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This Purim, a space for queer Jews to celebrate their identities — and dance the night away
(New York Jewish Week) — Stuart Meyers grew up in the heavily Jewish Philadelphia suburb of Voorhees Township, New Jersey. Yet, even though he was Jewish, being queer meant that he often felt like an outsider in Jewish spaces.
Fortunately, as an adult, Meyers — a dancer, artist and nightlife events producer — realized that, instead of abandoning one identity in lieu of another, he could create a vibrant space for queer Jews to celebrate both aspects of their identities.
“I didn’t have an experience [growing up] of being able to bridge my queer and Jewish identities — I just was made to feel like they couldn’t coexist,” Meyers, 32, told the New York Jewish Week. “I started to have this desire and longing to understand what it meant to be Jewish and bring these two identities together.”
In 2021, the Bushwick, Brooklyn resident developed “Flaminggg,” a queer Jewish nightlife experience that aims to bring Jews of all gender expressions and sexual orientations together to loudly and proudly celebrate their Jewish and queer identities. (The name, Meyers said, stuck around after he threw his first Hanukkah party. “It was easy to affirm: We are a fiery, bright burning bunch whose light, despite it all, is eternal.”)
Flaminggg parties, of which there have been four so far, include DJ sets that incorporate pop music, house music and Jewish music, as well as drag performances, dancing, conversation and Jewish rituals. Next week, Flaminggg will host “Flamingggtaschen,” its second-ever Purim party on March 4, at 3 Dollar Bill, a queer club in East Williamsburg. These days, the winter holiday, when cross-dressing and role-playing are commonly a part of even traditional festivities, is often associated with queer pride and a celebration of coming out,
“It’s a sensitive thing,” Meyers said. “People who are queer but secular often say, ‘I do not want to be in a Jewish space.’” Some queer Jews had experiences growing up where they didn’t feel like they belonged, while others were unsure of what to expect, he said. Still others have participated in — and not enjoyed — queer Jewish events that are “not sexy” and felt antiquated, he said.
“I think being queer and Jewish is sexy, magnificent and magical and so related and I want to share that,” Meyers said. “That is the driving belief in what I’m trying to create.”
A drag performer at Flaminggg’s Hanukkah party in December 2022. (Afrik Armando)
Meyers believes that Flaminggg is the first intentionally Jewish nightlife experience for queer adult Jews that is unattached to a synagogue or larger Jewish organization. “It felt like no one was doing this kind of programming, that was artistically and thoughtfully making queer Jewish space in a way that was not just a ‘bright fluorescent lights, community hall,’ kind of Judaism, which I feel like a lot of people want to steer clear from because it just doesn’t feel meaningful,” Meyers said, adding: “Those bright overheads don’t flatter a queen’s skin!”
Of course, there are other organizations and companies that create events for LGBTQ Jews, such as Hebro and Jewish Queer Youth. While Meyers has worked with both in the past, they serve different demographics — cisgender gay men and younger adults mostly with Orthodox backgrounds, for instance. New York City synagogues and Jewish spaces like Congregation Beit Simchat Torah and Lab/Shul are also queer-driven, but, again, secular Jews may still be turned off by some of the synagogue and Jewish ritual aspects. (Meyers is also producing and hosting Lab/Shul’s Purim party extravaganza at House of Yes this year, which will feature drag performances, a Purim spiel and a dance party.)
Flaminggg, by contrast, aims to draw a diverse crowd — participants represent all sexualities and genders, and the parties are open to any level of religious observance (or not). Meyers hopes that his events will reach people who have previously not entered Jewish spaces and want to learn more about and celebrate Judaism and queerness in all its forms and nuances.
And, of course, Flaminggg differs from other queer, Jewish events in that it is a nightlife-oriented, night-long party. Quoting Jewish anarchist political activist Emma Goldman during a Zoom interview, Meyers joked: “If I can’t dance to it, it’s not my revolution.”
