John Hilgeman 0:10 Good morning. This is John Hilgeman for Lambda Reports, and our guest this morning is Andy Rose, who is co-editor of the book Twice Blessed, which is subtitled On Being Lesbian, Gay and Jewish, and he's also the director of the National Jewish AIDS Project. And Andy, maybe you could just tell us you're in town for a few days. Is that right? Andy Rose 0:34 Right? I was brought to town by different organizations in the Jewish community of St. Louis to talk mostly about issues of how to include lesbian and gay Jews in the Jewish community, and then also talking to one group also about AIDS and Jewish community responses to AIDS. John Hilgeman 0:53 Okay, can you tell us a little bit about Twice Blessed and what the book is about? Andy Rose 0:56 Yeah, the book is, it's about having a new alternative, beyond the traditional two that lesbian and gay Jews have had, which have been number one to remain closeted in the Jewish community, or the second is really to leave it all together, that it's it has seemed very hard to be fully ourselves and visible in the Jewish community, and so people have gone through one of those two alternatives. What the book is about is that there is another, especially in the past few decades, and that there's a growing body of experience that a lot of people have thought about, but not that many people had written about. And Christy and I both felt strongly that it was time to pull a book together. There had been a book earlier in the 80s called nice Jewish girls, which was about Jewish lesbians, which was very important and kind of laid the groundwork for ours, but ours is about women and men, and it's written in a way that we think is accessible to the non-gay Jewish community, and is being read and reviewed, and they are in a way that no other gay book has to this point. John Hilgeman 2:09 What does Judaism have to offer people who are lesbian and gay? Well, I know one of the with, like some of the major religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam, there's some very definite prescriptions against gay sexual behavior, and I'm just wondering, you know, in that context. Andy Rose 2:33 Right. You know, there's no question that institutional religion has been one of the main vehicles of anti-gay oppression that's been true for a long time, and it's still true now. For those of us who are Jews and have that not only as a religious identity, but as a cultural identity, and an ethnic identity and a communal identity and all those things, it's, it's, it's important for us to not, to not give that up and to claim that fully and not to give that up because we're gay, and there are some people in the community that would like to exclude us, that would be giving up too much, and you essentially can't. You can't really give up part of your identity. You can put it in the closet, but it's important, you know, emotionally and spiritually and politically and in all other ways, to be able to claim it fully. In terms of what it has to offer to me, just as an example, I feel that a lot of what I re-learned when I came out as a gay man in terms of why it was Important to be visible, and why it's important to be proud, and why it's important to have a community and and to build the institutions of that community, and you know why it's important to not let people make assumptions about who you are really came very directly from my experience growing up as a Jewish kid in Phoenix, Arizona, where I was very much a minority, where people would make assumptions about me unless I said otherwise, and where my Jewishness wasn't necessarily visible. And I've really drawn on that, on all those very deeply rooted understandings, to give me strength and clarity, I hope, as a gay man. There's also a strong current of commitment to justice and to including the outsider that's that's very much part of Jewish tradition. Now there's also part of Jewish tradition that comes from Leviticus and the traditional interpretations of it that that call male homosexuality an abomination, and that's something that a lot of us struggle to come to terms with and have our own interpretations of, or frankly, reject that. The fact is, is that most people outside of relatively small group of fundamentalists, no matter what your religion are, selective or look at traditional texts in contemporary context, and that's part of what we do. We really reject the traditional understanding of that text and feel that whatever the original intention, there was no understanding at the time of sexual orientation, there was no understanding of same sex relationship. And there's a question anyway, about the whether the texts are so much about sexuality or whether they're about, you know, idolatrous behavior or other things. So there, you know, we struggle with the the the oppressive tendencies within our own tradition, but we don't give up our entire identities and our tradition in order to do so. I think that it's really important, again, emotionally and strategically, to to to not for us to claim our place in the world of organized religion. It's, it's really one of the last places where it's, unfortunately, the last strongholds of anti-gay sentiment. I mean, we're not. Homosexuality isn't considered a medical disorder anymore, and most mainstream circles isn't considered a psychological disorder, but there's still this underlying tone of us being guilty of some kind of moral disorder, and so we need to talk about morality too, and talk about but to talk about what we think morality is. So it's important. John Hilgeman 6:56 In the book there's several different sections in the book. Can you just kind of summarize the thrust? Andy Rose 7:01 Yeah. You know, there's five different sections, and the first is really a set of personal stories. We felt that whatever we said in the book needed to be grounded in real, concrete experience and And it's, it's a range of people. It's a woman who's