“What would a queer bat mitzvah look like?”

— Chris Bartlett [here]

ALSO: “I do think there’s something unique about growing up different, so whether you’re queer or Jewish, from a young age, and participating in a serious recognition of that difference, without anyone else knowing. And it gives you a certain critical capacity to engage with the world, to know that things are not exactly the way they seem. And I think that queerness and Jewishness engage with this idea, that things are not exactly the way that they seem. So it’s natural that queers are comfortable either Jewish-adjacent, as I am, or full participants as Jews, because of that very young feeling of difference that was not observed, that that’s celebrated within Jewishness. So that piece of identifying difference, ongoingly, whether that’s exploration of the Talmud or conversations after Shabbat, about what you learned during that day, there’s a really interesting tradition, both within Jewishness and queerness, of a comfort in engaging with newness. Not always agreement about which newness should be celebrated and which one should be treated with some caution, but in both communities we’re comfortable with that sort of engagement.”