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‘Where do I stand?’ Queer Modern Orthodox teens navigate a changing world
This article was produced as part of JTA’s Teen Journalism Fellowship, a program that works with Jewish teens around the world to report on issues that affect their lives.
(JTA) — Until recently, Jacob Feldon considered Yeshiva University a serious candidate for his college education. As a senior at a Utah high school who has embraced Modern Orthodoxy and harbors dreams of potentially becoming a rabbi, he said he was drawn to “the idea of going to school in an observant community where I can study Torah and Talmud with some of the smartest people doing such a thing today.”
But Feldon is also bisexual and serves as a Jewish youth ambassador for Beloved Arise, a national interfaith support organization for queer youth. So Feldon took notice when Yeshiva University declined to officially recognize a Pride Alliance group on campus, and then pressed its case to the U.S. Supreme Court when mandated to do so.
“As a queer man I can’t see going into that environment right now with everything happening,” Feldon told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “I’m getting a pretty clear message that I won’t be welcomed, authentically welcome.”
Feldon is not the only high school student who identifies as Modern Orthodox to have complicated feelings about Yeshiva University at the moment. As the main Modern Orthodox university, the school blends secular and religious instruction and values. Its attempt to navigate a balance between being welcoming and inclusive and fighting for the right to control LGBTQ students’ official expression on campus has made national headlines — and caused some Modern Orthodox teens to question whether they would feel comfortable attending.
For LGBTQ teens, the lawsuit and other controversies around gender and sexuality in Modern Orthodoxy have created “a little hopelessness,” said Rachael Fried, executive director of the support nonprofit Jewish Queer Youth.
Fried described the mindset of Modern Orthodox LGBTQ adolescents as, “I’m trying to live an Orthodox life. I’m trying to build my future as a queer Orthodox person, and this is what the main, flagship institution of Modern Orthodoxy thinks about me. Then where is my future and what’s the hope for me and what are my dreams?”
For queer teens, the Y.U. saga is just one high-profile touchpoint in an ongoing grappling with their place within Modern Orthodoxy. Modern Orthodox communities range widely in many ways depending on their history, geography and leadership, meaning that some queer Orthodox teens say they have found acceptance and support while others say they’ve had more challenging experiences.
Rachael Fried is the executive director of the support nonprofit Jewish Queer Youth. (Courtesy JQY)
Often teens say they experience both. Like many of the queer teens interviewed for this article, Rivka Schafer and their parents first thought it best to keep their queer identity private due to the repercussions they feared with being LGBTQ in a Modern Orthodox community. When they did come out in middle school, Schafer said they received mixed reactions in their Jewish day school.
“The kids had a lot of stigma and the administration did too, but they tried to be really accepting and really supportive which was also really, really beautiful,” Schafer told JTA.
“Currently I identify as Modern Orthodox because Judaism is a really important part of my identity and I find Judaism to be really meaningful to me,” said Schafer, who is nonbinary, from their home in Teaneck, New Jersey. “So although I struggled a lot with the acceptance in the Jewish community, and stigma within the Orthodox community, I really ultimately believe it is and should be a strong part of who I am.”
But while Schafer has remained committed to their religious identity, Fried, of Jewish Queer Youth, said the Pride Alliance lawsuit and other LGBTQ-related controversies sometimes “pushes people away from Orthodoxy in a really unfortunate way.”
This is what happened to Mattie Schaffer. “I would describe it as [having] a religious identity crisis,” said Schaffer, a student at Lev Miriam Learning Studio in Passaic, New Jersey who uses he/they pronouns and identifies as queer. Schaffer, 16, said their neighborhood is a more right-wing Modern Orthodox community, colloquially called yeshivish, though his family is not.
“A part of all the alienation and isolation comes from a feeling of not having a place anywhere,” Schaffer said. “And as much as you try to conform, there just isn’t really a place for you to fit unless you want to be sticking out or be bending yourself in half.”
Modern Orthodox queer teens’ feeling “of not having a place” can be quite literal, particularly for those teens that are non-binary or transgender, said Schafer, the teen from Teaneck.
Schafer finds their nonbinary identity sometimes at odds with even the most basic rules of the Hebrew language, which assigns a gender to nearly all words, and of their synagogue. “Where do I stand? On the mechitza?” they asked, referring to the divider separating men and women in Orthodox synagogues.
