Pride Month is approaching, although Jewish LGBTQ activists like me have lived and worked under the presumption that Pride Day Is Every Day, with international effect!  You are welcome.  And that’s why I get to wear the big bifocals.  Charmed, I’m sure.

Just today I ordered a rainbow Star of David necklace from Pride Shack.  You can too.  Here’s that link.  I will probably wear mine under my shirt for safety reasons, but it will be close to my heart.  It’s tiring for us gay folks to start all the cool social and fashion trends, but someone has to.  (Smirk.)

https://www.prideshack.com/rainbow-ray-star-of-david-necklace-jewish-gay-lesbian-lgbt-judaism-pride-pendant/?srsltid=AfmBOooOr62yWaX6ghzPqLsWB5jH2QM4rkdrhHBbHubVXs_RDKAikrRM

I recently wrote to an old university friend about the problem of internalizing self-hatred.  The same holds true for any minority community facing oppression and discrimination, although the LGBTQ community has been subjected for millennia to more than its share of social, legal, religious, and educational disapproval.  It takes a lot of strength to buck that tide legally, but we did, and we prevailed.  Even in Israel!  Yay team.  Yom Ga’ava Sameach!  Be proud of ALL you are!  Every day!

Once again, with feeling, please join me in supporting the Jerusalem Open House for Pride and Tolerance this Pride Season.  It’s a safe and easy and charitable way to express your pro-Israel and proud pro-LGBTQ identity, whether you are a friend, ally, family member, or member of our LGBTQ community.  I do it every year!  Donations are easiest through JGive in US dollars.  Here are those links.  Learn more about the JOH at their link too.

https://www.jgive.com/new/en/usd/charity-organizations/2905

https://www.joh.org.il/en/homepage/

I am so impressed by the inclusivity of their excellent programs and that they span all age groups.  It’s a great way to celebrate Pride, with no sunstroke, no hate crimes, no crowds, no Portapotties, and no anti-semites.  With the economic challenges currently facing Israel, they need our support more than ever.

For the sociologists in the house, it might interest you to know that coming out and developing pride in our LGBTQ identities is a lifelong process, and that the mainstream Jewish community has a lot to learn from the LGBTQ community in this regard.

Jews and Israel have always been cast in the role of global pariah in a context of historical anti-semitism and threats against our community.  Indeed, even the Talmud teaches that rabbis would ask prospective converts to Judaism why they were converting, and advise them that it is difficult to be Jewish and to fulfill the mitzvot / commandments, but also that becoming Jewish may lead to certain life challenges, because many people hate us and oppress us and threaten our lives.  This has never been truer than today.

The holiday of Shavuot also celebrates the power of our Jewish spirituality and values and character.  As we learn in the Book of Ruth, Ruth chose to convert to Judaism and to honor her mother-in-law Naomi and to become part of the Jewish people.  Naomi arranged for Ruth to meet and marry Boaz, and as a result she became a celebrated member of our Jewish community and history.  Ruth is a celebrated ancestor of King David, and our future Messiah.

One of the leading social theorists on strategies of presenting social identities in public spaces and media and in the management of stigma was Erving Goffman, a Jewish Canadian sociologist who wrote the books The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life and Stigma.

I am dedicating this essay to my late great Jewish Sociology professor and influential mentor Y.M. Bodemann at the University of Toronto. May his memory be a blessing.  Thanks to Professor Bodemann, I learned a greater sense of pride in my Jewish identity and learned to politicize it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Y._Michal_Bodemann

Learn more about Goffman here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Erving_Goffman

In the 1950s, when Erving Goffman was writing, mainly in the US, the strategies used by Jews and homosexuals for the most part were mainly of hiding their stigmatized identities and ‘passing’ for non-Jewish or heterosexual to avoid social sanctions and marginalization.

In the Jewish community, the question of assimilation to the dominant surrounding culture or the maintenance of a separate religious and cultural identity has long been with us since ancient times.  Many of our holidays such as Hanukkah and its historical accounts repeatedly stress the tensions between assimilation (and becoming lost to the Jewish community) or retaining an ‘authentic’ Jewish identity true to our laws, values, and customs, no matter the cost.

