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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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How the next generation of rabbis is preparing for the age of A.I.
Denise Blumenfeld’s AI learning tool doesn’t have all the answers — or at least it’s not so eager to give them away. Instead, Blumenfeld, a second-year student at the Orthodox women’s seminary Yeshivat Maharat, has customized ChatGPT to answer her with questions with a question.
I watched recently as Blumenfeld fed a paragraph of Talmud into the module, aptly named Socrates Havruta (its surname is Hebrew for study partner). Its response tested her reading comprehension: Based on the first line of the text, what is the basic obligation around candlelighting? Blumenfeld typed in an answer, which Socrates affirmed before asking another.
She knew ChatGPT could simply summarize the text, but would that really help her learn it? On the other hand, responding to questions could help someone figure things out on their own. And to keep herself honest, she’d set a rule: “I always try to read the authentic source first,” she told me.
Blumenfeld is part of the first generation of rabbinical students who are training with artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google Gemini at their disposal — and hoping to avoid those tools becoming a crutch. But the beit midrash, or study hall, is just one of many contact points they have with an invention that may be changing not only what it means to be a student or a rabbi, but also what it means to be Jewish.
To get a sense of how AI is helping shape the next generation of the rabbinate, I interviewed students from five U.S.-based rabbinical schools about how use and think about AI in relation to their work. Their attitudes ranged from guarded enthusiasm to flat rejection. But their comments — and the boundaries they had each set around their personal use — revealed the deep influence AI is already having on their professional and religious outlook.
This was true even for students who did not use generative AI at all. Adrian Marcos, a student at the Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies, listed moral reasons he avoided it, among them its exploitation of stolen data, its environmental impact, and the digital literacy crisis it was accelerating. Yet Marcos admitted that the burden of explanation fell on AI’s detractors, not its enthusiasts.
“A lot of people are very into AI, and as a rabbi, whether or not you end up in a pulpit, you have to converse with those people,” said Marcos, a second-year student at the Conservative seminary. “And as the technology evolves, the conversations around it are also going to evolve.”
Hacking the sermon
ChatGPT can seemingly draw on the entire digitized Jewish canon, translate it from Hebrew if necessary, and draft new content about it. For students pursuing the rabbinate because of their passion for seeking and sharing knowledge themselves, the question was whether a tool that lightened the load was really helping.
Aiden Englander, a fourth-year at Yeshiva University’s Rabbi Isaac Elhanan Theological Seminary, engages ChatGPT for on-call intellectual companionship. Upon finding an interesting commentary on the week’s Torah portion, he’ll ask ChatGPT for secular variations on the idea. It might spit out Nietzsche, he said, or a recent news story.
Knowing ChatGPT can make such a connection unlocks a different level of rhetorical ambition — serving as a kind of academic force-multiplier — but it forecloses the possibility of, well, sorting out his concept without it. It also raises the question of what makes a sermon “better,” and whether literature you’ve only learned about via ChatGPT summary is any less suitable for a sermon than a volume you’re still working through on the page.
Englander’s calculus was straightforward. “When you’re able to quote a book that someone is familiar with, they’ll remember it more,” he said.
Though an avid user, he harbors doubts about AI’s reliability. “It will just completely make up a Gemara,” he said, and in his view its knowledge is especially shallow in matters of Jewish law. Yet what ChatGPT can do is what makes Englander, who is 24, most cautious. In a creative pinch, he’ll ask it to bullet-point some possible themes to explore from that week’s Torah portion to write a sermon about. But that’s a muscle he’s conscious about developing, so he tries to desist.
Yet a theological question about AI use persists underneath the utilitarian concerns. Is a ChatGPT-generated d’var torah a bad idea because it’s likely to spew cliches or degrade one’s writing ability — or because the very notion of a computer recommendation defeats the purpose of the exercise, which is to bring human experience to bear upon the Torah and vice versa? Major Jewish denominations have been as quiet on the religious questions around AI as rabbinical schools have been on the practical ones, leaving students to work out both problems on their own.
“An LLM doesn’t have autobiography — it’s not having a faith experience,” said Dani Pattiz, a second-year student at Hebrew Union College. “It can come up with these brilliant syntheses of other people’s ideas. But at the end of the day, it can’t genuinely glorify God, or speak to people’s souls in an authentic way.”
A changing pulpit
As they navigated their own use of AI, rabbinical students were pondering how it would reshape the lives of their future congregants, and in turn, their own work.
On a recent trip to Washington, Micah Glickman, a rabbinical student at Hebrew Union College, the flagship Reform seminary, visited a synagogue where a number of congregants had been laid off in DOGE’s federal job cuts. AI’s impact on employment, he realized, could be exponentially greater. If that were the case, it was not merely that more people would be facing financial and emotional vulnerability. It was also that a universal source of human fulfillment might have an expiration date.
“It seems like the promise of this technology is to basically do anything that a person can do, and do it better than that person can,” Glickman said in an interview. “And I wonder how that will affect a congregation of people who maybe derive a sense of meaning and purpose from their accomplishments in life.”