The question of LGBTQ individuals in gender-separated prayer spaces recently reared up at Y.U., when one of its leading rabbis decreed that a transgender woman could not pray in either the women’s or men’s section of her university-affiliated synagogue.
But while recent months have been abundant in controversy, the last decade has shown tremendous progress for LGBTQ Modern Orthodox teens, according to multiple people in and around the community.
Rabbi Steve Greenberg, who was ordained by Yeshiva University before coming out as gay in 1999, heads the Orthodox queer advocacy group Eshel. His organization surveyed approximately 240 Orthodox synagogues and rabbis and found that 74% of interviewees were “high welcoming,” meaning that “inclusion is explicit, principled and broadly acknowledged” and queer families’ life cycle events other than marriage are celebrated. Another 22% offered “moderate welcome,” while 4% were “low welcoming/inattentive.”
Nadiv Schorer, right, married Ariel Meiri in 2020 with Orthodox rabbi Avram Mlotek officiating. (David Perlman Photography)
Approximately 10 rabbis said they were willing to perform same-sex marriages, according to Eshel’s research.
“They do their best to make it possible for LGBTQ folks to belong to Orthodox environments,” said Greenberg. “And it’s grown.”
The head of school at North Shore Hebrew Academy on Long Island, Rabbi Jeffery Kobrin, said he believed that growing conversations about LGBTQ issues in Orthodox communities has had benefits.
“I think it’s easier to be a queer teen now than it was in 2012, just because it’s more out there,” Kobrin said. “People talk about it more, people try to be more accepting of it, and people, community-wise, seem to less feel this contradiction between Orthodoxy and alternative lifestyles.”
Some teens say they have witnessed change in just the last couple of years. Benjamin Small, a gay teen who graduated from SAR High School last year and now attends Yeshivat Ma’ale Gilboa in Israel, said his rabbi, Chaim Poupko, of Congregation Avahath Torah in Englewood, New Jersey, has advocated for queer members of the Orthodox community in his synagogue.
“That would be unheard of two or three years ago,” Small said.
Few Modern Orthodox schools in the New York area have an LGBTQ support club. But Fried, JQY’s executive director, said students are learning how to organize and build community independently, in the absence of recognition from their schools and synagogues.
“That comes with people choosing themselves, feeling empowered to build their own communities and to step-up and create the groups that others are not creating for them,” she said.
Before the Y.U. court case, “the messaging that I heard from the Modern Orthodox community was ‘your identity is not wrong, and we want to support our queer members of the community,’” said Fried, whose organization gave grants to student groups affected by the Y.U. case.
But now, she said, the message that queer Modern Orthodox teens are hearing has shifted.
“Actually, your queer identity is what is problematic. It’s not just the sentence in the Torah that is about behavior, but actually your identity,” she characterized Modern Orthodox institutions as saying. “You want to gather and build community that is based around identity and that, in and of itself, is problematic, and it’s inherently a threat.”
For its part, Yeshiva University has tried to thread a narrow needle.
A person walks by the Wilf Campus of Yeshiva University in New York City, Aug. 30, 2022. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)
“We love all of our students including those who identify as LGBTQ,” Y.U. said in a FAQ after it launched a school-sanctioned LGBTQ club. “Through our deep personal relationships and conversations with them, we have felt their struggles to fit into an orthodox world that could appear to them as not having a place for them.” (The YU Pride Alliance called the new club “a feeble attempt” at compromise and said they were not involved in its formation.)
There was no consensus among teens who spoke to JTA about how much the Y.U. saga would affect inclusion in other spaces. It’s also unclear the degree to which queer Modern Orthodox teens and their allies are incorporating the situation in their decision-making about college.
Y.U. declined to share student enrollment and admissions data, saying that the university does not generally release that information. But according to a recent Y.U. advertisement, last fall the school had “the largest incoming undergraduate class in over 20 years.”
Still, the school’s lawsuit and rhetoric has been a turnoff for 19-year-old Penny Laser, a queer student at a secular college who had envisioned possibly pursuing graduate studies in Talmud at Y.U. and grew up in a non-Orthodox household. (Laser asked to be identified using a pseudonym because she is seeking a giyur lechumra, a conversion for Jewish individuals to remove any doubt of their Orthodox Jewish legal status, and feared the Rabbinical Council of America would not grant her one if she was quoted in this article.)
