The most striking thing about Rabbi Shua Brick’s nearly five years at Oakland’s Beth Jacob Congregation may be how completely routine they’ve been.

That’s not at all a given. Brick, 31, is believed to be the first openly gay Orthodox rabbi to serve an Orthodox synagogue in the country, or perhaps the world.

He has been doing his job quietly all these years, ever since Senior Rabbi Gershon Albert hired Brick as director of family learning at the Modern Orthodox shul in August 2020 as his ordination approached. 

“Our synagogue is not an activist community,” Albert said. “We’re just trying to live our values, and accept every Jew for who they are.”

While that is true, the Bay Area Jewish community is also part of an open and LGBTQ-friendly culture. It’s how Brick ended up here in the first place and not in New York, where the large Orthodox community leans more conservative.

More than two years ago, Brick began the process of coming out more publicly, beyond his congregation, by speaking with Forward reporter Louis Keene. That article was published on Oct. 5, 2023, but it barely made a ripple, coming right before the devastating attack on Israel and the start of the ongoing war with Hamas. Whatever negative or positive reactions there might have been to the article were muted as the Jewish world was plunged into crisis. 

Now firmly established in the Bay Area, Brick sat down with J. to talk about how he sees his role — he splits his time between Beth Jacob and the Jewish Community High School of the Bay in San Francisco (JCHS), where he teaches Talmud and Jewish ethics — and what he hopes to achieve going forward.

On one hand, he made clear that his communal responsibilities are a higher priority than talking about himself. On the other hand, he is a trailblazer. Working to create an Orthodox world that is more welcoming to LGBTQ Jews like himself is part of his mission. 

“Many LGBTQ Jews who grow up Orthodox feel they would be better off if they left for the other, less restrictive movements, or Judaism altogether,” Brick said.

By not doing either and by taking a leadership role, Brick hopes he might help other Orthodox Jews to see themselves reflected in his journey and to believe that the observant world holds a place for them, too.

“It’s nice for me to be safe here,” he said. “But the idea would be for people like me to be safe everywhere.”

Brick always knew he wanted to become a rabbi. His journey toward self-acceptance was a long one.

It was during an internship at Beth Jacob in early 2020, before he was ordained, when Brick shared with Albert that he was gay.

“I had wanted to offer internships to young, future Orthodox clergy who would benefit from the kind of open-minded yet serious Judaism we try to cultivate here at Beth Jacob,” Albert said. “Rav Shua’s background, his intellectual, spiritual and academic pursuits, were all really impressive. When I interviewed him on the phone, he came off as compassionate, thoughtful and creative, and when I spoke to his references, I heard nothing but wonderful things.” 

When later that year Albert offered him a job, Brick accepted with the condition that he would be open about his identity.  Brick considers his sexual orientation and entire belief system to be fully and halachically within mainstream Orthodoxy.

Albert conferred with the synagogue’s board president and a few key members.

“Of course, I care about my reputation in the Orthodox world and want to make decisions that are halachically responsible,” Albert said, referring to Jewish law. “While I spoke to rabbinic advisers and peers about this, ultimately we all have to face HaShem.”

Albert emphasized that he was also motivated by the desire to reach observant Jews who might be feeling distanced from “Torah and mitzvot.”

“I have an opportunity to create a different path,” he said.

In addition, Albert has a personal reason. He had a gay friend growing up who kept the truth from him for years, and it has bothered Albert to know that his friend struggled alone and felt the need to hide his identity for so long.

Coming out in Oakland

Historically, Beth Jacob has always been a place where people of many different viewpoints and levels of observance congregate and coexist under one roof. Brick has fallen hard for its approach. 

“I met this beautiful community, and I’ve been in love with it ever since,” he said. 

Brick waited several months after his 2021 ordination from Yeshiva University to come out to Beth Jacob congregants. He and Albert discussed starting with some of the shul’s core members, and Brick began going down the list, emailing congregants and asking if he could stop by to talk about a synagogue project he was working on. Brick laughs about it now, as the language he used had most everyone thinking he was going to ask them for a donation.

Albert helped him craft a response should anyone have a negative reaction, but they needn’t have worried.

“When they learned that I was there to tell them I was gay, they were thrilled,” Brick said. “It was definitely big news to most people, and there were definitely a lot of emotional reactions. But without exception, every single one of them was incredibly excited and overwhelmingly supportive.”

That response continued as he came out more fully to the congregation and experienced only reassurance. Until those conversations, Brick had considered himself a burden or liability to any community that hired him.

“As a human being, to walk in the world and think of yourself as a huge liability is not great,” he said. “Having this community telling me how happy they were to have me was incredibly meaningful and made me see myself differently.”

Warren Mazer, a longtime congregant, expressed a view that he felt was held by many of his fellow Beth Jacob members: “It doesn’t affect my life in any direct way, except that I would like him to be happy and to be able to stay here,” Mazer said.

Single rabbis are quite common in all other movements, but not in the Orthodox world. Unmarried Orthodox rabbis have a harder time finding positions, Brick said, and a rabbi’s personal life is constantly open to remarks. He said he felt none of that intrusion when he arrived at Beth Jacob, both before and after he came out.

Brick’s presence at Beth Jacob also has sent a strong message to queer observant Jews in the area. One of them is Michelle Katznelson, who had ruled out Orthodox synagogues because of her queer family.

Katznelson grew up somewhere between Conservative and Orthodox, and her wife is a secular Israeli American. She had tried nearly every synagogue in the East Bay, she said, and none felt like home. It was after the couple had their son and put him in Beth Jacob’s daycare program that they gradually started to become a part of the community. Then Katznelson began attending services.

She already had been feeling very warmly toward Albert when, less than a year after her family joined, she learned the rabbi had hired Brick with the knowledge that he is gay.

“It meant a lot to me that Rabbi Albert hired Shua knowing that it would come out eventually, and he let him do it in his own time and in his own way,” Katznelson said. “Rather than being the kind of person who takes bold activist stances, Rabbi Albert finds a way to just quietly be a mensch about things and has a really solid sense of Jewish ethics.” 

Starting with Yeshiva U

It’s been 25 years since the groundbreaking film “Trembling Before G-d,” which testified to the existence of LGBTQ Orthodox Jews, and more than 25 years since Rabbi Steve Greenberg became the first Yeshiva University rabbi to come out as gay. Brick, however, is the first one known to be hired at an Orthodox synagogue.

YU is the flagship institution and seminary of the Orthodox movement. Brick’s father is a rabbi and attorney, his mother works at YU, and his family is well known in the community. (For years now, LGBTQ students at YU have sought greater acceptance, taking their fight to establish a campus club all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court.) 

Brick waited until he had his ordination document in hand before he began coming out to some of his former rabbis and teachers. 

“Each one amazed me with how much better on the subject they were than I thought they might have been,” he said. “I don’t think there’s a single [Orthodox] rabbi that hasn’t gotten more progressive over the last 10 years on this subject. But for a variety of reasons, they have no clue how to say it publicly.”

Mazer said it’s only natural that whatever is happening among the movement’s leadership would trickle down to Orthodox congregations, too.

“While Modern Orthodoxy does drag its feet, there’s a realization that we all have family members or people close to us who are gay, and the interest in letting them live their full lives as human beings and keeping them in the community is taking priority over prejudices or strict interpretations over things that are really nobody else’s business,” Mazer said.

In an observant community in New York or New Jersey, if you don’t like the rabbi or his politics, you can just walk down the road to the next one. Here, there are no other Modern Orthodox synagogues within walking distance.

That Brick would end up serving a community where he couldn’t even get a slice of kosher pizza was unfathomable to him before he arrived in Oakland. Yet once he was here, he realized that he had landed at his dream job, splitting his time between his synagogue work and teaching at the high school. It was exactly how he envisioned his career years ago.

At JCHS, he said, “I cannot describe how much no one there cares.”

The high school is nondenominational and welcoming to all, but Brick said his presence on staff might help Orthodox families feel more comfortable sending their children there.

Rabbi Howard Jacoby Ruben, JCHS head of school, called Brick a “fan favorite” of both students and faculty.

“He honors students’ inquiry and invites it without judgment. He models curiosity and inspires both more curiosity and deeper digging on the part of the students. And he’s also a favorite among his colleagues, because without regard to the subjects they teach, he’s fascinated by the craft of teaching and learning from others about how to hone his craft,” Ruben told J.

Ending the silence

Brick’s decision to come out more publicly and participate in the Forward article was largely influenced by the suicide of Herschel Siegel, a classmate at YU who took his life in 2023.

“From that moment,” Brick said, “I felt that leading by quiet example is not sufficient.”

So many of his colleagues stay silent about the existence of LGBTQ people in the Orthodox world because they don’t know what to say, Brick said, and in doing so, they are abandoning religiously observant Jews who need them.

“The LGBTQ community is disappearing themselves from our community, whether they’re choosing to leave or physically killing themselves,” he said.

A spokesperson for New York-based Jewish Queer Youth, which serves the Orthodox community, said that 58 percent of its participants have thought about suicide and 24 percent of them have attempted suicide.

According to Brick, the Orthodox establishment speaks one way publicly and another way behind closed doors. He would like to see the rabbis he’s had frank conversations with say publicly what they’ve said to him privately. Despite their reticence to speak up, he said, “there’s been real growth in the Orthodox rabbinate that people are completely unaware of.” 

As for the Biblical passage that is responsible for so much of the way that gay Jews are treated in the Orthodox community — Leviticus 18:22, which states that a man lying with a man as he would lie with a woman is an “abomination” — most Orthodox rabbis interpret it to mean that gay Orthodox Jews must remain celibate to avoid violating halachah. But Brick said that it’s reductive to talk about this passage in too much detail. 

Nevertheless, “most serious rabbis I’ve spoken to know that reparative therapy, marrying against your orientation and celibacy are all horrible ideas,” he said. “So at some point, a vision of what’s left needs to be explored halachically.”

One of the projects he’s working on is a curriculum that he hopes can one day be shared with Orthodox schools around the country, spelling out how to approach that Biblical passage and how to respond when a student comes out.

“Rabbis often have the first 100 words, but they don’t have the next 100 words,” Brick said. “They don’t know what to say after that. I want to offer everyone what the next 100 words are. It’s a series of Torah shiurim [lessons] that is content that they’re all familiar with that isn’t at all controversial but deeply speaks to the queer experience.”

Sources abound already for educators, but none come from a Jewish and Torah-observant perspective, he said.

“What is the authentically Jewish way to find an integration between one’s Jewish and queer self?” Brick said. “It’s not just copying and pasting and repeating a bunch of platitudes that you’ve heard at some recent Pride march. There are authentically Jewish ways to do this, and we need to find it from within our Jewish sources and not from without.” 

This summer, Brick is transitioning to a different role at Beth Jacob, as resident scholar. He will also be devoting more time to an inclusivity initiative he founded. Called Queerkeit Incubators, its goal is to promote the visibility of queer Orthodox Jews, making it easier for them to find one another.

“There are so many people who know, like, a handful of other happy Jewish Orthodox queer people and don’t realize that there are hundreds of us across the country,” he said.

Brick organized a retreat last August that 40 people from around the U.S. attended in Baltimore. He has organized the Queerkeit participants around writing groups, but creating community is just as important as the writing itself. His intention is to “create the community and to create the kind of Jewish queer canon that I wish I had when I was growing up.”

Just as his self-perception has evolved over time, Brick hopes that the greater Orthodox community will continue to evolve as more of his contemporaries come out and find their own place in the observant world, too.

