A Look at the Faces of LGBTQ+ Progress in the Jewish World
A Look at the Faces of LGBTQ+ Progress in the Jewish World
In honor of Pride Month, we take a look at the people promoting LGBTQ+ progress in the Jewish world.
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In honor of Pride Month, here are the people promoting LGBTQ+ progress in the Jewish world.
1. Ben Freeman
Born in Scotland, Ben Freeman is a gay Jewish internationally renowned author, educator and Diversity, Equity and Inclusion specialist focusing on Jewish identity, combatting antisemitism, and raising Holocaust awareness. He rose to prominence during the Jeremy Corbyn Labour Jew-hate crisis in the U.K. and quickly became one of his generation’s leading voices against anti-Jewish racism, and authored Jewish Pride: Rebuilding a People, released in February 2021.
2. Idit Klein
Since 2001, Idit Klein has served as the leader of Keshet (Hebrew for “rainbow”), a national organization for LGBTQ equality in Jewish life, supporting tens of thousands of rabbis, educators, and other Jewish leaders to make LGBTQ equality an imperative, communal value. In addition, she is the Executive Producer of Keshet’s documentary film, Hineini: Coming Out in a Jewish High School.
3. Hen Mazzig
Hen Mazzig grew up in Israel, the son of Mizrahi Jewish refugees from Iraq and Tunisia, and is now an educator on Jewish issues. His first book, A Jew of Color, will be published in 2022, and he was named in Algemeiner’s top 100 people positively influencing Jewish life in 2018 and 2021
In 2019, Mazzing co-founded the Tel Aviv Institute, a nonprofit dedicated to using data-driven social media strategies to stand up for the Jewish People and other minorities online.
4. Deborah Brin
On December 1, 1988, during the first International Jewish Feminist Conference in Jerusalem, 70 women carried a Torah scroll to the Western Wall, and Deborah Brin led a prayer service for them. When the conference ended, a group of Jerusalem women continued to meet at the Wall and formed Women of the Wall, a multi-denominational Jewish feminist organization based in Israel whose goal is to secure the rights of women to pray at the Western Wall, in a fashion that includes singing, reading aloud from the Torah, and wearing religious garments.
5. Yuval Noah Harari
Hebrew University of Jerusalem professor Yuval Noah Harari is a historian, philosopher, and the bestselling author of Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow, 21 Lessons for the 21st Century, and Sapiens: A Graphic History.
Born in Israel in 1976, Harari received his Ph.D. from the University of Oxford, and is currently a lecturer in the Department of History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. In 2019, following the international success of his books, he co-founded the social impact company Sapienship with his husband, Itzik Yahav.
6. Rabbi Rebecca Trachtenberg Alpert
Rabbi Rebecca Trachtenberg Alpert is a U.S. professor of Jewish American religious history, and was one of the first congregational women rabbis. Alpert’s research has focused on explaining and expounding the Reconstructionist tradition, the place of gays and lesbians in Jewish religious history, and the relationships between Jews, blacks, and sports during the years 1930–1950.
Her book Like Bread on the Seder Plate: Jewish Lesbians and the Transformation of Tradition from Columbia University Press received the 1998 Lambda Literary Award for best LGBT book on religion, and she also wrote Finding Our Past: A Lesbian Interpretation of the Book of Ruth.
7. Sarit Hadad
Sarit Hadad is an iconic Israeli singer who recently came out of the closet as a lesbian. In 1997, after failing to find real success in Israel’s mainstream music scene, she moved to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan and under the name سيريت حداد المطربة الكرمل (“Sarit Hadad The Singer from The Carmel”) and recorded an album that gained massive popularity in Jordan and throughout the Arab world. Eventually, shse returned to Israel and became a star there, too.
8. Rabbi Denise Eger
Rabbi Denise Eger was ordained in 1988 at the New York campus of Hebrew Union College, following which she served as the first full-time rabbi of Beth Chayim Chadashim in Los Angeles, the world’s first gay and lesbian synagogue recognized by Reform Judaism.
In 1992, she co-founded Congregation Kol Ami, a synagogue intended to serve both gay and non-gay Jews in West Hollywood, California. And in 2015, Eger became the first openly gay person to hold the position President of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, the largest and oldest rabbinical organization in North America.
