Queer as Jews?

Queer Jews. David Shneer and Caryn Aviv, eds. New York: Routledge, 2002. xi + 292 pp.

Within the larger GLBT community, queer minorities have witnessed their own transformations and accomplishments during the past ten years of queer social action, identity formation, and cultural production. David Shneer and Caryn Aviv's collection of essays, Queer Jews, is an excellent snapshot of the diversity of the queer Jewish community, for it simultaneously signals the achievements that this community has garnered and acknowledges some of the challenges that lie ahead. The book weaves together a multiplicity of topics, including essays on culture (film, theater, and literature), Jewish ritual and life cycle events (gay weddings, circumcision, and adoption), and identity issues (transgender, Zionism, and Orthodoxy).

The rapid change that the GLBT Jewish community has undergone becomes evident when one compares the essays in the present collection with those in Christie Balka and Andy Rose's landmark book, Twice Blessed: On Being Lesbian, Gay, and Jewish (1989). Though it would be unfair to call Twice Blessed outdated, one cannot help but notice the shift in focus from "identity politics" in that book to something much more inclusive and radical in this one. Whereas Twice Blessed centered on gay men and lesbians and attempted to create an identity politics that would foster harmony between "Jewish" and "gay" identities, Queer Jews speaks to all of the various and, at times, contradictory inflections of "queer," which serves both as a site of inclusion and as a point of challenge to a single shared J-GLBT identity. As Shneer and Aviv write: "Queer Jews explores sexual, ethnic, and religious diversity and their interaction with each other. It challenges the very notion of margins and center, sameness and difference, normative and alternative, assimilation and separatism by looking at the experiences of those who complicate these categories" (4). The result is a book composed mainly of personal essays that, while uneven in resonance, accurately depict the diversity of queer Jews.

The book's greatest strength is its essays on topics that were barely imaginable during the Twice Blessed period, namely, transgender issues. Queer Jews includes two trans articles that are particularly relevant for the Jewish community, because they not only advocate sexual inclusion but also point to the rigid and limiting gendered system that undergirds Jewish practice. TJ Michels and Ali Cannon's piece, "Whose Side Are You On? Transgender at the Western Wall," for example, astutely describes the complexities of transgender identity in the context of a visit to the Western Wall in Jerusalem, where the authors are forced to choose which side they will daven (pray) at: the men's or the women's.

Queer Jews also reflects the positive changes in social life that have greeted queers in the last ten to fifteen years, among them the ability to create families and meaningful life cycle events that reflect being gay and Jewish. The book contains three articles on same-sex wedding traditions and issues facing such newly constituted partnerships, including adoption and Jewish education of children. Marla Brettschneider's article, "All Points Bulletin: Jewish Dykes Adopting Children," is one of the collection's highlights, revealing the challenges—monetary, racial, religious, and other—that GLBT parents face when attempting to adopt children. Brettschneider acutely notes the way that race operates in the adoption process, particularly the difficulty that queer white parents experience when adopting white children and the further complexity that being Jewish adds.

Another of the book's strengths is its editors' refusal to exclude articles that challenge queer Jewish identity. Of particular interest is Jonathan Krasner's "Without Standing Down: The First Queer Jewish Street Protest," which narrates the efforts of the small protest group Jewish Activist Gays and Lesbians (JAGL) to take on the organizers of the 1993 Salute to Israel Parade's injunction that queer Jews not be allowed to participate in the parade in a visible manner. The true conflict that emerged, though, was a...