Making Unlikely Queer Worlds: Gay and Lesbian Orthodox Jews in Israel Open Access

Abstract

Religion and queer lives are often thought about as antithetical, but for some LGBTQ+ persons disaffiliation is not an option. Instead, religious LGBTQ+ people seek to carve out livable spaces within their faith traditions: they make what queer theorists call “queer worlds.” This article describes the making of one such queer/religious world and considers the plausibility of applying the lens of queer worldmaking in conservative religious and political contexts that do not seem to conform to queer visions of counterculture and counter-publics. The article draws from a larger project on the activism, identities, communities, and lived experiences of Orthodox LGBT Jews in Israel, with a specific focus on Orthodox gays and lesbians. The article considers how respondents negotiate with and transform religious (and religious adjacent) everyday spaces, practices, and discourses as examples of religious queer worldmaking, with the implication that religious acts are among the range of creative acts that are part of queer worldmaking. The article makes an empirically informed case for a queer worldmaking project that is grounded in everyday religious practice, ritual, and scriptural interpretations.

In 2004, Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, a stalwart of conservative Orthodox Judaism in Israel,¹ declared that “there is no such thing as a religious homosexual.” The rabbi was nominally right. Lacking visible religious LGBT² role models, and in the context of almost universally unquestioned assumptions that Orthodox and queer lives were incompatible, many LGBT Jews left the Orthodox fold—thereby confirming the rabbi’s stance. But under the surface, changes were brewing, and by the end of that decade Orthodox LGBT persons had launched advocacy organizations, formed networks and social groups, and began to innovate Jewish ritual spaces, learning, scriptural interpretations, and theology. Fast-forward another decade and Orthodox LGBT persons are visible (if not fully accepted) in (some) Orthodox communities, challenging with their very (queer) presence previously undisputed definitions of the family and what it means to be “Orthodox.” In queer theory parlance, they made religious queer lives, formerly socially invisible and culturally paradoxical, plausible and livable.

Each of these developments can be analyzed vis-à-vis different bodies of literature: social movements and activism, identity development, theological innovation, the social construction of reality.³ This article argues that they can also be understood as a process of queer worldmaking: a productive, creative, and ongoing process of rejecting cisheteronormativity by enlisting a range of social practices, cultural productions, and political activities to create new social contexts, scripts, and rituals. Queer worldmaking typically references rhetorical and performative strategies. This article argues that religious (and religious-adjacent) acts, including everyday ritual practices and scriptural interpretation, are among the creative acts that are part of queer cultural worldmaking.

The article builds on queer worldmaking scholarship to document how Orthodox LGBT persons “change the story” daily through improvisations associated with their marginalized status.⁴ Like other LGBTQ+ persons, they create a local counterculture, but the catch is that the particular counterculture I examine emerges from within a conservative religious tradition—a context often perceived as antithetical to queer lives—and from a geopolitical context (Israel/Palestine) that does not align with (and actively contradicts) queer visions of solidarity and social justice.⁵ Thus, the article makes an empirically informed case for a queer worldmaking project that is grounded in everyday religious practice, ritual, and scriptural interpretations.

The article draws from a larger project on the activism, identities, communities, and lived experiences of Orthodox LGBT Jews in Israel.⁶ Focusing specifically on Orthodox gays and lesbians, and building on the idea that religion is both performative and generative, the article makes the deceptively simple observation that some religious LGBTQ+ persons resolve the pain of living in/between religious/queer worlds by creating a new set of identities, new scripts for everyday living: new “worlds.” What is less obvious is that the generative raw materials to construct these queer worlds are deeply rooted in their faith tradition, community, rituals, and practices. Specifically, I examine the productive, generative potential of sacred as well as daily practices—“everyday theologies”—and how engagement with scripture and Jewish thought produces a particularly (Orthodox) Jewish way of being queer. The article contributes to the study of queer Orthodox Jews and the study of queer life in religion more generally. In addition, by analyzing a religious worldmaking process, this article brings in conversation fields that are often not connected conceptually due to their divergent intellectual and activist histories.

Queer Worldmaking and the Social Construction of a (New) Reality

This article is grounded in the idea that making LGBTQ+ lives livable entails the transformation of everyday spaces, practice, and discourses and applies it to the religious sphere, typically neglected in queer scholarship. To do so I bring in conversation the concept of queer worldmaking, which rests on the premise that cisheteronormativity is but one possible arrangement of the social world (with the implication that the social world can be rearranged) and the sociological insight that reality—any reality, including a religious and/or queer world—is, by definition, socially constructed.⁷

Queer worldmaking references a productive process by which an agentic minority group works from within the cracks of an oppressive dominant culture to produce counter-hegemonic practices, ideologies, rhetoric, and identities: a productive refusal of cisheteronormativity. Queer worldmaking has generally been associated with rhetorical, textual, and performative strategies that remake “secular” worlds, but these foci are a product of queer theory and activism’s history, interests, and biases; there is nothing inherent about the concept that would preclude it from being used as a lens on other types of practices or in religious contexts.

