Discussion: Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel

Until fairly recently, Orthodox people in Israel could not imagine embracing their LGBT sexual or gender identity and staying within the Orthodox fold. But within the span of about a decade and a half, Orthodox LGBT people have forged social circles and communities and become much more visible. This has been a remarkable shift in a relatively short time span. Queer Judaism offers the compelling story of how Jewish LGBT persons in Israel created an effective social movement.

Join Orit Avishai as she discusses her book, which traces the path of how LGBT Jews accomplished this radical change. She makes the case that it has taken multiple approaches to achieve recognition within the community, ranging from political activism to more personal interactions with religious leaders and community members, to simply creating spaces to go about their everyday lives. Orthodox LGBT Jews have drawn from their lived experiences as well as Jewish traditions, symbols, and mythologies to build this movement, motivated to embrace their sexual identity not in spite of, but rather because of, their commitment to Jewish scripture, tradition, and way of life. Unique and timely, Queer Judaism challenges popular conceptions of how LGBT people interact and identify with conservative communities of faith.

About the Speakers
Orit Avishai is a professor of sociology at Fordham University. She is an ethnographer interested in how ideology and culture, very broadly defined, shape social institutions, identity categories, political dialogue, cultural practices, and processes of knowledge production. She holds a Ph.D. in sociology from UC Berkeley, and law degrees from Tel Aviv University and the Yale Law School. Avishai clerked in the Israeli Supreme Court and worked briefly as a lawyer. Her scholarship reflects this broad training. She has written about breastfeeding and the politics of motherhood in the United States, gendered and sexual regimes in Israeli Jewish Orthodoxy, women in conservative religions, feminist knowledge production, and the marriage education movement in the United States. Her new research focuses on religious polarization and conceptions of religious freedom in American Jewish Orthodox communities in the U.S.

Ann Pellegrini is a professor of performance studies and social and cultural analysis at New York University and a psychoanalyst in private practice in New York City. Their books include Performance Anxieties: Staging Psychoanalysis, Staging Race (Routledge, 1997); Love the Sin: Sexual Regulation and the Limits of Religious Tolerance, co-authored with Janet R. Jakobsen (NYU Press, 2003; Beacon Press, 2004); and Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, co-edited with Daniel Boyarin and Danial Itzkovitz (Columbia University Press, 2003). Pellegrini’s most recent book, co-authored with Avgi Saketopoulou, is Gender Without Identity (The Unconscious in Translation Press, 2023). Pellegrini is founding co-editor, with José Muñoz, of the “Sexual Cultures” Series, at New York University Press, now co-edited with Joshua Chambers-Letson and Tavia Nyong’o.