Queer and Trans Studies and the Jewish Question: Looking Back, Looking Ahead

Abstract

A little over twenty years ago, Jewish studies scholars welcomed the publication of two influential works—Queer Theory and the Jewish Question (2003) and Queer Jews (2002)—that created new pathways for examining queer and trans lives within Jewish studies. These texts critically engaged with the ways in which Jews have been produced as racialized, gendered, and sexed subjects, particularly within antisemitic societies. In part inspired by these volumes, Jewish studies scholars in the past two-plus decades produced a rich body of work at the intersections of queer theory, feminist theory, LGBTQ studies, queer activism, and Jewish studies. Justifiably celebrated for expanding the boundaries of the field, to date this scholarship has in many ways only scratched the surface of the potential for queer and trans Jewish studies scholarship. Much work remains to be done. In the pages that follow, I will reflect on some of the related work Jewish studies scholars have produced in the intervening decades, considering both the limitations for work in this vein within Jewish studies, and the potential for new directions in the field. The analysis I am offering here is informed by my own personal stake in the field as an archivally focused scholar of queer Jewish history. In much of this groundbreaking work of two decades ago, and in the scholarship that has been produced since, we have witnessed a brilliant capacity for Jewish studies scholars to deploy queer theory as a productive analytical lens (particularly when analyzing discourses, as well as visual, artistic, and literary texts), especially in relation to the construction and performance of sexed and gendered Jewish bodies. But to date, we have seen much less work toward recovering histories grounded in the lived and embodied experiences of Jewish sexual and gender minorities, and insufficient progress in queering the Jewish studies archive. Indeed, by introducing queer theory into Jewish studies before laying a foundation of histories, analysis, or other “data” on Jewish LGBTQ people and queer Jewish pasts and presents, such theoretical work inverted normative scholarly practices and, as I will argue below, contributed to distorted perceptions of progress in the field. In addition, some of the other silences in the field-defining work of 2002 and 2003, particularly around the experiences of Jews of color and Jews beyond central and eastern Europe, have only recently been addressed or, in some cases, remain as significant gaps in our knowledge.

The publication in 2003 of Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, a collection of essays edited by Daniel Boyarin, Daniel Itzkovitz, and Ann Pellegrini, arguably marked the official “coming out” of queer theory into the scholarly world of Jewish studies. Opening with a thorough and brilliantly framed “state of the field” essay by the editors, the book also featured contributions from Judith Butler, Janet R. Jakobsen, and Naomi Seidman—each of whom would go on to continue producing significant work informed by queer theory or, as in Butler’s case, to expanding a body of work at the core of queer theory’s very origins and growth. Ten other academics affiliated with the Jewish studies field, representing a broad range of subdisciplines, offered contributions to the volume, published alongside brief excerpts from two key books by Jewish authors that helped define queer theory as a field: Vested Interests: Cross-Dressing and Cultural Anxiety (1992) by Marjorie Garber and Epistemology of the Closet (1990) by Eve Kosofky Sedgwick.

This was not the first scholarly intervention within Jewish studies to take up the opportunities and challenges posed by queer theory (or the centering of LGBTQ Jewish lives) to expand academic conversations on Jewish history, Jewish culture, and the place of Jews within broader historical and cultural narratives. Indeed, Boyarin himself had already turned to queer and feminist theory to inform his transformative study of a nearly two-thousand-year history of “feminized” Jewish men in Unheroic Conduct: The Rise of Heterosexuality and the Invention of the Jewish Man, published in 1997, the same year in which Rebecca Alpert helped initiate the scholarly study of contemporary LGBTQ contributions to Judaism and Jewish life with her groundbreaking Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition .¹

And in 2002, the year prior to Queer Theory and the Jewish Question, David Shneer and Caryn Aviv’s edited volume Queer Jews took the American Jewish world by storm when it was published, featuring twenty-two essays, primarily by queer Jewish artists and activists. Shneer, a historian of Jewish and European history, and Aviv, a sociologist and scholar of gender, sexuality, and Judaism, presented Queer Jews as an intervention intended to celebrate and give voice to LGBTQ Jewish innovators, while opening scholarly space to consider the importance of this diverse group of queer Jewish contributors.² With essays by rabbis and artists, scholars and activists, the collection offered an introduction to the diversity of a then-emerging social and cultural flowering of queer Jewish innovation. They also saw this work as a critical lifeline for LGBTQ Jews living in families, communities, or contexts in which envisioning a safe and affirming queer Jewish future felt difficult to imagine at the time.

Prior to these books, a handful of articles in scholarly journals probing the intersections of LGBTQ and Jewish topics had begun appearing in the 1980s, and activists and Jewish communal practitioners had been navigating these overlaps in published and visual media since the 1970s. Several edited volumes in this vein especially worth mentioning are Evelyn Torton Beck’s Nice Jewish Girls: A Lesbian Anthology (1982), Christie Balka and Avi Rose’s Twice Blessed: On Being Lesbian or Gay and Jewish (1991), and Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation  (ed. Rebecca T. Alpert, Sue Levi Elwell, and Shirley Idelson, 2001), as well as the Jewish feminist journal Bridges, which began publication in 1990.³ Of particular note, this earlier activist literature was often more inclusive and intersectional than Queer Jews or Queer Theory and the Jewish Question and some of the other related scholarly work emerging in the early 2000s. Some of the work in Bridges and Nice Jewish Girls, for example, expressly attended to racial, linguistic, and ethnic diversity while also gesturing toward an awareness of disability and class analysis.

But Queer Jews, and the 2001 documentary Trembling before G-d about gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews, significantly raised the profile of LGBTQ Jewish lives within the Jewish communal world and, by extension, in the scholarly world of Jewish studies.⁴ Shneer and Aviv, and many of the book’s contributors, gave talks stemming from the book at Jewish and LGBTQ communal organizations nationwide in the United States (and in a few cities in Europe and Canada), and the book received significant coverage in the Jewish and LGBTQ press. But framed primarily as a communal, artistic, and activist project, and with limited reference to theoretical perspectives, the book’s capacity to spark new scholarly conversations was perhaps more limited (although essays from Queer Jews have been used in Jewish studies courses at universities across the United States and the world).

