some Jewish astrology history from our friends at the Yiddish Book Center!
queerkeitcoven reblogged
A Medieval Gay Brawl in the Synagogue On Yom Kippur
Sometimes the finds of the Genizah are so incredible that you have difficulty believing that it’s really there, that you are really peering through this window into the lives of medieval Jews around the Mediterranean. This story caught my attention in a footnote of Goitein’s and I thought I would post it for Yom Kippur… It’s not really magic-related, except that I think there’s a certain magic in recovering and reclaiming the past.
The fragment shown here, T-S 8J22.25 in Cambridge, is a letter from a Jewish pilgrim named Hasan ben Mu’ammal, who had gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the High Holidays, Tishrei 4813 = September 1052 CE. He reports that a certain Daniel had wished to see him but he was unable to, because of “the altercation” that had happened in synagogue. Apparently, on Yom Kippur, many pilgrims had gathered from around the Mediterranean, and “a man from Tiberias and a man from [Tyre] became involved in love, and the Tiberian began fondling [?] the Tyrian in the sight of everyone… and the people from Tiberias and those from Tyre began to fight with one another and went out to […] and they brought the chief of the police to the synagogue and […] until the people calmed down.” Hasan goes on to report that Daniel had told him that “such is the behaviour of these people every day,” and concludes the letter with best wishes to the recipients (his brother Abu Nasr and family). A wild ride from start to finish. Goitein drily observes that the letter indicates that homosexuality was regarded as a “vice rather than a deadly crime… [and] it did not form the object of great social concern.”
Shana tova — welcome to 5777! May all who are fasting have a meaningful, enriching, and affirming day… and hopefully a peaceful one too!
A classic post! This source is now available with a full translation and commentary in my book, A Rainbow Thread. Shana tova, and may all who are observing Yom Kippur have a meaningful holiday!
When I spoke at Anshe Emet Synagogue for Pride, I challenged them to transform the memory of queer Jewish history into action... One of the new projects that they have taken on is honouring Ben Rosenstein, a transmasculine Jewish immigrant who died of tuberculosis in 1915, and is buried in Chicago in a pauper's grave without a headstone.
The synagogue is raising money to remember this queer/trans ancestor by providing Ben with a proper headstone. This project is so important, especially in a time when the stories we tell about America, about migration, and about family, are ever expanding. The greatest kindness that one can do in the Jewish tradition is to give dignity to the dead. Will you help me honour the life and death of Ben Rosenstein?
Originating from a broad range of geographic and chronological contexts, these texts, many of them appearing for the first time in English, offer the reader a broad vision of what it has meant to be a queer Jew throughout history — even in contexts where queerness has traditionally been assumed absent. Academic and lay readers alike will discover an astonishing variety of personal stories, poems, and midrashim in the anthology... I have been following the project since Noam first decided to publish it as a book — and was delighted to discuss it with him in more depth...
SL: What are your hopes for the book now that it’s been published?
NS: There’s almost no area of the Jewish world or aspect of Jewish life that is not touched upon in some way in the book — rabbinic literature, Hebrew poetry, Jewish immigration, secularization, modernization, and the development of the field of sexology. I really want other scholars to run with all of those different directions. The hope I have moving forward is that more people will be able to open up these historical fields.
There’s definitely more academic work to be produced from the book. About a third of the material in the book has never been published in English translation. Some material, sourced from archives, appears in this book for the very first time.
One reason why I chose to publish it with a trade press rather than an academic press is because I also wanted it to have a wider audience than just academics. I wanted a high school, even middle school, student to be able to read it, and I very consciously tried to write in a way that was accessible to laypeople. I’m excited to see the book serve as a resource for nonacademics: artists, filmmakers, playwrights, graphic novelists and people who are doing other kinds of Jewish programming. The stories included in this book could make wonderful plays, art installations, documentary films, comic books and graphic novels, children’s books, et cetera. I’m not the person to do that, but I’m really excited to put out the raw material for other people to work with.
SL: There’s a lot of talk right now among Jewish authors about what is out there for young readers that represents the full spectrum of Jewish experiences.
