Book panel: Queer Judaism

This panel brings together four scholars of religion, gender, and sexuality to engage with a pathbreaking book on religious queer lives and activism. Queer Judaism: LGBT Activism and the Remaking of Jewish Orthodoxy in Israel (New York University Press, 2023) documents how sexual minorities confront an ethnoreligious community of faith polarized by the politics of gender and sexuality and engages and challenges popular and scholarly assumptions about the incompatibility of religion and LGBTQ identities, liberal notions of tolerance and pluralism, theories of religious identity formation, queer activism, and gendered/sexualized politics of belonging, and a secularist bias in studies of LGBTQ activism. It also invites comparisons to other contexts where the politics of gender and sexuality are mobilized and weaponized. Respondents will engage the book's findings and provocations from the perspective of their areas of research on religion, sexuality, and sexual diversity in Judaism and Christianity.