Queer worldmaking is most often associated with Lauren Berlant and Michael Warner’s 1998 essay “Sex in Public,” but José Esteban Muñoz used the concept in an earlier essay, “Ephemera as Evidence.”⁸ Muñoz later defined queer worldmaking as a process that involves the undoing (“disassembling”) of the majoritarian public sphere and use of its parts to make a new world from within.⁹ Muñoz saw queer worldmaking as a process that requires “an active kernel of utopian possibility,”¹⁰ a process that can be located in attempts to fashion a new world via “spectacles, performances, and willful enactments of the self for other.”¹¹ Muñoz focused on public performances but acknowledged that everyday practices could qualify as queer worldmaking performances.¹²

Berlant and Warner shifted the emphasis from performance, utopia, and minorities’ ability to work from within dominant structures to the creation of counter-publics that “support forms of affective, erotic, and personal living that are public in the sense of accessible, available to memory, and sustained collective activity.”¹³ Their worldmaking project was “constructed and reconstructed through the circulation of texts.”¹⁴

Subsequent scholarship documented instances of decomposition and recomposition of dominant paradigms by minoritized groups, with a focus on deconstruction of cultural practices, artistic endeavors, and sexual cultures.¹⁵ Berlant and Warner named as examples “sites of drag, youth culture, music, dance, parades, flaunting, and cruising,”¹⁶ while Muñoz extolled the worldmaking potential of poetry, visual art, theatrical performances, and reality TV, as well as performances that often go unmarked as cultural productions, such as anonymous sex.¹⁷ Few have drawn on the concept to interrogate activism and its intersections with everyday life as pathways of queer worldmaking, despite the fact that activists frequently use the “majoritarian culture as raw material to make a new world.”¹⁸ Likewise, there is little scholarship on the making of religious queer worlds.¹⁹ This article ponders both possibilities.

Can queer worldmaking practices transcend the realm of the textual, performative, and rhetorical? If “queer world-making is rooted in the premises that cisheteronormativity is but one possible arrangement of the social world,”²⁰ and that worldmaking performances do not strive to merely entertain but also to demonstrate to spectators that a different future is possible, it follows that cultural productions are not the only paths to disrupt cisheteronormativity. Recent overviews of the concept’s trajectory in communication studies²¹ and education²² suggest such a broadening. Likewise, a recent consideration of the production of networks of sociability, parenting practices, and narratives of everyday life demonstrates how queer worldmaking can be operationalized outside the realm of cultural practices and public performances.²³ Drawing on the experiences of Orthodox Jewish gays and lesbians, this article suggests that the creative process of making queer worlds can also include more traditional subjects of inquiry in the social sciences: religious ritual, cultural scripts, activism, and everyday life—the social building blocks that amount to the construction, or, to use Muñoz’s terms, the disassembling and reassembling, of social realities. Building on Muñoz’s emphasis on the queer worldmaking potential of transformation of everyday spaces, I argue that creating new identity categories and social scripts and advancing new scriptural readings and theological innovations can be routes of queer worldmaking.

This reading hinges on defining what qualifies as a queer world. In the context of queer theory and practice, religious queer worldmaking may seem as much of an oxymoron as a religious queer person seemed to Rabbi Aviner and other rabbis. The religious subject occupies an ambivalent space in the queer imaginary,²⁴ resulting in the erasure of such subjects from queer worlds or their designation as paradoxical queer subjects. But religion is a particularly potent arena to think about worldmaking: “religion”—just like “cisheteronormativity”—is a socially constructed world. In this world—one that prescribes scripts for everyday living, interacting, making families, and so on (this is especially true of the Jewish tradition, where elaborate rules of conduct regulate both religious observance and everyday conduct)—Others (including, especially, gender and sexual Others) are by definition disruptive. Likewise, religious practices, rituals, spaces, and ideas are considered to be generative and productive. Indeed, as I show in this article, disruptions emerge from the cracks within the system’s own logics.

Thus, while queer worldmaking has predominantly been theorized as a performative, rhetorical, and secular process, it is also a quintessentially sociological process that references transformative unmaking and remaking of the social world. This article considers how religious LGBT subjects reshape hegemonic institutions, discourses, practices, and identities through a bottom-up engagement with the everyday: places, spaces, people, dominant communal narratives about sacred texts. Like textual, rhetorical, and performative strategies, these too can be sites of a “mode of being in the world that is also inventing the world”:²⁵ actions that simultaneously inhabit and reinvent dominant social, cultural, and political structures, thereby providing a lens for making sense of the creation, negotiation, and expansion of queer worlds.

Background and Methodology

This article focuses on Israeli “religious nationalists,” or religious Zionists (dati-leumi). Religiously, this group is a loose corollary to modern Orthodoxy in the United States. Religious nationalists also constitute a demographic category that amounts to around 20 percent of the Israeli population and that is associated not only with religious observance and spiritual belonging but also with a way of life and political identification with expansionist, nationalist visions of the state. Sociologically, then, “religious Zionists” refers to a loose category, a group whose members are engaged in political, cultural, and ideological negotiations with a range of Others, both Jewish (secular, traditionalist, ultra-Orthodox, Reform, Conservative) and non-Jewish. ²⁶ I use the term “Orthodox” to refer to this group because “religious” in English does not have the same register as the Hebrew term.²⁷ For my purposes, Orthodox also includes disaffiliated persons who were raised in Orthodox homes.

From 2016–21, I worked with Orthodox LGBT persons, most of them gay, lesbians, or bisexual, and studied the Proud Religious Community, or Kadag, a loose coalition of organizations and initiatives launched in the mid-2000s by LGBT activists from Orthodox backgrounds. My data includes interviews, physical and digital ethnography, archival research, and analysis of media content. I conducted over 120 interviews with Orthodox LGBT persons, activists, allies, educators, therapists, family members, and rabbis. To preserve privacy, I provide little contextual background on participants; the field is so small that attempts to mask one participant might inadvertently implicate others who did not partake in this study (I do name activists when referencing publicly available information). The ethnographic component includes conventional objects of ethnographic inquiry—ritual spaces, political activism, social gatherings, and community engagement as well as digital ethnography on the Facebook pages of Orthodox LGBT persons and allies who invited me to join their networks and those of Kadag organizations and high-profile organizations and religious authorities. I supplemented interviews and fieldwork with archival research into Kadag organizations’ documents and media accounts.²⁸ The analysis I present in this article emerges from a triangulation across this data.

