and as their identity changes and he steps back, you wonder if he’ll continue to support the team financially as much as he has.
James Hirsh: Yeah, I think it’s very interesting to see this. This is sort of a test case for Israel’s continued involvement in certain international sports or sports that have an international component. We’ll see if that will change. Obviously, there’s been great news today about the peace deal being signed. And if anyone is getting that news on that from a Jewish sports podcast, you’ve got to tune in a little bit more.
Gabe Pulver: Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Check out, close this and go to CNN and see what’s happening with that.
James Hirsh: But look, there have been calls for Israel to be removed from FIFA. We’ve talked about that. There have been calls for Israel to be excluded from other international sporting events. There have been on-the-ground protests that we’ve covered, you know, including at lower-tier sporting events. We’ll see what will come. This certainly seems like the first step of an Israeli team removing—continuing to be owned by an Israeli, is affiliated with Israeli coaches, owned by Israeli teams, all Israeli people, all that. But no longer having Israel in the name is not just a symbolic gesture.
Gabe Pulver: No. And I have a theory. It’s not a very charitable theory, but Israel Premier Tech had sort of been relegated to semi-conditional status on the World Tour this year. They had riders at a bunch of events, but they weren’t at every single event. They weren’t full Tour members. Next year, they have regained their position back in full Tour members. And after the disaster where virtually every rider on Tour was furious about all of the protesters in the Vuelta, I think they’re choosing to decide, I think they’re choosing to say we’re not going to have this shit anymore.
Like they’re going to get rid of Israel, the name, when you’re back on the Tour. Because we didn’t like the news, we didn’t like the coverage, we didn’t like the protests. You know, you can stay involved, the Israeli money. Obviously, they’ll take the Israeli money, they’ll support the Israeli riders. However, they’re very unlikely—they just don’t want the name Israel to be running around on the Tour so more people can show up and disrupt the Tour de France, which would be an enormous disaster for the sport. Maybe there are enough Jews in France and enough harmony in the international community in France that that won’t be a problem. I doubt it. But I think it’s probably a self-preservation move by the UCI before something a little bit bigger than the Vuelta a España has to get cancelled.
James Hirsh: Yeah, that makes total sense. And if there’s one thing, I don’t know much about the cycling federations and whoever runs that, but there’s one thing I know about European technocrats who run sporting organizations is that they’re all cowards and will always do the easiest thing in the goal of self-preservation.
Gabe Pulver: Yeah, self-preservation.
James Hirsh: They are about cycling, but I believe it, no matter what.
Gabe Pulver: No, they are all there. The show must go on in any possible way.
James Hirsh: Yeah.
Gabe Pulver: You know, I think if a single rider was to ever say something political, they would literally, you know, deflate their tires, like to, you know, steal a metaphor.
James Hirsh: Yeah. So when countries like Spain decide to, you know, continue their millennia-old tradition of anti-Semitism and protesters start protesting Israeli teams and non-Israeli riders at cycling events that they don’t care about in the first place—
Gabe Pulver: Yeah.
James Hirsh: —You can bet that whoever’s in charge of that cycling event is going to cave to those protesters. Absolutely.
Show Notes
Credits
- Hosts: James Hirsh and Gabe Pulver
- Producer: Michael Fraiman
- Music: Coby Lipovitch (intro), chēēZ π (main theme, “Organ Grinder Swing“)
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