Jewish Queerness as Political and Spiritual Refusal

In the 1960’s German-Jewish writer Elias Canetti theorized that the instinct to rid oneself of the “sting of the command,” which is to say the sting of a threat of violence inherent in power relationships, leads to the mimetic replication of the command (Crowds and Power, 1960). The mimetic impulse fuels the systems of power that “uplift some at the expense of queer others,” to quote the proposal for this panel. Many have written about the mimetic impulses of Zionism — the desire to replicate emergent European models of nationalism and paradigms of emplacement, the desire to replicate the lifestyle and privileges of whiteness, and the desire to embody European masculinity (e.g. Wolfe, Hochberg, Boyarin). The question that drives this paper is of how queerness is being used by certain Jewish communities to refuse and resist the impulses of mimesis that function to recruit Jewish identification into the projects of colonial violence. 

 The Jewish mainstream’s proximity to hegemonic power is currently rendered visible in the privileged attention to anti-semitism on college campuses amidst the dismantling of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) programing and interventions. While American Jewish institutions at the national level tend to keep lockstep in their support of legislative attempts to combat anti-Semitism, the Jewish community remains deeply divided regarding the exceptionalization of anti-semitism over and against other forms of religious and ethnic discrimination and violence. This is borne out in generational divides within the Jewish community over the hegemony of Zionism as well as controversy over the seemingly widespread adoption of the IHRA’s (International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance) 2016 definition of anti-semitism. The IHRA definition conflates anti-semitism, political critiques of Israel, and anti-Zionism, thus facilitating the weaponization of anti-Semitism against political speech and campus protest movements in the wake of genocidal anti-Palestinian violence in Gaza, the West Bank and internationally.  

By segregating anti-Jewish violence and raising it to a level of concern apart from other concerns of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” Jewishness is effectively reaffirmed as a privileged, or white, identity. Anti-Jewish violence is thus not seen as a threat to “diversity,” but a threat to white hegemony. In the move to elevate definitions like the IHRA’s as the legislative norm, Jewish whiteness and whiteness more broadly are then protected and maintained through the silencing of political dissent and legitimate critiques of Jewish nationalism by both Jews and non-Jews alike. Jewishness itself becomes a tool of violence and repression in the hands of largely Christian (sometimes explicitly Christian Zionist) legislators and Jewish institutions like AIPAC and the ADL. In the service of these political alignments there is a clear incentive to paint American Judaism, and Jewishness broadly, as a monolith.

There has, however, always been resistance to Zionism within American Jewish communities. Debates over Jewish anti-Zionism have been central to the organization of the Jewish secular left, although more recently resistance to Zionism has taken on a more intentionally religious and liturgical character. The NY Times Magazine emphasized this shift in a 2021 piece titled, “Inside the Unraveling of American Zionism,” which profiles a group of young rabbis who see solidarity with Palestine as part of their role as spiritual leaders. A 2024 Jewish Currents podcast on “Religion, Secularism, and the Jewish Left,” echoes this observation from the perspective of movement organizers and historically secular institutions who increasingly see the benefits of integrating spiritual and political discourses. Although the Jewish Current’s podcast highlights controversy over the uptake of religion in the Jewish Left (focusing on reader reactions to the magazine’s choice to begin publishing a weekly Torah commentary), it is nonetheless clear that a shift is occurring in the Jewish Left’s relationship to Judaism (or, religion). Although it is not a primary focus of these pieces, it is easy to observe that the increasingly liturgical character of American Jewish resistance to Zionism is also a turn towards an increasingly visible Jewish queerness in these spaces — a connection I plan to make more visible in this paper. 

Atalia Omer’s Days of Awe opens with a sermon from Scout Bratt, a non-binary member of the Tzedek Chicago congregation (Tzedek was one of the first explicitly anti-Zionist congregations in the U.S.). Bratt evokes Leslie Fienberg’s Stone Butch Blues, in their call to embrace the radical spiritual and political potentials of liminality during the days between the Jewish new year and Yom Kippur, the day of atonement. “This twilight,” Bratt states, “is seen as a possibility: possibly day, possibly night, neither wholly one nor the other. And, yet, it is time for creation. This is the active non-binary…” (Bratt, quoted in Omer, 1). Bratt’s sermon urges congregants to get out of their comfort zones, to question binary political formulations, and to give up certainty. Although Bratt doesn’t name Fineberg, an anarchist Jewish trans-queer activist and author, I suspect their invocation of twilight is meant to echo the climactic scene at the end of Stone Butch Blues when Ruth explains her own experience of gender as a twilight, “a moment of infinite possibility” connecting night and day (Fienberg, 296). Bratt’s evocation of a queer Jewish ancestor, whether intentional or not, in the framing of a sermon at an anti-Zionist synagogue brings us back to the question of this paper — How are Jews invoking queerness as a resistance, in the mode of Cathy Cohen’s vision of queer politics, to the politics of whiteness at play in the Trump administration’s (and Biden’s before him) weaponization of anti-semitism? This paper will explore queerness in Jewish anti-Zionist spaces, both explicitly “religious” and presumably secular, to theorize the role of queer identification in reimagining and re-orienting (to invoke Sarah Ahmed’s attention to the spatiality of queerness) Jewishness and Jewish belonging.