Queer Theory and the Jewish Question put queer theory squarely in the center of the field of academic Jewish studies, partly because of the already high profile of several of its editors and writers but also because the bulk of the scholars published in that book were working far from the margins of the field. Queer Theory and the Jewish Question suggested that interventions applying queer theory to Jewish studies scholarship could and should be thought of as mainstream—as presumptively normative. Certainly, this domestication of queer theory within Jewish studies moved slowly, unevenly, and more gradually into some of the more conservative corners of the field. But only a few years later, queer theory had attained a level of legitimacy and importance within Jewish studies that would have been previously unimaginable.

Twenty Years of Work at the Intersections of Queer Theory, Queer and Trans Studies, and Jewish Studies

First, some notes on terminology and parameters. When I first communicated with the editors about contributing to this issue of QTR, the suggestion was that I write a “state of the field” of “queer and trans studies in Judaism.” One might presume that the range of work that falls under such an umbrella would cover a lot of ground. But it comes down to one’s definition of terms. As religious studies scholars editing a journal dedicated to the study of religion, it makes sense that Melissa M. Wilcox and Joseph A. Marchal suggested a focus on “Judaism,” but that would leave me dealing with a rather narrow body of scholarship. As a historian connected to broader conversations within Jewish studies, I’m redefining the prompt and am thus writing about “queer and trans Jewish studies.” The field of modern Jewish studies has its roots in the early nineteenth-century development of Wissenschaft des Judentums (“Science of Judaism”) in Germany, which sought to study Judaism within the context of Enlightenment scholarship and new research methods. Gradually, the field expanded to include the study of Jewish history, the Jewish people, and Jewish culture broadly, in addition to the study of Jewish spiritual texts, religious practices, and biblical archaeology. By the 1960s, Jewish studies began being accepted as a discipline within the liberal arts in North America and Europe, with departments and programs in the field at universities from Atlanta to Boulder, Boston to Los Angeles, Toronto to Berlin. This shift attends to the reality that Jews have long understood themselves as a culture, nation, and people, often more so than (and at times, in contrast to) a religion. The majority of Jews in the world today do not see themselves as “religious” (even as many might strongly identify as Jewish) and even in earlier periods, from ancient times to the early modern era, Protestant and Christian-centric notions of “religion” as a category often only loosely apply to Jewish communities and Jewish practices. As you will see in the pages that follow, the shift from “Judaism” to “Jewish studies” opens a much broader frame—one that more meaningfully captures the breadth of scholarship on Jewish social, cultural, religious, and political production. And to clarify, for reasons of my own knowledge and language capacities, I’ll focus on literature produced in English, therefore largely privileging Anglo-American Jewish studies, with some exceptions.

There is another definitional problem, however, given the unstable nature of the terms queer and queer studies. Should I focus on scholarship that centers the lives and experiences of sexual and gender minorities, broadly defined, taking advantage of my own scholarly expertise? Or should I instead consider applications of broader notions of queer theory within Jewish studies that move well beyond questions of sexuality and gender? These options point to two overlapping, but sometimes distinct, bodies of work. This takes us back to the question of just how wide a field we are talking about here. Despite the breadth and visibility of work by often prominent Jewish studies scholars engaging with queer theory, the body of scholarship attending to queer and trans lives and experiences remains surprisingly small.

Of course, in most cases, these aren’t really two separate categories of scholarship. They often overlap and exist more on a continuum. To begin creating a taxonomy of such scholarship, I found it useful to think of a Kinsey scale of queer and trans Jewish studies, with a 1 on the scale denoting work informed by queer theory but minimally or even not at all engaged with questions of sexuality and gender, let alone any ties to the embodied experiences of sexual and gender minorities. At the other end, let us assign a 6 to work fully centering lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, and nonbinary lives, or their sibling, antecedent, or related experiences from eras before the creation of our modern Western regimes of sexuality and gender (with all due caveats about avoiding essentialist notions of continuity between modern and ancient or medieval sexual and gender formations).⁵

Michel Foucault, Butler, and many others have taught us that we should challenge any perceived direct or essentialist links between modern LGBTQ identities, on the one hand, and experiences of same-sex eroticism and gender diversity that might have preceded the modern regimes, on the other. Therefore, these earlier examples of nonnormative sexual and gender practices and experiences perhaps should not occupy a “Kinsey 6” on our scale, but rather a 5, or maybe even a 4 the further back in time we go and the more distant we are from any notion of our modern sexual systems. Fine—that’s the point of a continuum, of course.

So, sticking with this Kinsey scale rubric, however admittedly simplistic, let’s first consider work produced in the past twenty years that lands somewhere between the 4 and 6 on that scale, or to put it another way, let’s focus on work dealing with various formations of ancient, medieval, and modern same-sex intimacy and gender diversity, along with Jewish studies scholarship explicitly centering contemporary LGBTQ lives. Here, our list of key texts is surprisingly small. I will cover the work of ten diverse, but representative, scholars here in some depth because many colleagues within Jewish studies, religious studies, and queer studies are not aware of much of the scholarship in this vein. As you will see, these ten scholars also reflect the very broad and interdisciplinary approaches to queer and trans Jewish studies currently being practiced, and thus represent key works I recommend to colleagues in other fields interested in exploring the range of currently available queer Jewish studies scholarship. You might think of these as the core of my own loosely defined, personal, and highly subjective LGBTQ Jewish studies canon, with an emphasis on work that sheds light on broader themes within Jewish studies and religious studies, helping us rethink other histories and other norms, experiences, and expectations.

I’ll begin alphabetically with Israeli scholar Elazar Ben-Lulu, an anthropologist of religion and gender who has published multiple articles focused on the intersections of Judaism and LGBTQ lives. To date, Ben-Lulu’s research has primarily explored LGBTQ engagement with Jewish ritual, liturgy, and prayer, especially among Reform Jews in Israel.⁶ Ben-Lulu addresses the ways in which LGBTQ Jews reclaim Jewish traditions, adopting and, at times, reworking practices from which they might have been excluded in decades past, or which might have failed to conform to their embodied experiences as LGBTQ people. Ben-Lulu’s current work (as yet unpublished) centers contemporary LGBTQ Jewish immigrants to Israel from Russia and the United States.

