Book Review Orit Avishai Queer Judaism

Contemporary Jewry https://doi.org/10.1007/s12397-023-09510-0 Orit Avishai, Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel (NYU Press, 2023). ix + 300 pp Ronit Irshai1 © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature B.V. 2023 This comprehensive, fascinating book on Jewish Orthodox gay people, was written by Orit Avishai, a Professor of Sociology and women, gender and sexuality studies at Fordham University. The book is a product of 4 years of field research in Israel. During this period, 120 open-ended interviews were conducted with self-identifying Orthodox LGBT persons, activists, allies, educators, therapists, family members, and rabbis. The ethnographic component includes observations in ritual spaces, political activism, social gatherings, and community engagement, as well as digital ethnography: Facebook pages of Orthodox LGBT persons, allies, organizations, and initiatives, and analysis of archival material. This is the first book to describe and analyze in depth the battle of Jewish Orthodox gay people to change Orthodoxy from within. Avishai frames the Orthodox LGBTQ movement as a liberal movement, focused on expanding existing structures to make room for LGBTQ Orthodox Jews, rather than a radical one, which would aim to dismantle and revolutionize the existing structures. The book presents a compelling analysis of how Orthodox Jewish LGBT persons in Israel became more accepted in their communities. It points to a major shift that took place within Orthodox society in less than 20 years. At the turn of the twentyfirst century, homosexuality and religiosity were perceived as incompatible, and religious LGBT persons were portrayed as transgressors with few religious elite allies. By 2020, we witnessed a social and cultural shift: a vibrant and visibly proud Orthodox community (known as KADAG—umbrella organization of Orthodox LGBT groups). An increasing number of young gay people are no longer willing to forgo their religious identity, but instead now identify as both Orthodox and gay. Their insistence on “remaining within” is accompanied by a halachic-theological shift as they are harbingers of public acceptance of same-sex partnerships and families. The Orthodox LGBT movement in Israel has brought about profound changes in the form and content of religious life. The book aims to portray these changes on several planes in its six chapters. Chapter One, “Making a Social Movement,” offers * Ronit Irshai Ronit.Irshai@biu.ac.il 1 Bar-Ilan University, Ramat Gan, Israel 13 Vol.:(0123456789) R. Irshai a historical overview of LGBT Orthodox activism. It notes the massive change since the 1990s, when “Orthodox homo” or “Orthodox lesbian” seemed like an inherent contradiction and LGBT people were expected to live their lives in the closet. Today, a visible vibrant Orthodox LGBTQ community and Orthodox gay people who are willing to identify as queer, are met with increasing tolerance by mainstream Orthodox society. In Chapter Two, “Unlivable Lives,” Avishai traces the personal transformation process experienced by many of her participants. The first step is a shattering of dreams, when they realize that same-sex attraction is not going away and that the heterosexual dream of the husband/wife/kids is not going to happen for them. This leads to a period where different emotions and thoughts break loose and there is sadness and confusion. Many feared a harsh reaction from their families and social isolation if they came out. They encountered a crisis of faith, a feeling that they have a religious obligation to date members of the opposite sex, to see if they can live straight lives, and were told by religious figures that their same-sex attraction will go away. Most participants reported a breaking point: a moment of decision of what to do with the fact that one is same-sex attracted, and knowing and accepting that they cannot change that fact. At that point, the chaos gives way to the writing of new dreams, and the scripting of what their lives might look like as Orthodox LGBTQ people. This process involves writing new scripts and stories, which are an important part of activism. This is what is described in Chapter Three, “Orthodox Queer Worldmaking,” where Avishai explores how Orthodox LGBTQ people mobilize religion to create new stories. In re-imagining weddings for themselves, and in having children and being part of communities and living their personal lives in Orthodox communities, Orthodox LGBTQ people make visible both their LGBTQ and Orthodox identities. In doing so, they remake the meaning of Orthodox identity itself. A main part of activism is the act of taking space: ritual space, such as the Beit Midrash and the Beit Knesset, that previously excluded LGBTQ people and reclaiming space for LGBTQ there, creating