Click on the following videos to listen to interview excerpts. To enable Closed Captioning, please click on “CC” on bottom right corner of each video.
Jeff Kushner: “gay people are more likely to be antisemitic than Jewish people are homophobic”
Syd Lapan: “it hasn’t always been positive. I have encountered bias, outright antisemitism”
Val Fishman: “In all those spaces… I claimed it [being Jewish] because the visibility for me was really important”
Marsha Ablowitz: “for a number of years, I was pretty uptight because people would sometimes make anti-Israel or anti-Jewish comments, and some of them still do”
SD Holman: “Some of my friends were telling me… could you just be a little bit less? Could you just be kind of a little less Jewish?… I find the waspy culture very… passive aggressive”
Nancy Rosenblum: “at one Gay Pride March here [in Nelson], and I marched with the Jewish banner… I was more nervous to do that than marching as a lesbian”
Alan Stamp: “They don’t understand anything about Judaism… it’s not my role to educate people”
Susan Dempsey: “the theme as I talk about it is more about tucking that [Jewish] part of myself away”
Shira Macklin: “I could tell who thought it was okay and who didn’t, but nobody gave me any trouble”
Ruth Simkin Z”L: “At least the ones that I know have been really inclusive… it’s not something I’ve ever fought with”
Ann Daskal: “the lesbian community I knew was mostly Jewish… I don’t know of much prejudice to me”
Aaron Devor: “I have felt increasingly, as the years have gone by, cautious about raising the fact that I’m Jewish”
Lisa Weiner: “lesbians who play klezmer music?… we’re a group of nine women, four of them are Jewish, five of them are not, four of them are straight, five of them are gay”
Ira Rogers: “I have never experience anything… from the gay community for being Jewish that I would call mean-spirited or traumatic”
Jaye Beer: “Kind of negative and growing more negative per day… I grew up being instilled in me not to let people know I was Jewish”
Karen Newmoon: “there’s just… so many ways of not fitting into dominant culture… how do I tease apart what are Jewish experiences or lesbian experiences or… general idiosyncrasy?”
Jono Lerner: “I have always found that I’ve been accepted for being gay in the Jewish community. I’ve not always been accepted for being Jewish in the queer community”
Bayla Greenspoon: “I encounter more than any kind of overt prejudice or antisemitism would be more ignorance… stereotypes can be pretty deep seated in peoples’ perspectives”
Hope Forstenzer: “a queer woman, I was a little bit of a token and I think I did that to myself… I announced my Judaism. I have experienced… flat out ignorance in the queer community”
Lily Hoenig: “as a leftist trans person… found that a lot of places did not have any involvement in leadership positions with Jewish people, and oftentimes were completely antagonistic of them”
Julie Elizabeth: “I’m just Julie and I have a few lesbian friends… people know I’m Jewish. I’m not hiding it. It’s a non-issue. It’s just who I am.”
Debby Yaffe: “there’s a lack of knowledge and understanding in Victoria… they’re so respectful. It’s a bit creepy”
Pat Johnson: “I take anti-Zionism in the gay community really personally… it upsets me and makes me irrational… and so outraged”
Dorothy Elias: “A woman I knew, a feminist and a lesbian, once told me that I shouldn’t be identifying as a Jew because that was a patriarchal mindset”
Lauren Nackman: “lots of experiences over my life both in the queer community and straight community of ‘Oh, I didn’t know you were Jewish’…. which is then followed by an array of awkward, weird… tokenizing statements”
Glen Phillips: “I have had to put up with stuff like the Israel thing… it’s been harder [being] Jewish in the gay community than gay in Judaism… I just avoided going to Pride altogether”
Max Dexall Z”L: “as far as I know, the gay people that they were friends with were very supportive and and… weren’t antisemitic”
David Steiner: “I don’t think people were interested… whether you’ve been cut or not… being a gay guy outweighs everything else, being Jewish or Catholic”
Avital Jarus Hakak: “Here in Canada… [not] much intersection between my lesbian identity and Jewishness… we went once to Kabbalat Shabbat in Or Shalom. It was a queer event”
Caryl Dolinko: “a few years ago in the Pride Parade, there was Queers Against Apartheid in Israel… again just felt like Jews had been pushed aside”
Marc Gelmon: “I feel like it’s upon myself to educate people about Jewish identity and some aspects of being Jewish that people generally don’t know or the stereotypes that they have”
Jack Huberman: “the only Jewish community event celebrating gays… was a Shabbat dinner… I was most encouraged when I saw 30+/- groups willing to put their name on the sponsorship”
To continue with the online exhibit, please click below on Jewifying Queering Space 2.
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