Continuing alphabetically takes us to S. J. Crasnow, a religious studies scholar focused on how queer and trans Jews construct their religious lives in conversation with normative Judaism, thus queering and redefining normative Judaism in the process.⁷ They have published innovative work on trans Jewish ritual and artistic innovations, including an insightful analysis of the ways in which trans Jews have reclaimed and transformed the use of the mikvah to mark gender transition and other key moments in trans Jewish life journeys.⁸ As a specific case study, Crasnow has analyzed the work of trans Jewish ceramics artist Nikki Green, who explores embodied trans Jewish experiences and links them to histories of alchemy, mythology, mycology, and traditional Jewish texts and practices through an embodied approach to painting and ceramics—which are among the most physical and embodied visual art forms—reflecting trans visions of self-actualization and becoming.⁹

Continuing this passage through the alphabet, but also the linked theme of work dealing with contemporary or relatively historically recent experiences, this body of literature would include my own work within the US Jewish world on such topics as the role of Jews in the homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s; the ways in which gay synagogues in the 1970s and 1980s facilitated the articulation of coherent gay Jewish and lesbian Jewish identities and the emergence of a uniquely queer embodied Judaism (the first such gay synagogue, lasting only six weeks, was formed in Brooklyn in 1970); and the queer origins of the Jewish healing movement in the 1980s and early 1990s, in which I show how, in the context of the AIDS crisis, Jewish feminists, leaders at LGBTQ synagogues, and lesbian activists shifted American Judaism toward more expressly embodied and personalized forms of Jewish ritual and liturgy.¹⁰

I am also working on a study of the ways in which the Jewish AIDS activist and writer Larry Kramer deployed memories of the Holocaust, and the thinking of the Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, to make sense of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s.¹¹ In addition, I was coeditor, with Joshua Lesser and Shneer, of the 2009 volume Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible. That text included essays offering queer perspectives on each of the fifty-four weekly Torah portions read in most synagogues as part of the annual reading cycle of the Torah, along with additional essays covering major Jewish holidays and framing the methods and significance of analyzing the Torah queerly in this way. The contributors to that volume included a mix of scholars, clergy, and LGBTQ Jewish activists.

Continuing with examples of scholars centering LGBTQ Jewish lives, historian Shaun Jacob Halper completed his dissertation in 2013 at the University of California, Berkeley, on the queer Czech Hebrew poet and scholar Jiří Georg Mordechai Langer (1894–1943). Langer, before his death in Tel Aviv, lived for several years as a Hasidic Jew, studying in the court of the Belzer Rebbe (a Hasidic leader based in Belz, a town variously within Poland, Ukraine, and the USSR in different periods in the twentieth century), and later studied psychoanalysis and used its conceptual tools to locate the homoerotic in Judaism, while also responding to the antisemitism in the early movement in central Europe for homosexual rights.¹² A friend of the great modernists Franz Kafka and Max Brod, Langer also penned the most explicit poetry on themes of same-sex attraction that existed in modern Hebrew literature before the 1970s. Halper remains one of a very few scholars to offer a deep dive into the life and work of a queer Jewish figure who lived prior to World War II, and shows that for Langer, both his queerness and his Jewishness were central to his life and thought. Halper shows how Langer synthesized Hasidism, Jewish mysticism, kabbalah, the erotic, and the homoerotic in the 1910s through the 1930s to style a unique public identity but also to inform his groundbreaking 1923 book, Die Erotik der Kabbala (The Eroticism of Kabbalah), an exploration of the erotic, and homoerotic, potential at the heart of Judaism, Jewish history, Jewish nationalism, and Jewish mysticism. Halper’s study of Langer offers new perspectives on the formation of the early homosexual rights movement in central Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century, reinserting Jewish voices who explicitly and clearly engaged with Jewish history and thought while simultaneously theorizing and producing the modern categories of homosexuality and heterosexuality. The rise of the early homosexual rights movement has generally been presented as part of a secularizing process. But Halper troubles this assumption, showing how thinkers like Langer, deeply involved in the movement, linked their understandings of sexual and gender diversity with their religious imaginations and experiences. I would argue that Halper is thus queering queer history by rejecting the false dichotomy between queer identities and religiously informed lives. Other Jewish figures central to the discourses that helped build and solidify our modern sexual/gender regimes have received ample attention, most notably Magnus Hirschfeld, Benedict Friedlander, and Sigmund Freud. Halper’s queering of the normative framing of these discourses is even more crucial for centering a religious, rather than a secular, Jew.

The literary scholar Warren Hoffman, since 2017 serving as the executive director of the Association of Jewish Studies, has offered a detailed analysis of queer themes in Jewish literature, drama, and film in the early and mid-twentieth century. Of particular value in his 2008 book, The Passing Game , is one of the most thorough takes on the now-trendy 1907 queerly inflected Yiddish play, God of Vengeance by Sholem Asch, along with chapters on the ways in which the Yiddish actress Molly Picon played with gender (Picon, 1898–1992, most famous for her cross-dressing performance in the 1936 Yiddish film Yidl Mitn Fidl) and queer subtexts in works by Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902–91, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978), Abraham Cahan (1860–1951, the editor for over four decades of the Yiddish socialist newspaper Forward—“Forverts” in transliterated Yiddish), the novelist Jo Sinclair (the pen name of Ruth Seid, 1913–95), and the Pulitzer Prize–winning novelist Philip Roth (1933–2012). Hoffman shows that queer themes have infused Jewish literature throughout the twentieth century, even when those themes might not be obvious or explicit. But he also, and perhaps more importantly, questions what work those queer themes are actually doing. With his read of God of Vengeance, for example, he troubles our contemporary desire to read Asch’s work as a “lesbian” play, or even to presume that the intimacy between two women at the heart of the play was the play’s main point or the element that damned the play to scandal on the American stage, becoming a cause célèbre when the production was shut down on obscenity charges on Broadway in 1923. Hoffman instead attends to how different audiences might have received the play, reflecting the contextual interplay between the play, the playwright, and diverse Jewish and non-Jewish audiences.¹³