spaces welcoming of and in some cases run by LBGTQ people (such as the Yachad synagogue in Tel Aviv). Some participants see the existence of LGBTQ people as a challenge to society by God to train society to accept minorities and other marginalized groups. Chapter Four, “Educating our Rabbis,” describes halachic developments. The first stage was breaking halachic silence by conducting conversations on the halachic prohibition of homosexual acts or attractions. This gave way to a new trend of halachic tolerance, and rabbis who are trying to make halachic life livable for LGBTQ people. The problem with these halachic works in favor of tolerance is that such understanding denies essential rights to gay people because it still places them in a marginalized group and maintains preexisting power structures. Indeed, the third stage was that of a public statement in 2020 by Rabbi Benny Lau (a religiousZionist liberal rabbi), allowing LGBTQ partnerships. Religious LGBTQ people are increasingly taking halacha into their own hands, marching forward and not waiting for rabbis to catch up. This was the advice they were given by Malka Puterkovsky, a halachic female leader and a trailblazer for women in the Orthodox feminist movement, to take things into their own hands and challenge the rabbis to catch up. Although halacha has come a long way on LGBTQ issues, most of the public statements are still focused on tolerance without legitimization. 13 Orit Avishai, Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking… Chapter Five, “Telling Stories,” focuses on the politics of authenticity. This authenticity has three components: (1) LGBTQ activists say to the wider Orthodox community that they are part of their communities, schools, and synagogues; (2) LGBTQ activists make an ethical case for acceptance of gay people that is rooted in Jewish texts, such as tikkun olam (as opposed to using broader/more secular human rights language); and (3) the Orthodox LGBTQ movement is moderate; it asks to make room for it on the boat but does not aim to upend the boat itself. Chapter Six, “The Battle for Judaism’s Straight Soul,” looks at the politics of respectability employed by Orthodox LGBTQ people to gain legitimacy in Orthodox spaces. By presenting themselves as “authentically” Orthodox they are saying: we are Orthodox and gay. You do not define what is Orthodox. In this chapter, Avishai explores the concept of Orthodox drag: the LGBTQ activists actively perform Orthodox identity. They must co-opt the master’s tools to expand the house. Avishai concludes that in asking to make space for themselves, Orthodox LGBTQ people are rewriting both Orthodox and queer stories, and re-envisioning Orthodoxy. However, this queering of Orthodox spaces comes at a cost: it creates a moderate movement allied with the Orthodox community’s overall nationalist values, meaning that it cannot be in solidarity with Palestinians or oppose the Occupation. Nevertheless, in articulating a new queer Orthodox theology and living their lives in Orthodox communities and telling their stories, they rewrite what it means to be Orthodox. I believe that one of the most important contributions of this book, beyond its being the first written history and analysis of the Orthodox LGBTQ movement, is highlighting secularist biases in the field of sexuality studies and queer theory in which religion is a blind spot. Those frameworks overlook religious pluralism and the transgressive potential of subversive religious voices and results in an impoverished portrait of the lives, struggles, strategies, and desires of LGBTQ persons of faith. I believe that the ramifications of this important claim go beyond the specific case study, as I shall discuss below. According to Avishai’s findings, for many of the participants, religion is a source of pain but also of knowledge and empowerment in the construction of Orthodox LGBTQ identity. This defies conflict identity theory, which is based on positioning religion and gay identity as opposed to each other. Although this can be true, and participants certainly felt conflict between the two, it reduces what is in fact a more complex picture to a polarity, without leaving room for space in the middle. Religion’s role can be ambivalent or constitute both an obstacle and an aid. The new identity that is being created challenges static categories of sexuality and religion. Avishai argues for the fluidity of these categories and demonstrates through her work how people live fluid lives and can move between categories or blur boundaries between them. This, I would claim, echoes exactly the situation of Orthodox religious feminism. Religious feminism was suspected by secular forms of feminism to be uncritical and in fact contradictory in terms. According to these secular feminist approaches, feminism and