Today is Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, so I’m honoring the occasion not only by baking (and eating) ridiculous amounts of challah and honey cake (a low-carb people we are not), but also by rounding up a few recent stories about Jewish lesbian moms.
There was so much good stuff going around for Mother’s Day that I neglected to share this great one-minute video from The Righteous Conversations Project, which brings together Holocaust survivors and teens to speak up about injustice. The video isn’t about the Holocaust, though; if anything, it’s about parental nagging in the age of social media. It comes via Keshet, the organization for LGBT inclusion in Jewish life—but I think it speaks to a commonality of many families.
You likely know about Heather Has Two Mommies, the classic children’s book featuring a girl with lesbian moms. But did you know author Lesléa Newman is also the author of two Passover-themed picture books?
I wrote the other day about The Purim Superhero, the first LGBT-inclusive Jewish children’s book in English—but two lesbian moms might be lurking in a children’s book about Judaism that was published 28 years ago.
It is a truism in the LGBT community to say that we need LGBT-inclusive children’s books so our kids see images of families like theirs. Yet with few exceptions, LGBT-inclusive picture books have largely shown culturally and religiously neutral families. Diversity of color has started to appear, but even those books don’t explore the families’ various cultural and religious traditions. Kids may therefore see some important aspects of their families in these books, but others are left out. Elisabeth Kushner’s The Purim Superhero, the first clearly LGBT-inclusive Jewish children’s book in English, takes a different approach.
Lesléa Newman is best known as the author of the first children’s book to feature LGBT parents, Heather Has Two Mommies, as well as other LGBT-inclusive picture books, such as Mommy, Mama, and Me; Daddy, Papa, and Me; and Donovan’s Big Day. The prolific author’s latest book, A Sweet Passover, does not feature an LGBT family, but is nonetheless a charming tale worthy of consideration by readers here.
Susan Goldberg, aka Mama Non Grata, has just published a terrific article, “Que(e)rying the matrilineal principle,” in Lilith magazine, the Jewish feminist powerhouse. Susan questions what it means to be “born Jewish” when Jewish identity is traditionally passed on through the mother–and her sons are only biologically connected to her non-Jewish spouse.
Jewish LGBT organization Keshet has announced the winner of its first Jewish Children’s Book Writing Contest (mentioned here in February): The Purim Superhero, by Elisabeth Kushner, a public librarian in Vancouver, Canada—and a lesbian mom herself. Kushner told Keshet: When I heard about the Keshet contest, it seemed like a perfect fit: in the Purim story,
There’s been a lot written on the recent bullying-related suicides. I found this piece by Rabbi Victor Appell, “If Only Tyler Clementi Had Been to a Gay Synagogue,” particularly moving. Too often religion and LGBT rights are set up as opposites; Appell shows us how they don’t have to be, and how “coming out in
Politics and Law Two big wins this past week: Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court ruled that same-sex couples have the right to adopt each other’s children. Uruguay’s lower house of Congress approved a bill to allow same-sex couples to adopt children. The Senate must vote before September 15, and is also expected to approve. Uruguay approved