More recently, historian Sarah Imhoff joined Halper in offering a detailed study of an early twentieth-century queer figure, writing about the life of the disabled Zionist writer, educator, and poet Jessie Sampter.¹⁴ Sampter, a relatively obscure figure prior to Imhoff’s biography, moved to Palestine in 1919 and shared a home for many years with Leah Berlin, an advocate for Yemenite Jews and for disabled people in the Yishuv (the Hebrew word for the Jewish communities living in Palestine prior to the formation of the state of Israel). Imhoff does not attempt to identify Sampter as a “lesbian,” but rather centers her cohabitation with Berlin and notes that “[Sampter] wrote of homoerotic longings and had same-sex relationships.”¹⁵ Imhoff, like Halper and Golan Y. Moskowitz (see below), also engages with a much broader queering, persuasively expanding beyond simply recovering Sampter’s same-sex erotic interests to also gesture toward Sampter’s nonnormative relationship to Jewish identity and spirituality (Sampter became active with the Unitarian Church in her twenties), queering or destabilizing our sense of the boundaries of who does and does not count as a Jewish subject. Imhoff also engages the interplays between queer theory and disability studies (or crip theory, the intersectional lens combining the two), processes of racialization, and cultural colonialism by centering Sampter’s disability and also her engagement with those in Palestine marked as other, such as disabled and Yemenite Jews, whose embodied experiences as subjects so dramatically differed from early Zionist imaginations of idealized European-born “muscle Jews.”

In 2020, in one of the most complex contributions to the queer and trans Jewish studies canon, literary scholar Moskowitz published a groundbreaking queer and Jewish analysis of the life and work of the writer and illustrator Maurice Sendak (1928–2012), author of Where the Wild Things Are, among many other classics.¹⁶ Moskowitz argues that Sendak’s Jewish and queer identities deeply informed his creative work. Moskowitz builds on earlier scholars who linked Jewishness and queerness as categories that have long troubled normative boundaries and binaries (more on these scholars, below). Moskowitz adds two new dimensions to these comparisons and linkages. He brings to Jewish studies an emerging understanding from literary scholars and queer theory of childhood as inherently “queer,” as well as a vision of the families of acculturating immigrants—particularly Jews with their experiences of violence and trauma in the twentieth century—as occupying unstable and liminal statuses that can be productively analyzed using insights from queer theory.¹⁷ Seeing childhood and migration narratives as two categories that exceed societal efforts to maintain normative boundaries, Moskowitz applies queer theory to deepen our understanding of both childhood and Jewish migration, while illuminating how these themes and experiences informed Sendak’s life and work. Moskowitz thus has produced one of the richest in-depth studies of an embodied queer Jewish life, while simultaneously using queer theory to expand and complicate our understandings of Jewishness, American literature, migration, childhood, and the Holocaust. In addition to his work on Sendak, Moskowitz has also published on queer postmemory, examining how queer ideas of family and embodied difference shed light on intergenerational memory and trauma in post-Holocaust families.¹⁸ More recently, Moskowitz has been working on a project exploring the links between Jews and drag in American culture.

In 2019, historian Noam Sienna created the groundbreaking volume A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Literature, his brilliant collection of 120 queer Jewish texts from the first century CE through 1969, each carefully annotated with a brief bibliography, and many newly translated for this edited volume. The collection includes sources from throughout the Jewish world, from Philo and Sappho, to rabbis, activists, and poets writing on the eve of the Stonewall Rebellion of June 1969, and notably pushes against the Ashkenazi-centric focus of much other work linking queer and Jewish lives. As Sienna writes in his thorough introduction, the book recovers a “lineage which has been denied and withheld from the people who have sought it” and a history that has been “manipulated and censored, forgotten, buried, and destroyed.”¹⁹ Sienna attempts to build connections across time, centering queer Jewish texts that invite us to imagine legacies of same-sex erotic and intimate relationships and of Jewish ancestors who moved between genders or defied gender categories altogether. Sienna never avoids the ambiguity or complexity of the sources he is presenting, and studiously avoids claiming any list of “famous gays in Jewish history” (or famous trans Jews, for that matter), encouraging readers to engage with the “diversity of individuals and identities without erasure or homogenization.”²⁰

Max Strassfeld’s recently published Trans Talmud: Androgynes and Eunuchs in Rabbinic Literature (2022) offers the most nuanced and thorough examination to date of the complexity of the constructions of sexed and gendered bodies in early Rabbinic literature (as found in such collections of rabbinic texts as the Mishnah and the Babylonian Talmud, produced roughly 200–500 CE). In addition to elegantly historizing and contextualizing these complicated texts, Strassfeld also uses them as tools to help us think expansively about sex, gender, and culture in our own time, contributing to efforts to forge new pathways toward a more liberatory way of thinking about gender and embodiment in Judaism and in our world broadly. But while highlighting possible liberatory readings of these texts, Strassfeld does not ignore the ways in which these texts enforce and structure boundaries, contributing to the construction of the category “male” defined in opposition to females, and the ways in which these texts explore sexed bodies that exceed definitional norms as a technique for propping up a male/female binary. This complex and nuanced “transing” of rabbinic texts helps readers build connections across time, while simultaneously challenging any capacity to situate our contemporary concerns within these ancient and medieval discourses.²¹

The final individual here in my selective alphabetical journey through significant recent scholarship in the Kinsey 4–6 range takes us to Zohar Weiman-Kelman’s 2018 monograph, Queer Expectations: A Genealogy of Jewish Women’s Poetry. Trained in comparative literature, Weiman-Kelman brings a personal, literary, political, and historical lens to Jewish American women’s poems from the late nineteenth century, Hebrew and Yiddish women’s poetry from the interwar period, and Jewish lesbian writing from the 1970s and 1980s. Weiman-Kelman creates a “backward continuity” linking these three distinct epochs—as well as their own present cultural and political context—through a queer, personal, and political reading praxis that challenges linearity and heteronormative reproductive futurities while producing an affective genealogy (a personal queer rootedness) grounded in a nonlinear form of queer resistance. Weiman-Kelman explains that in this work, they at times retroactively read queer and/or lesbian desire into texts by authors who made no such identity claim in their lives.²² Weiman-Kelman’s queer and personal reading practices allow them to identify with these desires as a queer reader, even if these desires may not have been nameable by these authors in their own contexts and own times. Weiman-Kelman is not claiming to have uncovered any previously hidden “truth” about the lived experiences or sexual practices of some of these writers. Rather, by bringing a queer present into nonlinear conversation with multiple literary pasts, Weiman-Kelman creates a new queer conversation that allows for an unfolding of multiple and multivalent queer possibilities. Weiman-Kelman thus simultaneously queers the texts they read, while also queering the relations of these texts and their authors to time, kinship, language, and progressive notions of history.