“These are people who have to decide to choose Orthodoxy against their best interest,” Brick said. “We keep treating them as if they’re liabilities instead of realizing that they are resplendent souls that are definitely closer to God in some way that we haven’t fully appreciated.”

How do people who go by they/them pronouns in English refer to themselves in Hebrew? What do you call the Jewish rite of passage ceremony for a nonbinary tween? What plural words should we use for a group of people who each have a different gender?

I was faced with these wonderfully productive dilemmas when I studied Hebrew in college eight years ago. I had come out a year earlier as nonbinary, which means for me that my gender does not fit neatly into the boxes of man or woman. I asked Eyal Rivlin, my Hebrew professor at University of Colorado at Boulder, about the established conventions for nonbinary people. After he and I did research by asking friends, family and colleagues and examining literature, we realized there was no comprehensive system for speaking Hebrew without using the masculine or feminine. 

We decided to experiment and created the Nonbinary Hebrew Project in 2018.

Hebrew is both ancient and modern. As a living language, it is constantly changing, evolving and growing to adapt to the needs of its speakers. It is used daily for conversation, prayer, ritual and study. As such, it is critical that everyone who needs or wants to use Hebrew can do so in a way that is affirming.

One of the aspects of Hebrew that distinguishes it from English is its use of what linguists call grammatical gender. English has some familiar uses of it, such as the personal pronouns she/her and he/him. But in many languages, including Hebrew, almost all parts of speech are gendered, including verbs, nouns and adjectives. This grammatical gender is often chosen based on the gender of the speaker or the subject of the sentence. 

Some queer communities in Israel use “lashon me’orevet,” or “language that crosses over,” in which they intentionally challenge this convention by switching grammatical gender mid-sentence or in every other sentence for the same speaker or subject. This is affirming for many people — but I sought to create a third option for people like myself for whom the grammatical masculine or feminine did not entirely affirm my identity.

The system that Eyal and I created is intuitive to Hebrew speakers because it creates a third parallel system of grammatical gender for use alongside the masculine and feminine options. 

In traditional Hebrew, for example, grammatically masculine words are usually considered the default, while grammatically feminine words often end with an additional “-et” or “-ah.” In our new, more expansive option, many singular nouns, verbs and adjectives end with “-eh” to distinguish them from the masculine or feminine.

In another example from traditional Hebrew, grammatically masculine plural words end in “-im,” with groups referred to with the pronouns “hem” or “atem,” while feminine plural words end in “-ot,” with groups referred to with “hen” or “aten.” In our new system, plural words can use the ending “-imot” or “-emen,” both of which combine existing plural endings and were already used by some people before our project.

Since the Nonbinary Hebrew Project’s creation, many people across the world have applied our system for their own uses, such as Yizkor (memorial) prayers, baby-naming ceremonies and wedding blessings. There are other innovations as well, such as using “bet mitzvot,” instead of a bar or bat mitzvah. I can now start the day with the prayer “Modet Ani” (rather than “modeh” or “modah”). And when I’m called to the Torah, I can receive a blessing that truly honors me.

Another application I have been excited to see is the use of our system to refer to the Divine without using the masculine or feminine.

There is a rich history in Hebrew texts of gender being used in playful ways, for both people and the Divine. Many names for the Divine, such as Rock or Fountain of Life, are already beyond traditional notions of binary gender. 

The Nonbinary Hebrew Project opens up possibilities for radical joy, euphoria and recognition of the other as a sibling rather than a stranger. We connect with one another through shared language, and our project aims to provide another tool for weaving communities closer together.

If you’re interested in learning more, come to one of our workshops this Friday evening, June 6, at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco or stay tuned for our virtual workshops by checking the calendar at nonbinaryhebrew.com. You can find applied uses of the system on the website, as well as grammar charts, podcasts and news articles.

This Pride Month, and all year long, let’s find joy together by using language to uplift one another and honor each other’s light.

Gear up, cheer up and queer up — Pride Month begins this Sunday, June 1! As the Bay Area prepares for San Francisco’s 55th Pride Parade on June 29, the Jewish community is hosting family events, parade delegations and celebratory Shabbat services. Did we miss any? Let us know at events@jweekly.com.

Keep reading to the end for details on how to march with Jewish groups in the S.F. Pride Parade.

Ongoing

Pride Snack Drive—Food drive benefitting the Oakland LGBTQ Community Center. Bring items to the lobby bin at JCCSF, 3200 California St., S.F. Through June 30.

Saturday, May 31

“Harvey Milk Reimagined” —Opera Parallèle will close its 15th season with the West Coast debut of “Harvey Milk Reimagined,” an update of the original “Harvey Milk” opera that premiered in 1995. At 7:30 p.m. May 31. Also, at 3 p.m. Sunday, June 1; 7:30 p.m. Friday, June 6; and 5 p.m. Saturday, June 7. At Blue Shield of California Theater at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, 700 Howard St., S.F. $50-188, “creatives” 30 and under $35.

Tuesday, June 3

“Opera and Activism”—Stewart Wallace, composer of “Harvey Milk Reimagined,” and opera dramaturg Kip Cranna discuss the life and legacy of the gay icon through the lens of opera and how his story is reimagined for the stage, blending history, activism and music while also highlighting Milk’s Jewish identity and its influence on his vision for justice and equality. At JCCSF, 3200 California St., S.F. 1-2 p.m. Free, registration required.

Friday, June 6

Trans Shabbat—Community Shabbat service to celebrate trans people and offer learning sessions. Topics include “Creating Inclusive Hebrew Grammar” and “What’s to be Done with Hebrew? The Creation of the Nonbinary Hebrew Project.” Livestream option. At Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 290 Dolores St., S.F. 5:30-7:30 p.m. Free, registration required.

Saturday, June 7 

Pride Tot Shabbat and Park Day—Outdoor Shabbat celebration for families with young children featuring singing, dancing and picnic lunch. Presented by Congregation Sha’ar Zahav and Or Shalom Jewish Community. At Precita Park, 3200 Folsom St., S.F. 10-11:30 a.m. Free.

Sunday, June 8

“Transgender Community in Israel”—Discussion with a diverse group of leaders of Israel’s trans community. Presented by Congregation Sha’ar Zahav and co-sponsor A Wider Bridge. Online. 11 a.m.-12:15 p.m. Free.

Monday, June 9

“Sound Journey: Pride”—Sound bath experience celebrates LGBTQ+ Pride. At JCCSF, 3200 California St., S.F. 6:30-8 p.m. $25 members, $30.

Thursday, June 12

“Early Queer Jewish Liturgy”—Rabbi Yoel Kahn examines the creation and evolution of early LGBTQ-informed and -inclusive liturgy in the 1970s and 1980s. Livestream option. At Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 290 Dolores St., S.F. 7:30-9 p.m. Free, registration required.

Friday, June 13

Pride Yizkor—Memorial service remembering members of the queer community who died due to bigotry, AIDS and transphobia. Livestream option. At Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 290 Dolores St., S.F. 6-7 p.m. Free.

Friday, June 20

Juneteenth Drash—Sermon from Jews of Color Initiative CEO Ilana Kaufman during Shabbat service with readings and songs. Livestream option. At Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 290 Dolores St., S.F. 7:30-8:30 p.m. Free, registration required.

Saturday, June 21

“Dance with Us: Pink Saturday Pride Zumbafest”—Zumba dance class and party with light refreshments. At JCCSF, 3200 California St., S.F. 10 a.m.-12 p.m. Free, registration required.

Sunday, June 22

Pride Family Festival—Celebration featuring a kid-friendly drag show, hands-on crafts and activities from community partners Keshet, CheerSF, Repair the World and more. At JCCSF, 3200 California St., S.F. 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Free, registration required.

Drag 101 for Teens—Workshop introducing teens, ages 13-18, to drag performance followed by family-friendly drag show. At JCCSF, 3200 California St., S.F. 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. Free, registration required.

Friday, June 27

Shabbat ritual and picnic ahead of Trans March—Join Congregation Sha’ar Zahav and Kehilla Community Synagogue for pre-march Shabbat ritual and BYO picnic dinner. Meet at Dolores Park, Dolores and 19th streets, S.F. 5-6:30 p.m. Free.

Pride Shabbat Service—Pride pre-party with food and drinks followed by Pride Shabbat Service and rainbow-themed oneg. At Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 290 Dolores Street, S.F. 6:30 p.m. in-person pre-party. 7:30 p.m. in-person or livestream service. Free, registration required.

Saturday, June 28

“Shalom Dykes Brunch”—Social event for queer women and transgender and nonbinary people. Presented by Sapphic Sabbath and co-sponsored by Queers Against Antisemitism, A Wider Bridge, Zioness and J Leaders. San Francisco location provided with registration. 11 a.m.-1 p.m. Free.

Sunday, June 29

S.F. Pride Parade — march with Bay Area Jewish groups:

Join JCRC Bay Area, JCCSF, Keshet, Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, A Wider Bridge and Jewish Community Federation and Endowment Fund at the S.F. Pride Parade with a float, DJ and dancers. All ages and abilities are welcome. More than two dozen other Jewish congregations, schools and nonprofits, including J., are co-sponsors and partners. All participants get swag and a free Pride T-shirt. Meet at the parade assembly area in downtown S.F. 10 a.m.-3 p.m. Free, registration required.

S.F. Pride Parade — march with a multifaith group:

Walk or ride the bus with Congregation Sha’ar Zahav’s delegation in the parade as part of a multifaith group of religious organizations called United in Spirit. Meetup time and location provided with registration. Free.

Sasha Velour is one of the most imaginative drag stars working today. Known for her fantastical, multimedia shows, she’s a storyteller at heart whose theatrical performances routinely surprise and move her audiences.

But before she became Sasha Velour, she was young Alexander (Sasha) Hedges Steinberg, who celebrated a bar mitzvah and confirmation in Urbana, Illinois, and was always finding ways to get on stage.

“My first performance gig was doing puppet shows for Sunday school,” she recalled ahead of her show coming to Berkeley Rep in June. “I was supposed to be assisting a teacher, and I ended up turning it into a performance opportunity, like I did with everything, turning stuffed animals and Barbie dolls into marionettes so I could act out traditional fables and stories from the Torah.”

It must have been a good training ground. Velour, 37, is now world-famous after winning the TV reality competition “RuPaul’s Drag Race” in the 2017 season, memorably delivering an iconic lip-sync “reveal” when she released red rose petals hidden inside her gloves and wig. She went on to tour in 80 cities around the globe. 

At home in New York, she launched a long-running revue that gives a stage to her fellow drag queens. In 2023, she wrote and illustrated her first book, “The Big Reveal: An Illustrated Manifesto of Drag.” Part drag history and part memoir, it leans heavily into family stories.

She was born in Berkeley, but before she was a year old her family began moving around the country for jobs in academia. Velour still feels a strong pull toward the Bay Area, where her parents grew up and where she would frequently come to visit her grandparents. Her father, Russian history professor emeritus Mark Steinberg, attended UC Santa Cruz and earned his Ph.D. at UC Berkeley. Her mother, Jane Hedges, was an academic editor who grew up in Palo Alto. (Hedges died of cancer in 2015, and Velour continues to shave her head in her mother’s memory.)

