The Chain of History: a conversation with three Jewish lesbian activists

Intergenerational conversation is often missing from queer and trans spaces, in part because these identities are not passed down through families. As a result, even as the visibility and representation of LGBTQ+ identities increase, young queer and trans people often grow up without role models who demonstrate what it means to be an LGBTQ+ adult or elder.

I seek out queer history. Seeing representations of myself in the past is a healing process, since people like me are often written out of history — and the present.

It has been similarly powerful to talk with LGBTQ+ people from other generations and hear about their lives firsthand. After meeting Rachel Gold and Judith Katz through our work on the lesbian magazine Sinister Wisdom, I asked them to sit down with me for this conversation about our shared identities as lesbians, Jews, writers, and activists.

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Ella Stern (she/her): There are a lot of topics we can talk intergenerationally about: being Jewish, being lesbian, being writers, and engaging in activism. Something that’s especially interesting to me is how we all have experienced these topics in different times, and how things have changed over our lifetimes.

Judith Katz (she/her): One of the things I’ve done specifically as a Jewish activist was in 1986, during the First Intifada, with a group of other Jewish dykes. I named us the Hannah Arendt Lesbian Peace Patrol. We were inspired by the Women in Black, which was a movement happening in Israel. We didn’t call it pro-Palestinian work; we called it anti-occupation work. We demonstrated on Friday nights in front of synagogues.

One thing that hasn’t changed, except it’s getting worse, is the Israel-Palestine situation and the occupation. Netanyahu is being even more bellicose than he’s been in the past.

ES: What sort of reactions were your demonstrations met with, and what inspired you to still do that activism?

JK: People yelled at us. It was the same thing that was happening to Jewish women everywhere who were standing against the occupation. People would call us antisemitic Jews and said they wished we would get raped. So, it wasn’t fun. It’s still not fun. Jewish friends of mine who are still demonstrating against the occupation and against all the violence in Gaza are getting the same kind of harassment, from other Jewish people and in general.

ES: Something that’s been hitting me hard is the “antisemitic Jew” rhetoric you mentioned. Something that is important to me about the Jewish American culture I grew up with is the emphasis on political participation and activism. Judaism tells us to stand up for those who are experiencing oppression. To me, standing up for people who are experiencing oppression in Gaza is a “correct” interpretation of Judaism. But I have heard many people say you are a bad Jew if you’re standing up [for Palestine].

They tend to think that those who [care about] the innocent people being killed in Gaza think it’s good that innocent people are being killed in Israel. Of course I don’t think that’s good. Of course I want that to stop too.

Rachel Gold (they/them and she/her): I grew up with a brand of Reform Judaism that doesn’t care that much about what you believe, as long as you do good. And doing good is about social justice.

ES: It’s been similar for me. Personally, there’s a lot about religion that I don’t actually believe in, but that I still enjoy because of the tradition and the culture and that strong commitment to voting and social justice.

RG: For non-Jewish readers: Judaism is a culture in addition to a religion. For example, in my kitchen, there’s a Jewish cookbook. I’ve never seen a Catholic cookbook. Catholicism is a religion. Judaism is both. There are all these practices from the culture that go along with the religion. At least in Reform Judaism, what you believe doesn’t matter that much. Whether you are doing the cultural practices is so much more important than what you think.

JK: My writing voice became more authentic after I decided to enter my own identity as a Jewish person, to find my Jewish voice. For inspiration, I went to the work of African American women writers like Zora Neale Hurston, or Jewish male writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer. I tried to develop an authentic voice, and then tell the story of a Jewish lesbian in a family and community; that’s where my first book, Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound, came from. A major part of my activism has been publicly being out.

RG: Running Fiercely may have been the first Jewish lesbian book I read. I remember thinking: Oh, this is dykey and quite thoroughly Jewish.

Being public as an author makes a big impact. I write these very queer and trans novels. A lot of people aren’t going to or seeing demonstrations. They may be isolated in their corner of the world, but they could read one of our books and feel less isolated.

I do think self-care and self-compassion are kinds of activism. I see a direct line from many concepts of tikkun olam [the Jewish concept of repairing and improving the world] to adrienne maree brown’s concept of fractal responsibility. The way you treat yourself is the way you treat the world, and the repair that we do with ourselves is the repair we do in the world. If all we did was go to demonstrations, the world would be a much worse place for it — we need the multidimensionality.

ES: This speaks to the importance of representation. I think it’s so healing to find stories of lesbians and queer people, and queer joy and love, in different generations, because that’s not taught in schools. I did a lot of reading about that this summer. I wasn’t expecting how healing it would be to hear these stories of people like me existing decades ago. Representation in books is such an important form of activism. I’m reading Running Fiercely right now. I haven’t read a lot of books about Jewish lesbians. When I was younger, before I even realized I was gay, I read a bunch of YA books with queer characters, and I recognized something in that before I figured out what it was.

The people who are trying to ban books know the power that representation has. Obviously, books aren’t turning people gay, but they’re helping people realize something in themselves. They would torture themselves if they didn’t see it somewhere and feel represented.