This year Purim’s party, which is set to run from from 9 p.m. to 4 a.m., will include a spiel (a comic retelling of the Purim story), a DJ set and other diverse queer Jewish performances. Meyers expects around 300 attendees.
“I’ve basically been waiting for this Purim party ever since the Hanukkah party ended,” Yochai Greenfeld, a drag performer who performed at Flaminggg’s 2022 Hanukkah party, told the New York Jewish Week.
That event, he added, was “probably one of the best parties of my life.”
“There are a ton of Jewish spaces to party in, but those tend to be somewhat uninviting for queer people to express themselves within those spaces,” said Greenfield, whose drag persona is named “Abbi Gezunt” (Yiddish for “so long as you’re healthy”). “The queer party scene is also mega-oversaturated, and there are tons of different spaces to explore. However, it can sometimes feel a little uncomfortable to express your Jewishness in those spaces.”
Greenfeld added that being around people with similar backgrounds allowed for empowering conversations on the sides of the dance floor, something he said he’d never experienced at other parties.
In addition to nightlife, Meyers has plans to grow Flaminggg into a more robust programming venture. Funded solely through donations and ticket sales, Meyers hopes to keep it that way so as to remain independent from any political or religious agendas. Currently in the process of establishing Flaminggg as its own LLC, Meyers envisions branching out into Shabbat dinners and queer Jewish study groups.
Ultimately, Meyers hopes that through Flaminggg’s events, attendees will feel more ownership over their Jewish identities. “All the Jewish programming I do is for building a deeper and deeper possibility of people coming into a space and going: ‘I’ve never felt so affirmed in being both queer and Jewish,’” he said. “Creating a platform where we can celebrate all of that is really special.”
Flamingggtaschen: A Queer Purim Party is on Saturday, March 4 at 3 Dollar Bill (270 Meserole St.) Get tickets here.
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The post This Purim, a space for queer Jews to celebrate their identities — and dance the night away appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Will Trump’s Peace Plan for Gaza Actually Lead to the Next War in the Region?
FILE PHOTO: US President Donald Trump is interviewed by Reuters White House correspondent Steve Holland (not pictured) during an exclusive interview in the Oval Office in the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., January 14, 2026. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein/File Photo
Donald Trump wants to create peace in Gaza. He wants headlines that frame him as a historic dealmaker and a global statesman. But behind the carefully staged announcements and the language of “stability” and “prosperity,” Trump’s newly assembled Gaza peace structure reveals a misplaced trust in failed diplomatic elites, and fails to accurately account for Israel’s security realities.
The appointment of Sigrid Kaag to Trump’s Gaza Executive Board is emblematic of this problem.
Kaag is frequently portrayed as an experienced, neutral technocrat. Her defenders point to decades of United Nations service and her time as a Dutch minister as proof of professionalism. Yet in the Middle East, neutrality is not an abstract virtue; it has concrete consequences. And the institutional culture in which Kaag built her career has consistently betrayed Israel, while empowering those who undermine it.
This is not a personal attack. It is a political assessment.
For decades, the United Nations has approached the Israeli-Palestinian conflict through a deeply flawed lens. Israel is treated as a permanent suspect, the Palestinian leadership as a perpetual victim, and terrorism as an unfortunate but contextualized byproduct of “despair.”
This framework did not begin with Kaag, but she rose within it, succeeded within it, and continues to represent it.
That same UN ecosystem once elevated Yasser Arafat from terrorist mastermind to international statesman, without demanding that he dismantle the machinery of violence. The results were catastrophic: waves of suicide bombings, incitement, and a peace process that collapsed under the weight of its own dishonesty.
The lesson should have been clear. Instead, the same thinking persists.
Figures like Kaag emphasize humanitarian access, reconstruction, and governance mechanisms while consistently avoiding the core issue: Gaza’s problems are not caused by a lack of international oversight, but by the systematic indoctrination of hatred and the glorification of violence. Without confronting that reality, no amount of technocratic management will bring peace.
Donald Trump’s political history shows a consistent pattern at times: grand gestures, dramatic announcements, and a hunger for recognition that can override strategic depth.
