Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha’olam asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu al ha-milah. Baruch atah adonai eloheinu melech ha’olam asher kidshanu b’mitzvotav v’tzivanu lihach-neeso bivreito shel Avraham aveenu.
Blessed are You, O Lord Our God, Ruler of the universe, who has sanctified us with Your commandments, and has given us the command concerning circumcision. Blessed are You, O Lord Our God, Ruler of the universe, who has sanctified us with Your commandments, and hast commanded us to make our sons enter the covenant of Abraham our father. (Source)
Eight days after birth, Jewish boys are supposed to be circumcised as part of the covenant between God and Abraham (in Genesis), as specified in Leviticus. In this way, Jewish boys are supposed to continue the line of the Children of Israel, fulfilling the obligations and duties laid out for them in the Torah.
There are no required rituals or ceremonies to mark the birth of a girl.
Snip snip!
Continue reading 'Circumcision'»
Hello again! I’m back from Minneapolis, and done (for the moment) with posting ridiculous photos from my trip. Last week, before I left, I participated in a panel discussion organized by the National Council of Jewish Women, as part of their Chicago chapter’s effort to build bridges between Jewish and LGBT communities. I was speaking as a “transgender activist,” which sort of amused me, and spoke alongside Lisa, a representative from the Center on Halsted and the Rabbi of Or Chadash.
The conversation was really interesting, and I’ll get to the meat of it later in this post. First, I want to talk about an interesting and thorny topic that came up during the discussion section of the evening. I claimed that, to truly integrate and embrace the LGBT community, Judaism needs to move away from inherently gendered ceremonies such as Bar and Bat Mitzvahs. That, even if the ceremonies are ‘equal’ (which is effectively true in liberal Judaism today, even if that wasn’t always the case) the idea of ‘separate but equal’ for boys and girls is a bad precedent to set at the threshold to adulthood.
I know this is going to be a tough pill to swallow for many Jews, and I said as much at the panel discussion. The idea of a Bar or Bat Mitzvah is ingrained in the idea of those ceremonies. But it’s flawed, problematic, and oppressive, particularly for trans Jews.
Continue reading 'Ba(r/t) Mitzvah'»
I’m a bad Jew.
I don’t say this because I’m not observant. (Although I’m not.) I don’t say this because I haven’t been to services in years. (Although I haven’t.) I don’t say this because I don’t keep kosher. (Although I don’t.)
I’m a bad Jew because I dislike Israel. Indeed, I oppose the very fact of its existence.
Israel has been on my mind a lot this past week, first because of the flotilla raid near Gaza, but also because of a post at From the Rib?. Specifically:
I believe that Jews should be able to be Jewish without needing to be tied to Israel; Israel does need the support of the international Jewish community and cannot be abandoned, but a connection to Judaism should not only be based on a connection to Israel. While learning about Israel is one important way to establish a Jewish identity, why can’t there be other ways? What ever happened to cultural Judaism based on Jewish literature, plays, and heritage? What happened to having a unique Jewish culture? (Emphasis added)
Yes, being Jewish should not depend on one’s attitude toward or connection with Israel. But I disagree that Israel cannot (or should not) be abandoned.
Continue reading 'Standing Against Israel'»
Some links for your Saturday enjoyment. First, from The Guardian, Nawal El Saadawi: Egypt’s radical feminist.
El Saadawi already seems to have lived more lives than most. She trained as a doctor, then worked as a psychiatrist and university lecturer, and has published almost 50 novels, plays and collections of short stories. Her work, which tackles the problems women face in Egypt and across the world, has always attracted outrage, but she never seems to have balked at this; she has continued to address controversial issues such as prostitution, domestic violence and religious fundamentalism in her writing.
Very worth reading.
Next, from Feministe, Hipsters, Hasidim and a Bike Lane in Brooklyn.
…this is where I lose sympathy. I get it you’ve lived here longer. And you know what? I do believe that when a wealthier, more powerful group comes into a traditionally marginalized community, seniority does matter. But at some point, you don’t get to pull the seniority card when it comes to your religiously-based objections to female use of public space and transportation. And here, the hipsters weren’t making rules for the entire community. They were using a public street, paid for with everyone’s tax dollars, to ride their bikes. I run out of patience for objections to people using public streets because your religion objects to the female form. I run out of patience where people object to having to see people who are different from them in New York City. This isn’t about, “Damn, all these outsiders are coming in and driving up the rental market and now I can’t afford my place” or “I moved here to live in a neighborhood, not to have a bunch of loud bars built on my block.” This is, “I think that my religious belief regarding the appropriateness of women in public should trump the rights of women to move through public space.”
Continue reading 'Feminists, hipsters, and a cuddling seal'»
I have a complicated relationship with Judaism, at best. I don’t need to get into my whole life experience . . . but (briefly) I really enjoy the cultural aspects of Judaism and appreciate its long history, yet have serious problems with Judaism as a religion and integrating the less-positive parts of Jewish history into the modern functioning of the religion.
Expanding on that, slightly, I have moved from being ambivalent to how I feel about Israel to being specifically anti-Israel. To wit, the ends don’t (shouldn’t) justify the means: The (sort of) peaceful (mostly) democratic State of Israel as a beacon of Western Civilization to the rest of the Middle East can’t, to me, excuse its horribly colonialist founding or head-in-the-sand attitude toward the idea of a Palestinian state. (I know things are much more complicated than that, and the obvious fact that Israel does exist today means grumblings over how things came to be this way are somewhat moot. Nevertheless…)
All of which means I’m not sure how I feel about Birthright Israel.