NS: It’s so rich and so much of it is unknown, and so really this book is an excuse to get people to read primary sources from Jewish history. If the fact that it’s about lesbians or about cross-dressing stowaways or about Yeshiva students sleeping with each other gets people excited to read that, great — but what’s equally exciting to me is that this might be a conduit for someone to learning about Jewish life in the Ottoman Empire, or life in colonial Brazil, or in medieval Iraq.
The intent of this book is to broaden the horizon of Jewish history — in terms of sexuality, gender, temporality, and location. I think people might be surprised to discover just how many areas of Jewish life can be enriched through the incorporation of these marginalized voices.
"[A rabbi in 1969] looked at his Jewish 'bookshelf.' And he said 'I don't see anything that deals with homosexuality.' [He concluded] that homosexuals don't exist in Jewish history. But the mistake that he makes is that he looks at what happens to be on his 'bookshelf' -- the Mishnah, and Talmud, and Medieval compilations of Jewish law, all written by men, mostly written in Europe -- and thinks 'that's everything I need to know about Judaism.' But that bookshelf is just a sliver -- the '1%.' As soon as we move the spotlight over a bit, we see an entirely different picture of Judaism."
Listen in to the latest episode of Judaism Unbound, featuring Noam Sienna, author of A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts!
queerkeitcoven reblogged
“The man was an enigma. A homosexual surrounded by women, an outright anti-Zionist who came to appear in Israel. Musically he was diverse as well, and was blessed with lots of color and richness. On the one hand, his singing was essentially Arab. On the other hand, he corresponds with styles that also spoke to Western ears. At heart he was a pop singer, the sort who performed in coffee shops and at weddings.”
— Tom Cohen
ברוך שהחינו וקימנו והגיענו לזמן הזה / Blessed is the One who has enlivened us, sustained us, and brought us to this moment.
Not much more to say at the moment except acknowledge the overflowing gratitude to all the mentors, colleagues, scholars, activists, lovers, and friends who contributed to making this book possible. Looking forward to sharing it with all of you! If you’d like to bring me to your community to share the stories of A Rainbow Thread, please get in touch!
queerkeitcoven reblogged
[Image Description: a black and white photo of Salim Halali, an Algerian-Turkish man wearing a suit with a white flower and bow tie and a fez.]
The life story of Salim Halali is one with countless branches. His experiences as a gay Jewish man in Paris in the 1930’s are as eventful as one would imagine, and his music career is not only well known but well remembered, what with being crowned the “King of Shaabi” at the height of his popularity. He lived just as extravagantly behind closed doors, often throwing lavish parties with his two pet tigers. There’s much to be said of his storied life. (Read full article)
If you want to read about the fusion of modernist futurism and mystical messianism in Yiddish poetry, you may be interested in this article in the latest issue of In Geveb. Nathan Wolski analyses Aaron Zeitlin’s Keter, which uses the image of an “androginos,” a multi-gendered (or non-gendered) being from Jewish mythology, to portray his vision of a unified new consciousness.
“Although the messiah figures throughout the poem, the messianic is primarily imagined as the overcoming of fallen reality and the return to humanity’s edenic condition, prior to duality and multiplicity, outside time, and before sex. This new state is described variously throughout the work, but perhaps the central image for this new phase in human existence is the androgyne... Zeitlin’s androgyne rises at the very end of history following the annihilation of time, and signifies unity regained and the arrival of new consciousness... Furthermore, the new androgyne will not simply be a recapitulation of the old. In place of a back to back configuration, as described by the rabbis, the new Woman and Man, like the cherubim above the ark, will be aligned face to face... So united, sexuality—the most essential marker of duality—comes to an end. Hence the surprising call of the poet, “May sexuality cease!” and the wish for “Liberation from multiplicity, / From sexual two-ing and three-ing!””
