Jewish Queeries Series: The Modern Yentas
Real advice. Real Nice Jewish Queers. Introducing the Jewish Queeries Series.
Journalism by Jewish college students, for Jewish college students.
Real advice. Real Nice Jewish Queers. Introducing the Jewish Queeries Series.
“Four years after my entry into youth groups, I’ve finally been able to process the harmful culture I was subjected to. Now, I’m more than ready to join a discussion about consent and power in Jewish spaces; there is still much work to be done, and we need participation from the community as a whole in order to create a healthier culture for every Jewish teen.”
In July 2020, Rena Yehuda Newman became the second transgender Editor of New Voices magazine. As Rosh Hashana approaches and the year changes, Rena Yehuda sits down with their predecessor Daniel Holtzman to reflect on writing, yearning, revelation, and transitioning on the job.
On this weekend, five years ago, a community member of the synagogue in which I’d grown up stood up at the podium of my teen minyan, and talked about the verse in this week’s Torah portion — one that’s served as the basis for discrimination against queer Jews for decades. I had just come out…
Being gay in a fraternity has not been the easiest experience. I joined Alpha Epsilon Pi as a wandering, socially inept freshman. I was at lunch at Hillel and one of the brothers of the fraternity, a fellow psychology major, took an interest in me. He brought me out to a party, and after meeting…
In the fall of 2011, Yeshiva University demanded that The Beacon, a student-run publication, remove a ‘scandalous’ story about premarital sex from its website. The student editors fought back, but the administrators threatened them with sanctions if they did not comply with the Orthodox university’s perceptions of modesty. Ultimately, the editors decided to sever ties…
This past week has left me, and many others, searching for answers to questions I only recently realized I had. What follows is a series of thoughts that I had over the last ten days. Privilege, at perhaps its most basic and functional iteration, is the ability to wake up in the morning and…
This semester, I read C. J. Pascoe’s Dude, You’re A Fag, an ethnography of a typical American public high school. To summarize some of Pascoe’s “findings” (I put “findings” in quotes because to most teenaged American boys, what follows may come as no surprise), high school boys become men in a two-part process: 1) embracing…
When I was very young, I was jealous of the way my sister and her friends played together. Other boys were always so aggressive, so into breaking stuff, but girls just played nice. What they were playing–Barbies, house, Mall Madness–I thought was stupid, but I was frustrated that I couldn’t find another boy who wanted…
In middle school (thankfully not high school), “tzitzit checks” were a common feature of my morning. The boys in first period Judaics were required to prove to our teacher and anyone who might ask over the course of the day that that we were following the dress code by wearing tzitzit. Failure to do so…
In this week’s Torah portion, Naso, we receive two new laws. First, is the law of Sotah, a process in which women accused of adultery are given a special water that will prove whether they are innocent or guilty, then the Nazirite, someone who has taken a special oath to not drink alcohol, cut…
“You shall be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” Parashat Kedoshim begins with this powerful command, telling us to be holy because God is holy. It pushes us, giving us an expectation that we just can’t work our way around. We aren’t commanded to be holy because it will extend our lives,…