What does it mean to get dressed up for the dressiest of Jewish holidays for transgender Jews, for whom simple wardrobe choices can balloon into complex issues of identity? And what does it mean for Jews and Jewish families with diverse ethnic and racial backgrounds to prep for the High Holy Days?
A pair of articles this week addressed those questions.
First, from women’s style website Refinery29, a fashion column of sorts: When writer Hannah Simpson made her debut as a woman at the Jewish new year, moving on from the menswear she’d worn in years past, she was “celebrating a season of growth an change,” she writes. “Rosh Hashanah is a time of new beginnings; we try to present ourselves fittingly. The outfits can be as diverse as the congregants.”
She profiles the High Holy Day outfits of two others, including Halley C. “So many of us have been told that we’re ‘too much’ or ‘too loud’ or ‘too’ something,” Halley says. That the color and detail of her whole outfit match, including her tallit, “is not just an affectation – it is a form of prayer.”
And from Huffington Post: “What It’s Like For Non-White Jews During The High Holidays.” The article includes brief first-person essays, including one by Helen Kim, a Korean American married to a Jewish man.
Kim, who will convert later this year, writes: “There are certainly cultural differences between the idea of repentance and forgiveness within Judaism vs. Korean Confucianism. For me, this is what makes the philosophy on forgiveness within Judaism compelling because I was never completely satisfied with Korean Confucianism’s approach to these practices.”
Sandra Lawson, a black Jew-by-choice and a student in the Reconstructionist rabbinical program, writes: “This year on the 1st of Elul, also known to some as the month of love, I was blessed to marry my life partner, Susan. … This is also a time where I reflect on my own history, and the journey that has brought me to this day…”