Queer Jewish Pasts: A History of LGBTQ Jewish Activism and Innovation, 1965 to Today with Dr. Gregg Drinkwater

Explore the queer Jewish past in the United States with Dr. Gregg Drinkwater, a scholar of queer Jewish history and a longtime advocate for LGBTQ inclusion in the Jewish world. In this online talk, we’ll discuss these and other questions:

• When did Jewish sexual and gender minorities in the United States forge identities as LGBTQ Jews?
• Where did LGBTQ Jewish activism emerge and how did LGBTQ Jews gain allies?
• Who founded the first gay synagogues? What did “Jewish Gay Lib” look like in the 1970s?
• How did American Jews respond to the AIDS Crisis?
• Why did LGBTQ Jews develop specifically queer Jewish ritual and liturgy?

Through images and stories from the queer Jewish archive, we will consider the lives and work of the political, cultural, and spiritual leaders who created space for LGBTQ people within American Judaism and within American culture, broadly, from the mid-1960s to the present.

About Dr. Drinkwater: Dr. Gregg Drinkwater’s research focuses on sexuality, gender, and Judaism in the modern United States. His work has appeared in the journals Jewish Social Studies and American Jewish History, as well as the Journal of Modern Jewish Studies. He is currently working on a book on the history of gay and lesbian synagogues and their role in transforming the American Jewish community in the 1970s and 1980s by incubating queer Jewish space. For the 2021-2022 academic year, he will be a visiting professor in Jewish History at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where he completed his PhD in U.S. history in 2020. Prior to entering academic life, Drinkwater worked for 10 years as a researcher and advocate for LGBTQ inclusion and social justice in the Jewish community through the organizations Jewish Mosaic and Keshet. He is the co-editor of the book Torah Queeries: Weekly Commentaries on the Hebrew Bible (NYU Press, 2009).

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