And here are some excerpts from the poem itself:
An androgyne will arise from us, planted like a tree by its stake! And the most supremely-sonorous and sharpest of axes Will be unable to shatter in pieces its ONE: Its clothing and robes— Stone, And it, the serene one, alone— Luminous stone. Awesome and radiant and beautifully Samsonite-grown— Luminous stone. At its feet— Everything. And it, serene colossus— Over all. It looks and understands An expectant, quiet understanding. It stands— And is stone... And that androgyne, The one extending unto Keter Will not be like the ancient androgyne, Who once stood in the Garden of Eden, Before Adam-Eve were separated By the serpent-youth, the divider! No one will tear it apart, A one-alone will it be, a child of sun and stones, And its two countenances Will be aligned one towards the other,— Not like before, when stormy desires Burned like smoke, Because Adam’s face could not see Eve’s... At that time shall begin A never-been-before monumentality. The old wine barrel—will lie empty, God will uncork a new barrel of wine, [primed and ready,] A world without evil and without sexuality, The world of after-world shall it be!
A Medieval Gay Brawl in the Synagogue On Yom Kippur
Sometimes the finds of the Genizah are so incredible that you have difficulty believing that it’s really there, that you are really peering through this window into the lives of medieval Jews around the Mediterranean. This story caught my attention in a footnote of Goitein’s and I thought I would post it for Yom Kippur… It’s not really magic-related, except that I think there’s a certain magic in recovering and reclaiming the past.
The fragment shown here, T-S 8J22.25 in Cambridge, is a letter from a Jewish pilgrim named Hasan ben Mu’ammal, who had gone on pilgrimage to Jerusalem for the High Holidays, Tishrei 4813 = September 1052 CE. He reports that a certain Daniel had wished to see him but he was unable to, because of “the altercation” that had happened in synagogue. Apparently, on Yom Kippur, many pilgrims had gathered from around the Mediterranean, and “a man from Tiberias and a man from [Tyre] became involved in love, and the Tiberian began fondling [?] the Tyrian in the sight of everyone… and the people from Tiberias and those from Tyre began to fight with one another and went out to […] and they brought the chief of the police to the synagogue and […] until the people calmed down.” Hasan goes on to report that Daniel had told him that “such is the behaviour of these people every day,” and concludes the letter with best wishes to the recipients (his brother Abu Nasr and family). A wild ride from start to finish. Goitein drily observes that the letter indicates that homosexuality was regarded as a “vice rather than a deadly crime… [and] it did not form the object of great social concern.”
Shana tova — welcome to 5777! May all who are fasting have a meaningful, enriching, and affirming day… and hopefully a peaceful one too!
And now, 5778. Tzom mo’il!
theatrejew
5779!!
queerkeitcoven reblogged
Johnny Abush, the creator and curator of the first LGBT+ Jewish archive, leads Queer Yiddishists at a pride parade circa. early 1990s.
Abush died of AIDs on November 26, 2000/Cheshvan 28, 5761, may his memory be a blessing.
queerkeitcoven reblogged
Who else is running around with muppet level excitement?!
Have some Pride posters featuring LGBTQ Jews!
queerkeitcoven reblogged
“I defend the foreign-born against the present deportation hysteria because of a consciousness that it was the foreign-born and their children who built this nation of ours and who have been its most loyal partners.” – Pearl M. Hart . Picture: Pearl M. Hart (April 7, 1890 – March 22, 1975), c. 1965. c/o @gerberhart. . Pearl M. Hart, who was born one hundred and twenty-seven years ago today as Pearl Minnie Harchovsky, was a Chicago attorney who dedicated her life to defending the underrepresented. . After being admitted to the bar in 1914, Hart became one of the first female attorneys in Chicago to specialize in criminal law. In her early career, she focused on the needs of young people in the juvenile court system, and then on issues facing women—many of whom were charged with prostitution—passing through the courts. In 1933, Hart volunteered to serve as the first public defender in the city’s morals court, where most of the female defendants were unable to afford counsel. Before Hart took the position, the court’s conviction rate was approximately 90%; within four months of Hart’s arrival, that number dropped to 10%. . In the 1950s, Hart helped clients accused of communist subversion. In a landmark case, the United States Supreme Court sided with Hart and her client, George Witkovich, holding that non-citizens are protected by the constitutional guarantees of free association and speech. . Throughout her career, Hart defended members of Chicago’s queer community against police and other official harassment. Although generally a private person, Hart became more visible in the homophile movement in the 1960s, helping to form Mattachine Midwest and speaking on its behalf. . Hart met pulp writer and poet Valerie Taylor in 1961 and the two became partners in 1963; they remained a couple until Hart’s death. . Pearl M. Hart died of pancreatic cancer on March 22, 1975; she was eighty-four. . Despite Hart’s decades of work for social justice, Valerie Taylor was denied admittance to Hart’s hospital room as she lay dying; by the time Taylor was let in, Hart had slipped into a coma from which she would not wake. #lgbthistory #HavePrideInHistory #PearlHart (at Chicago, Illinois)
Pearl Hart was also Jewish, and her father was an Orthodox rabbi, whom she would quote in her speeches. It was an essential part of her activism and her identity. Her moral clarity, and passionate advocacy for the protection of society’s most vulnerable, including children, migrants and the “foreign born,” and the LGBTQ community, is more relevant today than ever.
