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A Place in the Tradition: Queerness in Jewish Life

Is queerness something Judaism has had to make room for, or has it been part of our tradition all along? Join Rabbi Jamie Weisbach for a three-part exploration of queer Jewish life through Torah, rabbinic texts, halakhah, and Jewish ethics. Together, we’ll look beyond contemporary debates to discover how traditional Jewish sources can open unexpected conversations about identity, belonging, and the ways Jews have navigated the distance between inherited law and lived experience.

  • Session 1: Finding Queerness in the Tradition: Where might queer stories and experiences already live within traditional Jewish texts? We’ll encounter sources that invite us to look at familiar texts differently and ask what they can teach us about the place of queerness within Judaism.
  • Session 2: Leviticus 18:22 and the Challenge of Halakhah: We’ll confront one of the Torah’s most frequently cited verses about same-sex relationships and then widen the lens. What happens when halakhah and the lived reality of many Jews appear to be at odds? Through a historical case study, we’ll explore how rabbis in the Middle Ages responded when Jewish law and Jewish life did not neatly align, and consider what their approaches might offer us today.
  • Session 3: Building a Community of Kavod: What does Jewish tradition ask of us in our relationships with queer family members, friends, and fellow community members? Drawing on Jewish interpersonal ethics, we’ll consider everyday questions around names and pronouns, privacy and outing, lashon hara, and respect for human dignity, asking how Jewish values can help us create communities in which people are treated with care and respect.
Whether these questions are personal to you or simply part of the Jewish community you care about, this course invites us to encounter challenging texts honestly, listen closely to Jewish tradition, and consider how Torah can inform the communities we build together.

We strive to ensure access and meaningful participation by all. As such, this program will have closed captioning.

Faculty photo

Rabbi Jamie Weisbach (he/him) is a rabbi, educator, and scholar of Jewish law whose teaching brings classical Jewish texts into conversation with contemporary questions of identity, embodiment, ritual, and belonging. Ordained by Yeshivat Hadar in 2023, Jamie has studied and taught extensively at Hadar and SVARA and has served as Senior Jewish Educator at Hunter Hillel in New York City.

Jamie's scholarship explores how the Jewish legal tradition responds to changing human realities. As an educator and writer with SVARA's Trans Halakha Project, Jamie has written on mikveh, embodiment, and Jewish law, and has taught on topics ranging from surrogacy and matrilineality to biblical narratives of inclusion and exclusion, grief, ritual, and the evolving nature of halakhah.

A graduate of Bowdoin College with a background in theater as well as Jewish studies, Jamie brings a creative, discussion-centered approach to the beit midrash, inviting learners to encounter Jewish texts with intellectual rigor, curiosity, and openness.

#Ethics #Identity

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