Velour herself has some pretty sparkly credentials. She graduated from Vassar in 2009, won a yearlong Fulbright scholarship to study Russian art in Moscow and St. Petersburg, and earned an MFA in comic illustration. Her drag revue was made into a documentary series in 2020. She was profiled in the New Yorker in 2023 and was invited to illustrate the cover. And last year, she was a host on the Peabody-winning HBO series “We’re Here.” 

Next month Velour will return to where it all started, presenting the stage version of her book from June 4 to 15 at Berkeley Rep. She said that family history and her own story are the core of “A Big Reveal Live Show!” 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

J.: Tell us about the “Big Reveal” book, and why you decided to write it.

Sasha Velour: It’s a memoir, but it’s really a history of drag and a philosophy of what the art of drag is, as told by someone who does it. As basic as that sounds, that book has never existed before. And I felt like it was impossible to tell that story without infusing it with the story of how I got there, how my family and my context and my culture inform the way that I do drag and the way that I see it. I think my family’s own peculiar way of loving history and telling ancestral stories generation to generation, and my insistence on always carrying this history with me, shaped my approach to drag.

How did you turn all of that into a live show?

The drag show was the destiny of the book. I wanted to take some of my favorite stories that I felt best spoke to the fears of drag and the political backlash against it, and the stories from my childhood, showing videos of me as a little kid playing with drag and expressing myself in very queer ways before I had that kind of language or self-awareness. I think that kind of speaks the truth more clearly than anything can.

I wanted to put that on stage and then transform those stories into drag numbers, which are metaphors. They’re operas. They are multimedia, visual, emotional gestures, and they all kind of circle around the idea of a reveal, which is something I’m known for in drag — about three-quarters of the way through a number you do a surprise that the audience didn’t see coming, that somehow makes the story all fit together in a new way. 

Can someone who is new to drag still enjoy it?

I always say that drag is for everyone. It’s about stepping into a world of fantasy where you can access all the different sides of yourself. I like to throw them all together and exaggerate them and make my outfits as true to me as I can, which does involve lipstick and giant feather headdresses and absurdly shaped costumes and very bright colors. For me, it’s about the freedom to just play and have fun, which I think is what theater and art are perfect for. 

In what ways do your Jewish background and your drag identity intersect?

My dad’s family was very Jewish. My Grandma Dina especially features heavily in my book and also in the stage adaptation, because she was the first glamorous person I ever encountered. Her Judaism and her Jewish family, literally traveling around the world to escape antisemitism and find opportunities — that shaped me so much. She was very comfortable around queer people, too, maybe just from being in San Francisco. She went to a gay hair stylist, and she would go to Finocchio’s and see the [female] impersonations there. She had a love of sequins, and she spent an hour doing her makeup and hair, and there was no one else in my family like that, so I immediately connected with that. There was some spark of her that I felt I must have in me too.

How far back did you go in researching the history of drag?

I definitely tiptoe through some very bold claims in the book (laughs) about the origins of language and performance and storytelling in Indigenous societies around the world that had clear examples of gender-expansive identities. But obviously language like trans and drag and gay didn’t exist. It’s hard to say how people saw themselves, but the fact that they crossed genders on and off stage definitely rings a little bell of recognition in my head. I think it’s clear these impulses are nothing new. There have been times when people saw it as the height of art or even religion, or as something sacred, to be able to live in between genders.

And yet we seem to be at a low today when it comes to full acceptance. 

It’s always people who don’t know, like, a trans person or a nonbinary person firsthand, or haven’t seen drag themselves, who have the strongest negative opinions about it. Politically it’s a low, but culturally this is a high point. There’s more knowledge about the possibilities that are out there for people, especially for young people, than I’ve ever experienced in my life. 

You have a nonbinary name yourself. Is Sasha your given name?

My legal name is Alexander, but I was called Sasha from the moment I was born. My family wanted me to have a Russian name to honor my dad’s family’s legacy. My grandma spoke Russian and Yiddish when she came to San Francisco in the ’30s. So they chose a gender-neutral name for me, and when I started doing drag, I was like, well, I already have a superstar nonbinary drag name that fits me perfectly.

You spent a year studying in Russia on a Fulbright scholarship. Do you speak the language of your forebears, and do you plan to visit again?

It’s less fluent than it used to be, but I did study Russian. I don’t think I will be going back anytime soon. My dad has been banned for speaking out against Putin, and there’s so much fear of gay propaganda. I think given my reputation, I would probably be banned as well. But I’ve connected with people from all over. I’ve been able to connect with Ukrainians, who are very open, so there’s a great drag scene in Ukraine. There’s great drag in Russia, too, but it’s not a safe space for people to take part in that culture. I dream of getting to go to Ukraine or to Russia and perform in a safe space for all people.

Coming back around to the show, how did you end up bringing it to Berkeley?

It hadn’t dawned on me that theater spaces like Berkeley Rep, which is one of the most respected theaters in the world, especially for new work, would be open to someone doing drag, or to someone like me. I don’t have a famous theater producer or director attached to this project. It’s me and my team of artists that I work with all the time, but we’re all kind of on the outside of the institution of theater. But we just thought of asking, do you have a space for us? Are you interested? And the excitement that was there really surprised and humbled me in this time where we’re wondering whether the art is going to be illegal, or whether our lives or genders are going to be illegal. The fact that there are institutions and communities standing up for inclusion gives me a lot of hope.

Looking forward to returning to the Bay Area?

Many of my fondest memories are there. My grandparents lived there until they passed away, so I would go back two times a year and always loved it. And when my mom passed away, we spread her ashes into the Pacific Ocean because she grew up in Palo Alto. So my family, though deceased, is still in the Bay Area. Yeah, in the bay (laughs). And so it’s like a sacred emotional space every time I go and visit, and I feel like family is always going to be there.

“The Big Reveal Live Show!”

June 4-15 at Berkeley Rep’s Roda Theatre. Times vary. $39-$99, with a free pre-show celebration for Pride on June 7.

Updated June 28

When Congregation Sha’ar Zahav opened its doors to San Francisco’s queer Jewish community in 1977, the Reform synagogue’s membership consisted exclusively of adults.

That began to change in the 1980s, and by 1988, the synagogue had established a religious school to educate children. But it wasn’t a smooth transition.

“This is a gay synagogue. We’re not going to have children [here],” Tiela Chalmers, who joined Sha’ar Zahav in the early ’80s, recalled several older gay lay leaders saying at the time. “There was actually a discussion: Are we going to allow children in the synagogue?”

Children would be painful reminders of what those men couldn’t have, according to Rabbi Mychal Copeland, the synagogue’s current leader.

“It was specifically due to the pain at not being able to bear children themselves,” she said. “Many gay men were shunned by Jewish communities and families in part because they wouldn’t be able to observe the all-important commandment ‘pru urvu,’ being fruitful and multiplying.”

In addition, some gay members objected to having to pay dues to support a school that would serve the two dozen families blessed with biological or adopted children, current members said in interviews.

These conversations were taking place against the backdrop of the AIDS epidemic, which was devastating the LGBTQ community. By the end of the 1990s, about 100 people in the synagogue community had died of AIDS, according to Rabbi Yoel Kahn, who led the synagogue from 1985 to 1996.

Amid so much loss, however, the number of member families with children steadily increased through the early ’90s, as the LGBTQ community grew more open and assertive about their identities. Meanwhile, more queer people were choosing to adopt or have children through artificial insemination, which was becoming more mainstream. 

“I just said: There’s a flood behind me. There’s an avalanche. You guys haven’t seen anything yet,” said Barbara Cymrot, who joined the synagogue in 1994 with her then-partner Dafna Wu and their 9-year-old daughter Ruby. 

Kahn, who with his husband adopted their son, Adam, in 1991, said the congregation was more than capable of embracing everyone. 

“Just as it was our responsibility to take care of our members who were dying, it was also our responsibility to take care of our children in the next generation,” Kahn said.

Today, the Hebrew expression “l’dor vador” — from generation to generation — is very much at the heart of Sha’ar Zahav’s ethos. Some of the children who grew up attending its school, Kadimah, and becoming a b’mitzvah there have returned as adults. (B’mitzvah is the gender-neutral term that some congregations, including Sha’ar Zahav, now use for the ceremony.)

Morey Lipsett, 26, is a product of the school, now called Beit Sefer Phyllis Mintzer in memory of its first teacher. Now as a gay adult, he has become a synagogue member in his own right.

“In college I had somewhat of a queer Jewish community that I had developed,” Lipsett said. “That was really important to me, and so that’s what made me want to return.”

He began attending services there in 2019 and took on the role of recorder on the synagogue board in 2023. He’s currently completing his Ph.D. at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union with a focus on queer Judaism.

Jim Frazin, 77, joined Sha’ar Zahav in 1991, shortly after coming out as bisexual. He and his partner had separated a few years prior, and his son was approaching bar mitzvah age. In 1994, his son, Ethan, became one of the first bar mitzvahs at Sha’ar Zahav. 

Fifteen years later, Frazin wanted another child, specifically a daughter this time. Through the Jewish dating site JDate, he met a woman with a 5-month-old daughter, and Frazin legally became her father. “I was thrilled!” Frazin said.

Nearly three decades after his son’s bar mitzvah, Frazin celebrated again as his daughter, Amelia, became a b’mitzvah at Sha’ar Zahav in 2022. Now 15, Amelia is one of five teen classroom “madrichimot,” a gender-neutral term for helpers, at the religious school, which had 28 students enrolled in the 2023-2024 academic year.

“It pretty much encompasses three generations,” Frazin said of himself, a baby boomer, his son, a millennial, and his daughter, a member of Generation Z.

Frazin is also a grandparent thanks to his son. Other longtime Sha’ar Zahav members have been welcoming grandchildren into their lives too.

Cymrot, who conceived her three daughters through artificial insemination, is the proud bubbe to a 4-year-old grandson. 

“He’s just the light of my life,” she said. “I love that kid.”

Chalmers, who served as Sha’ar Zahav’s president from 1993 to 1995, became a first-time grandmother when her grandson was born in May. That same month, Deborah Levy, who joined the synagogue in 2001, also became a grandmother. 

“I hope and I think that as the baby gets older and can stay with me that I can bring the baby with me to tot Shabbat,” said Levy, who is finishing up her two-year term as president this month.

Sha’ar Zahav has also embraced the idea of chosen family since its beginning.

Martin Tannenbaum and his husband, Alex Ingersoll, do not have biological children. But Tannenbaum said he considers the five children he has mentored over the years in preparation for their b’mitzvahs as an extension of his family.

“We’ve been invited to seders with families and graduations and things,” he said. “We’ve been included as family.”

The b’mitzvah program pairs each child with a volunteer synagogue mentor who helps them prepare. Cymrot said many of the mentors are men who back in the ’80s had resisted welcoming children to the synagogue. They’ve since apologized, she said.

“Every single one has come up to me and said, ‘Being a mentor to the kids, it’s like the most important thing in my life,’” she said.

Tannenbaum meets one on one each week with his mentees for roughly 18 months ahead of their b’mitzvah. He helps them prepare to chant their Torah and haftarah portions, lead services and deliver a drash. He also tries to help them explore their own notions of Judaism and God. 

“It’s so rewarding for everyone,” he said of the mentorship program.

Both Tannenbaum and Kahn noted that at Sha’ar Zahav, l’dor vador means that the congregation has a role in raising different types of children, whether that child is a young person who finds their way there or is a member family’s newborn.

“There always were two [kinds of] younger generations coming up at Sha’ar Zahav that the congregation felt it had a responsibility for,” Kahn said. “Mentoring and adopting and taking care of the younger queer folk who found their way to our doors was one kind of parenting the congregation had responsibility for. And the other was raising our children.”

