GENDER BENDER ON THE BIMAH
Reuben Zellman becomes first transgender rabbinical student
Of all the nice Jewish girls who have become nice Jewish boys, none has ever tried to become a rabbi. Until now. According to the New York Jewish Week, Reuben Zellman recently became the first transgender person to gain admission to rabbinical school. His classes at Hebrew Union College Institute of Religion, the Reform movement’s rabbinical seminary, will begin next summer.
According to the Jewish Week, “transgender” can mean a person born with ambiguous genitalia, or with the chromosomes of one sex but the sex organs of the other. Or it can mean a person with the chromosomes and physical traits of one gender who feels he or she is the other.
Zellman refuses to divulge exactly how his physical appearance has changed since his transition but says he began identifying as male four years ago. Since then, the native Californian’s involvement in Judaism has deepened and he now teaches Hebrew School at his San Francisco synagogue, Sha’ar Zahav, a predominantly gay congregation. “I applied to rabbinical school because I love Torah,” Zellman told the Jewish Week. “I realize there are political ramifications to what I’m doing and hope that they will be positive.”
Understanding that his was an unusual situation, Zellman prefaced his application with a letter of explanation. He also wanted to prepare officials for reading his high school transcripts, which carry a different, female name. “Yes, we did have to stop and think about this situation,” Rabbi Roxanne Schneider Shapiro, HUC’s national director of admissions and recruitment, told the Jewish Week. “But the real question was ‘is he a qualified candidate the way the others are?’ and the answer was ‘certainly.'”
STUPID IS AS STUPID DOODLES
Cartoon satirizes American student killed by Israeli bulldozer
On March 16, Rachel Corrie, a 23-year-old student at Evergreen College, was run over and killed by an Israeli bulldozer in the Gaza Strip. Protesting house demolitions with the pro-Palestinian International Solidarity Movement, Corrie was attempting to provide a “human shield” by placing herself in the direct path of a bulldozer. Daniel J. Friedman, a student at University of Maryland at College Park, evidently thinks her actions were stupidity defined. Two days after Corrie’s death, Friedman drew a cartoon of Corrie perched in front of a bulldozer in the school’s independent student newspaper, the Diamondback. The caption, a mock dictionary entry for “stupidity,” provided the following definition: “Sitting in front of a bulldozer to protect a gang of terrorists.”
According to the Israeli army, Corrie’s death was a “regrettable accident.” They maintain that the bulldozer was clearing foliage to prevent terrorists from hiding explosives. Corrie’s fellow activists tell a different story. They say that the soldier driving the bulldozer clearly saw Corrie and intentionally ran over her, twice.
While the Israeli military crushing to death a non-violent American protester might normally have provoked an international outcry, response was muted due to the impending war with Iraq. Washington Representative Brian Baird did say Corrie’s death, “doesn’t seem to be an accident,” and called for an American investigation into the matter. But the State Department responded with a statement of confidence in Israel’s ability to investigate the matter. The Forward reported that within two days media coverage of the incident had essentially ceased.
At Maryland, the story was just beginning. Friedman’s cartoon set off a flurry of angry responses: 60 students protested for an entire night, demanding an apology; 2,000 critical e-mails swamped the newspaper’s Inbox; a U.S. congressman blasted the Diamondback; and university officials denounced the cartoon. In a letter to the Diamondback, Maryland Provost William Destler wrote that printing Friedman’s cartoon set a “dangerously low standard,” and that printing it lacked “editorial responsibility.” The Diamondback editorial staff has stood defiant. They defended Friedman’s cartoon, writing: “Some find it offensive, but censoring it would go back on our values.”