It would fall on rabbis and other faith leaders, Glickman said, to shepherd their communities through this change. “There’s some impending spiritual crisis that we’re on the verge of,” he said. He was helping organize a symposium at HUC to consider these and other AI-related issues — seeking a spiritual solution, he said, to a spiritual problem.
Meanwhile, he was already encountering ChatGPT-written bar mitzvah speeches from the students he tutors. That put him in the position of his HUC professors: Should he discourage kids from using it, or — conceding to inevitability — try to steer them towards using AI responsibly?
It was a theme across interviews: The future rabbis I spoke to were more worried about how the generation after them would learn than they were about their own trajectories. Today’s students, after all, largely passed their studies prior to rabbinical school without ChatGPT; they were wary of atrophy only because they knew they had muscles to begin with.
Even Blumenfeld, the Maharat student, was not sure she would recommend her Socrates bot to younger students. “Because I had experience learning and teaching before AI, I know what the result I’m looking for is, and know how to ask the right thing,” she said, whereas kids at that age hadn’t yet developed those skills. “As teachers,” she added, “we need to learn how to teach.”
They also need to teach how to learn, and why to learn. YU’s Englander recalled a thought experiment shared decades ago by the university’s former president Rabbi Norman Lamm: If you could implant a microchip into your brain that gave you complete knowledge of the Torah, would you ever have to learn? Lamm’s opinion was that learning in fact had primacy over knowledge — that the toil of studying the Torah was not just a means to an end, but a form of worship in and of itself.
“This might be a little bit more of a mystical notion, but from the standpoint of accessing Hashem, it’s only accomplished through learning the text and struggling with it, not being told what the text says by a third party,“ Englander said. The reason he could generally detect when ChatGPT was hallucinating the Talmud, he added, was because he had put in the hours studying it himself.
The post How the next generation of rabbis is preparing for the age of A.I. appeared first on The Forward.
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Belgium Joins South Africa’s Genocide Case Against Israel at UN Court
A general view inside the International Court of Justice (ICJ), at the start of a hearing where South Africa requests new emergency measures over Israel’s operations in Rafah, in The Hague, Netherlands, May 17, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Yves Herman
Belgium officially became the latest country to join South Africa’s genocide case against Israel at the United Nations’ top court on Tuesday, as international pressure mounts on the Jewish state despite a US-backed ceasefire that has so far paused the two-year conflict in the Gaza Strip.
The International Court of Justice (ICJ) announced that Brussels has requested to join the South African case by filing a declaration of intervention, allowing it to participate without being the original plaintiff.
Belgium joins several other countries in the case, including Brazil, Colombia, Ireland, Mexico, Spain, Turkey, Cuba, Libya, Bolivia, the Maldives, Chile, and “Palestine.”
Earlier this year, South Africa vowed to continue its genocide case against Israel despite the ceasefire in Gaza, the most significant effort yet to halt the two-year Middle Eastern conflict.
Speaking before parliament in Cape Town, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa affirmed that the US-backed peace deal “will have no bearing” on the ongoing legal proceedings against the Jewish state.
Ramaphosa promised to continue seeking “justice for the people of Gaza,” while reiterating false accusations that Israel committed genocide under international law during its defensive military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas.
Israel has strongly rejected all allegations of genocide, calling South Africa’s case “baseless” and “politically motivated.”
Ramaphosa’s continuing push comes amid ongoing international pressure, with the US, South African political leaders, and the local Jewish community all expressing opposition to his government’s actions, accusing it of pursuing an anti-Israel campaign instead of addressing the country’s own pressing issues.
Since December 2023, South Africa has been pursuing its case at the ICJ accusing Israel of committing “state-led genocide” in its defensive war against Hamas in Gaza.
Israeli leaders have condemned the case as an “obscene exploitation” of the Genocide Convention, noting that the Jewish state is targeting terrorists who use civilians as human shields in its military campaign.
Meanwhile, South Africa’s Jewish community have lambasted the case as “grandstanding” rather than actual concern for those killed in the Middle Eastern conflict.
Last year, the ICJ ruled there was “plausibility” to South Africa’s claims that Palestinians had a right to be protected from genocide.
However, the top UN court did not make a determination on the merits of South Africa’s allegations, which may take years to go through the judicial process, nor did it call for Israel to halt its military campaign.
Instead, the ICJ issued a more general directive that Israel must make sure it prevents acts of genocide. The ruling also called for the release of the hostages kidnapped by Hamas during the terrorist group’s invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
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US Professor Who Was Suspended After Calling for ‘War on Israel’ Requests Reinstatement in Lawsuit
Illustrative: A student puts on their anti-Israel graduation cap. Photo: Angelina Katsanis via Reuters Connect
A University of Kentucky professor who is serving an interim suspension for promoting an antisemitic petition which called for “Palestine everywhere from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean See” on Friday asked a US federal judge to reinstate him even as an investigation into his remarks is ongoing.