The Gaza peace plan features these elements, and that’s a bad omen for the future of peace in the region.
Rather than anchoring Gaza’s future in hard security guarantees for Israel, clear red lines against terror financing, and ideological deradicalization, Trump has surrounded himself with figures whose records suggest the opposite: a preference for “balance,” moral equivalence, and pressure on Israel to accommodate the unacceptable.
Unfortunately, it seems that Gaza is being used as a stage, not treated as a powder keg.
And Israel will pay the price if this experiment fails.
The composition of Trump’s Gaza councils should alarm anyone who understands the region. UN veterans, European moral arbiters, and political figures with long histories of criticizing Israel’s self-defense now sit at the table defining “peace.”
What is absent is just as telling as what is present.
There is no serious focus on dismantling terror ideology. No insistence on ending incitement. No recognition that Gaza’s suffering is directly linked to Hamas’ strategy of embedding itself within civilian infrastructure, and radicalizing the population against Israel.
Instead, Israel is once again expected to prove restraint, flexibility, and goodwill, while its enemies are treated as stakeholders rather than threats.
Trump’s defenders will argue that engagement is better than isolation, and that new structures are better than stalemate. But engagement without moral clarity is not diplomacy. It is delusion.
By empowering figures whose careers were shaped by institutions that consistently misinterpret Palestinian politics and excuse extremist behavior, Trump is not stabilizing Gaza. He is laying the groundwork for the next crisis.
Trump should prioritize hard truths over flattering headlines. He should reject failed diplomatic paradigms instead of recycling them. And he should stop mistaking international applause for strategic success.
Peace built on denial is not peace at all.
It is merely the pause before the next war.
Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.
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Are We Living Through the Synagogue Burnings of the 2020s?
Smoldered remains of the Beth Israel Congregation’s library in Jackson, Mississippi. Photo: Screenshot.
Six months ago, I stood on the grounds of Beth Israel Congregation in Jackson, Mississippi. I observed a sign that read in bold, “Bombings In Jewish Community.”
I was curious about the history, so I leaned in and read further: “In 1967, Beth Israel broke ground for a new synagogue on Old Canton Road. The first service was held that March. Six months later, the Ku Klux Klan bombed the new synagogue.”
I have visited synagogues across the United States, and spent years studying Jewish history through firsthand experiences visiting sanctuaries, cemeteries, memorials, and communities that thrived in places many already forget that Jews ever lived in.
So coming across a sign of a synagogue being attacked in the 1960s felt horrifying, but not unfamiliar. American Jewish history knows well what living under the shadows of hate feels like — especially in those years when Jews were accused by extremists of “masterminding a plot to ruin America.”
That led to the synagogue bombings of the late 1950s, where justice never arrived in many of the cases.
After reading that sign, I walked the garden of the Beth Israel Congregation, which has a Holocaust memorial formed from seven glass structures, each representing a part of the Holocaust. One of them depicts the Ghetto, another one Kristallnacht. One that caught my eye, was for the victims who wore striped clothes. Another one depicts the book burnings. I found myself thinking of my own family history, as all of my great-grandparents were Holocaust survivors.
And yet, I stood there grateful. Grateful to be an American Jew living freely, enjoying the unalienable rights this country promises its citizens. Grateful for raising my children in a land that, with all its flaws, has been a safe haven for Jewish life.
Still like many American Jews, I asked myself: Could another synagogue be attacked? Could our books burn again? Could this history return in a new form? And most of all, could the unthinkable become thinkable again?
Earlier this month, that question was answered — painfully.
Federal authorities say a 19-year-old admitted that he set fire to Beth Israel because of the building’s “Jewish ties.” The fire consumed portions of the building, some Torah scrolls, and memories of a defiant and historic Jewish community.
Synagogue attacks are often treated as isolated incidents. A tragedy for a few. An investigation for authorities. A bit of solidarity from some, and the news cycle moves on.
They are no longer reported as “The 1950s Synagogue Bombings,” which is how they were in the past, and even has its own dedicated Wikipedia page.
