UC Riverside

This dissertation is based on nearly two years of multi-sited ethnographic observations and seventy-two semi-structured interviews documenting the religious lives of queer and transgender Jews in Boston and Los Angeles. My primary analytic interest is in how LGBTQ Jews adapt their religious lives in response to the privileging of heterosexuality and cisgender (non-transgender) identity, or even homophobia/transphobia, in normative Judaism. I explore how queer and transgender Jews are assimilated, or not, into normative frameworks of Jewish law, theology, ritual/liturgy, and religious spaces. Previous ethnographic research on queer religious communities within the field of Religious Studies has sometimes given minimal attention to queer and transgender theory and to gender nonconforming and transgender participants; in contrast, my work asserts the central importance of transgender participants and queer/transgender theory to such projects. My first chapter focuses on the function of LGBTQ and/or Jewish organizations as well as synagogues in fostering LGBTQ community and inclusion in Jewish spaces. The second chapter explores the interplay between Jewish and LGBTQ identity in politics and activism with regard to Israel and Palestine, a topic that can be polarizing in both LGBTQ and Jewish communities. The third and fourth chapters analyze the disparate ways actors within normative institutional Judaism, as well as transgender Jews, address inclusion. I consider a conversation amongst rabbis on inclusion for transgender converts as well as transgender-affirming rituals created by and for transgender Jews, arguing that institutional Judaism’s normative framework, which values cisgender bodies and binary gender, may result in assimilating transgender Jews into normative Judaism, or more radically, ostracizing them. In contrast to this assimilative approach for incorporating transgender Jews, I map the ways transgender Jews have created affirmation for themselves within Judaism through innovating rituals that engage Jewish tradition to celebrate transgender identities and lives.