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Title: Queer Jews by David Shneer, Caryn Aviv ISBN: 0-415-93167-3 Publisher: Routledge Pub. Date: September, 2002 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.33 (6 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: Inspirational
Comment: Shneer & Aviv's Queer Jews presents a striking collection of academic thought, personal experience and political views expressed by an interesting and diverse group of contributors who have much to offer on the issues affecting people who identify as a minority group within a minority group - both queer and Jewish.
This informed volume bravely assesses where queer & Jewish people currently are in the progression towards acceptance by both their own culture as well as the wider society, whilst providing important pointers for future work that must yet be done.
As a non-Jew, I have found this milestone work to be a useful and fascinating insight into understanding the experiences and issues dealt with by friends who are both queer and Jewish. As a gay man, I have been personally challenged and inspired by the strength of character and determination to be accepted as part of a community, as demonstrated throughout the essays in Queer Jews.
From out and proud Reformist Rabbis and closeted Orthodox Rabbis to a personal dilemma of whether to pray on the male or female side of the Western Wall; from queer Jewish education to queer Jewish students' first public protest; from the challenges of queer Jewish weddings to queer Jewish parenting and adoption, Queer Jews is a significant positive step in the right direction for inclusiveness, acceptance and unity - a book that should be read by anyone connected with queer and/or Jewish culture. You can't help but be impressed with the great strides that queer Jewish people have made in their communities, whilst also recognising that there are still difficulties ahead to face.
Rating: 5
Summary: Welcome Addition
Comment: "Queer Jews" deserves its place among the previous Lesbian and Lesbigay Jewish Anthologies, Evelyn Torton-Beck's Nice Jewish Girls (1982, reprint and expanded 1989) and Christi Balka and Andy Rose's Twice Blessed: On Being Lesbian or Gay and Jewish (1989). It not only pays homage to its predecessors (see the Introduction and Balka and Rose's own contribution), it honors them by reflecting some of the changes that have occurred in the past 20 years.
This is immediately intimated by the title's use of the word 'queer' and further carried through with essays by transgender or non-traditionally gendered Jews. Although 'queer,' is used throughout the book mainly as an umbrella term "to include lesbians, gay men, bisexuals, and transgendered people" (14) when one delves more deeply into a number of the individual contributions, one senses the mobilization of the term queer as something that "marks a suspension of identity as something fixed, coherent, and natural"(Jagose, Queer Theory, p. 98). Queerness and Jewishness are thus both expanded--or stretched--within this book's pages. Thus Queer Jews not only calls into question conventional understandings of sexual identity by deconstructing the categories, oppositions and equations that sustain them, it similarly calls into question (many) conventional understandings of 'Jewish identity'. This is a good thing.
And so it that an essay about a traditional Jewish lesbian wedding is bound together with a cogent questioning of the Reform Movement's recent decision to recognize (sanction?) 'same-sex' marriage. And the stories of a non-traditionally gendered Reform Hebrew School teacher, a gay Orthodox rabbi, a closeted Conservative rabbinical student, and a secular 'liberationist fem' are similarly bound together in this book. One is also invited--or swept--on the road with the creator ('mother') of the groundbreaking film "Trembling Before G-d", further carried into the Yiddish Film Archives for queer subtexts, and finally (finely) guided through queer viewings of Angels in America and The Producers. Added to this, Queer Jews tra(ns)verses geographical boundaries, including essays about queer Jews in the U.S., Israel, and Canada (the latter of which cites two articles by Jewish lesbians in Australia).
Sprinkled throughout the book are essays specifically about activism (though all of the essays, let's be clear, are activism)--in schools, on the streets, at Seders taken to the streets, and at the Kotel (Western Wall). One essay deftly delivers us into the tangled web of anti-semitism, homophobia, classicism, and racism all present in queer Jewish adoptions.
And there's history here too--history in the making as well as glimpses of the range of GLBTQ Jewish history over the past decades. Could one ask for more?
Emphatically yes. Queer Jews earns its place in the expanding canon--let's just call it torah--of GLBTQ Jews. Among its greatest triumphs may just well be its power to spark more queer Jews to tell their (our) stories. Is there a Queer Jews Too in the works? This reader certainly hopes so. And please, let's not wait another 10 years.
Rating: 5
Summary: The voice of the next generation speaks out
Comment: This book is a much-needed anthology representing diverse voices, primarily from young, out [homosexual] Jews today. The essays are challenging and inspiring, and demand that Jewish communities everywhere move beyond tolerance and towards full acceptance of gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender Jews.
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Title: TWICE BLESSED by Christie Balka, Andy Rose ISBN: 080707909X Publisher: Beacon Press Pub. Date: 02 April, 1991 List Price(USD): $20.00 |
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Title: Lesbian Rabbis: The First Generation by Rebecca T. Alpert, Sue Levi Elwell, Shirley Idelson ISBN: 0813529166 Publisher: Rutgers University Press Pub. Date: 15 August, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: Yentl's Revenge: The Next Wave of Jewish Feminism by Danya Ruttenberg, Susannah Heschel ISBN: 1580050573 Publisher: Seal Press Pub. Date: 10 October, 2001 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
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Title: Like Bread on the Seder Plate by Rebecca Alpert ISBN: 0231096615 Publisher: Columbia University Press Pub. Date: 15 November, 1998 List Price(USD): $20.50 |
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Title: Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective by Judith Plaskow ISBN: 0060666846 Publisher: Harper SanFrancisco Pub. Date: 01 February, 1991 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
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