raised orthodox and a man who's disabled, and a woman who talks about being raised Jewish and working class, and it's kind of a spectrum of our own diverse of our own internal diversity. And in trying to set the tone of valuing diversity instead of fearing it, at the outset of the book, and people talk about their own stories of growing up and coming out and being out and integrating the different parts of ourselves into a whole life. The second section of the book is more about traditional texts and Jewish history, about Leviticus, about what it means to look at Jewish history and historical texts without heterosexual assumptions. And there's also a wonderful piece in that section, an oral history of a Jewish lesbian who's in her 80s. The third section of the book is about the family, both about our relationships with our families of origin and the ways that we're creating family: parenting, having commitment ceremonies, et cetera, redefining family, rethinking sexuality and sexual ethics. That's a third part of the book. The fourth is the ways that lesbian and gay Jews in the past decade or so have been building community. There's a piece about the lesbian and gay synagogue movement. There is a piece about Jewish lesbian feminist groups, etc. And then there's the fifth part of the book is more about how the rest of the Jewish community has responded to us and our issues so far, and includes, you know, essays about what's happened on a policy level in terms of getting lesbian general issues in general, and AIDS in particular. But also has some stories in there. There's a wonderful and sad and moving story in there by a lesbian Rabbi who's not able to write under her own name, and she writes about that, about what it means to be in the Jewish community and not be out, and how the parts that she could bring to it, and the parts that she can't, and how everybody loses when someone is closeted, especially someone who's being a spiritual leader. It's just such a contradiction to not be able to bring your whole self to it. And then we have some appendices of the book that talk about some of our visions for the directions that we hope the Jewish community and to some degree, the lesbian and gay community go in. And some other resources for people, for Jewish educators dealing with homophobia and other matters, John Hilgeman 10:10 What do you what do you see lesbians and gay men offering to Judaism to the Jewish community? Andy Rose 10:17 Well, there's a lot, I think partly we starting with something I just mentioned about our our own sensitivity to issues of diversity and our ability to see, I mean, it's a struggle, but our ability to see diversity as a blessing and not as a threat is something that the Jewish community and a lot of other people need to learn from. I think that as far as much as we … though there's there's a lot more progress to make. I think that we in the gay community have dealt with that, and have had to deal with that, and coming together more than most communities have because of our own diversity. I think that we have—you know, it's hard to generalize about us—but, but I think that as a group, what I've seen is that there's often kind of a depth of spiritual sensitivity. There's a depth and strength of political commitment. There's a real not taking things for granted. You know, I'm thinking of, you know, what some of us have gone through to become parents or to remain parents. We don't take parenting for granted when we're when we do that. What so many of us have been through with AIDS, we don't take anything for granted anymore. And I think that a lot of people stand to learn from and derive benefit from our experience. Those are some of the things that come to mind, our humor, you know, our awareness that you know, having a lively culture is integral, you know, which Jews understand also certainly, but all those things, and probably more than I'll think of a little later. John Hilgeman 12:30 And I guess really, every Jew is different, every gay man and lesbian is different, so that each individual brings his or her own to each community. Andy Rose 12:40 Right. And it's hard to generalize. I usually get myself in trouble for doing it. And part of what we try to say in the book, explicitly and by the people we include, is that we know we are all different, and part of the strength is not pretending that we're all the same, but there are some common threads and most of our experiences, just in having gone through whatever we've gone through to be public and to care about both parts of ourselves. John Hilgeman 12:41 I know there were several people who made reference in the book to a thought that John Boswell has, showing that there's been oppression against Jews and against gay people that's been connected in at least European history. Can you make some comments about that? Andy Rose 13:30 It's true that often the same that Jews and lesbians and gay men have suffered at the hands of the same kinds of oppressors and bigots. And it was certainly true in medieval Europe. It was certainly true during the Holocaust, and it's true in terms of right wing fundamentalists today. I mean in terms of we were some of, I was living in California in the 70s in 1978. We were dealing, some of us were involved in trying to raise consciousness in the Jewish community about an anti-gay teachers initiative that was in the ballot and that was beaten. And we learned over, there was a similar campaign in Seattle at that time, and one of the leaders of that campaign said something about, in one sentence linking gay teachers as a threat to Aryan culture, and it was so startling and so clear cut, at least in some people's minds, that there was a connection between the two historically, and that if you are the outsider, if you are the vulnerable minority that can be split off and be scapegoated, either for political problems or economic problems or moral problems or whatever that will