“I’m not sure how I can trust or engage with Y.U. in the future,” said Laser. “A. I don’t know if it’s going to be a safe place for me, and B. I don’t want to align myself with an institution that has values like this.”
Schafer, from Teaneck, and Schaffer, from Passaic, are both not considering Y.U.
And the consequences of the Y.U. litigation goes beyond influencing the decisions of individual students, according to Fried.
“What the Y.U. situation is doing right now is forcing this conversation into the spotlight,” she said. “So different institutions and leaders are forced into having this conversation, or even thinking about where they stand. People are asking them to communicate where they stand.”
Feldon, from Utah, has hope. He thinks that the Modern Orthodox world needs queer rabbis to lead the conversation on inclusion from a halachic perspective — and he thinks that can still happen, despite the push by Modern Orthodoxy’s flagship university to block the Pride Alliance.
“I choose to believe,” said Feldon, “that we’ll get there. My dream life is where I can bring my boyfriend to minyan [prayer services] three times a day. And I choose to believe that we are on that path.”
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The post ‘Where do I stand?’ Queer Modern Orthodox teens navigate a changing world appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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‘Fourth Reich’: Self-Described Neo-Nazi Charged for Assaulting Jewish Man in Montana on Oct. 7 Anniversary
Illustrative: A woman walks past police tape the day after an attack that injured multiple people in Boulder, Colorado, US June 2, 2025. Photo: Mark Makela via Reuters Connect
A self-proclaimed neo-Nazi in Missoula, Montana has been charged for allegedly assaulting a Jewish man outside a homeless shelter last week on the second anniversary of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, according to local media reports and the Missoula Police Department.
Michael Cain, 29, was charged with felony malicious intimidation or harassment relating to civil or human rights, and his bond was set at $50,000. He allegedly accosted the victim after identifying a Star of David tattooed on his arm.
Cain also reportedly told the victim that he is a Nazi, initiating an exchange of remarks which ended with a brutal assault replete with kicks and punches.
According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, Cain later told police that he is part of a “Fourth Reich” fifth-column cell in the US.
“Statements and other evidence obtained by officers on scene substantiated probable cause that Cain had assaulted the victim and that the assault had been motivated by the victim’s religious, ethnic or cultural [identity] of belonging to the Jewish religious community,” the Missoula Police Department said in a statement. “The Missoula Police Department respects the civil rights of all citizens and thoroughly investigates all reports of bias or hate crimes.”
The incident occurred about a week after the release of a new survey, commissioned by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and Jewish Federations of North America, showing that a majority of American Jews now consider antisemitism to be a normal and endemic aspect of life in the US.
A striking 57 percent reported believing “that antisemitism is now a normal Jewish experience,” the organizations disclosed, while 55 percent said they have personally witnessed or been subjected to antisemitic hatred, including physical assaults, threats, and harassment, in the past year.
This new reality, precipitated by Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, has effected a psychological change in American Jews, prompting firearms sales, disaster planning, and “plans to flee the country.”
“It is so profoundly sad that Jewish Americans are now discussing worst case scenarios,” ADL chief executive officer Jonathan Greenblatt said in a statement. “When American Jews — who have built lives, careers, and families here for generations — are making contingency plans to flee, we must recognize this is a five-alarm fire for our entire country. This is not just a Jewish problem; it’s an American problem that demands immediate action from leaders at every level.”
The survey results revealed other disturbing trends: Jewish victims are internalizing their experiences, as 74 percent did not report what happened to them to “any institution or organization”; Jewish youth are bearing the brunt of antisemitism, having faced communications which aim to exclude Jews or delegitimize their concerns about rising hate; roughly a third of survey respondents show symptoms of anxiety; and the cultural climate has fostered a sense in the Jewish community that the non-Jewish community would not act as a moral guardrail against violence and threats.
“Even in the face of unprecedented levels of antisemitism, we continue to see what Jewish Federations have termed ‘the Surge’ — a remarkable increase in Jewish engagement and connection to the community,” Eric Fingerhut, president and chief executive officer of the Jewish Federations of North America, said in a statement. “The fact that nearly two-thirds of those who directly experienced antisemitism are responding by deepening their Jewish involvement demonstrates the extraordinary resilience of our people.”