The instructor, Ramsi Woodcock, teaches at the University of Kentucky J. David Rosenberg College of Law. In July, he shared a petition which implored “every country in the world to make war on Israel until such time as Israel has submitted permanently and unconditionally to the government of Palestine.” Using a variation of the “from the river to sea, Palestine will be free” slogan that has become a signature of anti-Zionist groups around the world, he echoed language that has been widely recognized as calling for the destruction of Israel, the world’s lone Jewish state.
Woodcock also self-identifies as an “antizionist scholar of law and economics” on his website, where he introduces himself as a scholar “who recognizes that my country is currently committing a genocide of Palestinians through the colony that we maintain in Palestine called the ‘State of Israel.’” The academic goes on to state, “I oppose the genocide and the existence of that colony. I believe that the international community has a moral and legal duty to go to war to liberate Palestine and end Israel.”
The University of Kentucky responded to the incident in July by suspending Woodcock and banning him from campus, citing his “disturbing conduct” and “calling for the destruction of a people based on national origin.” In reaching a decision, the university drew from state guidance based on the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism as well as its own principles.
“We condemn any call for violence and the views expressed online certainly do not represent the institution’s views. They express hate,” university president Eli Capilouto said in a statement. “While someone in his or her personal capacity may be free to express themselves, the university is also free to make clear that the individual’s personal views are not those of our community.”
Citing the university’s obligations under Title VI of the US Civil Rights Act, he added, “Let me be clear: the views expressed by this employee, if accurately attributed, are repugnant. Importantly, too, if such individual expressions threaten the safety and well-being of the university’s students and staff, we are obligated to act to protect our community and our people.”
Woodcock sued the university in November, arguing that the decision to suspend him violates his First Amendment rights and “degrades the quality of education the University of Kentucky.”
In his latest legal action, Woodcock, testifying on Friday at the US District courthouse in Lexington, Kentucky during an evidentiary hearing, demanded to be allowed to teach during this upcoming spring semester and denied the allegations against him. For its part, the university continues to pay his salary but maintains that he must remain inactive until it concludes its investigation into his alleged misconduct.
The judge presiding over the case, Danny C. Reeves, did not issue a ruling, as he is awaiting the filing of two additional motions calling for the lawsuit’s dismissal or abeyance, pending the outcome of the university’s investigation. According to the Kentucky Lantern, he did say in court that Woodcock’s team has failed so far to show a “nickel’s worth of harm.”
Following the hearing, the university said, “We were pleased to defend the university’s decisions to investigate Professor Woodcock and to reassign him during the investigations.”
Woodcock is not the first professor to face disciplinary sanctions for using the campus as a platform for calling for violence against Jews.
In September, Cornell University canceled the course of a professor who according to the school violated federal anti-discrimination law when he expelled an Israeli student from class. Later, the professor reached an agreement with the administration which allowed him to retire rather than serve out his punishment.
According to a recent survey conducted by the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) and the Academic Engagement Network (AEN), university faculty and staff have exacerbated the antisemitism crisis on US college campuses by politicizing the classroom, promoting anti-Israel bias, and even discriminating against Jewish colleagues.
The actions by faculty provided an academic pretext for the relentless wave of antisemitic incidents of discrimination and harassment which pro-Hamas activists have perpetrated against Jewish and Israeli members of campus communities since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, according to the survey, released in September.
The survey of “Jewish-identifying US-based faculty members” found that 73 percent of Jewish faculty witnessed their colleagues engaging in antisemitic activity, and a significant percentage named the Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine (FSJP) group as the force driving it. Of those aware of an FSJP chapter on their campus, the vast majority of respondents reported that the chapter engaged in anti-Israel programming (77.2 percent), organized anti-Israel protests and demonstrations (79.4 percent), and endorsed anti-Israel divestment campaigns (84.8 percent).
Additionally, 50 percent of respondents said that anti-Zionist faculty have established de facto, or “shadow,” boycotts of Israel on campus even in the absence of formal declaration or recognition of one by the administration. Among those who reported the presence of such a boycott, 55 percent noted that departments avoid co-sponsoring events with Jewish or pro-Israel groups and 29.5 percent said this policy is also subtly enacted by sabotaging negotiations for partnerships with Israeli institutions. All the while, such faculty fostered an environment in which Jewish professors were “maligned, professionally isolated, and in severe cases, doxxed or harassed” as they assumed the right to determine for their Jewish colleagues what constitutes antisemitism.
In September 2024, AMCHA Initiative, an education nonprofit, published a groundbreaking study which showed that the FSJP is fueling antisemitic hate crimes, efforts to impose divestment on endowments, and the collapse of discipline and order on college campuses. Using data analysis, AMCHA researchers said they were able to establish a correlation between a school’s hosting an FSJP chapter and anti-Zionist and antisemitic activity. For example, the researchers found that the presence of FSJP on a college campus increased by seven times “the likelihood of physical assaults and Jewish students” and increased by three times the chance that a Jewish student would be subject to threats of violence and death.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.