More in ‘gay community’

Attention Law & Order: if you’re looking for strange, ripped-from-the-headlines cases, you may want to call Shin Bet. Three months ago, the Israeli security agency arrested American-born settler Jack Teitel for allegedly murdering two Palestinians and detonating numerous makeshift bombs that targeted intellectuals, gay-rights activists, and police officers. Teitel was quick to confess many of ...

It was Saturday morning, and my girlfriend and I woke up in Tel Aviv. I’m here for a month from London, engaged in an ongoing flirtation with the place where I think I want to live. Poppy is here for a week, skeptical, but with an avowedly open mind. All week I have been propagandizing her about the city. Schlepping her hither and thither, wheeling her into cafes and out again, waiting, and hoping for the love to take hold. Look! The world’s first secular Jewish city! 100 years old! I listen to myself and realise I sound like some kind of publicity instrument of the municipality. But it’s genuine, I feel it—that beauty flowers everywhere here. I want her to feel it herself, that thing, whatever it is. Not Zionism, necessarily. But Tel Aviv-ism. It’s a bubble, she says. How can people live like this, not engaging? What she sees is a city of consumers—dancing, eating, hooking up, ignoring. I see that too, but feel happy: to me it’s just a city of people living their lives.

For Gay Pride Shabbat, which begins this evening at sundown, two of the most influential gay synagogues in the country will be using new prayer books, each of which, the congregations’ rabbis believe, will revolutionize the liturgical landscape.