religion cannot go hand in hand, because religion is understood as a patriarchal system and religious commitment is understood as resting on obedience and submission. These approaches in Western feminism 13 R. Irshai have joined popular culture in representing the religious feminists, especially Muslim but also Jewish, as victims of what is considered a static, patriarchal, discriminatory religious world. When we see this secularist bias in many arenas such as those revealed by Avishai’s book and in the research on religious feminisms, we can understand in a more nuanced and deeper way the contribution of religious queer and feminist studies to the larger field of gender and religion by challenging the binary mode of thinking and by demonstrating how working gradually from “within” can be no less efficient than radical approaches that endanger an entire world of identity and shared values. In an article I wrote together with Miri Rozmarin (Irshai and Miri 2023), we asked, through the prism of the philosophy of Foucault, how can we understand critique as a complex practical relation between negativity and belonging? How can we understand freedom beyond a simplistic notion of liberation? Joining the effort to rethink religious feminism beyond the Euro-centric fantasy of secularization, we assume that feminist religious struggles should not be represented as “particular circumstances” or an exotic case study. Instead, our claim is that religious feminism allows us to rethink feminist analytical approaches regarding critique, subjectivity, and freedom. We suggest that Foucault’s notion of critique offers a productive perspective for conceptualizing the unique positionality and activity of religious feminism. Moreover, this perspective opens new possibilities for understanding the role of belonging as an aspect of contemporary political subjects. In the same vein, I believe Avishai’s book demonstrates by using the concept of “lived religion,” how religious lives, beliefs, and actions are inherently messy, fluid, and ambiguous, and that people do not uncritically absorb authorized versions of religious doctrines and messages. At the same time, they are not willing to live outside their world of meaning and core identity. They want to belong on their own terms. Exactly like religious feminists, Orthodox LGBTQ people struggle to soften and expand the borderlines of religion, by struggling from within and by doing so changing both Orthodoxy and queer, sexuality and feminist theories, and blurring the binary dichotomy between them. To use the theoretical framework of Robert Cover (Cover 1983) nomos and narrative are intertwined, and Orthodox LGBTQ and feminists demonstrate that when we see nomos as embedded in narrative (creating new stories, for example, as Avishai emphasizes in Chapter Five), we understand that the potential for change is already encapsulated within it. When we look at nomos in the context of narrative, the law is opened to diverse interpretations that may lead over time to a situation in which the law itself changes and brings the current state closer to an alternative reality in the future. There is more. Scholars of Jewish law and gender studies, like me, are often interested in understanding the hermeneutical mechanisms through which halacha absorbs or adjusts itself to new values, realities, and paradigm changes within cultures. Avishai’s book clearly demonstrates that we see only part of the picture. All in all, there is a need for interdisciplinary studies in the realm of gender and religion to better understand the sociological phenomenon of “lived religion” together with analytical theoretical work in the field of the philosophy of halacha from gender and feminist perspectives. 13 Orit Avishai, Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking… References Irshai, Ronit and Miri Rozmarin. 2023. Religious Jewish feminism in light of Foucault’s concept of critique. (Hebrew), Daat 91: 7–38 Cover, Robert M, 1983. The Supreme Court, 1982 Term, foreword: Nomos and narrative. Harvard Law Review 97 (4): 4–68. Publisher’s Note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Ronit Irshai is Associate Professor and the head of the gender studies department at Bar Ilan University and a research fellow at the Shalom Hartman institute in Jerusalem. She published a series of articles on halacha (Jewish Law), theology and gender, Jewish sexual ethics, Jewish religious feminism etc. Her first book: Fertility and Jewish Law – Feminist Perspectives on Orthodox Responsa Literature was published by Brandeis University Press in 2012. The second book on abortion was published in Hebrew by Magness press, in 2022 and the third book on Modern-Orthodox Feminism in Israel (together with Dr. Tanya Zion-Waldoks) will be published by Brandeis University Press in spring 2024. 13