Conference a revelation for some in double minority
A small and close-knit group, the queer Jewish community represents a double minority – a minority of Jews are LGBT, and a minority of the LGBT community is Jewish.
So it’s no surprise that attendees at last weekend’s annual conference of the National Union of Jewish LGBT Students found the conference helpful simply because it gathered together so many students with a similar identity.
“There’s a part of me that was always really curious: What would it be like to be the majority?” Steven Philp, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, said. “That’s the interesting thing about walking into this room.” (Philp used to blog for New Voices.)
NUJLS gathered at American University in Washington, D.C. for its 15th annual conference last weekend, bringing students from across the country together to discuss the intersection between the LGBT community and Jewish life.
With a theme of “Advocating Our Identity,” event organizers brought in various gay rights advocates and Jewish leaders from across the District to hold workshops and lectures on the challenges of being both queer and Jewish.
Students came from near (like Richard Dweck from George Washington University) and far (like a group of four students from the University of Southern California) for the conference. A total of 87 students came to AU for the conference, 10 of them students at AU.
The decision to hold NUJLS at AU this year started when Jonathan Lipton, a sophomore at AU, and AU Hillel Associate Director Mindy Hirsch attended the last year’s conference in Boston.
They thought that AU would serve the conference well because AU is known to be inclusive of all religions and sexual identities.
“This brings together two communities of enormous importance of both the current activities of this university and to its history,” AU President Neil Kerwin said at the keynote brunch on Feb. 19.
Campus Pride gave AU a perfect score for its inclusion of the LGBT community last year. The campus is also popular with Jews (though the exact percentage of Jewish students here differs depending on the source).
D.C. also offered an opportunity for students to network with and hear from leaders in LGBT and Jewish advocacy. Some of those professionals included Hillel International President Wayne Firestone, Standing on the Side of Love Campaign Manager Dan Furmansky and representatives from LGBT advocacy groups such as the Human Rights Campaign (you know them from the blue and yellow equal sign logo), Keshet (a national Jewish LGBT group), Hoshen and The Aguda (secular Israeli LGBT groups) and A Wider Bridge (an American Jewish LGBT group with a strong focus on Israel).
Other major sponsors included the Embassy of Israel and AU’s Hillel and GLBTA Resource Center.
“For a community that has known what it feels like to be marginalized by institutions, by community leadership, to see the leaders of these very important institutions here … I think it’s a really important message,” AU Hillel Director Jason Benkendorf said.
Students left the conference with a new vigor for finding commonalities between Jews and gays and a commitment to being better advocates for both communities.
“I’ll be able to take a real energy and enthusiasm for this kind of community,” Justin Elliot, a freshman at the University of Southern California, said.
A number of the students interviewed by New Voices mirrored Elliot’s comments, mentioning that they were deeply involved in both LGBT and Jewish communities back home.
“We’re [the LGBT community] survivors, we’re innovators, we’re a people who have had to make a lot out of a little that’s been given to us, and I feel like there’s so much room for creative engagement of our faith,” Philp said. “What I’m seeing from people I’m meeting is that there isn’t a lot of that happening in their home communities.”
Gay Jews often get caught in conflicts between those two sides of their identity. Philp, for example, spoke of other students who wanted to be more Orthodox but couldn’t because they were gay. However, they felt equally uncomfortable in joining a Reform shul because it’s not the brand of religion they seek.
“It forces them to feel like they have no connection and feel like they don’t have a safe place,” Dweck said.
The keynote address by Furmansky, a gay Jew, spoke to that exact theme. Furmansky grew up chanting the same verse of Leviticus every year on Yom Kippur that proclaims, “If a man lies with a male as with a woman, both of them have committed an abomination.” He also spoke about his professional life fighting “religious-based bigotry” to an audience that included his fiancé.
“Without a spiritual anchor, I could not continue to do the advocacy work that I do,” Furmansky told attendees.
Organizers sought to provide that safe place by encouraging students to engage in dialogue in their mishpacha (their small group, literally family in Hebrew), a subset of the conference’s total attendees. These small groups stayed together throughout the weekend to discuss a variety of topics.
“They’re learning about their dual identities,” Hirsch said. “They’re having conversations that they normally wouldn’t have … The conversations that have been coming out of those groups are really amazing.”
The life of a gay Jew is difficult, but it does not have to be, Furmansky said. Instead, he wanted attendees to consider “professional advocacy, [which] is like tikkun olam [social activism, literally repairing the world in Hebrew] on steroids.”
“Advocacy is hard, hard work, most especially when we are advocating for our identities,” Furmansky said. “It is personal.”
In the end, students left the 15th annual NUJLS conference with energy, like that of Elliot and Dweck, to continue to embrace, and advocate for, both identities that brought them there.
Firestone told attendees, “That [diversity] is something that becomes a core strength of our people, not a weakness.”
Zach C. Cohen is the New Voices associate editor and political correspondent. He is the student life editor of The Eagle at American University. Zach has contributed writing and reporting to TIME Magazine, the Jewish Daily Forward, AWOL, AmWord and the Suburban News. Follow him on Twitter at @Zachary_Cohen.