The focus on Orthodox gays, lesbians, and bisexual persons is a product of careful deliberation and reflection; I concluded that one project could not do justice to all the categories under the LGBTQ+ umbrella given divergent histories, contemporary politics, and the intricacies of Jewish jurisprudence, coupled with the demands of ethnographic fieldwork and my subject position as a cisgender straight non-Orthodox Jew. I chose to focus primarily on sexual diversity, and specifically on Orthodox gays and lesbians, who were most visible and accessible at the time I conducted my research. I am cautious not to extrapolate from their experiences,²⁹ though when I speak of activism or generalize I do use “LGBT,” mirroring my interlocutor’s own terms.

Unlivable Lives

One key finding in the broader project is that Orthodox Jewish contexts—communities, religious traditions, educational institutions, cultural practices, and the very definitions of what it means to be a full-fledged, authentic member of this particular society—prescribe an overwhelming cis and heteronormative social order that renders Orthodox LGBT lives, to use Judith Butler’s term, unlivable.³⁰

My informants spoke of shame, secrecy, denial, repression, spiritual harms, theological angst, and family dramas that resulted in shattered life plans, social deaths, crises of faith, and a yearning to be “normal.” Many fell into a depression, experienced suicidal ideation, and sought harmful interventions such as reparative therapy. Most of all, they mourned the loss of a normative (and, many believe, singular) path to Orthodox adulthood; informants spoke of a torn, shredded, broken picture, image, vision—a life plan of adulthood composed of “a normal family” that fell apart with no alternative to take its place. One gay participant reflected how “in twelfth grade, the rabbi starts talking about relationships, home, family. And I realized, to be religious means to marry a woman. To build a normative family. But I knew that I can’t be there.” This participant concluded that “I have no future.” A thirty-two-year-old lesbian had to rethink every aspect of adult life:

In these ways, communal messages, expectations, and structures that offered only one path to Jewish adulthood rendered Orthodox LGBT lives unlivable. (Orthodox LGBT Jews are far from outliers, and their experiences echo those of LGBT persons from other religious traditions.³¹) For the time being, most LGBT Orthodox persons still inhabit this realm of “unlivability,” but a growing number have figured out what it means to be an Orthodox LGBT person: working from the ground up, alone in their everyday lives and together in community, they are creating new blueprints for living: queer/religious worlds.

Religious Queer Worldmaking

How does a marginalized group, especially one that is hidden and whose very existence is denied, disassemble and reassemble a cisheteronormative social world? In what follows I consider some of the ways that my respondents created a queer/Orthodox world, in the process reshaping Orthodox hegemonic institutions, discourses, practices, and identities. As we will see, the antidote to harmful Orthodox messages about same-sex attraction and LGBT identities draws on a variety of resources, suggesting the unique flavor of local projects of queer worldmaking. Given the goals of this article, my main focus is on how Orthodox LGBT persons engage with mainstream Orthodoxy, but I note that this is far from an internal Orthodox dialogue. Orthodox LGBT persons’ attempts to remake material culture and practices also draw on, and involve negotiations with, the largely secular Israeli LGBT community, other demographic groups in Israel (e.g., secular, traditionalist, and ultra-Orthodox Jews), non-Orthodox Judaism (e.g., the Reform and Conservative movements, both marginalized and demonized by Orthodox Jews in Israel), and the expectations of the global queer community.

Articulating and Normalizing New Identity Categories

The making of new identity categories, normalizing them and infusing them with positive meanings and with joy,³² has been central to Orthodox LGBT Jews’ efforts to remake Orthodoxy’s cisheteronormative social order—a vehicle for imagining a queered Orthodox world.

Interviewees who came of age prior to the era of Orthodox LGBT public visibility that began in the early 2010s almost uniformly said that they could not imagine “being” Orthodox and gay or lesbian: this was not a plausible social category. Their neighborhoods, families, texts, and cultural images were exclusively populated by cisheteronormative persons, families, and communities. One interviewee could not identify with the term “lesbian” despite being familiar with the term, explaining that as a “normative Orthodox girl from the yishuv [village]” the term seemed inapplicable; LGBT people were secular, characters on TV and in the movies, foreign and detached from Orthodox reality. Having never met a lesbian who was religious, this participant could not identify with the concept nor fathom living as one: “It seemed unrealistic.” Many located this impossibility in utopic ideas about normative Orthodox families, a “scenery in a play: When you grow up in such a home [cishetero], in such a community, there is this scenery all around you. What the home is supposed to look like, the family. And that rubs off on you.”

For many study participants, the key that unlocked access to envisioning (and enacting) alternative sceneries and stories was finding a community of like-minded people. Early communities were virtual (anonymous chatrooms that were later replaced by publicly visible social media groups), but in the late aughts, trailblazing Orthodox LGBT activists, some of whom met online, founded affirming ritual and social spaces. In the early days these spaces were largely hidden and insular. Such safe spaces, where stigmatized persons can let down their guard, have long been documented as key arenas of political mobilization: while providing respite and access to mentors, role models, and a peer group, these spaces also serve as fertile grounds for generating new rituals, symbols, rhetoric, and ideas about shared history, destiny, and needs. Hidden from prying and judging eyes, marginalized persons work together to reframe traits that distinguish them from the majority as a social positive, articulate legible social and political categories (Orthodox gay, Orthodox trans), and mobilize on behalf of the collective. In queer theory parlance, these safe spaces are sites of queer worldmaking, a point of departure for building affirming new worlds. A couple of examples illustrate this process.

