Young, Jewish & proud: a queer activist’s manifesto
When I was 19, I developed a huge crush on my best friend. We kissed during a sleepover, dated for one long, closeted, emotion-ridden year, and broke up before anyone in my life knew I had a girlfriend. Fully coming out to myself and to my family took another four years.
What finally enabled me to come out of the closet was discovering the word queer. At the most basic level, queer held room for me as a person who does not find gender to be the most helpful determining factor in whom I might fall in love or have sex with. I also loved, however, how it grounded and integrated my sexuality into a broader queer ethic of living oriented toward liberation and self-determination.
Last Saturday, in the tradition of what 20th century theologian Abraham Joshua Heschel called praying with his feet, I spent Shabbat participating in the echoing liturgy of the “human mic” as I occupied New York’s LGBT Community Center with 150 other people. It has been almost a year since the Center imposed a ban on Palestine solidarity activists. The center does not allow such groups to meet in the center, and they have instituted a moratorium on any discussion of the Israeli occupation.
Since we are not allowed to book a room for our queer organizing, we packed the lobby instead to demand an end to the ban and a re-institution of the Center’s original access policy of full inclusion for all queers who organize for liberation.
During the initial controversy last February, Executive Director Glenda Testone justified the cancellation of an Israeli Apartheid Week activity as a way to make the Center “safe haven for LGBT groups and individuals.” In its most recent statement on the topic, the Center asserted that “our priority must be to ensure that all LGBT people feel comfortable coming here.”
Whose safety does the ban protect? In announcing the ban, the Center said that its staff was not prepared to negotiate issues of anti-Semitism in political expression. Organizing to resist occupation — even when the occupiers are Jewish — is not anti-Semitic, and I resent the implication that it is. Resistance and liberation are very Jewish values that appear again and again in our sacred texts, our holidays and rituals, and our very history of surviving under centuries of hostile governments. Earlier this week we celebrated Purim, a fabulously queer holiday that employs cross-dressing and spectacle to commemorate escaping state-sanctioned genocide.
My Jewish identity, like my queer identity, grounds and sustains my activism. I am a member of Young, Jewish and Proud, a group of Palestine solidarity activists who are, as our name suggests, mostly young and Jewish. We work within Jewish Voice for Peace, America’s largest Jewish grassroots peace group dedicated to reaching a just peace between Israelis and Palestinians based on the principles of equality and international human rights law.
I spent Shabbat occupying the LGBT Community Center because as I am not proud when Jewish comfort is privileged over discussing occupation and Jewish “safety” is invoked to justify the exclusion of groups and individuals working for liberation. I agree that the Center should be a safe haven. Safety is, after all, a very queer and Jewish value. But let’s talk about what safety for queers actually entails.
Queers are safe when our rights related to our gender and sexual diversity are recognized and protected by our communities. We are safe when our queer bodies are protected — from AIDS, from bigoted violence, from our own self-loathing. We are safe when we have access to the resources we need to live into our varied sexual and gendered selves. Queers are safe when we can forge our own paths to self-determination. Queers are safe when we can safely be queer.
Queers are also safe, however, when we can safely be. We are safe only when all of our human rights are recognized and protected by our communities. We are safe when our bodies are protected from all violence. We are safe when we have access to the resources we need to live. Queers are safe when we can forge our own paths to self-determination as individuals and as communities.
A safe haven for queers is space we can seek refuge in when our safety is violated. It is a haven where we can strategize, energize, and organize to fight for our safety outside of that space. A safe haven is not space where we ignore the reasons we need safe space. It is not space where we stay closeted about the struggles in our lives. And it is definitely not a space where wealthy donors decide who is in and who is out.
Saturday afternoon, the Center was a truly safe haven for queers. By occupying that lobby, we re-oriented the space from one that closets queers back toward mobilizing against an occupation that threatens the safety of all Palestinians, including Palestinian queers.
Carolyn Klaasen is currently earning her M.A. in Bible at Union Theological Seminary. She is a member of Jewish Voice for Peace and an activist within Young, Jewish and Proud.
I’m someone who doesn’t feel safe in The Center anymore – because it allows groups like Carolyn’s to protest and criticize Israel on its premises, despite the ban.
No queer groups are organizing against Iraq, which has rounded up, tortured and executed nearly 40 Iraqis since February for the crime of “seeming gay,” according to IGLHRC. Nor are they protesting the Iranian regime, which hanged 3 gay men for crimes of sodomy last September. Nor the Syrian regime, despite its year-long campaign of Muslim-on-Muslim deaths, resulting in thousands of casualties and counting.
Why aren’t these also queer causes? Why single out only Israel?
In the last 24 hours, 92 rockets were fired at Israel from Gaza. This was a response to Israel killing 14 Palestinians – 10 of them members of Islamic Jihad – who were in the final stages of planning terrorist attacks against Southern Israel from Egypt’s Sinai peninsula.
Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza 7 seven years ago. Instead of bringing peace, it brought thousands of unprovoked rocket attacks against Israeli civilians since Hamas took over in 2007. If Israel withdraws from West Bank before its security concerns are guaranteed through peace with Palestinian Authority – how can we expect anything different? The West Bank has high ground over all Israel’s population centers.
Reduced to a story of Palestinian underdogs and Israeli overdogs – which ignores facts like ongoing rocket attacks from Gaza, and Palestinian Authority Muftis calling publicly for the death of Jews as recent as January, 2012 – it makes a tidy narrative where Israel is bad and the Palestinians are good. But this is not reality.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is anything but a queer issue. In fact, given the situation for queers in Palestine vs. Israel, it’s a perversion of the truth.