queerkeitcoven reblogged
“It was oddly liberating. You identify yourself more as a gay man, or whoever you are, and it helps you to realize who you are as an artist,” said Ross Bleckner. In honor of Pride Month, celebrate with the artist’s Double Portrait (Gay Flag) on view now. As its title suggests, this self-portrait raises the conceptual issue of doubleness: the stripes form the gay pride flag, referring to the artist’s own identity as a gay man, and his Jewishness is symbolized by the Star of David, in subtle low relief at upper center of the painting.
queerkeitcoven reblogged
10 LGBTQ Jewish Women from History You Should Know
Another sneak preview from my anthology, in honour of International Women’s Day! Preorders will be coming soon: to sign up, go to the Print-O-Craft website! And of course this isn’t a comprehensive list… These are just entries for which I happen to have photographs (and so it’s very 20th-century heavy, and Ashkenazi-heavy — but trust me, there’s more in the book!).
Clockwise, from top left:
1. Rina Natan (b. 1923). The first trans woman known to have transitioned in Israel. Born in Germany, she made aliya in 1946, and began advocating for her case for transition in 1953, inspired by Christine Jorgensen. She finally underwent sex affirmation surgery at Assaf Harofeh Medical Center in 1956 and received a new te'udat zehut [identity card], but continued to face discrimination and suspicion. In 1958 she left Israel for Switzerland; further details of her life are unknown.
2. Emma Lazarus (1849-1887). Born to a prominent American Portuguese-Sephardi family, Lazarus is most well known for her poem, “The New Colossus,” written in 1883 and inscribed on the base of the Statue of Liberty in 1903. In several of her other published and unpublished poems, Lazarus openly expressed a yearning desire for emotional and erotic connection with other women, but nothing is known about her own sexual or romantic life; Lazarus died of Hodgkin’s disease at the age of 38.
3. Charlotte Wolff (1897-1986). A German Jewish physician, psychologist, and sexologist. In 1933 she fled Nazi Germany to Paris, and then to London, where she lived the rest of her life (with a brief return to Germany in the late 1970s). Her first publications dealt with cheirology (the study of the hand), but in the late 60s she turned to the study of sexuality, and began a series of in-depth interviews with lesbians and bisexual women that resulted in her groundbreaking study Love Between Women (1971), followed by Bisexuality (1977).
4. Vera Lachmann (1904-1985). A renowned classicist, poet, and teacher. Born in Berlin, she graduated from the University of Berlin in 1931; in 1933, she opened a school in Berlin for Jewish children, and maintained it until the Nazis closed it in 1939. Lachmann managed to escape Germany in November 1939 to the US, and taught at Vassar, Bryn Mawr, Yale, and finally Brooklyn College, until her retirement in 1974. She also founded a boys’ educational summer camp, Camp Catawba, in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina; Lachmann directed the camp until its closing in 1970. In 1950, Lachmann met the woman who would become her lifelong partner: American composer Tui St. George Tucker (1924-2004), to whom Lachmann dedicated her 1969 book of poetry, Golden Tanzt das Licht im Glas [Golden Dances the Light in the Glass].