JK: When I came out to my parents in 1972, my father started crying — first, he said, because I’d never get married, which at that time was true because it wasn’t a legal possibility. But the other thing he said was, “I don’t want you to be miserable.” This was influenced by the poor representation of queer people at that time.

My best example of that is Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour, in which the woman who finally realizes that she’s in love with her best friend ends up killing herself. Those are the images of lesbians that I grew up with. They were also always white, usually engaged in some kind of emotionally masochistic relationship, and usually very unhappy or “straightened out” at the end.

Part of my job when I was first writing plays was to not create suicidal lesbians. And if I did, being queer was not gonna be why they were suicidal.

Lesbian art from the ’70s and ’80s, such as writing books and making movies and having our own music industry, was about making a culture. This is, as Rachel was saying, a form of tikkun olam — we have to make our world. My activism has been taking part in creating a culture.

RG: I want to draw the map that goes exactly from what you’re saying, Judith, to what Ella and I are saying. You came out in ’72. I was born in ’71. Your book came out in ’92 when I was still in college. You’re creating a culture that I’m growing up into. I came into lesbian culture in the ’80s and started to have access to the culture that had been built in the late ’60s, the ’70s, early ’80s. So I’m a direct inheritor of that culture that you started working on shortly after I was born.

Your decision to say, “I’m not going to have someone kill themselves because they’re queer; I’m going to write books where people struggle with life settings, but being queer is not the problem,” created a space where, now, I can write books where people struggle with queer and trans things, but the trajectory is optimistic.

I suspect that me writing optimistic novels and participating in culture change, and the millions of people who have participated in culture change, sets up a place where Ella actually has real-world things to report on.

ES: I’ve been writing an article about the experience of being queer in the school system I grew up in — in a suburb of Boston, so things are pretty good there. The people I’ve been interviewing have been very aware that the problems we’re talking about are real, such as barely any representation in the curriculum, incomprehensive sex ed, barely any openly gay teachers, as well as issues with gender-neutral bathrooms or changing your name. Even so, that’s so much better than what a lot of other places around the country have, and what a lot of other generations had.

RG: I also want to add that super-important for me in my twenties were Jewish trans lesbians, such as Kate Bornstein and Rachel Pollock. I was really lucky in my twenties to come across Jewish dykes and Jewish trans lesbians, and get to have that reparenting.

JK: What we’re talking about is the chain of history, in terms of what and who came before us. We’re in an interesting time, as you know, and a really scary time. As the oldest person in this conversation, at 73, this is the scariest time that I can remember — and I lived through Reagan, and Bush, and however many wars.

Conversations like this are important for me to remember that I’m one of the advocates for never shutting up. So I’d better not shut up.

RG: As we talk about activism, an important part is doing what it takes to keep yourself around and to make sure you will last. Because of the need for lineage and to connect generations, and because queer and trans folks are not usually born into families with each other, taking care of yourself is super important.

Since we touched on Israel and Palestine and Gaza, I want to make a case for understanding how trauma works. There are so many generations of trauma in that region, and I think that’s part of what makes it so hard to navigate. You have millions of people with multi-generational trauma. The more well-regulated we all are, the better solutions we’re going to be able to come to.

ES: I have one last question. What has been one of the most important changes in terms of being Jewish, or being queer, in our lifetimes?

In my lifetime, gay marriage got legalized. But post-Covid, I’ve seen a shift in how much people know about being queer and trans, especially in terms of asking about pronouns. Covid started during my freshman year of high school. Earlier that year, I knew one person who was out as trans and one who was out as nonbinary. So many people had time to reflect on themselves during the pandemic and realize they were queer or trans. I realized that I was queer then.

The most pressing issue I see in terms of the queer community right now is this horrible transphobia that’s taken over the right wing. That’s something that scares me a lot. They’re trying to erase us again.

RG: For me, having access to historical religious and spiritual resources about queerness and transness in Judaism and in Mesopotamia, pre-Judaism, has been important during my whole life. I first came across these resources when I was about 15, so I’ve had a long time to understand that there are other cultures that did gender differently and beautifully. There’s a whole ton of stuff about binary gender in Judaism.

One of the biggest things we’re dealing with as a world is how to have the ability to collaborate and build community on a global scale. We’re not good at it yet as human beings.

We evolved from small-band hunter-gatherer people who never dealt with more than about 150 people in their lives. We’re not good at figuring out how to operate on these scales. We need to figure out what drives peace and collaboration.

From the context of Judaism, when we take care of the most intersectional among us, the ones who have the greatest support needs, we end up taking care of everyone. I’m hoping that in the next few decades, we realize this and come up with better ways to implement it globally.

JK: In my lifetime as a Jewish person, I have experienced the introduction of women onto the pulpit, but also feminism into the discourse and theology. There is a long history of women taking on the mantle of religious leadership way before my time. But in the 1980s, there started to be [visible] women rabbis, and this introduction into theology.

I think the hardest thing right now is backlash. I never understood what that word really meant, and then I started to understand it, and now we’re in it. For me, the worst thing that’s happened is that people with a lot of money, and values that are very different from ours, have decided it’s time to have their kind of place for everybody. That backlash is the most dangerous thing.

It’s important to remember our history, but also to do what Rachel is doing in her work, and what you are going to be doing in your work, Ella — which is looking forward.

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