Other scholars we might count over on this far side of our Kinsey scale, at least for some significant component of their published work, would include (again, alphabetically) sociologist Orit Avishai, who has a new monograph, Queer Judaism (2023), on contemporary gay and lesbian Orthodox lives in Israel.²³ Political scientist Marla Brettschneider has produced important work on queer multiracial Jewish families and identities, and more broadly has produced work since the 1990s emerging from an intersectional Jewish, feminist, antiracist, queer, class-based, and decolonial perspective.²⁴ Straddling the Anglo-American and French scholarly communities, literary scholar David Caron has helped theorize HIV and fears of the body in French literature and culture, as well as the ways in which both Jews and queers continue to challenge normative models of universal citizenship, even in the late twentieth century and into the present.²⁵ The 2007 book Rainbow Jews: Jewish and Gay Identity in the Performing Arts by Jonathan C. Friedman explores “the intersection of gay and Jewish identity in the sphere of the performing arts.”²⁶ Media theorist Slava Greenberg produces work at the intersections of trans studies, disability studies, and gender, having engaged with specifically Jewish material in a study of trans representation in the Amazon series Transparent.²⁷ Holocaust scholar Anna Hájková has been uncovering queer and other nonnormative sexual experiences during the Holocaust (what she collectively frames as categories of “transgressive sexuality”), contributing to deeper understandings of gender and sexual violence, consent, and normative behavior during the Holocaust (an often politically explosive and understudied topic).²⁸

Religious studies scholar Gwynn Kessler has explored Rabbinic texts through the lens of queer theory.²⁹ Historian and scholar of Jewish education Jonathan Krasner, a contributor to Queer Jews in 2002, has more recently written on same-sex couples raising children in Jewish communities.³⁰ Religious studies scholar Brett Krutzsch has written on the ways in which murdered Jewish gay activist and politician Harvey Milk, along with other murdered queer subjects (Brandon Teena, Mathew Shepard, and others), has been turned into a martyr by LGBTQ activists using Christian constructions of martyrdom, challenging the normative assessment of LGBTQ political activism in the United States as secular.³¹ With Samira Mehta, Krutzsch also wrote an essay on Jewish communal responses to same-sex marriage and has recently coedited a book with Jewish studies scholar Nora Rubel titled Blessings beyond the Binary: “Transparent” and Queering the Jewish Family.³²

The poet and scholar Joy Ladin has offered work blurring the boundaries between literature, biography, scholarship, and creative reimaginings of queer and trans theology.³³ Rabbi, writer, scholar, and activist Jay Michaelson has produced a wide range of public and journalistic work on queer and trans Jews. As a scholar, he recently published a detailed study of Jacob Frank, the eighteenth-century mystical leader and false messianic figure, in which Michaelson attends to the queer potential in some of the sexual rituals and teachings associated with Frank and his followers.³⁴ Michaelson’s 2011 book, God vs. Gay? The Religious Case for Equality, analyzes Jewish and Christian religious texts and traditions to argue against any fundamental conflict between LGBTQ people and religious practice.

Folklorist and ethnographer Amy K. Milligan has written about Jewish bodylore, or the embodied discourses and practices (clothing and accessories, body language, movement, embodied rituals, etc.) Jews rely on or experience as Jews. In this vein, she has studied the literal embodiment of queer bodies and the ways in which queer Jewish culture manifests and is taught through innovative bodylore and ritual.³⁵

Scholar, musician, and activist Eve Sicular has been working for nearly three decades on queer themes in Yiddish film, or what she calls the “Yiddish celluloid closet,” while also queering the musical tradition of Klezmer with her band, Isle of Klezbos.³⁶ Writer, theater critic, and cultural studies scholar Alisa Solomon began writing at the intersections of queer and trans studies in Jewish culture in the late 1990s with her 1997 classic, Re-dressing the Canon: Essays on Theater and Gender (including essays on cross-dressing in Yiddish theater and in the work of Tony Kushner), and has continued pursuing queer Jewish topics from time to time in her frequent essays as a public intellectual.³⁷ Rounding out this section brings us to an author writing primarily in German, Jan Wilkens, a doctoral student in Berlin writing on Jewish LGBTQ activism and culture in Europe in the 1980s and 1990s.³⁸

Dozens of other scholars have made infrequent forays into queer and trans Jewish topics, including Jonathan Branfman, Gil Z. Hochberg, Brooke Lober, Laurie Marhoefer, Bryan K. Roby, Jeffrey Shandler, and Mir Yarfitz.³⁹ And moving past Anglo-American and European scholarship, within Israel (or within Israel studies produced outside of Israel), multiple scholars attend to queer and trans Jewish studies and/or Israel studies. Some examples include the work of cinema studies scholars Raz Yosef and Gilad Padva on queerness and masculinity in Israeli cinema (Yosef also coedited a volume on Israeli LGBT and queer studies with legal scholar Aeyal Gross and gender studies scholar Amalia Ziv), and of Israeli historian Ofer Nur, who has productively queered Zionist masculinity.⁴⁰ Literary and film studies scholar Yaron Peleg has produced several works on queerness and the homoerotic in Israeli and Jewish film and literature.⁴¹ Ofri Ilany and Dotan Brom are documenting LGBTQ social and cultural history in Israel, while Israeli scholars Yuval Yonay and Moshe Sluhovsky, along with the German literary scholar Andreas Kraß, have turned to the interplay between queer Jewish intellectuals and activists in early twentieth-century Central Europe and mandatory Palestine.⁴² Cultural theorist and longtime LGBTQ activist Amit Kama works on identity formation and representation of minorities within Israeli society, particularly LGBTQ and immigrant communities and people with disabilities.⁴³ Pioneering activist, scholar, and public intellectual Amalia Ziv has produced work on pornography, queer kinship, queer representation, and many other topics. They are head of the Gender Studies program at Ben Gurion University.⁴⁴

