Jewish Queerness as Political and Spiritual Refusal

This paper will explore examples of queerness in contemporary American Jewish pro-Palestinian spaces to better understand the ways that queerness is being mobilized as a resistance to mechanisms of political violence and paradigms of national belonging. What are the possibilities borne of a refusal to align with the political role ascribed to Jewishness by, for instance, the Trump administration's privileging of campaigns to combat anti-semitism on college campuses? What is the role of queerness in religious and liturgical performances of this refusal? How is queerness sparking re-imaginations of Jewishness, Jewish life, and Jewish ritual in direct opposition to political violence and Zionism as an attempt to enclose and emplace Jewishness? This paper seeks to answer these questions through a reading of queer anti-Zionist Jewish communities through the lenses of queer theory, theories of space and place, and religious studies