Correction, June 28: An earlier version of this article and a photo caption misidentified Phyllis Mintzer as the founder of Sha’ar Zahav’s religious school. It was founded in 1988 under Rabbi Yoel Kahn.

Update, June 26: This article was updated to include comment from Rabbi Mychal Copeland.

Although San Francisco canceled official city-sponsored Pride events this year for the second consecutive season due to the coronavirus pandemic, the LGBTQ Jewish community is still finding ways to celebrate, and to remember.

On Sunday, Congregation Sha’ar Zahav held its 16th annual Pride Seder, with participants logging on to Zoom from across the globe. The event was organized by the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, the Jewish Community Relations Council, Keshet and the World Congress: Keshet Ga’avah.

The seder, which has become a Bay Area tradition, helps participants actively remember the long, arduous journey toward queer liberation in America in the same way that the Passover seder ritualizes the story of the Israelites’ Exodus from Egypt.

“Pride has obviously changed quite a bit since its inception,” said Rabbi Mychal Copeland, who helped lead the event. “[And] with so much criticism of the corporate and marketing nature of Pride parades, the Pride Seder is crucial because it reminds us why Pride exists.”

Like the Passover seder, the Pride Seder features a written haggadah, guiding participants through LGBTQ-centered versions of traditional seder elements, such as the four questions and a seder plate. It adds unique features, for instance purposefully omitting the hand-washing ritual (to reject the notion that LGBTQ Jews are impure) and drinking four glasses of water instead of wine (because water is the source of life).

The event this year began with the traditional Hebrew blessing for seeing a rainbow — a symbol that is now synonymous with Pride. The seder also highlighted other symbols that represent the LGBTQ community’s triumphs and adversities through the decades.

Instead of a shank bone or bitter herbs, the Pride Seder plate featured a loaf of bread to symbolize the holiness of the human body, which, unlike the Passover afikomen, was left uncovered because LGBTQ Jews remained hidden for too long. In previous years, challah was used, but this year in an effort to be more inclusive to non-Ashkenazi Jews (braided challah originated among European Jews), Sha’ar Zahav switched to a loaf of bread. A cup of coffee was a reminder of the settings of early LGBTQ rights protests, such as the Cooper’s Do-nuts riot of 1959 in Los Angeles and the Compton’s Cafeteria riot of 1966 in San Francisco.

In addition to the bread and coffee, a pink triangle, a symbol worn by gay inmates in concentration camps during the Holocaust, was reclaimed as a “badge of honor, resistance and identity.” State Sen. Scott Wiener did the reading.

A bundle of sticks was used to represent confrontation against persecution and oppression, past and present. Bricks and stones, like the ones thrown at police during the Stonewall Uprising, represented walls that still need tearing down. And this year, a seashell was added to remind participants of Israelite ancestors who found freedom through crossing the sea, and to signify the community’s similar journey toward freedom.

With so much criticism of the corporate and marketing nature of Pride parades, the Pride Seder is crucial because it reminds us why Pride exists.

Maggid Elias Ramer, a regular leader of the Pride Seder, said he enjoys the creative process of updating the symbolism and wording used in the haggadah each year.

“Every year I tinker with the text, and I play a little bit with it,” Ramer said. “So this year, we had a seashell as one of the items on the seder plate,” symbolizing hope during the coronavirus pandemic, “but last year it was a feather.”

The core text of the haggadah has evolved from several that were passed around the country in the 1990s and early 2000s, from the Berkeley Queer Minyan to Aleph Kallah in Colorado and the Gay and Lesbian Committee of B’nai Jeshurun in New York. The text is treated as a living document and regularly revised to reflect the needs of the community at the time.

“When my friend Mark Horn gave me a copy of the text I was deeply moved, because it was something I hadn’t personally considered — that you could take a very clear and established piece of the Jewish tradition and morph it in that way,” Ramer said. “To me, it was an amazing, glorious door.”

The Pride Seder also always dedicates time for people to share their personal stories of coming out and meditations on living life as LGBTQ Jews.

“It connects us to our history and reminds us that we are part of something larger — our individual liberation stories become linked to a much larger narrative,” Copeland said. “And that is powerful to do in Jewish community where so much meaning comes from connecting our stories across generations, making us part of something larger than ourselves.”

Congregation Sha’ar Zahav will host two other free virtual events to celebrate Pride Month: the 15th Annual Trans & Nonbinary Celebration Shabbat on June 18 at 7:30 p.m. and the Pride Celebration Shabbat on June 25 at 7:30 p.m. Registration information can be found here.

They came out by the thousands across Israel to show their support for LGBTQ rights — but the numbers were a far cry from the Pride parades held annually that were canceled due to the coronavirus.

Tel Aviv, Jerusalem and Haifa, as well Beersheba and smaller cities, hosted Pride rallies. The demonstrations, organized by the Aguda Association for LGBTQ Equality in Israel, were held under the banner “The revolution is not complete.”

Among other things, the demonstrators called for making it legal for single men and gay male couples to have children through surrogacy in Israel.

But only some 1,250 people were permitted to participate in the Jerusalem rally because of the coronavirus. Some 27 people belonging to right-wing organizations were detained before the rally due over concerns that they would try to disrupt it.

A similar number showed up for the Tel Aviv rally in Rabin Square — well below the more than 100,000 people who have come out in recent years for the city’s annual Pride parade.

The Tel Aviv-Jaffa municipal building also was lit up for Pride Month.

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

A year before Noam Sienna, 30, earned his Ph.D. in Jewish history at the University of Minnesota last month, he had already published a groundbreaking book. “A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969” collects primary sources by and about queer Jews dating back much further than most people would have thought possible. Some are legal documents, others are poetry. They range from shocking to moving. And many have never been published before.

Sienna, who lives in Minneapolis, will discuss the book on July 6 at a virtual event sponsored by the Jewish Community Library, Afikomen Judaica and Congregation Sha’ar Zahav.

J.: Why this book, and why now?

Noam Sienna: I wish I had published this book 20 years ago, so I could have read it when I was a kid. I loved learning about Jewish history and Torah and Talmud, but as I got older and increasingly understood myself as a queer person, I felt alienated from the Jewish textual tradition. I hope this book is opening a door for Jewish LGBTQ people to connect to the Jewish tradition in some way. It’s not a narrative that you read cover to cover. It’s a tool box that people can open to find pieces that will help them understand themselves within Jewish history.

You exclude biblical texts because they’ve already been extensively mined for queerness. The texts you do include are all over the map — poetry, Talmud, journalism, personal diaries — and many of them have never gotten attention before. How did you find them?

Some of these sources are very well known — Talmud, Maimonides, certain literary texts. But those texts haven’t always been read through the lens of the LGBTQ experience, so I’m inviting people to read them in a new way.

Some texts are documentary sources that have been excavated by scholars of queer history, but haven’t yet been seen for their relevance in Jewish history. For example, the first gay bar in Paris was run by an Algerian Jew. French historians dug up that story, and what they all note in a small way is that the owner of the bar was a Jew. But they’re not Jewish historians, so they didn’t stop to think what it tells us about Jewish history. The end of his story is tragic, as I discovered: In the late ’30s he was arrested and sent to Auschwitz where he was murdered. I was in contact with a French historian who was working on this, and he had no idea that he was murdered in Auschwitz. He had never thought to ask, what’s the end of that story of a Jew in France at that time.

There are also sources from within the Jewish community talking to the Jewish community, and those have only started to be looked at in the last 10 or 15 years. For example, sources on Jewish same-sex relationships in the Ottoman Empire. I’ve tried to take these sources and present them in an accessible English translation that is open to anyone — someone in eighth grade in Omaha could pick this up and read the text and feel invited into this history.

About one-third of the sources in this book have never appeared in English before. So that’s exciting to me to say, here’s raw historical material that is now open for engagement and analysis for people who aren’t going through original archives themselves. It’s collating work by myself and other scholars and putting it in one place for the general public.

Who is this book for?

It’s already being used in a number of college classes on gender, sex, religion and Jewish studies. A number of high school teachers have been working with it, and synagogue and camp educators are working with the material. And the texts are also being used by Jewish artists and thinkers as jumping-off points for their own creative work. The play “Indecent,” which has won numerous awards, is based on the Yiddish play “God of Vengeance,” which is excerpted in this book. It excites modern audiences, but it’s based on a historical story on the intersection of Jewish and LGBTQ identities. I think there are more Broadway plays to come from this book. Or graphic novels or PJ Library books or contemporary dance. And I hope there’s more of that.

What’s one example of a text that really surprised you?

The story of Ben Rosenstein, a Jewish immigrant who comes to the U.S. in the early 20th century and works in a factory on the Lower East Side, and he marries another Jewish immigrant, Pauline — up to that point it’s a very typical immigrant story. But he gets tuberculosis and a HIAS doctor comes to see him and discovers that he was born and raised as a woman but was now living as a man. He died shortly after. The story was leaked to the papers, and it was front-page news in Chicago in 1915. I was able to find corroborating documents, including Ben Rosenstein’s death certificate, which lists him under his birth name as female, but his census record from 1910 lists him as male and married to a woman. Finding that census record, it was a huge relief because I was so moved to know that this person had chosen a way to live that felt right to them and they stuck to it. If the doctor hadn’t taken his story to the paper, this person might have had a long life as a man, and just slipped through history without leaving a record of their life. How many more people lived like this?

Why the time frame of the first century to 1969?

I started with Hellenistic Jewish literature, written in Greek around the 1st century C.E. — it’s a black hole of Jewish history that people forget about. People jump from the Bible to the Talmud, forgetting that there are five centuries in between. The very first source is a literary text that compares a homoerotic poem by Sappho to the Torah. In the first century, Jews are reading this homoerotic poetry and appreciating it in the same breath with the Torah!

I wanted to end with 1969 because of Stonewall, which is often seen as the catalyst for the gay rights movement; people start the story of LGBTQ issues there, as if in 1969 gay people were invented and Jews tried to figure out what to do with them. But I knew there was material to show Jewish LGBTQ life from before 1969. So the last text is actually about Sappho! It is by this German Jewish classicist named Vera Lachmann. In 1967, she goes on this pilgrimage to the island of Lesbos, the birthplace of Sappho and the origin of the word lesbian. She later published some poetry about her trip. So I wanted to end with this Jew writing about Sappho, just as we started with a Jew writing about Sappho.

I assume there’s some Bay Area-relevant material in the book?

Oh yes. For example, in 1961 Rabbi Alvin Fine at Temple Emanu-El in San Francisco, a Reform rabbi, appeared on TV and made the following statement: “Judaism today takes a different view from its Biblical and post-Biblical edicts on homosexuals… Such persons are not criminals and should not have punitive action as atonement… Judaism believes that the psychological approach is the answer.” In 1961, no American rabbi had made anything close to this public statement. It was so radical that it immediately provoked an official response from the Reform movement emphasizing that Rabbi Fine was not speaking as a representative of the Reform movement.

What will people hear about if they tune into your July 6 discussion?

We’ll look at and read some of these texts and see what they can bring to contemporary LGBTQ Jewish life, and we’ll have an opportunity to put the texts from the book to work and chew over where do we go from here.

Pride Month invites those of us who stand at the intersections of histories to lift up the voices of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer and intersex Jews. This month, we celebrate how far we’ve come, 50 years this month since the first Pride parades. As we mourn the lives of black Americans killed by those who were supposed to protect them, we remember what the first celebrations of Pride commemorated.