9. Eytan Fox
Born in New York to American parents, Eytan Fox has been one of Israel’s leading filmmakers since he made Yossi & Jagger, the groundbreaking story of two male soldiers in love, in 2002. Fox was . The films he made after Yossi & Jagger — among them Walk on Water (about the friendship between a Mossad agent and a gay German), The Bubble (the story of a gay Palestinian who comes to live with a group of young Israelis in Tel Aviv), Yossi (the sequel to Yossi & Jagger), and Cupcakes (about friends, one of whom happens to be gay, who write a song for a Eurovision-like contest) — have helped to alter Israeli perceptions of the gay community.
In his most recent film, Sublet, Fox tells a story about the generation gaps in the gay community and dilemmas and challenges that gay parents face.
10. Rabbi Steven Greenberg
Rabbi Steven Greenberg is described as the first openly gay Orthodox-ordained Jewish rabbi, since he publicly disclosed he is gay in an article in the Israeli newspaper Maariv in 1999, and participated in a 2001 documentary film about gay men and women raised in the Orthodox Jewish world.
His book, Wrestling with God and Men, received the 2005 Koret Jewish Book Award for Philosophy and Thought, considered one of the highest honors for authors writing prose on Jewish themes.
11. Bari Weiss
Bari Weiss is the editor of Common Sense and the host of the podcast, Honestly. From 2017 until 2020, she was a staff writer and editor for the Opinion section of The New York Times. Weiss is also the winner of the Reason Foundation’s 2018 Bastiat Prize, which annually honors writing that “best demonstrates the importance of freedom with originality, wit, and eloquence.” And her first book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism, was a Natan Notable Book and the winner of a 2019 National Jewish Book Award.
12. Rabbi Jason Gary Klein
Rabbi Jason Gary Klein became the first openly gay man chosen to head a national rabbinical association of one of the major Jewish denominations in the United States in 2013, when he was chosen as president of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical Association.
13. Ron Yosef
Ron Yosef is the founder of the Israeli organization Hod, which represents Israeli gay and lesbian Orthodox Jews, playing a central role in the recent reevaluation of the role of religious homosexuals in the Israeli Religious Zionist movement. Coming out at 21, he at first left his faith behind and moved to Tel Aviv, but soon returned to traditional Judaism, continuing his studies in yeshiva and eventually obtaining ordination. Yosef became the first Israeli orthodox Rabbi to come out.
14. Rabbi Reuben Zellman
In 2003, Rabbi Reuben Zellman became the first openly transgender person accepted to the Reform Jewish seminary Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion. He also directs the New Voices Bay Area TIGQ Chorus, a chorus for transgender, intersex, and genderqueer singers, at the Community Music Center in San Francisco.
15. Sharon Cohen (AKA Dana International)
Dana International, a transgender Mizrahi singer, started her career at 18 as a drag queen, parodying famous female singers. With her glamor, vocals, and stage presence, she represented Israel at and won the 1998 Eurovision song contest. Cohen took her stage name from a feminized version of a childhood friend, Daniel, who died in a car accident.
16. Yotam Ottolenghi
Yotam Ottolenghi is an Israeli-born British chef, restaurateur, and food writer. With Sami Tamimi, he is the co-owner of six delis and restaurants in London, as well as the author of several bestselling cookery books, including Ottolenghi, Plenty, Jerusalem, and Simple.
17. Zohar Weiman-Kelman
Zohar Weiman-Kelman is scholar of Queer Studies, Yiddish Studies, and Jewish literature. In her book, Queer Expectations, she shows how Jewish women writers turned to poetry to write new histories, developing “queer expectancy” as a conceptual tool for understanding how literary texts can both invoke and resist what came before.
18. Assi Azar
Assi Azar is an Israeli television host. Shortly after coming out as gay in 2005, he began creating the documentary film, Mom and Dad: I Have Something to Tell You. A decade later, Azar married his Spanish boyfriend Albert Escolà Benet (pictured above) at a ceremony in Barcelona. He’s been listed among the most 100 influential gay people in the world by OUT Magazine.