But looking back, over the past few years, multiple synagogues and Jewish centers in the United States have been targeted by fire.
Some have been prosecuted as arson, while most carried hate crime charges. In Texas, a man was charged and sentenced after admitting guilt to a hate crime and arson connected to an attempt to burn down Congregation Beth Israel in Austin. In Arizona, the Justice Department announced a hate crime charge tied to the Khal Chasidim synagogue fire in Casa Grande. In Florida, prosecutors charged a man tied to the fire at the Chabad Jewish center in Punta Gorda, stating that the man had “hatred towards Jewish people.”
But the latest attack in Jackson, Mississippi is symbolic. It’s not another one — it is a second act by fire on the same platform, nearly 60 years apart.
We live in a faster world now — social media, constant noise, outrage, and excitement. We often skim through things that should make us stop.
We treat extremists’ behavior as news, and hateful rhetoric as theater or comedy. We rarely pause. But standing at the Beth Israel Congregation months ago, reading what happened in 1967, worrying about what could happen again and then watching my worry become a reality — has forced me to pause and ask are we living through “The 2020s Synagogue Burnings?”
American Jewry changed dramatically over the last 60 years. Jews have done very well in this country, with most still holding onto their Judaism. And yet it pains me to say that hatred did not disappear. It changed its vocabulary, its slogans, its platforms, its activists, and its camps. But the basic “Jews are the problem” is maintained. Our houses of worship are burning throughout the land.
Jew hatred travels. It mutates. Sometimes it wears the nationalism hat, other times the “social justice” hat, and other times it wears the libertarian hat. Sometimes it’s just a joke. But the line is not hard to draw when we’re willing to draw it consistently.
When leaders in our country dismiss Nazi rhetoric as “Kids being kids” and brand them as “stupid jokes” or when Jewish leaders and politicians choose to politicize antisemitism and make it a partisan tool, it sends a confusing and ultimately a harmful message.
We should be clear.
Hate towards any group of people is wrong. Hate towards Jews for being Jewish is wrong. Nazi “jokes” are not childish or stupid, they’re corrosive. Praising terror groups is evil. Harassing a visible Jew in the streets with any political chants just because you recognize a Jew and want to intimidate him — is evil.
We the Jewish community have work to do, too. We cannot let our public voice become only “look at what they did to us.” We cannot let bigots frame the story of American Jewish life as one of living in the shadows.
While speaking of and confronting bigotry, which is real and dangerous, we should also insist on our truth and shine light — that Jewish life here has contributed quietly and profoundly to the country’s civic and moral fabric, and that our contributions, just like the contributions of many others in the country, have shaped our country for the better.
And while we do not have to justify our existence and right to belong, it is still a mistake that we allow our identity in the American public to be reduced to one of victimhood.
I am a Jewish father, and a patriot of this country. And I keep returning to the most difficult question: will my children and grandchildren read this 60 years from now and conclude the same — that nothing has changed? Or will we as a collective finally do better?
The writer is an Orthodox Jewish New York businessman.
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Palestinian Authority Admits Its True Goal: Israel ‘Is Doomed to Perish’
French President Emmanuel Macron welcomes Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas at the Elysee Palace in Paris, France, Nov. 11, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Benoit Tessier
The Palestinian Authority (PA) consistently indoctrinates Palestinians to believe that Israel’s demise is inevitable and is an inherent form of justice.
This message is delivered by senior PA leaders and is reinforced repeatedly across official PA media, including news programs, children’s education, political commentary, poetry, and international forums broadcast to the Palestinian public.
This doctrine has been articulated again recently by Abbas Zaki, a senior Fatah leader and member of the Central Committee, the PA’s ruling party:
Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki: “In the end, the winner is the one who remains on the land … and those who will remain are the ones with the idea, the idea that says there is no escaping the fact that this land will be liberated, and that the land of peace cannot be based on revenge.