The LGBTQI liberation movement was born out of police brutality and harassment of gay, lesbian, bisexual, homeless youth and transgender people of color in San Francisco, New York City and around the country that led to uprisings against systemic marginalization.

Not only does Pride Month invite us to look back at our struggles and victories; it is also a time when, as a society, we turn our attention to the many ways LGBTQI people continue to be attacked and our rights diminished, through the proposal of anti-transgender legislation, so-called “religious freedom” bills, and the chipping away of adoption rights and access to health care.

While on June 15 we celebrated a major success with the Supreme Court decision protecting LGBT people from workplace discrimination (on the fourth anniversary of the deadly Pulse nightclub shooting), the Trump administration days before announced the elimination of protections in health care for transgender patients. Pride Month reminds us that the struggle for our liberation is not over.

As Jewish organizational leaders, we know that June is also a time when those who are coming out look around to see which institutions might know how to support them. Due to Covid-19, this year millions of people will be without this important annual Pride celebration to mark our individual and communal struggle toward liberation and empowerment. In Jewish communities, we can make sure this moment doesn’t pass by unnoticed.

One way we can bring LGBTQI voices to the fore is by hosting a Pride Shabbat or other virtual events this month or into the summer. Since the 1970s, congregations serving majority LGBTQI communities have been celebrating queer, Jewish life and creating liturgy and lifecycle ceremonies that make sacred the everyday lives of LGBTQI people.

In part due to these communities’ groundbreaking efforts, nowadays many mainstream Jewish communities welcome — or even celebrate — LGBTQI people in their midst, and June has become a time to highlight these voices and experiences.

Most of the early synagogues that were rooted in the LGBTQI community are still thriving and innovating, attracting LGBTQI people and others who discover in them a synergy with their values.

At Congregation Sha’ar Zahav in San Francisco, a Jewish community rooted in Jewish LGBTQI history, one way we harnessed our creative energy was to produce our own siddur (prayerbook). Members authored liturgy that speaks directly to the experiences of our community — prayers for transgender transitioning, marriage equality, creating a family, being single, healing from trauma, remembrances for difficult relationships, questioning sexuality and coming out.

We honor the groundbreakers who came before us in “For Queer Elders” and our “Queer Mi Shebeirach.” Especially relevant in this time of Covid is a blessing for caregivers and those caring for ailing parents. And as we mourn the deaths of victims of police brutality, our “Communal Prayer of Remembrance” before the Mourner’s Kaddish calls on God to remember those who are “struck down in our cities, in our own time” and those murdered because of their sexual or gender identity.

Like our sibling LGBTQI-majority Jewish communities, we call Pride Shabbat a chag, elevating it alongside our most important religious holy days. A special section of our siddur lists liturgy for Pride Shabbat and Transgender Celebration Shabbat, and throughout the siddur, commentary on traditional prayers highlights Jewish liturgy through an LGBTQI lens. Many prayers are offered with options of gender expansive language. Since synagogue services are now virtual, our siddur is available so communities can share our liturgy on screen.

Other great sources of Pride liturgy written by Jewish LGBTQI communities include “With All Your Heart” from Congregation Beit Simchat Torah in New York, “Shavat va-Yinafash” from Bet Mishpacha in Washington, D.C., Rabbi Denise Eger’s new compilation, “Where Pride Dwells: A Celebration of LGBTQ Jewish Life and Ritual” from CCAR Press this year, Keshet’s online resource pages, and Noam Sienna’s “A Rainbow Thread: An Anthology of Queer Jewish Texts from the First Century to 1969” with a foreword by Judith Plaskow.

In many locales, inviting a Jewish LGBTQI identified speaker during June may not feel possible. But with the tremendous liturgical resources our communities have produced in recent years, our voices can still be present at these vital celebrations. Don’t let the 50th anniversary of Pride pass your community by.

This piece originally appeared at eJewishPhilanthropy.com, and is reprinted with permission. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of J.

In 2019, Italian film scholar Margherita Ghetti joined the S.F.-based Jewish Film Institute — the entity that puts on the annual San Francisco Jewish Film Festival — as its programmer for younger audiences. One of her goals was to spark conversations about love and relationships.

Little did she know that a global pandemic would completely up the ante for young people, or anyone, looking to “meet” someone.

In her second JFI Next Wave screening, Ghetti has scheduled a 26-minute made-for-TV comedy that follows a newly out lesbian as she negotiates dating and work.

The pilot of “Lady Liberty” was scheduled long ago for Pride Month, but now the screening will take place on Zoom — as will a post-screening discussion likely to veer toward the challenges of love in the time of coronavirus.

Ghetti says dating and building relationships are “a deep concern” right now among young people in a world of social distancing.

“Everyone is talking about it,” says Ghetti, 35. “It’s a real thing.”

“Lady Liberty,” however, should offer some comic relief when it is presented on June 25.

Created and written as a TV pilot by N.Y.-based comic actor Julia Lindon, the script draws on Lindon’s experiences as a production assistant on “Saturday Night Live” and as a personal assistant to former “SNL” actor Jason Sudeikis (who has a role in the pilot).

Lindon also draws on some of her other experiences: co-hosting the podcast “Happy Campers,” her role on the short-lived Comedy Central series “Detroiters” and being part of the production team on “The Daily Show with Jon Stewart.”

In “Lady Liberty,” Lindon, a native of Rye, New York, who is in her late 20s, plays an aspiring comedian in the Big Apple seeking to forge her societal “labels” of nice Jewish girl, entertainment professional and queer woman into an authentic identity.

“‘Lady Liberty’ is very relatable,” Ghetti says. “It’s funny and light, but goes deeply into questions of what it means to navigate your identity, both sexual and cultural.”

While the formula isn’t exactly groundbreaking, Ghetti says, “What’s new and special to me is that this [episode] is very tender and heartfelt, in a way that passes through the screen to the viewer, showing the blossoming of this new period of her life. It captures a sense of urgency that I think is very relevant. It is also very well done cinematically; it is good television.”

The screening on Zoom originally was scheduled for June 4, but JFI postponed it in response to the nationwide upheaval over race relations and community policing. Now it falls two days short of Pride weekend on June 27-28.

“There will be no parade this year,” Ghetti says. “All the events are virtual.”

“Lady Liberty” premiered 13 months ago at the Tribeca Film Festival in New York, but June 25 will mark its first online screening and is being billed as its “public premiere.”

Along with JFI, it is sponsored by a number of entities, including Frameline (presenter of the S.F. International LGBTQ Film Festival) and Sketchfest (an annual comedy festival). It’s also part of the online series “JFI Cinegogue Sessions,” all curated, themed presentations of Jewish films, shorts and other features.

People will have access to “Lady Liberty” about three days prior to the event, or they can watch it, along with others, when it livestreams June 25 on Zoom and the JFI Facebook page. The episode will start at 5:30 p.m. and will be followed at 6:15 p.m. by a Q&A with Lindon and director Taylor Lee Nagel, a comedic monologue and an open discussion (with a cocktail in hand, if desired). The event is free. For more details, visit jfi.org/ladyliberty.

A progressive, Jewish member of the San Mateo City Council says she felt targeted and harassed after a rock was thrown through a bedroom window of her house last week while she and her family were inside.

Amourence Lee, whose father is of Chinese-Hawaiian heritage, is the first Asian American woman to serve on the city council.

Her mother, Litty Medalia, is the Jewish daughter of a former civil rights leader who supported school integration in Atlanta, and was subjected to harassment and discrimination as a result, Lee told J.

Medalia now works for Jewish Vocational Services in Boston.

The incident, which occurred just before noon on June 2, followed a string of vandalism in San Mateo targeting the Asian American community in recent months during the coronavirus pandemic.

Video footage captured by a neighborhood security camera and published by a Bay Area TV station shows a man who is walking on the sidewalk pause to hurl a rock toward Lee’s house, followed by a crashing sound.

In an emotional Facebook video recorded outside her home after the incident, Lee said she was “shaking with fear” and said she was the victim of a hate crime. “This is my home. I belong here. You will not take away my sense of belonging,” she said in a second video.

Lee is an outspoken supporter of Black Lives Matter, and has been at the forefront of recent protests against police brutality. A social justice advocate, the day before the incident she helped raise a Pride flag at San Mateo City Hall for the first time in the city’s history.

Lee said she was inside the house with her two children and husband when the glass shattered. The rock was sent through a bedroom window displaying an American flag emblazoned with the words “Dignity, Liberty, Justice for All.”

“The first thing we were trying to figure out is: Is this retribution for some of her work on the city council?” husband Rich Lin said during the interview.

In April and May, a rash of anti-Asian signs and slogans appeared in San Mateo, including graffiti with hateful messages like “F** China,” “Chinese Disease” and “Thanks China.” Police said they were still investigating those incidents.

According to the Anti-Defamation League, reports of anti-Asian assaults and hate crimes have spiked along with anti-Semitic and xenophobic conspiracy theories in response to the coronavirus pandemic.

In an essay about her identity, Lee wrote that she did not have a bat mitzvah nor grow up with Jewish practice, but said she is “exactly 50 percent Ashkenazi” according to her genome and acknowledged that both she and her children are “100 percent” Jewish by Jewish law.

She had an awakening in her late thirties after a visit to swim at a JCC, when her son asked her about their heritage. She was stumped when he asked “How did the first person know they were Jewish?”

“So I threw myself into reading Jewish books and met with three different rabbis to start my Jewish education,” she wrote. “I’m 38 years old and this is just the beginning of my story about being Jewish.”

A spokesperson for the San Mateo Police Department told J. on June 8 that police were still searching for a suspect. They asked members of the public to come forward with any information they might have.

The incident was classified as felony vandalism, according to public information officer Michael Haobsh. “We still need additional information to classify it as a hate crime. However we’re looking into it,” he said.

“We take instances of hate seriously in the city of San Mateo,” he said.

In preparing to become the next board chair of the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, Arthur Slepian says he has been doing some “unlearning.”

That’s because he now realizes the post he assumes July 1 will be nothing like what he signed up for back in January.

“When I accepted the role, we had no idea there was a pandemic coming,” Slepian said, “and in about 10 seconds we went from a community mostly doing OK to a community in crisis. And we probably didn’t know until last week that racial justice would be front and center for our community.”

This may be a time of multiple crises, but that should not overshadow the historic nature of Slepian’s appointment. He is the first openly LGBTQ president in the history of the S.F.-based Federation.

As the region celebrates Pride Month in June, Slepian’s appointment is, well, a source of pride.

“There’s been a lot of discussion about me being the first openly LGBT president of the board,” he said. “I don’t want to downplay that, because I see that has been a source of great pride in the Bay Area and around the country. But the deeper significance about my being chosen is the experience and perspective I bring because I’m a gay Jew. I’ve been here 40 years, and I’ve seen a lot of progress.”

Much of that progress has been driven by Slepian himself.

The native of Bensonhurst, New York, has been active in the LGBTQ movement for decades, starting with leadership roles at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, a mostly LGBTQ synagogue in San Francisco (he is today a synagogue vice president). He was instrumental in the work of the Federation’s LGBT Alliance, the first such task force of any Jewish Federation in the country. And in 2010 he launched A Wider Bridge, a groundbreaking nonprofit that linked the gay communities of the United States and Israel, for which he served as executive director until 2017.

All that experience should make his transition into his two-year term as board chair a smooth one.