Continue reading 'Any experiences with Birthright?'»
EDIT: I’ve rewritten the final few paragraphs, my thoughts on all this, and apologize for any confusion.
Bond posted a while back about a court case where a British court was asked to rule if a Jewish school was being racially discriminatory when it rejected a student who did not have a Jewish mother:
The case in question concerns a 12-year-old boy, referred to court documents simply as “M,” whose application to London’s Jews’ Free School was rejected on the ground that his mother’s conversion to Judaism was not overseen by Orthodox rabbis. The case has forced a reexamination of whether Judaism is a religion, a race, or an ethnicity.
The court has ruled that the school was practicing racial discrimination. From The Guardian:
M’s father took the school to court claiming racial discrimination. In June, the court of appeal ruled in his favour. It said the school’s policy amounted to racial discrimination because it prioritised applications from children with Jewish mothers.
And, ultimately, the supreme court ruled (5 to 4) that the school had “directly discrimintated against M on grounds of his ethnic origins.”
Continue reading 'Who decides what is Jewish?'»
An interesting article at the NYT:
Then he led off the discussion of the homework assignment. It consisted of an article from the national Jewish newspaper, The Forward, about a married couple who participate avidly in both synagogue and swinging. “Aren’t these people just being honest?” Rabbi Lookstein asked. Five or six hands immediately shot up.
So began another day in Jewish Sexual Ethics, the course better known around Ramaz, even to its teacher, as “Sex With the Rabbi.” For the last 23 years, since Rabbi Lookstein devised the class, he has taught it to every 10th grader to pass through Ramaz, a Modern Orthodox institution combining rigorous secular and religious curriculums.
I don’t have anything to add, just thought it was an interesting article. And nice to see an article on a more conservative Jewish institution acknowledging that sex exists and shouldn’t be taboo.
Today is the Transgender Day of Remembrance, a day “set aside to memorialize those who were killed due to anti-transgender hatred or prejudice.” There’s an expectation that The Trans Community is supposed to come together and mourn our dead, celebrate our living. (Indeed, I’ll be performing tomorrow night at Center on Halsted’s Night of Fallen Stars, set up to do just that.)
I mentioned last year that I felt really disconnected from the TDOR, and I’m not sure my feelings have changed.
QueenEmily at Questioning Transphobia wrote a post, the drowned and the saved, today in which she said
There was an Italian atheist Jewish writer called Primo Levi who wrote about his experience of Auschwitz, over and over. In his last book The Drowned and the Saved, he drew up a distinction between “the drowned” (those who died) and “the saved” (those who lived). He argued that only the drowned could give true and full witness to the horror of the Shoah.
I’m not comparing the murders of trans people to the Shoah directly – the murder of trans people, which horrific, is not institutionally organised towards genocide in quite the same way. But what I want to point out is the structure of witnessing. Even Levi, a man who lived through the camp, at the end of his life felt inadequate to witnessing, unable to have fully experienced the violence he wrote about. Even his proximity was not enough.
She goes on to say that, even with her own experiences of transphobic hatred, it is impossible to properly give witness to those murdered, particularly across cultural or racial lines (most of those murdered this past year where latino or black, and in Central or South America). But that we should try, anyway, because it is our duty and responsibility to the dead.
Continue reading 'Transgender day of what?'»
I was discussing my upcoming show with a friend recently, mentioning how I’m trying to keep my “success” threshold pretty low. Specifically, if the show goes off without too many disasters, has at least a few people come, and doesn’t massively suck, I’ll be happy.
She responded, “You’re such a Jew.”
I laughed, but said I didn’t quite get it.
She simply said, “Dayenu,” which made me understand the joke and laugh all the harder.
Continue reading 'If you’re Jewish and you know it, clap your hands'»
Daisy, the always-interesting author of Dear Diaspora, posted some of her thoughts on Judaism. She begins:
Something has been weighing on my mind lately. I am now more or less an adult, with the duties of an adult, and I realize that it is now up to me and my peers to take on the task of continuing Judaism. It is with us that Judaism will adapt and thrive or stagnate and die; it us up to us to create a new Jewish generation, or to allow our numbers to dwindle. The task of survival is ours, and the ship is ours to steer. We can make of this inheritance what we want.
She continues on the importance of Judaism to her, and how she feels about continuing to discover what the ‘next generation’ of Judaism will look like, and ends with some questions for other Jews. I’m still struggling with my Jewish identity, and figured I’d try to go through Daisy’s questions in hopes of getting my own thoughts together…
What do you like about Judaism and Jewish culture? What do you dislike?
I like the feeling that, in the very liberal form of Judaism in which I was raised, it’s possible to modify and change rituals and ceremonies to speak to what is important to whomever is performing them.
As an example, at this past Passover, the Seder I went to consisted of Passover Jeopardy, led by the hostess, followed immediately by dinner. Likewise, the year before, the Seder consisted of people going around the table and giving voice to oppressions which still exist today. In both situations, I felt a connection with Jewish history without feeling obligated to engage in a long ritual in which I, personally, don’t find much value.
Continue reading 'What do I want Judaism to be?'»
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