AIDS Was Our Earthquake: American Jewish Responses to the AIDS Crisis, 1985–92

On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on an unusual cluster of Pneumocystis Pneumonia among five previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles. That report is generally understood as the first official documentation of the epidemic that was briefly called "gay cancer" and then "Gay Related Immune-Deficiency" (GRID) before being labelled "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" (AIDS) in the summer of 1982. By 1985, 15,000 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease. Nearly 13,000 of them had died.¹ The majority were gay and bisexual men and intravenous (IV) drug users—all populations that were widely stigmatized at the time.

From the beginning of the AIDS crisis in 1981 through 1985, American Jewish leaders were largely silent. We do not see evidence of widespread Jewish communal engagement with AIDS in the United States until September 24, 1985, when two young and charismatic rabbis in San Francisco delivered Yom Kippur sermons on AIDS in their respective Reform synagogues: Congregation Sha'ar Zahav (serving primarily LGBTQ members) and Congregation Emanu-El (with primarily straight members). Both sermons, and the rabbis who delivered them, profoundly shaped liberal American Judaism's responses to AIDS.

The Sha'ar Zahav sermon, delivered by Yoel Kahn, a 26-year-old gay man newly ordained as a Reform rabbi, suggested a Jewish path forward on HIV/AIDS grounded in the insights of the Gay Liberation Movement and an approach that centered gay and lesbian lives. The Emanu-El sermon, in contrast, delivered by Robert Kirschner, a 34-year-old straight man newly promoted as his congregation's senior rabbi, called upon Jewish compassion in the face of a public health crisis affecting stigmatized populations. Yet both shared common ground. Rather than framing the religious and moral issue at the heart of HIV/AIDS as a need to proscribe sexual behavior coded as dangerous and aberrant, as was common among evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox Jewish leaders, the rabbis who delivered both of these sermons reflected the emergence of a new moral calculus in which acceptance and tolerance of gay and lesbian people became a Jewish moral litmus test among liberal Jews. The Jewish AIDS initiatives that followed in the wake of the conversations these sermons helped spark were rarely about policing the sexual and intimate behavior of gay and lesbian people. Instead, most of the Jewish AIDS programs that emerged in the US in the late 1980s focused on providing support and social services to people with AIDS (hereafter PWAs) and their families; raising awareness about the risks of AIDS; making AIDS more visible in Jewish communities; and modifying the behaviors of non-gay Jews toward gay and lesbian people.²

In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, conservative American Christian religious leaders, such as Jerry Falwell, had insisted that AIDS was God's punishment for sinful "homosexual" behavior. A 1986 Gallup poll, five years after the AIDS crisis emerged, indicated that 42 percent of Americans agreed with him.³ Such religious bigotry in the early 1980s was one factor that gave political and cultural leaders license to minimize the threat of the disease and to openly mock those suffering from AIDS.⁴ Few Jewish leaders outside the ultra-Orthodox community, however, made claims about AIDS that explicitly invoked God's wrath as the cause of AIDS. One exception was the Modern Orthodox Rabbi Barry Freundel—the same rabbi who was arrested in 2014 for voyeurism at a Washington DC mikvah (ritual bath)—who wrote in a 1986 essay that—although one can cite Jewish proof texts arguing both for and against divine punishment—"[b]y far, the greater evidence indicates that God's retribution plays a role in epidemics such as AIDS." Yet even Freundel quickly dismissed the question as irrelevant to the Jewish obligation to "heal and prevent death wherever possible."⁵ More often, Orthodox Jewish leaders joined conservative Christians in describing AIDS as the consequence of what they saw as abhorrent or even pathological behavior, although the vast majority still held that regardless of...