Rabbi Mike Moskowitz knows that he is not what people expect to see when they hear he’s an LGBTQ+ ally. After all, he knows that not many ultra-Orthodox-trained rabbis take on that role.
“This was not on the syllabus in yeshiva,” said Moskowitz, who said he learned in “very far right-wing yeshivas like Mir in Jerusalem, and in Lakewood, N.J.
Moskowitz will be the scholar-in-residence at Beth El Synagogue on March 13-15. Registration is available online. The topic for his weekend is “From Subjugation to Liberation: Then and Now.”
Moskowitz is now the director of scholarship and multi-faith engagement for a project of Union Theological Seminary known as the Beacon, a pro-democracy, multi-faith initiative to cultivate and amplify a religious voice around democracy and anti-Christian nationalism, anti-authoritarianism, and anti-fascism. But he became a vocal ally of LGBTQ+ community when people in his family came out.
“When I was a rabbi at Columbia University, somebody in my family came out as trans. I had another person in my close family, who came out as a lesbian,” Moskowitz said. “And when the person in my family came out as trans, I was the Rabbi of the old Broadway Synagogue in Harlem, which is the closest orthodox synagogue to Colombia, and then just started talking about it from the bimah in a way that was just kind of thinking out loud, and then that, I guess, made people comfortable enough to start coming out.
“I had students and congregants who were trans, and they had questions. Turns out that there are gender queer folks everywhere, and they found somebody who wasn’t approaching it through the lenses of homophobia or transphobia. They were religious people, and they were asking in earnest.”
When he had questions, Moskowitz did what any other rabbi would: he went to his rabbis. The answer wasn’t what he hoped.
“He said, ‘I don’t know what to tell you, because I’ve never gotten asked that question before.’ And I said: ‘But, if you, if you don’t know that, who does?’ It was like a breakdown in the system,” he said with a laugh. “For me, it was a really important moment where I felt like the right thing to do was to try to think out loud and get feedback and try to give it the best chance of being successful, but not having a tradition on it means just having to do the best we can.”
Moskowitz embarked on an effort to be curious – he spoke to anyone who would talk with him about it from faculty at Columbia’s gender studies department to Keshet, a Jewish LGBTQ organization out of Boston.
“After about three weeks of really obsessing about what this means to be trans, I got to what I think is a relatively evolved space of just knowing that I don’t know,” he said. “Like, I’m a straight cis guy, and I just don’t get most of it. And knowing that I don’t get it was actually really liberating and freeing. And then I could just listen deeply, and then offer thoughts and reflections.”
In the decade since his journey of allyship beginning, he said’s gone from rocking the boat, to tipping it.
“The edges continue to expand,” he said. “The most frequently asked question now I get from orthodox members of the LGBT+ community is really about family planning much more than ‘Can you help me come out to my parents?’ There’s obviously some more work to be done, but this is the best it’s ever been in the religious world, which is phenomenal.”
It doesn’t mean it’s always easy for him; for example, the time police in North Jersey approached him at a Pride Festival.
“I got an award for Ally of the Year, and I went to this big outdoor Pride Festival and they asked me to speak,” he said. “And there were some non-Orthodox Jews who were there who called the police because they thought I was there to protest.
“I said, ‘I’m the bearded guy in the back of the brochure.’”
The incident, while upsetting to Moskowitz, was also illustrative of a social construction of the world that he says is broken.
“it’s upsetting to me, the reality that like that people who care about the Hebrew Bible should be questioned because they care about those who are marginalized,” he said. “That somehow the Hebrew Bible doesn’t care about immigration or like the stranger or the other, and it’s bizarre.
“For me, [it] has always been the quest to be a practitioner of the wisdom. So it’s not like it’s difficult to look at the verses and find support.”
On his visit to St. Louis Park, Moskowitz hopes to speak about allyship in the context of a post-October 7 Jewish world.
“Many in the progressive world feel betrayed and abandoned by people who we’ve marched on behalf of and for and with, and, at best, they were silent, and at worst, they were vocal in opposition,” he said. “I think reclaiming allyship is a moral imperative, that it’s not meant to be something transactional, that I’ll stand up for you on the condition that you’ll stand up for me. I’m going to stand up for you because it’s the right thing to do.”