Rainbow Maccabees
Rainbow Maccabees
Highlight from last week's panel exploring the fight against antisemitism by members of the LGBTQ+ community.
Last week I had the great honor of participating in a panel with my fellow “Rainbow Maccabees”, Jewish advocates and educators Ben M Freeman and Blake Flayton.
Often I’m asked about the relationship between LGBTQ+ activism and fighting antisemitism. Often it’s put to me that there must be a reason why so many of our loudest voices are all Queer Jews. It’s not a coincidence that this is the case, when many LGBTQ+ Jews have found themselves more naturally in progressive spaces in which the duality has been very abrasive; that of a community purporting to be a safe space for all, but one that asks Jews to leave their Zionism at the door.
It was moving to be part of a panel that gave extensive space to this conversation, but more than that for me personally it was vindicating and unspeakably powerful to be able to share deeply the conundrums a Queer Jew can face when trying to feel safe between two worlds: a Jewish world that often doesn’t see them, and a non-Jewish LGBTQ+ world that charges a price for assimilation.
When organizer of the event David Sachs put to me a question about what I felt had led to the vehement spread of antizionism among LGBTQ+ advocacy spaces, I decided to share my personal story, because demonstrating a capacity for empathy with the decisions that lead a Jew to bend to the path of antizionist antisemitism contains solutions to what we can do better as a Jewish community to ensure that every Jew is protected from shame and rejection among our tribe, first and foremost.
Isn’t it funny how many people found their Zionism because of Corbynism? Well said Eve x
Thanks for writing this. I was horribly shocked and dismayed several years ago when a Jewish group marched for LGBTQ rights and the organizers asked them to take down the Israeli flag and claimed that we were "pink washing" Zionism. The degree of antisemitism shrouded under the guise of opposition to Israel combined with a misunderstanding of our past and what Zionism meant angers and saddens me. I have come to find that although most members of the Jewish Community support equal rights for women, minorities and LGBTQ community, that the members of many of those groups do not return the support. I am sure, given what you have gone through, that the isolation you have felt is 10 times what I feel.