happen, and Jews and gays are not the only groups that that's happened to, but we are two of the groups historically that that's happened to. John Hilgeman 15:07 There's an author in the book that talks to that, I think she talks about being an Arab Jew. Is that right? I can't think of who that is. Andy Rose 15:14 Yeah, Rachel Waba, a woman who her family came from, her father's family came from Egypt, her mother's family came from Iraq, and she actually grew up in Japan, and comes from that whole large and internally diverse communities of North African and Middle Eastern Jews who've lived there for a long time. John Hilgeman 15:39 I've been struck, too by how, how many Jewish people have lived in various parts of the world, like in the Orient, I think during the Holocaust, a lot of people had moved to the Orient. Is that right? Andy Rose 15:53 Some, yeah, there was a, there was a community. The largest community was in Shanghai, actually. And a number of German Jews got out right before the war and established a Jewish community there. They mostly left China after the war. A few stay, but most of them came to the San Francisco area for the most part. So there were some, and then there were others who just took refuge wherever they could. I don't know about it in detail. I know some about the Shanghai community. You know. John Hilgeman 16:23 I think NPR had a program about that recently. Andy Rose 16:26 Oh, really, yeah, they may have. NPR had this other program that was, that there's a reference to in this book, actually, because they did a program about the hidden Jews in New Mexico, that there were people who have identified, have practiced in secrecy as Jews for generations, while identifying outwardly as Catholics, and have just begun connecting some of the pieces and beginning to identify as Jews in a way now. But the the woman, the lesbian Rabbi who writes in here under a pseudonym, talks about them and her her the way she identifies with them in terms of practicing in secrecy and and she actually calls herself la escondida, which is Spanish for the hidden one. And so there's that kind of parallel. John Hilgeman 17:26 It's interesting, like, like in the Christian churches too. I know so many gay and lesbian religious leaders, and it's kind of like the same kind of thing, to be hidden. It's almost to survive in the institution, you need to be hidden. Andy Rose 17:42 Right. John Hilgeman 17:42 To survive in the community, you need to be hidden. On the other hand, it's a real loss to not be able to be whole, and a loss to the community too. But it's a problem in terms of the community coming to grips with its own difficulties and prejudice is the people in the community and working through that. And sometimes people have to make decisions like, like the Rabbi who talks in that article. Andy Rose 18:11 Yeah, people make all kinds of decisions. There are very, very few rabbis in congregational positions, hardly any that are really able to be out. There are people who have left. There are people in the majority are there and they're closeted. And there's been and actually in the past year, there's been some new developments with that, because the Reform Movement, which is actually the largest, in the conservative movement, are the largest movements of Judaism in this country. After four years of haggling to pass a resolution that basically said that sexual orientation shouldn't be a factor in determining whether somebody's qualified to the Rabbinate, and sort of opened the door a little more. It didn't offer people ultimate protection against losing their jobs if congregations wanted to fire them, and that has happened with people have come out but or been forced out, but it's it's moving in that direction, and it's an important it's not the only issue, but it is an important issue, because part because it's rabbis, but also because it's a broader issue about role models. And are we, and when, what do people really think of us as role models for the community, especially for their kids, and that's where a lot of home, of homophobia still comes out. I mean, people can be very tolerant about the fact that we have civil rights, but when it comes to really including us and seeing us as valuable community leaders and role models, that's another story, and people take longer to get to that point. I feel, in general, the Jewish community is moving in that direction, but it's very uneven. And, you know, that's how it's going to be for a long time, you know? And we keep pushing or and we keep creating the institutions we need for to meet our own needs. But it's, I mean, for the future that I can foresee, I think this is still going to be a struggle. John Hilgeman 20:26 This is John Hilgeman today with Andy Rose, and we're talking about a book Twice Blessed, and we're talking about the topic of being lesbian, gay and Jewish. You're talking about the role model. Can you tell me a little bit more what I'm wondering about, what do you think is at the heart of people's fear of having lesbians or gay men as role models to their children? Andy Rose 20:50 Well, I think there's still some core irrational fear about, well, the most insidious part is about, you know, gays as child molesters. But there's also that, fears about, you know, recruitment and how, what kind of influence we're going to have. And I think people still feel that. And I think that, you know, when it's all predicated on the assumption that it's not okay that their kids would be gay. I mean, when we get to a point where parents know that it's fine, more than fine for their child to be gay or lesbian, then we really will have arrived, but we haven't arrived there yet. And some of it's understandable. Parents don't want their kids to, you know, feel unnecessary pain and don't want them to be in a position of being discriminated against. But when you really understand that all that, that none of that, is in inherent in being