Interviewees who came of age prior to the 2000s said, almost uniformly, that the internet “changed everything.” In the early days, they flocked to anonymous (and, by today’s standards, archaic) chat rooms. One participant said that before finding such a chat room, “there wasn’t another lesbian in the world.” Nati Epstein, an early Kadag activist, published an anonymous letter in a popular daily newspaper in response to an Orthodox journalist’s claim that homosexuality did not exist in Orthodox circles. Nati, who frequented a chat room populated by Orthodox gays and lesbians, knew full well that they existed; they just feared exposure.

Another interviewee described the activity in this chatroom: “People wrote poems, told painful stories; we debated religion, what it means to be religious gay person.” The catch was that initially, forum participants did not identify as Orthodox gays and lesbians; many were heterosexually married and had planned on remaining so. But bit by bit, conversations, debates, and cultural outpouring began to give shape to a new—now plausible—identity category: Orthodox gay, Orthodox lesbian. “One day, after spending hours in a chat, it suddenly hit me: I was a religious gay man. That’s all there was to it. I did not need to justify my existence, I was not a rare bird—there were dozens like me! I just did not know exactly what that meant.”

Finding community is a necessary but insufficient step in the journey toward making sense of oneself. Identities do not emerge nor exist in a vacuum—to figure out what it means to “be,” Orthodox LGBT persons needed to also expand their community’s horizons—to remake their worlds and change society. Shoval, an Israeli Orthodox LGBT outreach organization founded in the late aughts, attempts to do this via two-hour workshops. Trained volunteers meet with staff at Orthodox schools, with mental health professionals who work with Orthodox persons, or with members of an Orthodox community (neighborhood, synagogue) to educate them about sexual and gender diversity (generally in Jewish contexts). These workshops begin with volunteers telling their Orthodox LGBT story—a narrative arc revolving around a normative Orthodox childhood interrupted by a painful realization that the protagonist was “different.” The Shoval story relays a period of reckoning that often includes violent ruptures on the path to normative Orthodox adulthood and culminates with the volunteer’s declaration, “My name is ____ and I am a lesbian/gay/trans Orthodox person.” This performance is intended to shatter audiences’ allegiance to a singular vision of Orthodox authenticity. It also reaffirms the speaker’s claim to Orthodoxy. Interviews with Shoval volunteers revealed that their work with the organization, and especially the opportunity to make these claims repeatedly, were key nodes on their identity journeys: “Learning to say—out loud!—I’m a lesbian. Wow!” “Writing out my story, going through the training, and now doing these workshops has helped me figure out where I stand on issues, my identity.”

There is much more to be said about Orthodox Jews’ journey from chat rooms and backrooms, from being fearful, anonymous, and closeted, to crafting and disseminating personal and collective narratives through viral Facebook posts that proudly feature their faces, names, families, and stories.³³ But for our purposes, the main point is this: queer worldmaking—that productive, creative, and ongoing process of rejecting cisheteronormativity by enlisting a range of social practices, cultural productions, and political activities to create new social contexts, scripts, and rituals—also includes the making and performing of new identity categories that stake LGBT persons’ rightful place in a previously monolithic cisheteronormative world. Importantly, in this case, this new world certainly drew on well-established queer activist practices (e.g., curating and narrating one’s story) but also emerged from within the cracks of Jewish Orthodoxy: study participants drew on Jewish traditions, symbols, sensibilities, language, and mythologies to reframe, reimagine, and rewrite stories of self and community.

Rescripting Orthodox Family Life

Participants who figured out how to make Orthodox LGBT lives livable were not so much plagued by the question whether “one can be” Orthodox and LGBT (though this question drives much research on religious queer life in the social sciences³⁴) but rather how to pour substantive meaning into their reality. One interviewee never contemplated not being religious—though before this gay man got to know other religious gays, it “was not clear to me what life would be like.” Participants figured this out on the fly as they made conscious decisions such as where to live, how to get married, whether and how to start a family, how to interact with their religious family members, choosing schools for their children, and how to adapt Jewish rituals. Such decisions involved negotiating with Judaism’s heteronormative life scripts, and can thus be read as productive processes of rescripting. Same-sex weddings and family formation illustrate these queer worldmaking practices.

In queer activist and scholarly circles, family formation, monogamy, and, especially, marriage, are often critiqued as capitulation to heteronormativity.³⁵ But weddings—and the institution of marriage—are also creative arenas of queer rescripting. For Orthodox LGBT persons, marriage—and therefore weddings—represent a point of (re)entry to an authentic Jewish life course. Many thus ponder how to render their monogamous relationships, family units, and weddings Jewishly legible (and therefore legitimate).

Same-sex marriages in Israel are legally ambiguous. Per a 2006 Supreme Court ruling, same-sex couples who were married in jurisdictions where such marriages are legal can register as married in Israel, but this registration is of little consequence since registration serves predominantly statistical purposes. Marriage, along with other matters regarding personal status (i.e., divorce), are under the exclusive purview of religious authorities. The Chief Rabbinate, which authorizes Jewish weddings, does not recognize same-sex marriages, rendering such ceremonies symbolic. Same-sex couples’ legal status is regulated by the state’s cohabitation case law, which offers considerable legal protections, predominantly economic, but cannot confer same-sex couples and families the cultural and religious legitimacy they seek. Many Orthodox same-sex couples thus grapple with aligning their weddings with the Jewish tradition.

