'Queer Judaism'

For the purposes of this blog entry, I decided to review the Jewish Queer Youth's website. First, I notice the use of bright colors originating from the rainbow as the icon of homosexual culture. A nifty paragraph on the homepage announces their goal is to give young (18-30) homosexual Jews a comfortable place to anonymously discuss various issues facing their identity as both Jews and homosexuals.

Directly under the Home link is a link which leads to an article titled "Gay?" which addresses the issue of 'coming out'. "No matter how you look at it, according to Yahadut (Judaism), there is no aveirah (transgression) in having homosexual or transgendered feelings. What prohibitions are involved in terms of actually carrying out one's desires involves major halachic (Jewish legal) discussions. The GayJews' Homepage goes more into a halachic discussion of homosexuality. You may also want to check out the Open Halacha website." I tried to look at the links to see what they were referring to, but they were broken links.

An interesting thing about JQY is found in the FAQs page. After looking over the various questions and answers, I found that most, if not all the questions were about homosexuality and didn't reflect any concerns of judaism. For me, it seems that this organization focuses more on the homosexual identity than the jewish identity.

Another interesting tab was the 'experiences' tab where young Jews described their struggles with between their homosexuality and their Jewish ancestry. One woman tells a sad story of how her parents arranged her marriage (I believe she was Hasidic or Chabad. I don't remember which). She married the man and had children quickly but in a few years, she fell in love with a woman. Eventually, this led to a 'road to discovery' and she took the children and left her husband to pursue a new life, free to explore her new found identity. These messages were very touching and really captured the suffering some people go through, simply trying to be themselves.