“Arthur is ideally positioned to lead our board at this unprecedented time of challenge and opportunity for our community,” said Danny Grossman, the fifth-year CEO of Federation. “He has repeatedly demonstrated his ability to navigate complicated terrain, not least in founding A Wider Bridge, which is expanding LGBTQ inclusion in and engagement with Israel.”

As for leadership style, Slepian indeed has developed one, but, as he says, “It’ll give away that I’m gay because it’s based on ‘The Wizard of Oz.’ Brains, heart and courage. That’s what I look for in leaders, and it’s the standard I hope to live up to.”

In terms of the Federation’s goals for the Bay Area Jewish community, Slepian said job one is to “expand the tent.”

He acknowledged a measure of diversity among the Federation board members in terms of gender, geography and sexual orientation, but he does point out one glaring problem: It’s all-white.

“We need Jews of color as leaders among all boards and staff,” he said. “I am old enough to remember what it felt like to be on the outside of this community looking in, and wondering if I would ever belong. There are still members who are not sure they belong. There are trans Jews, Jews of color, people who still feel they are on the outside looking in. We can’t somehow have these conversations and make decisions without those voices at the table. It was important a month ago, but it is critical today.”

And, oh yeah, that pandemic? It’s still on, and so is the economic hardship it has caused. Slepian applauded the Federation’s pledge of generating $15 million in total relief funding, stemming from donor-advised funds, an emergency fundraising effort and other sources, but he knows this work will go on for a long time.

“I’m really proud of what we’ve done so far in addressing both humanitarian and organizational needs,” he said. “It feels like we’re still at the beginning. This is not like a wildfire that left town and we can assess the damage. We don’t know how long the health emergency will last, the full long-term economic impact, or how deep the recession will be. This is what Federations are built for.”

When he’s not presiding over board meetings, Slepian will be enjoying time at his Glen Park home with his husband and partner of more than 20 years, Gerry Llamado, along with their mini bernedoodle Dexter.

But the work he has devoted his life to is never far from his thoughts.

“When I think about building [the community], this is our moment,” Slepian said. “It goes well beyond raising funds. It’s about convening the best and brightest thought leaders in the community, making decisions with best possible data, and thinking of new ways of making Jewish life more accessible and affordable.”

Books coverage is supported by a generous grant from The Milton and Sophie Meyer Fund.

Using fake IDs and aliases, Emily L. Quint Freeman spent 20 years as a fugitive.

In 1969, the 22-year-old anti-war activist and her cohorts broke into a Chicago Selective Service office, raided files and carted out some 40,000 records of draft-eligible men, burning the documents in a parking lot. Police quickly arrived, arrested the group and threw them into jail.

As a ringleader, Freeman — whose given name was Linda Quint — faced a harsh, 10-year sentence in federal court. Instead of showing up for sentencing, she fled.

Now 73 and a resident of Napa, Quint (who later lived as Emily Freeman in San Francisco) has written the memoir “Failure to Appear: Resistance, Identity and Loss.” It takes readers through her transformation from suburban-raised, UC Berkeley graduate to woman on the run. Estranged from family, she lived on the lam, reinventing herself several times and shunning intimacy until she could bear it no longer.

With support from her therapist and a rabbi, Freeman decided to lift the huge burden she carried, and surrendered to authorities in 1989.

Taking into account Freeman’s honest explanation of her moral opposition to the Vietnam War and her years as a productive citizen who’d built a successful career as an insurance company executive in Bakersfield, the judge sentenced her to the 10 days she’d served in the Cook County jail in Illinois and three years probation. She was fined $20,000.

To this day, she does not regret her crime.

“I haven’t turned into a conservative old lady,” she said in an interview. “My activism is based on deep, embedded things … part of my childhood and part of my Jewish heritage.”

Growing up, she attended what she called an “ultra-Reform congregation” in Los Angeles. “My family sent me off on Saturdays to become a Jew,” Freeman said dryly. “But I did absorb a lot. I think the ethics of Judaism aligns with me very well. I feel Jewish. It’s something that is part of my life: the idea of tikkun olam, repairing the world.”

Now a member of Kehilla Community Synagogue in Piedmont, “I would be missing something in my life,” she mused, “if I left [Judaism] behind.”

After graduating from college in 1967 and being disowned by her father and rejected by her sister and mother after coming out as a lesbian, Freeman moved to Chicago and worked as a draft counselor with the American Friends Service Committee. As she became more involved in the anti-war movement, she and a group of like-minded activists hatched the break-in plan.

“I have no regrets about the actions I took,” Freeman said of the break-in and raid on Chicago’s South Side. “My hope is that they never reconstructed any of those records — ledgers, cards, 1-A files — of those 40,000 mostly black men, and that they never went to Vietnam.

“I think about some guy in the South Side of Chicago who is a grandfather, who wouldn’t have been otherwise.”

As for whether she regrets her decision to go underground, Freeman has this to say:

“Becoming a fugitive was a huge fork in the road, something I couldn’t continue after 19 years. It was a devastating turn of affairs. It’s had lasting effects. … I can’t go back to my younger self and ask, ‘Why did you flee?’”

As a fugitive, Freeman could never reveal her secrets or build close relationships. And it was only after deciding to turn herself in that she reached out to her mother and father (who’d since divorced) and sister.

Though family members attended her sentencing trial in the summer of 1989, the damage had largely been done. “My father never accepted me as being a lesbian,” she said, “so we remained pretty distant.” And the tattered relationship with her sister “never healed.”

She did make repairs with her mother, whom she described as “a complex person.”

Now retired, Freeman pursues her passions: playing classical piano, gardening and writing articles on immigration, racial justice and other causes important to her.

Writing “Failure to Appear” was “a three-year journey,” she said. “I was spurred to action when the current regime took power in Washington. I just felt it was important to speak up … and to make sure that people know that there was a whole generation that struggled [for change] on many fronts.”

Napa Bookmine Pride Month virtual author event with Emily L. Quint Freeman, 5 p.m. Saturday, June 20. RSVP for Zoom details.

The dimly-lit nightclub’s anxious patrons snap to attention when the “Fiddler on the Roof” song “Tradition” wails through the speaker.

Onto the small stage strides a busty Mizrahi woman, her lips defined by serious black lipstick and hair concealed by a luminescent headscarf. She is dressed as a parody version of a Hasidic man, wearing a long black coat over her frock and a top hat perched atop her kerchief-covered hair.

She clasps her hands, furrows her eyebrows, purses her lips and exclaims, for anyone still confused about what she’s performing, “Kanar al hagag!” — the movie’s title in Hebrew.

Her outsized presence easily overwhelms the stage and small club as she enthusiastically staggers around, waving her fists at the sky and dancing as only a Hasid knows how. During the furious performance, she tears off her garments to reveal an entirely new costume a full six times, depicting one stereotypical religious Jew — some male and some female — after another.

But the performer is in reality neither a woman nor a Hasid, but the 20-year-old genderqueer drag queen, combat soldier and political activist Mama de la Smallah, who switches between pronouns as easily as costumes. His journey to the stage was filled with twists and turns – and she’s only just getting started.

Drag has been around for centuries, but the art form is undeniably having a moment. Today, the 11 seasons (and counting) of “RuPaul’s Drag Race” can be streamed in high-definition on Netflix. Winning queens might not yet be household names, but they regularly secure lucrative high-fashion modeling contracts, charge thousands of dollars per performance and amass millions of followers on social media.

But for most of queer history – and in most parts of the world – a man daring to dress and perform as a woman is still a radical act. And while Israel certainly treats its LGBTQ citizens much better than most of their neighboring countries do, queer Israelis still have limited marriage, adoption and surrogacy rights.

This fight for equal rights, and the struggle to be taken seriously, is how Mama was born.

At the 2019 Tel Aviv Gay Pride Parade, Mama de La Smallah seems to have made it. She shared a float with the American TV star Neil Patrick Harris, wearing a red chiffon number adorned with dozens of gilded butterflies, which she designed and sewed herself. Hundreds of thousands of ecstatic sweat-drenched Israelis and tourists marched along with her, sweltering in the Mediterranean sun.

But Ellen Best, Mama’s name when not in drag, would be the first to tell you that the glitz and glamour are far from the point. In fact, Mama De La Smallah debuted not in a parade sponsored by the Israeli government, but as an act of protest against its treatment of its LGBTQ citizens.

“I’m a protest queen,” Best said proudly. In July 2018, he took his drag to the streets in a big, street-closing protest with 100,000 people in Tel Aviv’s Rabin Square over the issue of LGBTQ surrogacy, which is severely restricted in Israel.

Though he’d been experimenting with drag on and off since 10th grade, this was the first time Mama De La Smallah made a public appearance.

“The fun is the fun, but the job is to connect other people. Drag is about connecting the community,” he said in June over tapas at a trendy South Tel Aviv restaurant.

When not in drag, Best carries himself with a quiet confidence. He has thick tattoos on both thighs and, though he doesn’t drink much alcohol, chain-smokes Winstons, puffing big clouds of smoke even when indoors. If you try to rush through a crosswalk when the light is red, he may admonish you for not using the time to observe the world around you, and point out the architectural layers of the city in the same breath.

Best is a child of the periphery. He was born in Beer Sheva in 1998 and grew up in Dimona, a town best known for its “secret” nuclear reactor and home to Hebrew Israelites, Russian Jews and a religious Mizrahi community. He cites these colorful and disparate influences, along with his grandmother, as inspiration for the character of Mama.

Best has one older sister, two younger half brothers, an Indian Jewish father and a mother whose parents are haredi supporters of the Mizrahi ultra-Orthodox party Shas. His parents divorced when he was one, and he grew up “so poor that I didn’t realize that I didn’t have money.” In seventh grade, Best transitioned from religious to secular public school, where he attended dance classes instead of soccer because he was “a fat kid and I didn’t like to run.”

He was also bullied because of his long eyelashes. His classmates taunted him, saying he wore mascara, asserting this as undeniable proof that he was gay.

“In 8th grade, I thought, maybe I’m gay,” Best tells me, but he says he didn’t really know because didn’t even fully comprehend what that meant. He didn’t have a computer in the house, and his haredi grandparents weren’t exactly hosting candid discussions on human sexuality.

In 2014, at age 14, he first attended the Tel Aviv Pride Parade with some friends from IGY, an organization for LGBTQ Israeli youth – and came out to his mother a week later.

She didn’t quite know how to respond at the time, Best tells me. But about 6 months later, she had a coming out of her own: She told Best that she was an asexual lesbian, which means that she is not sexually attracted to anyone but is romantically attracted to other women. Best, in hindsight, speculates that this could have been because “they were very poor; my mom wasn’t thinking about relationships.”

Tragically, one year after Best came out to his mother, she got cancer.

When he turned 18, Best enlisted in the Israeli Defense Forces. Although he grew up living with haredi grandparents — it’s uncommon for haredi Jews to serve in the military, and when they do they are often ostracized by their communities — Best always knew that he wanted to serve. After high school, he and a friend enlisted in a program that involved service in Karkal, a light infantry combat unit that serves on Israel’s border with Egypt.

His mother died during his national service.

In many respects, his haredi grandparents have been remarkably tolerant of his lifestyle. His grandfather banned his own sister from the house when she spoke approvingly about conversion therapy at the Shabbat table.

“My grandparents don’t care that I’m gay,” he tells me, “they care that I’m not keeping Shabbat.”