He added, “Rather than retreating in fear, American Jews are choosing to stand together, strengthen their bonds and affirm their identity. This surge in Jewish engagement represents hope and determination in the face of hate.”
In 2024, antisemitic hate crimes in the US reached record-setting and harrowing statistical figures, according to the latest data issued by the FBI.
Even as hate crimes decreased overall, those perpetrated against Jews increased by 5.8 percent in 2024 to 1,938, the largest total recorded in over 30 years of the FBI’s counting them. Jewish American groups noted that this surge, which included 178 assaults, is being experienced by a demographic group which constitutes just 2 percent of the US population.
A striking 69 percent of all religion-based hate crimes that were reported to the FBI in 2024 targeted Jews, with 2,041 out of 2,942 total such incidents being antisemitic in nature. Muslims were targeted the next highest amount as the victims of 256 offenses, or about 9 percent of the total.
The wave of hatred has not relented in 2025.
In June, a gunman murdered two Israeli embassy staffers in Washington, DC, while they exited an event at the Capital Jewish Museum hosted a major Jewish organization. The suspect charged for the double murder, 31-year-old Elias Rodriguez from Chicago, yelled “Free Palestine” while being arrested by police after the shooting, according to video of the incident. The FBI affidavit supporting the criminal charges against Rodriguez stated that he told law enforcement he “did it for Gaza.”
Less than two weeks later, a man firebombed a crowd of people who were participating in a demonstration to raise awareness of the Israeli hostages who remain imprisoned by Hamas in Gaza. A victim of the attack, Karen Diamond, 82, later died, having sustained severe, fatal injuries.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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British Lawyers Send Major UK Studios, Distributors Legal Warning Over Israel Film Boycott
Small toy figures are seen in front of displayed Netflix logo in this illustration taken March 19, 2020. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
An association of British lawyers who support Israel sent roughly 6o of the biggest film industry companies and agencies in the United Kingdom a legal warning about a pledge to boycott Israeli film institutions that has already garnered support from thousands in the film business.
“This boycott breaches the law in this country which protects people of all religions, races, and nationalities from discrimination,” Jonathan Turner, chief executive of UK Lawyers for Israel (UKLFI), said in a statement to The Algemeiner on Monday. “If we allow celebrities to discriminate in this way, then it erodes the protection for everyone.”
Javier Bardem, Olivia Colman, Mark Ruffalo, and Emma Stone are among the more than 4,000 film industry professionals who signed the “Film Workers Pledge to End Complicity” last month, vowing not to work with Israeli film institutions – including festivals, cinemas, broadcasters, and production companies – which they claim are “implicated” in “genocide and apartheid against the Palestinian people.” The pledge defines “implicated” as “whitewashing or justifying genocide and apartheid, and/or partnering with the government committing them.” The boycott was spearheaded by the group “Filmworkers for Palestine.”
In a recent letter sent to major film companies — including the UK divisions of Netflix, Warner Bros, Disney, Amazon Studios, Apple, and Discovery — UKLFI argued that the boycott of Israeli film institutions is a breach of the UK’s Equality Act 2010 (EA). The law prohibits direct or indirect discrimination against persons because of “protected characteristics,” which include race, religion, and philosophical belief. “Race” includes nationality and ethnicity, and “philosophical belief” includes belief in the right of Jews to self-determination, according to UKLFI.
“[EA] is the key legislation in the UK protecting against racism and discriminatory treatment,” stated the letter, which was obtained by The Algemeiner. “If the UK television and film industry colludes with acts contrary to this legislation, organizations are themselves likely to be in breach. It also creates a dangerous precedent: one that condones the exclusion of individuals and/or organizations based solely on their nationality, ethnicity, and/or religion.”
“The boycott actively encourages its signatories to undertake discriminatory conduct contrary to the EA,” UKLFI further stated in its letter.
Domestic companies in the UK – such as the BBC, Film4, and ITV – also received the letter from UKLFI, as well as the film organizations BFI and Pact, the talent agencies Curtis Brown and United Agents, and unions such as Bectu and Equity.