There are also a handful of activists producing queer and trans Jewish studies work that speaks to both scholarly and popular audiences. Teacher and writer Noach Dzmura, for example, edited the award-winning 2010 collection Balancing on the Mechitza: Transgender in Jewish Community, offering a mix of essays by activists, clergy, and several scholars (including Alpert, Margaret Moers Wenig, Strassfeld, Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, Julia Watts Belser, and Judith Plaskow). In the same year, Miryam Kabakov, a social worker, Jewish community organizer, and director of Eshel, a national advocacy organization for LGBTQ Orthodox Jews, edited an anthology by and about queer Orthodox women that likewise offered essays by a range of activists, organizers, and scholars, including Naomi Seidman, Mara Benjamin, Ladin, Charlotte Elisheva Fonrobert, and Plaskow.⁴⁵ Elliot Kukla has written for more general audiences on discussions of nonbinary bodies in Talmudic texts (a topic explored from an academic perspective by Strassfeld and Fonrobert).⁴⁶ And Shaan Knan founded and coordinated Rainbow Jews, a thorough queer archival project in the United Kingdom to record and document the life stories of a diverse grouping of LGBTQ Jews there.⁴⁷

I chose the scholars and activists profiled in the past several pages to offer a sense of the breadth and diversity of such work. This list is by no means exhaustive. Much more work has been done or is in progress. But even accounting for scholars not included here, the volume of work in the field is still too little to adequately capture the complexity and richness of the history and current dynamics of queer and trans Jewish experiences.

Moving to a 2 or 3 on our Kinsey scale, the pool of scholarship expands. This moves us to scholars applying queer theory to their work, and often focusing on gender and sexual formations, but without necessarily attending to queer and trans experiences. Many scholars within Jewish studies are likely familiar with some of this work, much of which falls into four general categories:

1. scholarship queering notions of gender and sexuality in biblical and rabbinic texts, especially work queering the boundaries of male and female bodies;

2. scholarship linking Jews and queers as emblematic modern subjects, focused primarily on discourses in Europe and the United States in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that marked Jews as inherently queer, or exceeding normative sexual, racial, and gender boundaries;

3. a related but possibly separate body of work focused on the gendering and racializing of Jews in modern Europe generally, and their imbrication in broader discourses of gender, race, and sexuality;

4. scholarship analyzing traditionally sex-segregated Jewish spaces and Jewish roles as homosocial and, at times, even homoerotic, such as work focused on the homosocial bonds of yeshivot (Jewish learning academies, usually for boys/men) or Bais Yaakov schools for girls, and rabbinic hevruta pairs (traditional study partners).

Across these categories, which sometimes overlap, depending on the scholar, this grouping of Kinsey 2s and 3s would include dozens upon dozens of scholars. But the most obvious suspects are quite well-known and would include Benjamin M. Baader, Shirly Bahar, Julia Watts Belser, Boyarin, Matti Bunzl, Fonrobert, Jonathan Freedman, Jay Geller, Sharon Gillerman, Sander Gilman, Ann Pellegrini, Naomi Seidman, and Stacy Wolf.⁴⁸ I have only listed here those who have produced some of the most widely read work. There are, of course, many others, and nearly all Jewish studies scholarship in the last twenty years that touches on gender and sexuality has been produced in conversation with the innovations of these scholars.

Gaps, Opportunities, and the Urgency of Queer Jewish Recovery Work

One challenge with some of the work in this domain is that some of the earlier interventions emerged out of an interest in queer theory when the field was relatively new and, in some ways, underdeveloped. Some of this work, therefore, paid insufficient attention to broader issues of racialization beyond the questions they centered as Jewish studies scholars of the racialization of primarily white-skinned Ashkenazi Jews vis-à-vis hegemonic social constructions of whiteness. And even as they critiqued normative understandings of gender and sexed bodies, they still more often took male Ashkenazi bodies as the norm to be queered, attending less often to female, Mizrahi, Sephardi, and other bodies (even as they recognized the overlay of the Orientalist imagination mapped onto the bodies of central European Ashkenazi Jews). The work in Queer Jews, as well, did not attend to Jews of color, disabled Jews, or other marginalized communities.

More importantly, much of the queer work within Jewish studies in the 2000s and early 2010s often focused on discourse, rhetoric, and the discursive construction of Jewish and gendered subjects while rarely centering archival or textual analysis about the embodied experiences of specific individuals or communities. This is not to critique discourse analysis, much of which has been extraordinarily useful in expanding our understandings of the construction and performance of identities and subject positions. But as a historian committed to archives—both physical and nonphysical, including embodied archives carried in the affect, movement, and experiences of everyday people—this privileging of discourse leaves a huge scholarly gap, one that we often don’t notice—or when it is noticed, it is too often dismissed as a mere detail.

For ancient, medieval, and even many early-modern subjects, the lack of credible sources that might allow a deeper dive into embodied experiences is an obvious challenge. But for modern subjects, this is not always the case, as Halper, Imhoff, Moskowitz, and others have made clear in the work mentioned above. And this limited attention to the lived experiences of same-sex attracted and/or gender transgressive Jews limits our capacity to fully understand or concretize the theoretical insights of so many of the scholars adopting insights from queer theory. In some cases, diving into the details of embodied experiences and archival records might even challenge some of the theoretical findings and assumptions of these scholars, or in other cases they might complicate or even expand the theoretical insights of such scholarship.