Traditional Jewish weddings are gendered and structured, involving ritual gender-coded clothing; a male wedding officiator (rabbi);³⁶ a Jewish wedding contract, ketubah, which outlines the groom’s rights and responsibilities toward the bride (but not vice versa); and other practices that are performed by the groom: blessing with a ring, the ritualistic shattering of the glass. Orthodox LGBT persons are effectively shut out of this ritual domain altogether: per Orthodox religious elites, Jewish law and tradition preclude the possibility of Jewish same-sex weddings.³⁷ But many Orthodox gays and lesbians are determined to prove otherwise.

One couple realized that whereas heterosexual couples had to just accept the Jewish wedding ritual as is (“Ok, with slight pushback, you know, on the margins—the woman too can bless him with a ring”), they were in a position to put together a ceremony that would, in their words, be a real Jewish wedding, by breaking the ceremony down to its components and making decisions about each of its parts: “Can we stand under a huppah [the Jewish wedding canopy]? Which of the traditional blessings can we include? Who would bless us? Do we just tweak the language [Hebrew is highly gendered] or are there some blessings that simply don’t make sense for two women? Shattering the glass was very important to us. . . . But can a woman do this?” To find answers, they turned to the Jewish tradition. Both had postgraduate training in Jewish thought,³⁸ and they dove into Jewish archives and sources as they asked: “What makes a wedding ‘Jewish’?” They decided that the huppah could be easily incorporated into a same-sex wedding but arrived at a different conclusion regarding the shattering of the glass (other couples concluded otherwise). Nevertheless, they wove the ritual’s symbolism into the ceremony. This couple easily did away with the traditional Jewish marriage contract because it was a relic of a patriarchal culture (many heterosexual couples and Orthodox feminist organizations share these concerns), and replaced it with their own tradition-inspired wedding vows. The resulting ceremony was personally meaningful and, they said, authentically Jewish, adding, only half-jokingly, that their heterosexual friends were jealous that they were “forced” to construct their own ceremony.

As in the case of identity formation, successful rescripting—or undoing, disassembling, and reassembling of dominant (heteronormative) social scripts—is an interactive, iterative, and performative process. In recent years, photos and videos of Orthodox same-sex engagement parties and wedding ceremonies have gone viral by design: couples often encourage guests (or shall we say audiences?) to post photos, videos, and reflections. One such instance is the June 2017 wedding of Kadag activists Moshe Grossman (now Argaman) and Eran Ashkenazi (now Argaman). The men exchanged vows before hundreds of family members, friends, and Orthodox LGBT peers in a wedding that many in attendance said looked and “felt” Jewish: although the ceremony was officiated by a yeshiva-trained transgender woman, not an ordained male rabbi, and did not include a bride, it featured the Jewish wedding canopy, a broken glass (two, one for each groom to crush), customary blessings with requisite queer adjustments, and both grooms—and many of their guests—presented as Orthodox (or Orthodox adjacent) in their choice of clothing and ritual garments. Social media posts celebrated the occasion as an authentic Jewish wedding because not only did the grooms identify as Orthodox, but because their community recognized them as such. A queer world was being made right before their eyes—and then shared (performed?) for the world to see.

While many couples refrain from turning their private ceremonies into public spectacles, they, too, participate in queer worldmaking in the sense that such recognizably Jewish wedding ceremonies are a product of elaborate consultations and negotiations with a large circle of family, friends, other LGBT persons, and religious leaders. These deliberations often have a public facing component, as same-sex couples routinely share information on “best practices” for Orthodox (or Orthodox adjacent) same-sex weddings on social media. Thus, as rewritten scripts, which may begin as private creative endeavors, begin to circulate, these new, queer scripts are made public. Investigations into the essence of “real Jewish weddings” that sought to modify, not duplicate or replace, traditional weddings thus resulted in creative remaking of gendered rituals and ceremonial chants, prayers, and blessings. It is notable that this iterative, deliberative process represents a new way of “doing” Orthodoxy, one that does not take the word of the religious expert (a male rabbi) or the weight of tradition as having the final, authoritative word. For those committed to conventional forms of Orthodox communities, this is the key, ultimate threat to the existing Jewish world order.³⁹ To be clear, LGBT persons are far from being the first constituency to articulate and act on these alternative visions of Orthodoxy.⁴⁰ But for our purposes, their interventions do amount to a form of a queer worldmaking project.

Another arena of creative rescripting is family formation. Having children is a central waystation on one’s path to normative Jewish adulthood and is considered a key mitzvah, a commandment (having children is such a central principle in Jewish life that some rabbinic authorities use it to justify monogamous same-sex unions⁴¹). But Orthodox family and ritual life are highly gendered, rendering the same-sex family not only a cultural anomaly but also ritually deficient. One interviewee thus pondered: “Who will bless the Sabbath? Who will do kiddush, take the children to synagogue? Who will do all these tasks that in the halacha and in the Orthodox community are the tasks of the man?” Campaigns that castigate families that deviate from the cisheteronormative script as non-Orthodox, non-Jewish, foreign, and menacing capitalize on these fears (e.g., the ultranationalist, anti-feminist, transphobic, and homophobic Noam political party⁴²). But Orthodox LGBT persons are undeterred.

