At age 22 in 1986, Miryam Kabakov left Stern College, an Orthodox women’s school in New York, and headed to Berkeley, where she embarked on a double life.
She lived in an Orthodox bayit, or house, near the U.C. campus, and was the youth director at Congregation Beth Israel, an Orthodox shul in Berkeley. But on weekends she headed for the Dyke Shabbos, a meeting of Jewish lesbians who convened weekly.
“I found different groups that helped me express the Jewish part of me,” Kabakov said in a recent interview, “and others that helped express the lesbian part of me.”
But even in a group that theoretically merged the Jewish and lesbian parts, Kabakov was not totally at home.
“These women knew more about dyke than Shabbos … and I liked Shabbos, and I wanted to keep having it in the form I was used to,” she writes in “Keep Your Wives Away From Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires,” an anthology she edited about lesbian, bisexual and transgender Jewish women who have been, or are now, traditionally observant.
“Keep Your Wives …” was named the best anthology of 2011 by the Golden Crown Literary Society, which promotes lesbian literature.
On Wednesday, Nov. 16, Kabakov, will speak about her book, and the challenges faced by observant Jewish lesbians like herself, at Beth Israel, in front of many of the same people she knew 25 years ago. She is now director of a film and dialogue series in the Twin Cities, Minn., where she lives with her partner and two children.
Kabakov also will speak at the BJE Jewish Community Library in San Francisco and at a Reform synagogue in Aptos. But it is the Beth Israel appearance that is most significant, because it is just the second Orthodox synagogue in the country to book her — the first was the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale in the Bronx.
While the Reform, Renewal and Reconstructionist movements have pursued conscious policies of LGBT inclusion for years, and the Conservative movement voted five years ago to admit openly gay candidates to its rabbinical schools, the Orthodox world has been much less welcoming.
That is changing now, Kabakov said. But she doesn’t want to push too quickly.
“Orthodox synagogues that are welcoming on some level to LGBT Jews are often under a lot of criticism from more mainstream and right-wing Orthodox communities,” she said. “Each community has a different character, and what might feel taboo or acceptable to one is the opposite for another. Some synagogues that won’t open their doors to this conversation have invited me to do living room talks — private events that are not publicized except by word of mouth.”
Kabakov’s book has a strong local connection. Five of the 15 contributors live, or have lived, in the Bay Area. That’s no coincidence, she and others interviewed for this article said, as the Bay Area is famously open both to the LGBT community and spiritual exploration.
But as Kabakov learned with the Dyke Shabbos women, there’s a certain suspicion in LGBT circles toward those who maintain a traditional religious practice. Quite simply, it’s not easy to be gay and Orthodox.
At Congregation Beth Israel today, however, there is a small number of gay and lesbian Jews — and they say they are very accepted.
“I feel very accepted at CBI when I tell people I’m gay,” says CBI member Zvi Bellin, 32, who keeps kosher, observes Shabbat, and came out as gay five or six years ago.
Bellin says the welcome comes from the pulpit, where Rabbi Yonatan Cohen preaches the kind of acceptance he experiences from the congregation as a whole. “People seem to consider it as a matter-of-fact thing. We’re in a very different place than when Miryam was here.”
“The Beth Israel model is that we’re a family,” explains Cohen. “Maintaining our full commitment to Torah as a community, while creating a safe space for these members of our family, is part and parcel of the unique and difficult, yet sacred and rewarding, path we have chosen as a modern Orthodox community.”
“Keep Your Wives …” includes an essay by an ex-yeshiva girl whose Orthodox parents lovingly accept her unorthodox living arrangement. “I never left the Orthodox community, even though sometimes it won’t have me,” she writes.
There’s also an essay by Berkeley trans activist Sasha Goldberg about the time she passed as a “nice Jewish boy” in Chassidic circles in Jerusalem.
Naomi Seidman, head of Jewish Studies at Berkeley’s Graduate Theological Union, helped Kabakov find a publisher for her book and also contributed the tale of her colorful introduction to the Orthodykes, an Orthodox lesbian group active in Jerusalem in the late 1980s.
Seidman, who grew up in a Chassidic family in Brooklyn, posits that Orthodox Judaism, with its forced separation of the genders, in fact creates a safe space to explore homoeroticism.
“Community has a special flavor when it’s same-sex,” she said. “Catholics know about it. Muslims, too. In [Chassidic] Judaism, the idea is that everyone’s supposed to spend intense time with people of the same gender.”
And who would suspect yeshiva boys — who eat, study and sleep together — to be doing anything untoward? But the “persistent flaw in the system,” Seidman writes in her essay, “is that it assumes that desire is heterosexual.”
She adds: “Lesbian bars, by the strange quirks of Jewish law, were perfectly kosher in the way a place with mixed dancing wouldn’t be.”
Miryam Kabakov will discuss her anthology at 7 p.m. Wednesday, Nov. 16 at Congregation Beth Israel, 1630 Bancroft Way, Berkeley; 7 p.m. Thursday, Nov. 17 at the BJE Community Library, 1835 Ellis St., S.F.; and 7:30 p.m. Nov. 19 at Temple Beth El, 3055 Porter Gulch Road, Aptos.
“Keep Your Wives Away From Them: Orthodox Women, Unorthodox Desires” edited by Miryam Kabakov (192 pages, North Atlantic Books, $16.95)