It most definitely is perpetuating anti-Semitism, despite the participation like Carolyn’s group: Gay, Jewish & Proud. Singling out only Israel for policies that are widespread among other nations; and demanding that Jews be better or more moral than other groups because of their history as victims are indicators of this. What other entire population is vilified the way Israel’s is?
Personally, I feel extremely threatened by anti-Israel protest crowds like the one that took place March 3, 2012. I’ll never return to The Center, despite having spent many years congregating there. By allowing these sorts of protests on site, The Center has let me know it’s no longer a place that cares about me feeling safe and protected inside its walls.
To use the sacred space of the LGBT community center to push the anti-Israeli agenda has made many people very uncomfortable- and to invade it a self centered and self serving manner was inappropriate. Its simply not forgiveable. Leave Middle east politics out of the LGBT rights movement. like most queers, I strongly support Israel- but I dont want to let my political beliefs in one arena effect my relationships with other LGBT activists.
Saturday afternoon the center was an unsafe haven of bullies who agree to abide by laws and rules only when it suits their self-aggrandizing pseudo-rightious beliefs. If you want to protect Palestinian Queers you should be picketing the Palestinian Authority, not Israel to which many of them flock. And as mentioned above, it is regrettable that you have no room in your heart for other Arab Queers who are suffering much more right now, like emo youth in Iraq and the Queer beheadings in Iran. If you really DID care about Queers rather than political hammering of Israel I am sure you would see that those issues are much more pressing.
Thanks for writing this, Carolyn. This is a really inspiring action. It’s great to see queers recognizing and fighting oppression in all its different forms. Israel and its supporters constantly use the freedoms that Israeli queers enjoy for PR, while ignoring the fact that Palestinian queers, and straight people for that matter, don’t have the same freedoms. They don’t have freedom of movement, the right of return, equal rights, any of that. And before everyone jumps on me with “Palestinians have the same rights as Israelis in Israel!”, let me say a) no, they don’t and b) Palestinians in the West Bank, in Gaza, and in the diaspora most definitely do not.
So it is really great to see queers fighting back against Israeli apartheid. It is consistent with many of our politics, and there really should be space for it at the Center.
Scott:
There’s a good reason for that. Groups like Carolyn *aren’t* interested in your safety — for them you don’t belong in the LGBT Center at all the way they’d like to see it. In fact, you don’t DESERVE safe space because they don’t like your politics.
For them, “queer” isn’t a real identity based in being different than the gender/sexual majority, it’s a political identity of choice that implies signing up for a whole list of causes you must support. If you’re not politically “correct”, then you’re not Queer.
And if you’re not Queer, then you’re an agent of oppression.
I understand that both Palestinean’s and Israeli’s have harmed and been harmed in this conflict.
I do not believe that to be pro-Palestinean human rights, means you must be anti-Israel(i).
Perhaps we must attempt the impossible; let go of our fear-driven hate, tear down the walls and recognize that every human life is precious.
Isn’t that part of the un-chosen battle we find ourselves a part of as queers?
There is an opportunity to learn more with Rabbi Michael Lerner, Sunday, March 18, 7:30 PM – 9:30 PM, Upper Nyack, New York.
http://forusa.org/events/2012/03/18/evening-rabbi-michael-lerner
“If you have come here to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.” Lilla Watson
If she’s proud and Jewish why is she studying at a Christian Religious Seminary? Although witha name like ‘Klaasen’ that would make sense.
http://www.utsnyc.edu/page.aspx?pid=282
On the micro level, a solid argument could be made that Palestinian queers would be, in fact, less safe, under a Palestinians government. Wouldn’t your time be more effectively spent supporting nascent Palestinian queer rights organizations (google yields alQaws as one) than shouting at passersby in a center lobby in New York?
On a macro level, the center is intended to be a safe space for people of all political affiliations. The anti-anti-Semitism argument is a straw man. The center is not implying that occupation-resistors are anti-Semitic in their statement but said outright that their staff is unprepared to discuss questions of that nature. People objected to Israeli Apartheid Week because it was an issue unrelated to the queer cause that engenders heavy emotional responses, and one that tends to bring only controversy, not change. I fully support their decision to not take sides and preserve a safe space for all–from closeted young people courageously seeking community to activists of all stripes–by avoiding the issue entirely.
I admit I am an outsider and don’t understand the difference between bisexuality and “queerness.” As I have understood “queer” it is a word used by homosexuals and bisexuals who have a political agenda beyond just fighting discrimination. It apparently means more than that here.
Regardless, I have no idea how it is tied up in being against Jews returning to their homeland and the subsequent fight with ethnically identified Arabs (some of whom lived there for centuries and most of whom lived there for decades before the State of Israel was established). Obviously you can demonize the Jews, and many do, but what on G-d’s green earth has that to do with sexual identity? As Scott points out so well, Israel is the only country that protects its homosexual and bisexual (and yes, queer) population. And proudly so. Even the secular in Palestinian controlled areas persecute homosexuals. And they are brutal. Their executions are not down with a three cocktail mix administered by the State of California and held up by the Ninth Circuit. http://deathpenaltynews.blogspot.com/2011/08/gaza-divided-we-execute.html And this doesn’t begin to address the status of these folks in the other Muslim countries (Scott also brings up the most recent heartbreaking Iraq murders that have been allowed by the premature withdrawal of our forces just after Iraqi youth were starting to taste freedom).
So that’s on the political end. But on the social end, why would anyone be allowed to turn a center which is a haven for those who feel outcast by society into a battleground for unrelated politics? It’s not like pro-Israel protestors are allowed there. And I have personally been threatened by the anti-Israel crowd – whether you do it personally, Carolyn, many of the protestors are passionate and some are violent. Why would you being this into a haven? Would you allow this in a battered women’s shelter? How you can defend your opinion and actions is beyond me.