For example, the argument for a consistent and persistent category of Jewish men, from ancient rabbis to modern subjects in central Europe of the early twentieth century, who were feminized, or perceived as symbolically castrated, or as not quite men, has become a central insight of contemporary Jewish studies and even valorized by Boyarin as a particular queer and anti-colonial Jewish technique of survival that refused and thus stood somewhat apart from normative and hegemonic gender systems. But is it entirely and broadly an accurate understanding of not just constructions of Jewish masculinity but of the lived experience of wide swaths of Jewish men? The lived histories of Jews in Islamic lands, particularly in medieval Spain and under Ottoman rule, as well as the histories of Italian Jews and of Anglo Jewry, for example, offer us significant counterexamples of Jewish men readily conforming to normative masculine gender performances (of their time and place) and even being read as successfully enacting masculine roles. Boyarin, of course, clarifies in his preface to Unheroic Conduct that he is not describing the gendered dynamics of all Jewish men, but rather noting one adaptation—one formation among others—that he hopes to illuminate and reclaim. But much work on Jewish masculinity since Boyarin failed to maintain that careful balance. And when scholarship on Jewish masculinity encounters the homoerotic, it is too often presumed that male homoeroticism challenges or threatens normative masculinity. As Halper, Ilany, and others have shown (and as work on the homoerotic among Jews and Muslims in medieval Spain and the Ottoman Empire demonstrates—not to mention evidence among non-Jews in ancient Greece), in some cultural moments, the homoerotic has been constructed as deeply and principally masculine.⁴⁹ More work exploring the wide varieties of Jewish masculinity is certainly needed.

In other cases, the question is less about theoretical framing, but rather an insufficient focus on certain archival details. For example, what do we know of the Jewishness of the German Jewish sexologist and advocate for queer civil rights, Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld? In the Weimar Republic (and indeed throughout Europe, Asia, and North America), Hirschfeld was among the most famous Jewish men and homosexuals of his age (even as he remained officially closeted). The intersection of Hirschfeld’s Jewishness and gayness marked him as among the most threatening subjects for the early Nazi movement, as did his advocacy on behalf of civil rights and medical interventions for transgender people. Indeed, the infamous book burnings in central Berlin in spring 1933, images of which are iconic today, are most often images of the burning of the library and archive of Hirschfeld’s Institute for Sexual Research. These links have not, of course, been lost on scholars, and Hirschfeld’s place within the imagination of the Nazis, and other fascist or right-wing sympathizers, is well-documented and frequently discussed. But the scholars who have written about Hirschfeld rarely devote much, if any, thought to how Hirschfeld experienced his own Jewishness, or perhaps more crucially, how the German Jewish community navigated Hirschfeld, his work, and the right-wing focus on him and his institute. Those Jewish studies scholars who include material on Hirschfeld have largely privileged discourse and the ways in which Nazi leaders, other right-wing figures, and the broader German public understood and caricatured Hirschfeld, devoting very little energy to Hirschfeld’s own archive (and I’m using archive here not only to encompass the traditional archival records of letters, diaries, and mentions of Hirschfeld in print and by family, friends, and associates, but also in the queer sense of his self-presentation and self-styling, or what we can know of it, based on photos, wardrobe choices, geographic traces, and other clues). To date, multiple scholars have written book-length studies in English centering, or at least highlighting, Hirschfeld and the institute, but except for Marhoefer, they have approached him outside of a Jewish studies context and without attending in any deep way to his Jewish biography or to his place within the broader Jewish community of Berlin.⁵⁰ What role did Jewish community anxiety over Hirschfeld’s homosexuality play in the way Jewish leaders responded (or not) to early Nazi efforts to demonize and scapegoat homosexuals and trans people? Why were so many of the other activists and doctors working with Hirschfeld also Jewish?

I could give countless other similar examples of well-known figures for whom the intersections of their Jewishness and queerness has been insufficiently explored, including the homophile activists Frank Kameny (subject of a book-length study by Eric Cervini, but with little concern for his Jewish context⁵¹) and the attorney Pearl Hart; the anarchist Emma Goldman; the labor activist Pauline Newman; the feminist activist Bertha Pappenheim; the pioneers of surgical and medical interventions for trans people, such as Felix Abraham, Harry Benjamin, and Stanley Biber; and the founder of Humanistic Judaism, Rabbi Sherwin Wine. It was only a few years ago that Harvey Milk, hardly an overlooked gay Jewish figure, finally received a study that actively centered his Jewishness (the most well-known study of Milk, The Mayor of Castro Street, published in 1982 by journalist Randy Shilts, barely mentioned his Jewish context). Lillian Faderman’s 2018 biography, Harvey Milk: His Lives and Death, offers us a new perspective on a secular and cultural Jew at home in a world of Yiddish phrases, Jewish food, Jewish jokes, a prophetic call to social justice, and memories of the Holocaust. Faderman argues, quite convincingly, that these Jewish experiences influenced him as much as—or more than—his gay identity. Faderman’s work, requiring a deep dive into the archive, allowed us to see Milk differently, and by extension, to better understand the importance to American politics and American culture of the experiences of secular Jews who came of age in the middle of the twentieth century.

There are many, many other well-known twentieth-century figures known to be queer, or to have connected themselves as activists or professionals to queer contexts, who are waiting for scholars like Faderman to take the time and dive deep. What of even lesser-known figures or even unknown figures, the exploration of whom might offer us insights into the lived experiences of Jewish sexual and gender minorities in decades past, or, as with Jessie Sampter, people who through their queer self-stylings simultaneously help guide us toward a productive queering of other normative categories and embodied experiences of marginalization? Of course, well-known figures or those particularly active in political or cultural spheres generally receive the bulk of scholarly attention. But queer studies has long pushed against this trend, going back as early as the work of Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy and Madeline D. Davis and their 1993 classic study of working-class lesbians in Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold. More recent work to queer the archive and the push for community-based scholarship has continued to open opportunities for more diverse and unexpected stories to be told within queer studies, but this perspective has had only a limited influence within Jewish studies to date. To consider a different example that imagines an even broader conception of the archives we should be mining, no one has yet examined the lives and experiences of Jews arrested under antigay laws in the United States, Britain, or other countries (with some small amount of work done in the context of Nazi Germany). I’m thinking here of people arrested or charged for soliciting, public indecency, cross-dressing, and related charges used to harass and criminalize queer people for much of the twentieth century in the United States and many countries in Europe. George Chauncey mentioned a few such cases of arrests of Jews based on his deep work with police statistics in New York in the early twentieth century, but he did not dive into the details.⁵²

In addition, some of the early work that might have shed light on queer and trans Jewish experiences failed to attend to the Jewishness of their objects of study (or in some cases, to their queer or trans experiences). As an example, Mark Stein’s classic study of gay and lesbian life in Philadelphia, City of Sisterly and Brotherly Loves, was an important resource for me when doing my own work on in the involvement of lesbian and gay Jews in the homophile movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Stein helpfully identified the religious and/or ethnic background of many of his informants, cataloging quite a few Jews. Yet Stein did not expand that identification to consider the ways in which their Jewishness might have informed their gay or lesbian identities or their activism. But because Stein identified his Jewish research subjects, it leaves the false impression that the recovery work for this particular historical moment has already been attended to.