Since the Enlightenment in Europe in the 17th-18th centuries, and the granting of civil citizenship to many European Jewish communities in the 18th-19th centuries, many Jews chose to leave their restrictive shtetls and kehillot (religious communities) to pursue secular education and wider professional and social opportunities, including immigration to North America.  This led to the development of many new religious and ideological streams in Jewish life to accommodate these social and historical changes which continue today.

All of us have to find a way of making our Jewish heritage our own.  My belief is that this cannot be easily done without taking the time and effort to educate ourselves in our Jewish culture, heritage, history, and religious practice.  Our Judaism may not look like that of our ancient ancestors or great-grandparents, and our journeys may lead us to greater or lesser religiosity, depending on our choices and circumstances.

In my own life, I grew up in a fervently Zionist and Jewish home and family, attended a Hebrew day school and modern Orthodox synagogue, and grew in my adult life to participate actively in traditional Egalitarian synagogues and minyans, adult Jewish education, Jewish studies, and Jewish advocacy.  My Judaism today is still God fearing but less religiously observant, and still fervently pro-Israel (even when Israel makes mistakes) and proudly Jewish and educated and geared more toward philanthropy and pro-Israel Jewish human rights advocacy.

As Zionists we are increasingly viewed with disrespect by an undereducated Canadian populace, and our safety has never been more fragile, with unprecedented levels of hate crimes and institutionalized anti-semitism and anti-Israel sentiment, even in the highest levels of government.

As a published pro-Israel advocate for more than 30 years, I have witnessed the normalization of anti-Israel and anti-semitic sentiment and exclusionary and abusive practices in our universities, labour unions, leftist media and political communities and political parties to the point that it has now become mainstream.  This is designed to marginalize Jewish students, faculty, professionals, and citizens from participation in our civil society and economy, and it always has been. It’s THEIR loss.  They are impoverishing themselves. Remember this.

I would suggest that our students and professionals make strategic decisions on the disclosure of their stigmatized Jewish and pro-Israel identities in a context of demonstrated hostility and risk.  It remains my view that Jewish students seeking university environments supportive of their religious needs and pro-Israel ideology consider attending private Jewish universities in the US or Israel or pursue their pro-Israel and religious activities in the Diaspora mainly privately and off campus for their own safety, and focus primarily on their secular studies and professional attainments, for their future wellbeing.

Another important Jewish social theorist on the subject of managing stigmatized Jewish identities and marginalization was Bernard Lazare, who wrote at the time of the Dreyfus trials in France.  Lazare coined the term, ‘the conscious pariah’.

His theory was that if Jews were being marginalized by their surrounding cultures into social pariah status, they would be best served by developing a resistance mindset of ‘the conscious pariah’, one who is aware of the political circumstances and acts accordingly in response to false accusations (as in the Dreyfus case and contemporary canards and propagandistic blood libels against the Jewish people and Israel).  Learn more about him here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bernard_Lazare

The notion of the ‘conscious pariah’ has much in common with contemporary LGBTQ Pride movements and other social movements such as feminism and Zionism.  By taking pride in ourselves and refusing to internalize self-hatred or to shrink or annihilate our identities and communities, we become stronger as individuals and as communities, and a greater force to be reckoned with.

Stigma isn’t always a bad thing.  It might mean that we are at the forefront of much-needed historical change and a force for social justice and human rights advocacy.  Sometimes it feels like we are battered whenever we are visible, but I would argue that our invisibility would only serve our enemies, who would like to eliminate us from competition and ignore or oppress us with impunity.

As Rabbi and Professor Emil Fackenheim argued in his 613th Commandment “Let Hitler have no posthumous victories.”  That includes feminists and the LGBTQ community, who also perished in the Holocaust.

Pride means developing the strength and wisdom to be proud of ALL we are.  Pride Day Is Every Day.  Celebrate it and yourselves accordingly.  Am Yisrael Chai.  We send our love from Canada.