Orthodox LGBT persons’ paths to parenthood are varied, and include shared custody of children born during a previous, heterosexual marriage (at times involving a new, same-sex partner); mothers using sperm from anonymous or known donors; single gay men and couples who have children via surrogacy; and a range of alternative family structures. Orthodox communities and Jewish law trail far behind this vibrant reality, but Orthodox LGBT persons are adamant that their families, communities, and religious leaders will just have to catch up. As new realities demand that rituals and traditions be adjusted, new ones are made, sometimes on the fly. One respondent’s synagogue was initially at a loss regarding the marking of a lesbian couple’s birth because the ceremony typically involves the father in a set of rituals (a brother stood in); in the process of negotiating the ceremony, the mothers told me, they noticed a palatable shift in some of their co-congregants, and now thought of their synagogue not only as “a typical accepting space” but also as a truly affirming one. Another interviewee described conversations with the principal of an Orthodox school who initially balked at accepting a child with two moms. The deliberation itself was moot, since this was a public school and the principal knew that the child would be admitted: “He was just trying to scare us off, but I am not here to make people comfortable.” Zehorit Sorek, a prominent Kadag activist, told a more uplifting story at a public event in 2020 while discussing a daughter’s Bat Mitzvah at the inclusive Tel Aviv Orthodox synagogue Yachad. It is customary for the prayer leader to bless the child on this occasion, a ritual that includes naming the child’s parents. Without missing a beat, the prayer leader named three parents—Zehorit, the child’s father (Zehorit’s ex-husband), and Zehorit’s longtime wife who raised the Bat Mitzvah celebrant—thereby challenging seemingly intractable foundational categories in Jewish thought: Who is a parent? What constitutes a family?

In a different public event, another activist said that their family’s presence in Orthodox spaces such as the synagogue, school, and the very streets of their mostly Orthodox neighborhood was an activist intervention: “They see us. We’re a normal family. And they have to make space for us.” Likewise, the Facebook feeds of many Orthodox LGBT persons are often filled with the unceremonious stuff of everyday life: photos of children on the first day of school; complaints about teacher strikes, which are common in Israel; home renovations; holiday celebrations; and, occasionally, a photo from a Pride event. Much like wedding photos that go viral, these depictions of conventional everyday lives serve as a vehicle of both rescripting and reassembling Orthodoxy and communicating, to a broader audience, what these new, queer worlds look like (in this case, not very different than the cisheteronormative world, except that the two proud parents accompanying an excited child to their first day or the partners showing off their new bedroom happen to be same-sex).

By creating new stories and circulating new images of Orthodox Jewish life, both religious and secular, ritual and mundane, Orthodox LGBT persons render their lives both legible and livable within a cisheteronormative tradition. Inevitably, this is a subversive process, one that rests on first challenging, and then remaking, taken-for-granted practices, rituals, categories, and definitions. What distinguishes this mode of queer worldmaking is the fact that it engages—and sometimes explicitly enlists—religious sensibilities.

Innovating Theology, Scripture, and Jewish Thought

For many queer persons who grow up in religious communities, negative messages, one interviewee told me, “are deeply entrenched. You are bad, sinful, deviant. There’s no place for you.” It is well documented that many LGBTQ+ persons leave their faith communities as a result of such negative messages and related hostile practices, but for some queer persons, disaffiliation is not an option. Many Orthodox gays and lesbians I talked to pursued an alternative—affirming and potentially queer-worldmaking—strategy as they ask: “How do you rewrite that narrative?” The answer, in many cases, was to mine the tradition and construct alternative theologies and scriptural interpretations that helped Orthodox LGBT persons make sense of—and celebrate—religious queer lives, though with a twist: whereas Jewish thought and theologies are often gleaned from scripture and Jewish tradition by learned religious elites, my respondents drew on their own lived experiences, everyday theologies, and interpretations born out of the scars of human existence. As noted above, this process, in and of itself, was simultaneously transgressive and a generative, constructive move.

Many queer people of faith seek answers to existential questions: Why did God create them “this” way? Did he⁴³ intend for them to suffer? And if so, why? My study respondents were angry and wanted answers. Lea’s relationship with God had known ups and downs. Approaching thirty when we met, Lea was “pretty upset with him.” Others sought to assuage their anger by reimagining their deity. Effi, a thirty-something gay man, had delved into the Jewish sources and concluded that “God is good and has your best interest in mind and doesn’t want to screw you over.” Effi’s God did not intend for his followers to suffer and therefore must have had reasons for creating human variation.

Effi’s logic may make sense, but it belies a key Jewish theological principle that associates religious commitment with sublimation. The theology of binding, or Aqedah, holds that accepting Jewish law, scripture, and tradition as a way of life comes down to one’s willingness to subordinate oneself to a higher normative order; people who submit to God’s way sublimate all sorts desires, needs, and values, and same-sex attraction is not a special challenge: doing as God instructed means that one will at times endure trials and make sacrifices.⁴⁴