And what of same-sex intimacy and gender transgressive individuals in the early modern and medieval Jewish worlds? We have a paucity of scholarship on such figures.

The sort of recovery work in Jewish studies that might respond to or engage with some of these questions is still very much needed. By “recovery work,” I mean scholarship focused on uncovering and writing the history of a marginalized community or of topics and experiences long seen as peripheral or unimportant (in this case, queer and trans people and others whose behaviors or identities challenged sexual and gender norms). The example of women’s and gender studies is particularly instructive. Scholarship centering the lives of women—recovering undervalued or hidden histories—began in the early twentieth century and flowered from the 1960s forward, before gradually shifting away starting in the 1990s from a singular focus on the histories of women toward scholarship analyzing gender as a category of analysis, and its imbrications with power, identity, and racialized and sexed bodies. With this turn came a strong interest in applying critical theory, queer theory, and feminist theory within women’s and gender studies scholarship. This turn has enriched the field and produced an outpouring of complex and critical scholarship, much of it helping expand our understanding of broad historical and cultural themes. But it built on decades of existing recovery work on the history of women. When shifting from focusing on the lived experiences of women to instead theoretically interrogating gender, broadly, the field did so from the strength of a solid foundation.

The primary challenge for Jewish studies is that the field came to the phase of “recovery work” of queer and trans histories relatively late, after already branching out toward a strong interest in queer theory. Queerly inflected Jewish studies scholarship has thus been built on a relatively shallow foundation. The scope of work on the lived experiences of sexual and gender minorities has grown over the past two decades, as described above. But it remains only a fraction of the work on Jewish women.

And much of the recovery work within LGBTQ Jewish history that did come to the attention of scholars emerged from the realms of activists, advocates, and artists. The film Trembling before G-d, mentioned above, offers a useful example. Appearing on screens in 2001, the film offered in-depth, complex, first-person narratives of lesbian and gay Orthodox Jewish lives (all presenting as presumptively white and cisgender). It was not until twenty years later that scholarly work, such as the current work of Avishai, centered LGBTQ Orthodox Jews.⁵³

In addition, funding and resources for such work are relatively limited within the field (although not nonexistent). This has had the twin effect of discouraging some young or new scholars from taking up such work within the field and of allowing more senior scholars to presume such work is perhaps no longer necessary or of limited interest.⁵⁴

Beyond basic recovery work, there are multiple unexamined (or underexamined) queer and trans topics and questions within Jewish studies that would benefit from broader applications of queer theory, feminist theory, crip theory, affect theory, and related critical theoretical frameworks. Doing this work will enrich our understandings of Jewish history and culture; religious history; American studies; women and gender studies; and many other related fields. And activists and practitioners, who helped lay the foundations for uncovering and exploring queer Jewish narratives, would benefit from these theoretical insights as well.

We need more work on queer Jewish families and nonbiological forms of creating affective bonds. We need more attention to queering the physical archives that specialize in Jewish history (the American Jewish Historical Society in New York City has been actively working toward this goal).⁵⁵ We need more Jewish studies scholars to take up the charge of queer studies scholars to queer the archive more broadly by redefining what counts as “archive.” What does a Jewish archive look like that attends to embodiment, affect, the ephemeral, performance, and other social and cultural traces that leave minimal paper or other tangible records?⁵⁶ We need more work rethinking Jewish temporality and futurity from a queer perspective—frankly, we need Jewish studies scholars to “queer” queer futurity studies, bringing attention to the ways in which the (implicitly Christian and European) assumptions many queer theorists make about futurity, the family, embodiment, and reproduction fail to fully attend to the different ways in which Jews experience and discuss these topics. Judaism (as a religion) and Jewish culture (as a history of cultural practices) both offer unique takes on these questions, and we await a decolonized queer reading of Jewish futurity (and of its opposite—Jewish intellectual and cultural genealogies and lineages), in addition to a Jewish reading of queer futurity and queer genealogies. How might Weiman-Kelman’s insights and methodologies in Queer Expectations serve as a model for dismantling heteronormative understandings of Jewish lineages, Jewish cultural conversations, and Jewish thought?

Where is the work queering Jewish space (beyond the work on the homosocial bonds of single-gender Jewish institutions by Seidman and others, noted above), or scholarship queering Jewish categories of insider/outsider, thus queering the very question of “Who is a Jew?” in ways that might shift the very dynamics and foci of the Jewish studies field? We also need work on Jewish queer memory that might well shift the frames long established by the work of Yosef Yerushalmi in his canonical Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory (1982) and ensuing scholars in Jewish memory studies (such as Saul Friedlander, Sylvie Anne Goldberg, Elisheva Carlebach, and others). We need to queer Jewish oral history practices, a time-sensitive imperative if there ever was one.⁵⁷ We need more work at the intersections of Jewish studies, queer theory, and disability studies. We need more Jewish studies work building synergies between trans studies and crip theory.

After all, many, many Jewish scholars have already made core contributions to queer theory and queer studies, sometimes with a Jewish sensibility, implicit or explicit, even as they might not have always imagined themselves as making contributions to Jewish studies (or might even have rejected any such claim). I’m thinking here, especially, of the many Jewish builders of the field of queer theory, including: Lauren Berlant, Butler, Lee Edelman, Garber, Jack Halberstam, Adrienne Rich, Gayle Rubin, and Sedgwick, among others. Queer theory, LGBTQ studies, and Jewish studies should be natural partners. Let’s get to work.

Notes

References