His grandmother, he says, also “understands the passion” for why he does what he does, “but not the cause.” Best says he has a lot of other queer people in his family, including a trans uncle, but he was the first one to say, “hello, this is me, deal with it.”

While he can’t discuss his army service on the record, once he was finished with his time in Karkal, Best moved to Tel Aviv and got serious about drag. In Israel, like in the United States, serious drag performers often join houses, makeshift families of performers who look out for one another, sometimes living together and even taking a shared household name. Best is a member of WERK, a line of the house of Por De Bra, run by drag mother Galina Por De Bra (Gil Naveh).

While Best’s activism primarily focuses on LGBTQ issues, his drag persona highlights another pervasive tension in Israeli society. Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, commonly referred to as Mizrahi Jews, have long faced discrimination in Israel. While their descendants comprise a majority of the country’s Jewish citizens, their culture and language – much like queer culture and vernacular – are either appropriated or treated as a joke.

That’s one of the many reasons Mama’s performances are so powerful: With her voluminous headpieces, Middle East-inspired clothing and exaggerated curves, she is parodying not only Mizrahi women, but Mizrahi women as seen through the judgmental Ashkenazi gaze. By leaning into the absurdity of that view, she’s refracting some of that prejudice back into the eyes of those who have perpetuated it.

“I am speaking in Hebrew, thinking in English and paid in Mizrahi,” Best tells me, paraphrasing the Mizrahi poet Adi Keissar’s “I am the Mizrahi,” a scathing poem about her experience of racism in Israel.

Mama is unquestionably a rising star in the Tel Aviv drag scene. But his day-to-day reality is far from a cakewalk. He performs as Mama two to three times a week in the busy season, but sometimes only a few times a month.

“I’m poor but I’m happy,” he said.

Although the designer Liron Mar Mar, who he met through his drag house, has taken him under her wing, drag is still an expensive art form, and performers are typically responsible for paying for all that goes into their hair, makeup, costumes and performance. At this point, “the drag pays for the drag,” Best tells me.

Five years from now, Best plans on making more of Mama’s own performance clothes, starting a fashion line, making a name for herself outside of Israel and being even more political in drag.

Wherever Mama appears, whether crooning in a dusky club, haggling in the Jerusalem shuk at high noon or in the heart of the raucous chaos of the Pride Parade, one can’t help but feel that those around her are teetering ever closer – but not quite close enough – to the edge of being ready to internalize the political, cultural and artistic messages she embodies.

Even in liberal Tel Aviv, there’s certainly a lot of progress, both political and artistic, for Mama to make.

For the members of the Jewish Pride Fund, this is the best time of the year. Time to donate nearly $30,000 to five handpicked organizations that aid Jewish LGBTQ communities locally, nationally and in Israel.

Now in its second year, the Pride Fund is made up of 15 Bay Area Jews, all gay men (though they are recruiting from lesbian, trans and other communities), and all keen on using philanthropy as a tool to help their community.

“As a gay man and as a Jewish man, these are two of the most significant aspects of my identity,” said David Rak, chair of the Pride Fund. “To come together with like-minded individuals is very fulfilling.”

Helping with the effort is Danielle Meshorer, manager of venture philanthropy and giving circles at the S.F.-based Jewish Community Federation, who has served as a kind of philanthropy sherpa for the group. A giving circle is a group of individuals brought together by a common cause who pledge to donate their own philanthropic dollars.

This year, the Pride Fund members selected five organizations as grantees: Ma’avarim, which provides aid to trans men and women in Israel; Beit Dror, an Israeli shelter for at-risk LGBTQ youth; the local chapter of Keshet, a national Jewish LGBTQ nonprofit; Nice Jewish Boys, an S.F. social network for gay, bisexual and trans Jewish men sponsored by Congregation Sha’ar Zahav; and Eshel, which serves LGBTQ youth among the Orthodox.

All received grants ranging from $5,000 to $6,000. Pride Fund members each contributed no less than $1,800 of their own money (some also secured matching grants through their employers to add to the total).

They are pleased to work with the Federation, which has a long history of support for the LGBTQ community, beginning in 1996 with the formation of the Gay and Lesbian Task Force. A year later the Federation approved a proposal calling for LGBT inclusion in all Federation planning and activities. In 2001, the Federation formed the LGBT Alliance, the first such entity of any Jewish federation in the country.

“Back in the 1990s, we were one of the first federations to have an LGBT alliance as part of the structure of organization,” said Pride Fund member Arthur Slepian, who also sits on the Federation board. “We had LGBT people at the table, ensuring Federation policy was non-discriminatory. One thing [the Jewish Pride Fund] does is empower LGBT Jews to be the decision-makers in how Federation money is being allocated.”

Rak and Slepian credit Meshorer for helping them professionalize their giving circle.

“The goal of the Jewish Pride Fund and any giving circle the Federation runs is threefold,” Meshorer said. “To get assets into the community, to educate the philanthropists and to build community. Those are goals of the Federation, so it’s really strategically aligned.”

She also helped the membership build community from within. The group met several times a year to discuss grantees, celebrate Shabbat together and do volunteer work in the community.

Despite the progress the LGBTQ community here and abroad has experienced — from legal same-sex marriage to the first openly gay man, Pete Buttigieg, running for president in a major party primary — recent years have brought setbacks.

President Donald Trump recently banned trans men and women from the military. Legislatures in some states have sought to bar gay couples from adoption. Murders of trans men and women have increased.

The bad news serves as backdrop for Pride Fund members, who see their work as more critical now.

“More than ever we need to come together as a community and use our dollars as part of our voice,” Rak said. “It’s important to ensure that we, as members of this particular community, are speaking as loudly as we can, moving in the direction we think is right. It may not be billions we give, but in many ways, we can move the needle.”

A lesbian advocacy organization in Washington, D.C., drew wide criticism last week for banning Pride flags with Jewish stars from its signature march.

Organizers of the DC Dyke March said the rainbow flags featuring a Star of David in the middle too closely resemble the Israeli flag and thus were not allowed, along with other flags representing “nations that have specific oppressive tendencies.”

It was the second Dyke March organization to issue such a ban. In 2017, three women carrying Jewish Pride flags were asked to leave a Dyke March in Chicago and told the event was “anti-Zionist” and “pro-Palestinian.”

Despite the two high-profile incidents, organizers of five Dyke Marches — in New York, Boston, Seattle, Portland and Buffalo — say that they do not have bans on Jewish Pride flags.

“Seeing what happened in D.C., that folks are not feeling welcome, it’s just not how we want our march to feel,” said Nate Shalev, a Jewish organizer of the New York City march, which is scheduled for June 29.

New York organizers are “not interested in creating a binary of Palestinian or Zionist,” added Alex Tereshonkova, another Jewish organizer of the New York march.

Despite the ban in D.C., marchers there carrying Jewish Pride flags were able to join the rally in the end, though a video from the march showed that a marshal initially demanded they remove the flag.

Organizers of the San Francisco Dyke March did not respond to requests for comment.

But Rabbi Mychal Copeland of Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, San Francisco’s historically LGBTQ synagogue, said she doesn’t anticipate a problem. “We don’t know of any issue here in S.F.,” she said. “We aren’t anticipating that what is happening elsewhere will be replicated here.”

Some members of Sha’ar Zahav will participate in the march, Copeland said. Other members of the synagogue will be handing out water bottles to marchers and cheering them on. The S.F. Dyke March is scheduled for June 29.

The controversy surrounding the Chicago and DC Dyke Marches, which are held and organized separately from the Gay Pride Parades and positioned as more politically radical, speaks to a larger conversation about anti-Semitism in progressive spaces. As anti-Zionism and support for the boycott Israel movement have grown on the far left, liberal Zionists say they feel less and less welcome in such spaces, and often feel singled out as Jews.

The most prominent example is the Women’s March, which initially received wide support from Jews on the left but whose national organizers were later accused of anti-Semitism. The accusations stemmed from organizer Tamika Mallory’s failure to disavow her relationship with Louis Farrakhan, the Nation of Islam leader who has repeatedly made anti-Semitic and homophobic comments.

Another organizer, Palestinian-American activist Linda Sarsour, also drew fire for describing ways in which she felt Zionism and feminism are not compatible. The Jewish online magazine Tablet reported that early Jewish organizers of the Women’s March were made to feel unwelcome and pushed out.

There is no central or national organization representing the Dyke March, and rallies around the country are planned independently and on different dates. Though the march, which first took place in Washington, D.C., in 1993, originates in the lesbian community, many rallies welcome all who identify with the word “dyke,” including bisexual, queer and transgender women, as well as gender nonconforming people.

The Portland Dyke March is “completely against the banning of the Israeli flag,” head organizer Belinda Carroll said. The Oregon event is planned for Saturday.

There is no ban on flags at the Buffalo Dyke + March (the plus sign is intentional to welcome people with a range of identities), although the leadership has yet to discuss or make any policies on the issue, said organizer Karin Lowenthal, who is Jewish. The Buffalo march took place earlier this month.

But Lowenthal worries that her group could face outside pressure to ban Jewish Pride flags.

“I fear that we could end up with this kind of unnuanced, not thoughtful conflict here because of people’s lack of education and tendency to simplify these issues,” she said. “I am really concerned that we could end up with the same sort of hostilities.”

Carroll said she and other Portland Dyke March organizers had initially thought the 2017 incident in Chicago was “a one-off.”

“Now it ends up that it’s kind of a trend,” she said. “We want it to not be a trend, and we want everybody to be able to fly the flag that’s closest to their faith and their nationality.”

Frameline, the long-running LGBTQ film festival that’s an annual highlight of Pride month, will include two films with a Jewish focus during its upcoming 11-day run.

The 43^rd edition of the festival opens Thursday, June 20 at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco and will extend to theaters in Berkeley, Oakland and elsewhere in San Francisco.

“Circus of Books,” a new 92-minute documentary by Rachel Mason about her parents, longtime proprietors of a bookstore that sold gay pornography in West Hollywood, will screen at 4 p.m Friday, June 21 at the Castro.

Karen and Barry Mason, a modest Jewish couple, started out as distributors of Hustler magazine to support their growing family. In the early 1980s, after they bought one of the bookstores on their route, Book Circus, they tweaked the name and began selling gay and straight nudie magazines, and eventually pornographic films and sex toys, in addition to mainstream newspapers and books. The store evolved into a haven for gay men in an era when staying in the closet was largely the rule of the day.

“The Santa Monica Boulevard store gained legendary status in Southern California’s LGBTQ community as a place where people could peruse gay erotica or meet other gay people, hanging out in a place free from homophobia,” the Los Angeles Times wrote earlier this year in an article about the Masons, now Jewish grandparents, closing their doors after 37 years.

Though the Masons faced prison time for obscenity during the Reagan era, they eventually became the largest distributors of hardcore gay films in the country, all while raising three children within a conservative home environment. Mason’s documentary explores the layers of a traditional family that was really “anything but.”

Rachel Mason is listed as an “expected guest” at the screening.

The second Jewish-focused film, “Before You Know It,” is director Hannah Pearl Utt’s debut feature film. The 98-minute comedy-drama tells the story of the eccentric Gurner family, which lives in an apartment above a community theater in New York City. The film was written by Utt and Jen Tullock, who play sisters Rachel and Jackie, respectively.

