Countless Jews can recount a particularly moving experience they had at the Western Wall. For so many, standing in front of the remnants of the ancient Temple has evoked tears, renewed faith or a stronger sense of identification with the Jewish people as a whole.
TJ Michels and Ali Cannon are among them. But for them, the holiest site of Judaism is also where they were forced to reconcile their Jewish and sexual identities in a whole new way.
Their dialogue about that encounter appears in “Queer Jews,” a new anthology edited by Caryn Aviv, a San Francisco resident, and David Shneer, a former education director at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, who now lives in Denver.
Michels, a former copy editor for the Jewish Bulletin, first encountered Cannon when she was interviewing him for an article on a play Cannon was in.
Cannon, who identified as a lesbian for many years, now lives as a man. He is a former program director of the Holocaust Center of Northern California.
Michels, who was mistaken for a man and allowed to approach the wall on the men’s side, was going to write her piece by herself. But then she learned that Cannon had a similar experience, except in reverse.
“After meeting Ali and finding out where we overlapped and departed, I knew the backdrop would be this butch-FTM (female-to-male) discussion,” said Michels.
Writes Cannon: “The act of going to the Wall and living as a man for three weeks in Israel catapulted me to a sense of urgency…I had to reconcile that rite of passage because I had claimed something most sacred about myself as a man before those ancient stones.”
A lot has happened in the queer Jewish world since the anthologies”Nice Jewish Girls” by Evelyn Torton Beck and “Twice Blessed” by Avi Rose and Christie Balka examined the intersection between Jewish and sexual identity.
In fact, Aviv came up with the idea to do “Queer Jews” when she realized that “Twice Blessed” was already 12 years old.
One big difference is the use of the word “queer,” a term that anyone younger than 40 is comfortable with, but clearly, many others who identify as gay or lesbian are not.
At a recent reading in Philadelphia, an elderly man stood up and read the definition of queer in the dictionary aloud. “He said it’s degrading, and humiliating and finished by saying ‘I’m gay,'” said Aviv.
Aviv understood where he was coming from. However, in the current climate, the word “queer” has been reclaimed and bestowed with a sense of power, she explained.
Additionally, queer is all-inclusive; unlike gay or lesbian, it also refers to those who identify as transgender or bisexual.
Aviv is 33 and Shneer is 30, and many of the contributors are in that same age group. The writers in this anthology identify as queer, and most were born after the 1969 Stonewall riot in New York. AIDS, which might have been a dominant issue in an earlier anthology of this nature, is hardly mentioned.
“That shocked both of us,” said Shneer. “While a lot of queer Jews are living with it, it’s not the same political and identity issue that it was 10 years ago.”
Collecting abstracts helped Aviv and Shneer figure out what issues were most important to queer Jews today. Shneer said family issues, which are a dominant issue for secular gay-rights groups now, are also high on the agenda of queer Jews. “There was a lot about marriage and family and a lot about how queer Jews are working with, in or against Jewish institutions,” he said.
Many of the writers discuss how, when they came out, their Judaism had to take a backseat to their queer identity, as it was so difficult to reconcile the two. But that is clearly no longer the case.
“Oppression is no longer the only way queer Jews approach their sexual identity,” said Shneer. “Queer and Jewish are no longer just things to be overcome or reconciled; in fact, for many of the authors, they are mutually empowering.”
Bay Area contributors include Rabbi Jane Rachel Litman of Berkeley’s Temple Beth-El, who writes about how performing same-sex commitment ceremonies has become one of the most meaningful parts of her rabbinate; Jaron Kanegson of Berkeley, who writes about being a transgender Hebrew teacher; Shneer, who writes about the challenges of “queering” Jewish education; and Jill Nagle of San Francisco, whose piece “Queer Naked Seder and Other Newish Jewish Traditions” will no doubt offend some, as it incorporates Jewish ritual with group sex.
“She’s being irreverent with Jewish ritual but honoring it in new ways, which is hard for people to understand,” said Aviv, of Nagle’s piece. “That’s the one essay that pushes people’s buttons.”
While hoping mainstream rabbis might put this book on their shelf to recommend to congregants who come to them in fear that their son or daughter might be gay, Aviv said, “this is the one essay that could cause people to hesitate.”
Interestingly, while “Queer Jews” has been all over the queer press, the Jewish Bulletin of Northern California has, so far, been the only Jewish newspaper in the country to write about it. This proves to the authors that the Jewish establishment still has a long way to go before it is totally comfortable with this segment of the population.
“It’s a really unapologetic anthology,” said Aviv. Basically, what the writers are saying is “we refuse to abandon Judaism. We’re integral participants in Jewish life, and we’re queer and you all have to deal with it.”