Israel is doomed to perish.” [emphasis added]
[Arabi 21, London-based Arab news website, Jan. 9, 2026]
Zaki’s statement presents Israel as a temporary presence and Palestinians as the enduring owners of Israel’s land, so that justice will ensure Israel’s disappearance. This is a foundational belief promoted systematically by the PA.
PA/Fatah education teaches children to see Israel as temporary:
“Palestine fell under the Zionist occupation [in 1948], which continues today … The occupation will cease to exist just as what was before it ceased to exist …”
“All of the invaders were defeated, and Palestine returned to be free and Arab.”
“[Israel] the evil occupation state … this artificial state … It is artificial because it is foreign …”
“The liberation of Palestine will only be achieved through armed struggle.”
“The Zionist invaders will go to the garbage can of history.”
“Palestine will be liberated and purified from the occupation’s defilement.
“Palestine is destined for full liberation … from the yoke of Zionist colonialism”
“Algeria’s experience [of the French leaving] assures that the Jewish settlers in Palestine will disappear in the end.”
[Fatah’s Waed Magazine for children ages 6-15]
On official PA television, Israel’s demise is conveyed as fact.
PA TV narrators repeatedly describe Jewish presence as a transient colonial episode destined to end, with this specific script reiterated every two years on average:
Official PA TV narrator: “The illegal immigration of the Jews to Palestine: The beginning of the illegal immigration to Palestine was in 1837 … The Jewish immigration to the land of Palestine continued as part of a colonialist Zionist plan led by the world powers at the time …
But history has never let the colonialist remain, and the occupiers have always left in the end. One day they [the Jews] too will return to where they came from.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV]
The same doctrine is embedded in PA cultural programming. On official PA TV, Gazan poet Adel Al-Ramadi recited a poem listing past rulers of the land — Greeks, Romans, Persians, Crusaders, and British — before concluding that Jewish rule will meet the same fate:
Gazan poet Adel Al-Ramadi:
Do not believe that the land will not return
How much has this land been occupied!
How much defilement!
How many soldiers have trodden upon it!
So where are the soldiers?
Where is the rule of the Greeks over us?
Where is the rule of the Tatars?
Where is the rule of the Romans?
Where is the rule of the Persians?
Where is the rule of the Crusaders?
Where is the rule of the English?
Where are the soldiers?
One day you will grow up and ask:
Where is the rule of the Jews?[Official PA TV, Dec. 7, 2025]
By placing Jewish sovereignty alongside former rulers who disappeared, the poem teaches that Israel’s rule is merely another temporary phase awaiting its end.
Official PA TV amplifies this message by hosting guests who present themselves as analysts, while repeating the same conclusion:
Tunisian journalist Khaled Krouna: “This entity [i.e., Israel] was planted in the region to be a policeman for the interests of the world’s powerful forces … Now the services it [Israel] can provide, after its failure has become apparent, after its army only scares cowards … the cost of maintaining it is much greater than the benefits its existence can bring to the superpowers.
In time, they themselves will disown it and leave it to its fate, and its fate is to fall into the hands of the Palestinians. Its fate is to disappear.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Capital of Capitals – Tunis, Nov. 19, 2025]
The same theme is projected internationally and broadcast back to Palestinian audiences. Speaking at the United Nations and shown on PA TV, Arab League spokesman Mohamed Nasr declared:
Arab League Spokesman at the UN Mohamed Nasr:“The occupation [i.e., Israel] – no matter how much its violence intensifies – will cease to exist, while the Palestinian state will become a reality.” [emphasis added]
[Official PA TV, Dec. 1, 2025]
Across senior leadership statements, education, historical narration, poetry, political analysis, and international advocacy, the Palestinian Authority delivers a unified talking point to its people: Israel is temporary, Palestinians are permanent, and time itself will erase Israel’s existence — a doctrine that Western governments continue to ignore while proposing to restore the PA as a governing force in Gaza.
Ephraim D. Tepler is a contributor to Palestinian Media Watch (PMW). Itamar Marcus is the Founder and Director of PMW, where a version of this article first appeared.