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I’ve been lucky in the past week to have rediscovered an old friend, one of my best friends from first through third grade. She now lives in Massachussetts with her husband, where they spend huge amounts of time organizing and writing letters and garnering support for MassEquality. We grew up in an extremely conservative town, [...]

Surprise! In the quest for a home for the George Dubya Presidential Library, the most likely candidate is reluctant to accept. Southern Methodist University, Laura Bush’s alma mater, is dealing with heavy opposition to building the library on campus from their own ministers. “Methodists have a long history of social conscience, so questions about the [...]

Turning tables We begin with Judah pleading that Joseph take him into slavery in the place of his younger brother Benjamin. Joseph is moved. Then like Martin Landau in the old Mission Impossible TV series, Joseph finally ends the cruel deceptions and reveals his true identity to his stunned brothers. All 70 members of daddy [...]

My best friend is an opera nut, and thanks to her I just attended the fifth of eleven operas I’m seeing this season at the Met. (If you think that’s crazy, she has tickets for 23 performances.) I started listening to opera in college, when, during a fit signing up for the most eclectic selection [...]

CBST Rabbis’ Sharon Kleinbaum and Ayelet Cohen, leaders of the largest LGBT synagogue in the world, have offered one of the best concise responses I’ve seen thus far in noting the outcomes of the Committee on Jewish Laws and Standards decision this week. I say concise because while I agree with a lot of it, [...]

Gavriel Ansara is a polycultural polyglot from an observant Jewish background with ties to several continents. He is a board member of Keshet, Boston’s Jewish GLBTQI advocacy and education organization, and founder/coordinator of Tiferet, a Keshet project designed to meet the needs of Orthodox and traditionally observant Jews who self-identify as gender and/or sexual minorities. [...]

This past Saturday, December 2, was the 17th anniversary of my Bas Mitzvah. A few months ago I called the rabbi at the Conservative shul in Connecticut where I grew up and asked if I could come back and sing my torah portion again. He was excited to hear that I wanted to come back, [...]

Laban is the real hero of this parsha, despite getting dissed by the rabbis. When he hears Jacob is near he runs to greet him, hugs and kisses him. Rashi say Laban was checking Jacob’s mouth for jewels, which means, I guess, Laban gave him tongue. He performs the highest act of righteousness for the [...]

The arrangement reached with the police and the ultra-orthodox is not a compromise but a surrender. There is no difference between ‘don’t march’ and ‘do what you want, but in your houses behind closed shutters’. In both cases we are banished from the streets into a space that is fenced-in, policed and worst of all [...]

This week Torah portion is an action-packed affair. G#d appears to Abraham in the form of three men. Abraham seems to serve them one of the most traif meals imaginable and we get history’s earliest recorded punch line. The ugly side of gay love rears… its head… in Sodom. Lot’s daughters make sure the family [...]