5. Eve Adams (1891-1943). Born Ewa Zloczewer, in Mława, Poland. Immigrating to the United States in 1912, she moved to New York and opened a tearoom in Greenwich Village, referred to as Eve’s Hangout. It was raided in 1926, and an undercover female police officer confiscated a pioneering book Adams wrote (under the name Evelyn Addams) titled Lesbian Love. For publishing an “obscene” book, and for allegedly flirting with the policewoman, Adams served a year and a half in prison; since Adams was not a US citizen, she was then deported back to Europe. She settled in Paris, where she befriended (and sold the books of) a number of local and visiting literati, including Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin. After the Nazi invasion of France, Adams fled to Nice, but was deported to Auschwitz on December 17, 1943, and murdered there.
6. Dine Libkes (b. 1900). The pen name of Dine Kipnis-Shapiro, born in the Ukrainian shtetl of Slovechno in 1900. Libkes moved to Kiev as a young woman and published a number of stories, poems, and translations there; a number of her poems were republished in Ezra Korman’s Yiddish anthology of women’s poetry, Yidishe Dikhterins Antologye (Chicago, 1928). Her poetry speaks of longings and sensual desires for other women, although without explicit eroticism. Libkes apparently survived WWII in Central Asia, and returned to Kiev after the war.
7. Pearl Hart (1890-1975). One of the leaders of Mattachine Midwest, the Chicago chapter of the national homophile activist organization. Hart was born in Michigan, and raised in Chicago; her father, a Russian-born rabbi named David Harchovsky, served a congregation on the Near West Side. One of the first female attorneys to specialize in criminal law, she was admitted to the Illinois Bar in 1914, and practiced law for 61 years, working until just weeks before her death. A founding member of the National Lawyers Guild, and the American Committee for the Protection of the Foreign Born, she devoted her life to fighting for the rights of the vulnerable and oppressed, especially women, children, immigrants, and gay men and lesbians. She herself had two long-term female partners — singer/actress Blossom Churan, and activist/writer Valorie Taylor — but Hart never publicly identified as a lesbian; she portrayed her involvement with Mattachine as that of a professional legal advisor.
8. Amy Levy (1861-1889). A pioneering novelist and poet, born in London to an acculturated, upper middle class Anglo-Sephardi family. She received an excellent education, and was the first Jewish woman to be admitted to Newnham College of Cambridge University. Her first volume of poetry, Xantippe and Other Verse, was published in 1881, and over the next decade she published two more poetry collections, three novels, and many articles. She travelled throughout Europe, and in Florence met and fell in love with Vernon Lee (Violet Paget), a British lesbian writer and essayist, to whom she dedicated several love poems. Levy struggled all her life with depression, and with alienation as a woman and a Jew; she committed suicide in 1889, just before her 28th birthday. Oscar Wilde eulogized her, saying, “to write thus at six-and-twenty is given to very few… The world must forego the full fruition of her power.”
9. Jo Sinclair (Ruth Seid, 1913-1995). Award-winning leftist American writer, born in Brooklyn to parents who had fled pogroms in Russia. Her first published novel, Wasteland (1946), is a landmark both of Jewish-American literature and LGBTQ literature. The novel focuses on Jake Braunowitz (who also goes by John Brown), an American Jew struggling with his Jewish identity, and his sister Debby, who is both a committed Jew and a lesbian, although she never uses that word for herself — the closest Debby comes to naming herself is when when she tells Jake, "the odd ones, the queer and different ones. They were people. I was people… I was them.” Jonathan Ned Katz described Debby as “probably the most complex, human, and affirmative portrait of a homosexual (male or female) to appear in American fiction” until the 1960s. Seid herself was generally quiet about her lesbian identity, although she did discuss it more freely in letters from the 80s and 90s. She published a memoir in 1993, The Seasons, and spent her last years with her partner, Joan Sofer, in Pennsylvania.
10. Jessie Sampter (1883-1938). American Zionist writer, poet, and educator. Born in New York City to an assimilated, middle-class German-Jewish family, at the age of 12 she contracted polio, and lived for the rest of her life with chronic pain, muscle weakness, and limited mobility. Drawn to Zionism, Sampter moved to Mandate Palestine in 1919, and published dozens of books, essays, and educational materials about Zionism. Soon after her arrival she met a Russian immigrant named Leah Berlin, and the two of them lived together, along with a Yemenite orphan that Sampter adopted, for almost all the remainder of her life. Her recollections connect her disability and her own erotic desires through the complexity of her embodied experience.