UKLFI also said in its letter that any discrimination that breaches the EA can result in “potential legal, insurance, and funding issues” for the companies. They noted that efforts to breach the UK’s Equality Act are “highly likely to be a litigation risk,” and a deliberate breach of discrimination legislation could even invalidate insurance policies. Participating in the anti-Israel boycott may negatively affect funding for the company since financiers “typically require compliance” with anti-discriminatory laws, according to the group of lawyers. This means that any breach of the EA because of the boycott could result in a film being ineligible for government funding, or withdrawal of financing already granted, UKLFI claimed.
“It follows that a breach of the [EA] through the boycott, would render a film ineligible for government funding, or trigger clawback of finance already granted,” the letter noted.
UKLFI further stated that these companies could potentially be liable for any breaches of the Equality Act by their “staff and agents.” Actors, agents, managers, production companies, producers, and “anyone else who instructs, causes, induces, or helps to implement the boycott – for example, encouraging a distributor not to deal with Israeli outlets, or advising a colleague to insist on a boycott clause,” could also be liable for a breach of law.
“Producers and other contracting parties should also be aware that knowingly enabling or acquiescing to discriminatory demands – for example, by agreeing to exclude Israeli distributors or institutions from financing or distribution arrangements – may itself give rise to liability under the Equality Act,” UKLFI added.
The Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights under Law recently sent a letter to major American film industry companies stating that the boycott infringes US federal and state civil rights laws. The letter was sent to major film studios, distributors, platforms, talent agencies, and film festivals. UKLFI noted in the letter it sent out this week to major film industry companies in the UK that if any of the organizations also operate in the US and participate in the boycott, they may be in breach of US laws as well.
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Group Performs Nazi Salutes, Chants ‘Sieg Heil,’ Then Pepper-Sprays Jewish Man Outside Kyiv’s Obolon Synagogue
Illustrative: Kyiv’s Chief Rabbi Yonatan Markovitch holds a fragment of a Russian drone that damaged the Chabad-run Perlina school in Kyiv, Ukraine, Oct. 30, 2024. Photo: Jewish community JCC in Kyiv, Kyiv municipality, and Yan Dobronosov
A group of young men attacked a Jewish man outside of a synagogue in Kyiv on Saturday, hitting him with pepper spray.
The Obolon Synagogue, located in the Obolon district of Ukraine’s capital, was targeted shortly after noon as congregants marked Shabbat, the weekly Jewish day of rest. Witnesses said a group of several young men approached the building, jeered at worshipers, and made Nazi gestures while yelling “Sieg Heil.”
When one congregant stepped outside, the assailants sprayed him in the face with what police later described as an “irritant gas” before fleeing the scene. The victim, who was wearing a kippah and tzitzit (fringes on Jewish religious garments worn underneath a shirt), suffered burns and severe irritation to his eyes and skin, according to statements from the Chabad Kyiv Jewish Community and the United Jewish Community of Ukraine.
Chabad Kyiv condemned the assault as a “brutal antisemitic attack” that desecrated the sanctity of the Sabbath. “This was a deliberate, cruel, and premeditated antisemitic act,” the community said in a statement. It added that the attack “overshadowed Shabbat at the Obolon Synagogue” and left local Jews shaken.
The incident followed an earlier episode the previous day in which a similar group of youths appeared near the synagogue, shouting antisemitic insults at the rabbi and mocking worshipers. Community leaders said they believe the same individuals returned on Saturday to escalate their harassment into physical violence.
The Kyiv Jewish Community in Obolon described the sequence of events in a social media post: “Around 3:00 pm, the men inside the synagogue saw youths approach our building and begin demonstratively gesturing. One of our community members stepped out to them. Seeing a man wearing a kippah and tzitzit, the boys drenched him with tear gas from two spray cans and fled.”
Community representatives said police were informed of the assault only after the post began circulating online. In response, the Kyiv Police Department issued a statement confirming that it had opened an investigation into “provocative actions against a member of the religious community.”
The statement read that “police determine the circumstances of the attack on members of the religious community in the Obolonsky district of the capital. The event became known by the law enforcement officers from social networks. According to the published post, a group of unidentified youngsters, outside a synagogue building, began shouting antisemitic slogans, showing Nazi greetings and then using gas in provocative actions against a member of the community. Currently, the fact is under investigation, the police establish all the circumstances of the event, as well as its participants. The issue of legal qualification is being resolved.””
As of Monday, authorities had not announced any arrests or identified suspects.