But many Orthodox LGBT persons have come to resent—and reject—this logic, claiming that it made no sense that God would create entire categories of people with the expectation that they, alone, carry an unresolvable burden: forever single, celibate, and childless. How to explain gender and sexual diversity then? Effi landed on this explanation: God created gender and sexual variance not in order to punish LGBT persons or challenge them with sublimation—making them the poster children for religious commitment (as rabbis, some of them LGBT allies, frequently claim). Rather, the challenge was to embrace and “to be how God made me.” Effi reasoned that in creating gender and sexual variance, God was challenging society to deal with difference, rendering LGBT persons a vessel for positive social change. Effi accepted the challenge: “He created you in a way that you cannot change and gave you a social challenge that you will be different and the Other, that you will force society to deal with you. It’s not easy and it’s not fun. But if you choose faith, you choose this job.” Not only was this social role not inferior to that fulfilled by heterosexual Jews, but it was also imbued with perhaps the ultimate mitzvah that Jews take upon themselves: practicing world repair, which, Effi said, was much more meaningful than suffering. LGBT Jews, in this reading, were no lesser than their cisheteronormative counterparts: while the latter fulfill the command to repair the world by having children, LGBT persons can fulfill this mitzvah by helping create a more tolerant and loving society. Effi’s reasoning here not only turns a central Jewish principle on its head but also casts queer life as a positive social force, a net social good that is legitimated—indeed, necessitated—by Jewish ethics. There is an additional theological move here. For many Jews, observance is rooted in pious compliance with Jewish laws, scripture, and tradition. But the logic here instead grounds a committed Jewish life in a personal commitment to God and the ethics of world repair.

Such deliberations reference another theological discussion in Jewish thought: What renders a Jewish life fulfilled? Does Jewish cosmology care for individual happiness and self-fulfillment? Lea’s upbringing emphasized that choosing one’s own happiness defied a collectively oriented Jewish ethics. Lea was taught that fulfilling one’s dreams and chasing happiness is an egoistical pursuit—un-Orthodox. But others drew on the Jewish tradition to insist that not only did God not intend for them suffer, but also that self-fulfillment and self-realization were compatible with Jewish ethics because, as one man explained, “A happy and content person who lives to their full potential can contribute much more to others.” Happiness, in other words, was essential to living a Jewish life.

The moves described here challenge hegemonic theologies, but they are firmly grounded in established theological and ethical traditions within Jewish thought, albeit from less-known minority voices.⁴⁵ The point, however, is that like other queer worldmaking practices, these theological and scriptural interpretive moves represent a productive, creative, and ongoing process of rejecting cisheteronormativity by a minority group that works from within the cracks of an oppressive dominant culture to produce counter-hegemonic practices, ideologies, rhetoric, and identities. Given the intimate connection between Jewish thought, theology, and philosophy and everyday lives, these rhetorical moves literally open up livable spaces. Numerous participants mentioned in their interviews longtime Kadag ally Rabbi Benny Lau’s refrain that “the closet is death, and you should choose life.” “Choosing life” is a key principle in Jewish law and ethics. Elevating this principle and placing it on the same plane as scripturally derived principles that produce spiritual harm literally makes LGBT lives livable. One interviewee had come perilously close to committing suicide out of despair a few years before we met. Hearing Rabbi Lau speak persuaded this woman to decide that “I was just going to live,” even without fully abiding by Jewish law. According to this participant, Jewish law, as promulgated by “generations of hetero-cis male rabbis,” represented just one way to live a normative and authentic Jewish life. Orthodox conservatives would beg to differ, but the point is that innovative theologies and scriptural interpretations—ones that emerged from the Jewish tradition itself, from the bottom up—were the key to constructing meaningful queer worlds for these people of faith.

In sum, same-sex attracted Orthodox Jews engage with, rather than reject, Jewish theologies, interpretive traditions, concepts, and values. They ask foundational theological questions: What does it mean to believe? Who is this God that I believe in? What does it mean to be a religious/Orthodox/observant Jew? As they reach into the Jewish archives to seek answers, they construct new theologies of God and religious life, new modes of interpreting Jewish scripture and sources.⁴⁶ While they are fully aware that such innovations are potentially subversive, they insist that they are not out to start a revolution: “My intention,” one activist said in a public outreach event, was never to start a movement. All I wanted was to make space for my family.” But making space for a queer Other in an otherwise cisheteronormative community, developing an affirming and inclusive stance that is grounded in Jewish scripture, thought, philosophy, and theology is, in and of itself, a performance of difference, both utterly mundane and spectacularly outlandish, one that serves to not only enable individual survival but also to use the stuff of the real world to remake a collective sense of the world.

Conclusion

The “queer worldmaking” framework emerged in the 1990s as part of theoretical explorations into how gender and sexual difference could be channeled into not only subverting and resisting cisheteronormativity, but also creatively deployed to ensure queer thriving. Politically, worldmaking points to a strategy of building up—and, crucially, from within, rather than tearing down the existing world. Muñoz, especially, recognized the power of working from within dominant structures and hegemonic cultures, imagining worldmaking as a cultural recycling of sorts, where cisheteronormative and antiqueer cultural norms would serve as raw material that could be repurposed: “A disempowered politics of positionality that has been rendered unthinkable by the dominant culture.”⁴⁷ The performances—not only theatrical ones, but also those on everyday stages such as synagogues, schools, event halls, the streets, and Facebook—that make queer worlds neither assimilate into existing cultures and structures nor completely oppose them; the key, for Muñoz, was a process of disidentification which worked from within “on, with, and against a cultural form.”⁴⁸