Rachel is a lesbian who serves as the theater company’s stage manager and also struggles to manage the complicated lives of her playwright father, younger sister and a niece. A big plot point is the discovery that Rachel and Jackie’s mother, presumed dead since their childhood, is the star of a long-running soap opera. Tony Award-winning actress Judith Light (the divorced mom on ABC’s “Who’s the Boss” from 1984 to 1992) stars as the mother, and Emmy-award winning actor Mandy Patinkin (“Homeland”) is the father. Alec Baldwin plays a shoddy therapist.

One of the centerpiece films in this year’s Frameline, “Before You Know It” will be screened at 6:30 p.m. Monday, June 24, with Tullock and Utt listed as “expected guests.” The film also will play at the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, July 18 through Aug. 4.

Information about Frameline, which includes 22 world premieres among its 174 films from 38 countries, is available at frameline.org/festival.

Like many American children, I first read Anne Frank’s diary in school. And like many American children, I was unaware that I read the first, censored edition of the famous work.

There is actually a complete and unabridged second edition. That edition has been out for 20 years, but English-speaking readers do not often encounter it. All of this is to say, upon finally reading the uncensored version, I really wasn’t prepared to discover Anne Frank wrote quite clearly about her attraction to boys — and girls.

My first response to this discovery was anger. Anne Frank was bisexual? There was a bisexual person in a work I unwittingly read as a child? When I was just discovering I liked both girls and boys, there was an actual, real life person who could have told me those feelings were natural?

That anger was quickly followed by sadness. Representation matters, and to discover I was denied that representation when I needed it most was all too painful.

Once that sadness faded, it was back to anger, this time as a Jewish convert. When I first became interested in Judaism as a teenager, I was also discovering that I was not quite cisgender or heterosexual. I did not know any other queer Jewish people. As much as I considered taking classes and converting to Judaism, it did not feel appropriate for me as a queer person. It took me many years to realize how wrong I was — that Judaism would accept me as the person I am. But what if I had known all those years ago that queer Jews exist, that they have always existed? What impact would that have had on my life?

We never realize the impact of representation until we live it. We might logically understand that yes, obviously, representation is a Good Thing, but that goosebump-inducing thrill is something we cannot truly comprehend until we experience it ourselves. For some people, representation may have no impact at all, or a small impact in an otherwise normal life. For a person with as few role models as I had, representation is everything.

We never realize the impact of representation until we live it.

I have craved representation for each facet of my identity in my life. It is impossible to not keenly feel those lost possibilities when discovering Anne Frank’s words for herself:

“I remember that once when I slept with a girl friend I had a strong desire to kiss her, and that I did do so … I go into ecstasies every time I see the naked figure of a woman, such as Venus, for example … If only I had a girl friend!”

The strength of those words is so absolute. Anne knew what she wanted and had no shame in writing it. That strength and certainty would have meant the world to me.

But once the initial shock and sadness wore off, I was left with an altogether different sensation: hesitancy. Queer individuals often react passionately to discovering that historical figures were also queer. Many of those individuals would have been out if society allowed it at the time.

Some of those individuals, though, may not have come out. Some may have considered it an incredible breach of privacy to discuss their sexualities and gender identities out in public. And so I found myself wondering what matters more to us as a community, the feeling of representation or respecting the privacy of a deceased person. Whose needs matter here?

Anne Frank was quite clear in her diary about wanting to become an author one day, but that is not consent to having her diary published. We have no idea how she would have felt to have her emotions and experiences published without her consent. There is no doubt her diary has had a tremendously positive cultural impact, but we certainly are not entitled to that impact. Anne’s words are hers alone, and in her death we cannot speak for her. All we can do is make decisions and understand there are no easy answers.

If the publication of Anne Frank’s diary is already problematic, how much more so are her personal musings on her sexuality? At times it feels like an incredible breach of privacy to take a child’s words on her identity and use them as inspiration for myself. This girl was murdered for who she was. Her identity was all she had, and it was taken from her. I have no right to take it again.

Ultimately, being queer means being true to oneself, and Anne was never given a chance to do that. Instead, her words form an incomplete impression of an identity that was never allowed a chance to grow. We should feel conflicted about that. Anne Frank’s legacy, like all historical figures, is messy, and there are no easy answers to these conflicting emotions.

Maybe that messiness is what we should truly embrace as we honor what would have been her 90th birthday on June 12. She left us with inspiration, yes, but also more questions than answers. What a perfect legacy for an aspiring author, after all.

This story originally appeared on Alma and was distributed by JTA.

Pride Month in the Bay Area offers plenty of opportunities to celebrate the LGBTQI community and its history. Many synagogues host “Pride Shabbats,” but you can also join the Jewish community at other events to show your pride.

For example, kids and their parents can enjoy the “Family & Friends Pride Shabbat” outdoors in Dolores Park on what hopefully will be a beautiful, warm Saturday morning. High school students (including incoming freshmen) will be able to make new friends and dance the night away in a fun and safe environment at the “LGBTQ+ Teen Pride Prom” at the JCC of San Francisco. And for moviegoers, there’s a Frameline festival documentary about a middle-age, binary, Jewish husband and wife who for decades ran a small but somewhat famous gay pornography shop in West Hollywood.

Monday, June 17

“Somewhere Under the Rainbow”—Congregation Sha’ar Zahav hosts a panel about what it’s like to be LGBTQ in a religious community, with speakers from Buddhist, Catholic, Episcopal, Muslim and Jewish perspectives. At Manny’s, 3092 16th St., S.F. 7 p.m. Free; RSVP required. shaarzahav.org/pride2019

Thursday, June 20

Pride challah baking—Make colorful challahs with rainbow dough and share Shabbat rituals and pride stories. Hosted by Made 2 Gather. At 1031 Cotton St., Oakland. 5 p.m. Also Friday, June 28. eventbrite.com/e/pride-challah

“Call & Response: Curator Swap”—Progressive gallery talks at three Mission Street museums — including Contemporary Jewish Museum’s “Show Me As I Want to Be Seen” exhibit, which features several queer artists — in connection with Pride. 20 minutes at each site. Starts at Museum of the African Diaspora, 685 Mission St., S.F. 6-7:30 p.m. thecjm.org/programs/497

Friday, June 21

“Circus of Books”—Rachel Mason’s 2019 documentary about a Jewish couple (her parents!) running a gay sex shop in West Hollywood. Playing in the Frameline LGBT film festival. At Castro Theatre, 429 Castro St, S.F. 4 p.m. $13-$15. frameline.org

“Family & Friends Pride Shabbat”—A joyful and song-filled evening service for all ages includes dinner, with music by Isaac Zones. At Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 290 Dolores St., S.F. 6 p.m. Also Saturday, June 22, an outdoor service with music and storytelling. At Dolores Park. 10:30 a.m. Free; RSVP required. shaarzahav.org/pride2019

Saturday, June 22

“Intergenerational Pride Seder”—Modeled after a Passover seder. At Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 290 Dolores St., S.F. 6 p.m. $10-$15. shaarzahav.org/pride2019

Pride Comedy Night—Lisa Geduldig of Kung Pao Kosher Comedy hosts a lineup of LGBT comedians. At Kuumbwa Jazz Center, 320-2 Cedar St., Santa Cruz. 8 p.m. Also Sunday, June 23 at Freight & Salvage, 2020 Addison St., Berkeley. 7 p.m. $25-$30. koshercomedy.com/pride-comedy-night

“LGBTQ+ Teen Pride Prom”—Includes free food, giveaways, a drag performance and a DJ for dancing. Open to high-schoolers and incoming ninth-graders from all Bay Area high schools. At JCCSF, 3200 California St. 6:30 p.m. Free in advance; $5 at the door. jccsf.org/guide/pride

Sunday, June 23

“Fragments of the Brooklyn Talmud”—Local author Andrew Ramer discusses his book, which imagines the future of diaspora Jewry centered in the East Bay, where women and queer people dominate as leaders. At Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 290 Dolores St., S.F. 2 p.m. Free. shaarzahav.org/pride2019

Monday, June 24

“Before You Know It”—Writer-director Hannah Pearl Utt and co-writer Jen Tullock star in a 2019 comedy-drama about a Jewish family running a community theater in New York City, co-starring Judith Light, Alec Baldwin and Mandy Patinkin. Playing in the Frameline LGBT film festival. Utt and Tullock scheduled to appear. At Castro Theatre, 429 Castro St., S.F. 6:30 p.m. $20. frameline.org

Friday, June 28

“Pride Shabbat”—Tyler Gregory, executive director of S.F.-based A Wider Bridge, which builds support for Israel and LGBTQ Israelis, speaks about the importance of Israel’s LGBTQ community. At Congregation Emanu-El, 2 Lake St., S.F. 5:30 p.m. Free; RSVP required. awiderbridge.org/pride-shabbat-emanu-el

“Pride Shabbat, Cocktails & Trans March”—Cheer on participants in the 16th annual San Francisco Trans March, followed by cocktails/mocktails and a joyous service at 7:30 p.m. At Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 290 Dolores St. 6 p.m. Free; RSVP required. shaarzahav.org/pride2019

Saturday, June 29

S.F. Dyke March with Sha’ar Zahav—Cheer on participants in the 27th annual San Francisco Dyke March and hand out water to keep them going. At Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, 290 Dolores St., S.F. 4 p.m. Free. shaarzahav.org/pride2019

Sunday, June 30

San Francisco Pride Parade—Walk with the JCCSF and Sha’ar Zahav contingent, or ride in one of two VW buses if you aren’t able to participate otherwise. Meet at 9 a.m., place given with registration (by 3 p.m. June 27). jccsf.org/guide/pride

San Francisco Pride Parade—Walk with Reform synagogues under the banner of Union for Reform Judaism. Meet at 9 a.m., place TBA. betham.org/community/event

A handful of protesters carrying Jewish Pride flags, a rainbow-striped flag with a Star of David in the middle, were allowed into the DC Dyke March despite a ban on the flags.

The march, a leftist alternative to the main LGBTQ parade in Washington, D.C. the next day, said it was banning the flag because it looks too much like the flag of Israel. The march banned the flags of countries with “specific oppressive tendencies.” The flags of Israel and the United States were the only two mentioned specifically in the ban. There was no such ban on Palestinian flags.

Some would-be marchers carrying the Jewish Pride flag were blocked by Jewish marshals at an entrance point to the march. In video taken of the event, Jill Raney, a marshal also affiliated with the left-wing Jewish group IfNotNow, said they could enter if they removed the Star of David from the flag. Jewish stars were welcome in any other context.

“In order to have the Jewish Pride flag not be about Zionism, all you have to do is move the star,” Raney told a group of Jewish marchers holding the flags. “With respect, we are all Jewish dykes here and we just want to march in solidarity with Palestinian dykes, and if y’all want to march also, great.”

The group holding the flags included representatives of Zioness, a women’s group that demonstrates openly as pro-Israel activists in progressive spaces, A Wider Bridge, a pro-Israel LGBTQ group, and the local Jewish Community Relations Council.

“You are creating a binary in which the only way to be a dyke is to explicitly denounce the existence of the Jewish state, which is an important thing for most Jews, the vast majority of Jews in the world” said Amanda Berman, the founder of Zioness. “We support liberation for all dykes. You support the Palestinian flag. You support Palestinian nationalism.”

The marchers were eventually allowed to enter the march. The march aimed to focus on combating gentrification and displacement.

The march’s Facebook page was full of comments criticizing the decision to ban the Jewish Pride Flag, accusing the organizers of placing “an unwarranted burden of proof [on] Jewish dykes that they don’t approve of the actions of another country [in] which they do not vote,” and “discriminat[ing] against gay Jews while marching against discrimination.”