gay, and that it's a choice between your child coming to terms with who they are or not, then hopefully there'll be some shift. But I think there still is this fear that we maybe can't be completely trusted around kids. And it's, it's just, it's, it's so ridiculous, and it's so, you know, it's more than ridiculous, it's offensive and it's painful, and it's a lot of different things. But I think that still is there for a lot of people. John Hilgeman 22:38 I sometimes wonder, it seems that some people have a peculiar feeling that somehow or other homosexuality is stronger than heterosexuality, that somehow, if a person is is growing up heterosexual and they meet somebody who's gay, that they're going to become gay, like all The pressures, all the societal pressures to try to keep people straight and raise people astray, are real threatened, almost as though they don't feel secure about their own heterosexuality. Andy Rose 23:10 You said it; I agree. You know, it's, I mean, that's part of it, and some of it is sort of this mystical power that's attributed to us. And again, I there's a real parallel, because this because it happens to Jews too. I mean in terms of this exaggerated sense of who we are and what kind of economic or political power we have. And I think then people tend to have that about gays too. There are certain minorities that really evoke that in people. Then that, it is kind of amazing to me. I mean, I don't think that. I mean considering all the lesbians and gay men who grew up with heterosexual role models, you know, I mean people, people hopefully come to realize who they are, and then can live their lives accordingly. And you know, the role models will help you do that in a more healthy and integrated way, but they're not going to make you something that you're not. And that seems so obvious, but you're right that it's not clear to everybody. John Hilgeman 24:19 I'd like to get back to the topic that we started with, for we have a few more minutes and just kind of thinking, the Scripture is the basis of Judaism, or at least one of the main sources of writings for Judaism. And then, of course, it's common to Christianity and other other groups, I guess. And what do you see as the real heart or the main themes of the scripture that kind of transcend any kind of limitations, because I know that with any religious group, there's a tendency to cut people off and to say where the were, the chosen ones and they're not. And what are the values that you see that really stand out, that transcend all those other things? You know? Andy Rose 25:13 That's a really good question. And the main thing that I think of is the very basic core concept that we are all without exceptions, created in the image of God. And I know people have all you know, we could talk about God for a long time in terms of what people's conception of that means. But the point is, is that it's not, there isn't a qualification there, that that that who I am is a reflection of that divinity and creativity and and spirit which is which infuses, you know, a sense of connection and meaning in the world. And that sexual orientation is absolutely irrelevant to that, absolutely irrelevant to that. So that that's one of the things. And then in Judaism, there's a, there's a very strong prophetic tradition, you know, a tradition of of of justice, of welcoming and bringing in the stranger, of speaking out when, you need to speak out, of defending the rights of the people who are most vulnerable, and of doing the right thing, of doing what needs to be done, is very much a part of Jewish textual and historical tradition, and that's what I and many other people draw on. Is there anything you'd like to add? Anything that we haven't touched on? Let's see. Well, just that it's been, it really has been wonderful and gratifying to to to see how the book has been received into and how it's reflected some people's experience, and how it's been, you know, appreciated by lesbians and gay men who are not Jews, and how it's been appreciated by some Jews, at least, who are not lesbian or gay who who may not even agree with everything that's in the book, but they are glad that there is a place to go to as a resource which hasn't really existed so far. And we, you know, feel very gratified about it, and we and are glad we picked the title. We did. We got, we've gotten a lot of comments about that, but maybe that's a good place to end, that that we that Twice Blessed means that we don't buy any of the traditional concepts of our sexuality as a fate or a curse or as a burden. It really, we really do see it as a blessing, and that the opportunity to integrate these very powerful identities is a wonderfully enriching one. John Hilgeman 28:11 you might say, in kind of, in other words, I guess that both Judaism and being gay are gifts. Andy Rose 28:22 Fine., John Hilgeman 28:22 special gifts, Andy Rose 28:23 I see that way for me and and I hope too, that you know, and that that's not exclusive, that they are not certainly not the only two gifts. And I hope that that that all of us who are lesbian or gay, can, you know, fully reclaim the other parts of ourselves and the other cultures that are ours and and to do so as as gifts also. John Hilgeman 28:53 Okay. Well, thank you very much for being with us today, and you have a couple other talks while you're here? Andy Rose 28:58 Right. I will be talking at Hillel at Washington University. We'll be talking at Central Reform Congregation in St Louis and another congregation called Chara Charay Emmett on Sunday morning, and already spoke to some people at Jewish Federation in St Louis about AIDS this afternoon. John Hilgeman 29:19 Okay, well, I'm so happy that you were able to be with us Andy Rose, and maybe when you're in St. Louis again, we can have you on the show again. Andy Rose 29:25 Great. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Okay, okay. Transcribed by https://otter.ai