Queer Israel: A dispatch from Jerusalem by Jewish Mosaic’s director

Last Friday, I joined over 15,000 people marching through the streets of Tel Aviv for the city’s annual gay pride event. As Jewish Mosaic co-founder David Shneer wrote in the Huffington Post (see below), the event felt casual, normal, perhaps even mundane, a striking contrast to the usual intensity of political activism in Israel, and the heightened battle over the gay parade in Jerusalem (scheduled for next Thursday, June 21—see the articles below for details). It seems that the struggle for LGBT inclusion in Israel doesn’t register as exciting enough to motivate the “been there, done that” crowds of secular Tel Aviv, while in Jerusalem, the very idea of LGBT people marching in a public place drives the city’s religious communities into an almost unheard-of frenzy of rabbinic curses, riots and death threats. And yet, the depth of the secular/religious divide in Israeli society alm ost guarantees that these two mutually opposed populations (Israel’s secular and increasingly comfortable LGBT community and the country’s powerful Orthodox establishment) never really debate, let alone even encounter each other face-to-face. The work of engaging the vocal opponents of LGBT inclusion is left to a handful of activists, politicians and clergy (such as Jewish Mosaic board member Rabbi David Lazar, Noa Sattath, the director of Jerusalem’s GLBT center, Saar Netanel, the openly-gay member of Jerusalem’s city council, etc.) and they really have their work cut out for them! Someday, perhaps we’ll be able to talk about the Gay Pride event in Jerusalem as “casual and normal.”