This article argues that the processes described here—and their consequences—are a case study of worldmaking through everyday practice and spaces that draw on antiqueer cultural material to actively imagine a new world. Politics here works from within an existing social system and draws on its logics and sensibilities as well as negotiations with its cultural Others. As we have seen, Orthodox LGBT persons’ demands that they be seen, heard, acknowledged, and legitimated from within the system have been both transgressive and constructive. To arrive at new cultural scripts and identities, to rewrite stories and conjure new images, to redefine families and weddings, to invigorate ritual and study spaces, and to rethink their relationship with their creator, Orthodox LGBT persons have actively mined, leaned into, and mobilized the Jewish tradition—a Jewish tradition that they have insisted is rightfully theirs. Like other religious practitioners (Jewish and otherwise) who innovate (and queer) religious ritual, practice, and theology, sometimes inadvertently, the performances discussed here have opened up a previously unimaginable space that makes Orthodox LGBT lives livable. Livable, in the literal sense: LGBT persons raised in Orthodox homes and communities attribute public visibility and newfound plausibility to their decisions to not disaffiliate (disaffiliation was routinely the case before the turn of the twenty-first century) or, in more extreme cases, to overcome suicidal ideation. And livable in a metaphoric sense, for public performances such as same-sex weddings that legibly read as Jewish, LGBT Jewish study spaces, and well-developed Orthodox LGBT narrative arcs communicate to others: there is a blueprint and there is space for you.

The empirical sociological process I have been discussing is without a doubt one of worldmaking, but whether it can be labeled as a process of “queer” worldmaking depends on one’s stance vis-à-vis a number of theoretical—and political—questions. One issue is whether queer worlds can be religious. Queer worldmaking scholarship seems to have taken for granted that queer worldmaking projects are inherently secular. This would make sense: religion has been a key (though hardly exclusive) source of trans-, queer-, and homophobia; exclusion; and violence. But, as we have seen, and as numerous other studies have shown, religious lives and LGBT ones are not inherently incompatible.⁴⁹ In fact, rejecting this compatibility lends support to conservative religious factions’ claims to exclusive hold on their faith traditions and accepts queer theory’s secularist bias as inevitable rather than a product of intellectual and political histories.⁵⁰

Thus, from a theoretical perspective, the idea that a remade, queer world could be a religious one is not preposterous. Indeed, a careful reading suggests that Muñoz did not discount religion from queer futurity. Groups of people make worlds (i.e., construct reality) from the cultural raw materials at their disposal; for persons of faith, these cultural raw materials include things like religious symbols, rituals, language, and sensibilities. And if these worlds are inherently cis and heteronormative, religious queer worldmaking amounts to a productive rejection of these worlds from within their own paradigms. That the antidote to harmful Orthodox messages about same-sex attraction or trans experiences draws from the same fount of Orthodox scripture, wisdom, tradition, and philosophy does not inherently make this a non-queer project but rather a thoroughly local project of queer worldmaking. Because it emphasizes performances from the ground up, queer worldmaking helps see how ordinary people go about their lives in the context of social systems and institutions outside of their control, and how they create new forms from within the cracks. This is one sense of “unlikely queer worlds” that the title of this article alludes to.

The second issue—of whether a worldmaking project predicated on complicity, assimilation, and deradicalized politics can qualify as a queer project—may be impossible to resolve. My respondents were not merely working from within religious logics; their religious system’s values (monogamous, natalist) and the larger political context (nationalist, nativist) resulted in deradicalized, homonormative, and homo-nationalist politics. “We’re not seeking to destroy the institution of the straight family. . . . All we want is a room of our own within the Jewish home,” a prominent Kadag activist told an audience at the Orthodox-affiliated Bar Ilan University in May 2018.⁵¹ The Jewish Home is not only a metaphor; the Jewish Home had also been the name of a nationalist, right-wing political party. That party dissolved, but its vision lives on in other nationalist parties, including the Religious Zionist and Jewish Empowerment parties that are part of the current ruling coalition in Israel.

Early queer worldmaking theorists were critical of assimilative practices associated with homonormativity, including (especially) the reproductive, monogamous family. Even more unforgivable is affinity with homonationalist stances (the association between LGBTQ+ rights and nationalism).⁵² Desiring a room in “the Jewish home” telegraphs support for a particular mode of expansive nationalism; most Orthodox LGBT persons subscribe to right-of-center nationalist visions, and while there are certainly many dissenters, activist organizations are as a general rule mum about Israel’s geopolitical conflict. This is hardly a queer utopia of the sort that Muñoz envisioned. Can a project that refuses to interrogate larger social structures that do not guarantee safety and justice for all be a bona fide queer one?

Perhaps here, too, Muñoz’s theorizing can offer direction. Muñoz’s model of political action was grounded in “disidentification,” a strategy that recognizes the importance of local context, locates resistance in everyday lives, works on and against dominant ideology, and seeks to transform cultural logics from within.⁵³ Rather than assessing queer lives and activism through the radical-queer-versus-complicit-sellout binary,⁵⁴ we might extrapolate that seemingly complicit practices and movements can pose a threat to heteronormativity and normalization by virtue of their very being. Everyday performances that rewrite social scripts and normalize LGBT persons’ Orthodox legibility is both worldmaking and transgressive, with the heart of transgression residing in claims to Orthodox authenticity. One interviewee surmised that they were queer Orthodox, “queer” referring not to gender or sexual categories but rather to religious ones. And what is queerer than blowing up categories? This is the second sense in which my title references an “unlikely” queer world. I recognize, however, that this world belies—perhaps irrevocably—the boundaries of “queer.” My goal is thus humble: to provide an opening to expand the uses of queer worldmaking while providing a conceptual framework for students of religious queer lives to discuss a number of phenomena that are often separated across research agendas, disciplinary frameworks, and epistemologies.

Acknowledgments

QTR editors Joseph Marchal and Melissa M. Wilcox’s encouragement and sage advice, as well as two anonymous reviewers’ comments, helped refine the arguments I develop in this article.

Notes

References