JVOICES.COM

This year was my first Passover in Jerusalem. At my seders last year, I still wasn’t sure whether I meant it when I said “next year in Jerusalem,” but this year I knew as I said it that I’d be staying for a second year. When I spoke with my mother a few days before [...]

(apologies to those who aren’t living in new york city - this is an event announcement)
(it seems like there are many more radical purim extravaganzas going on all over the country, though, and i’m posting this announcement in part to encourage folks to think big and exciting for next year…)
this year’s eighth-or-so edition of the [...]

Almost a year ago, I wrote my first real post for JVoices, which generated more response than anything else I’ve written. The original story is here, if you haven’t read it.
One of the basic tenets of Judaism, as far as I’m concerned, is that no matter what you do, someone will always tell you [...]

whenever i start to get bored with the idea of staying vocal as one of the surprisingly few non-closeted secularists in most of the electronic jewish spaces i frequent, something like this comes up.
ruth messinger, former manhattan borough president, american jewish world service president, and makher-in-chief of the current (and problematic as well as important, [...]

one.
i’ve been meaning to write something about the destruction of temples, and whether it’s something to mourn. partly because i have a soft spot for some aspects of tisha b’av despite my secularism, and partly inspired by a friend’s experience being told by a progressive jewish organization that a drash she wrote for them [...]

“Androgynos is in some manners equivalent to men and in some manners equivalent to women; in some manners equivalent to both men and women; and  in some manners equivalent to neither men nor women.�
(Mishnah  Ze’raim, Bikkurim)
I don’t know how many men have studied this text in yeshivah or on
candlelit kitchen tables over the centuries. As [...]

for poetry month (why april, by the way? ‘the cruelest month’? ‘with his shoures soote’? please.), here’s the text of a talk by irena klepfisz - a fantastic poet in yiddish, english, and both at once, as well as an insightful essayist and deeply committed radical - from a 2006 conference at barnard college called “Jewish Women Changing America: Cross-Generational Conversations”. at the bottom is a poem from one of klepfisz’s books. a complete transcript of the “Changing Culture” panel that klepfisz spoke on (and the rest of the conference) is available online here.

Parashat Terumah
The Gift of Safe Space
by Y. Gavriel A. Levi Ansara on Saturday February 24, 2007
6 Adar 5767
Exodus 25:1 - 27:19,Shabbat
Parashat Terumah opens with G-d speaking to Moses on Mount Sinai and commanding him in meticulous detail regarding the construction of the Mishkan, or “tabernacle,� the portable dwelling place of G-d’s presence that the Israelites [...]

Introduction
In this brief essay, I’d like to read and think through three verses of Genesis, in order to start to establish a foundation for transgender Jewish thought. In particular, to consider hierarchy and binary opposition in the Biblical pattern of creation. (Heaven opposed and superior to Earth; Sun to Moon; Adam to Eve, [...]

At 5, he learned his primary colours. Red, blue, yellow. Except that the red wasn’t truly red, but a pinkish red that he later learned was called magenta, and the blue wasn’t really blue, but an electrical turquoise hue called cyan.
At 13, he learned the colour of longing when his family [...]