Adventures in Jewish Studies

The Association for Jewish Studies Podcast

Episode 37: When Life’s a Drag: A Look into the History of Jews & Cross-Dressing

About the Episode

Every year on Purim, Jews around the world stage shpiels, or plays, that not only feature people in costumes, but cross-dressing as well. These Purim events have allowed Jews to participate in drag throughout history, and have opened the door for other traditions like cross-casting in theater.

In this episode, we’ll hear from scholars Golan Moskowitz and Naomi Seidman and former drag queen Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie about Jewish historical examples of drag, Jewish contributions to the art and culture of drag, and how Jews have used drag to explore trauma, identity, and belonging.

Transcript

Erin Phillips: Welcome to “Adventures in Jewish Studies,” the podcast of the Association for Jewish Studies. In every episode, we take you on an entertaining and intellectual journey about Jewish life, history, and culture, with the help of some of the world’s leading Jewish studies scholars. I’m one of your hosts, Erin Phillips, and today, let’s have a kiki because we’re talking about Jewish drag.

Every year on Purim, Jews around the world stage plays, also known as shpiels, that recount the story of Queen Esther saving the Jews of Ancient Persia from a genocidal plot. The staging of these plays is over the top, exuberant, and often involves gender-bending roles and costumes. Many of them easily qualify as drag: a type of performance that transcends gender and identity boundaries and is often associated with queer experiences. Drag rose to popularity particularly in the gay male community in the 1960s and 70s, growing and shifting with each subsequent decade. In 2009, the television show Rupaul’s Drag Race premiered, solidifying drag’s place in the cultural zeitgeist, even among cisgendered, heterosexual Americans. Today, drag can be found in venues from nightclubs to children’s story hours, on the stage and screen, and often in political debates. The tradition of doing drag on Purim might seem curious. The Hebrew bible prohibits cross-dressing, as do some strictly religious Jewish communities. But even Orthodox religious authorities have long made exceptions to this rule on Purim. As a result, Purim has allowed Jews to participate in drag throughout history, and has opened the door for other traditions like cross-casting in theater. Building on this flexibility, less traditional Jews have pushed the boundaries even further, participating in drag more openly – from the Yiddish theater to the Hollywood screen and beyond. In fact, many pioneers of drag have been Jewish, including Flawless Sabrina, the mother of New York’s early drag pageants in the 1960s. And since the 1990s, figures like Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie, the subject of the new documentary film, Sabbath Queen, have also used Purim as a jumping off point to blend drag and Jewish ritual. Today, celebrity queens like Sasha Velour and Pink Pancake celebrate their Jewish identity as part of their drag. In this episode, we’ll hear from scholars – and a former drag queen – about Jewish historical examples of drag, Jewish contributions to the art and culture of drag, and how Jews have used drag to explore trauma, identity, and belonging.

*Musical transition*

The term drag, as far as scholars can tell, is roughly 200 years old.

Golan Moskowitz: The word drag itself is sometimes believed to have emerged from Polari, which is a transnational language that combined Yiddish and Italian and French and working class English slang.

This is Golan Moskowitz, a fellow at the University of Michigan’s Frankel Center working on a book on Jewish American drag, as well as a core faculty member in the Stuart and Suzanne Grant Center for the American Jewish experience and an assistant professor in the Jewish Studies Department at Tulane University.

Moskowitz: And it was kind of a code between gay people, traveling entertainers and social outcasts in the 19th century. And generally, drag is something that refers to a transformative performance that's accomplished through makeup, through bodily manipulation, like body tape and padding and binding and other kinds of tools, costumes and movement and voice.

The term drag, while invented in the 18th century, was created to describe a kind of art and performance that has existed throughout history. Not all cross-dressing is drag. But Golan Moskowitz argues even more straightforward examples of gender impersonation can carry complexities that make it drag-adjacent – unintended theatricalities, performativity, or hidden queer elements. From this angle, we can find examples of different forms of drag stretching all the way back to the Hebrew Bible itself.

Moskowitz: So, Joseph transforming from one of Jacob's sons, who happens to be colorfully cloaked in his rainbow or colorful cloak, into an Egyptian courtier who wears makeup and heels. 

While the Bible tells several stories that can be read from this lens, it also appears to prohibit cross-dressing completely.

Moskowitz: In Deuteronomy, chapter 22, verse five, a woman shall not put on a man's apparel, nor shall a man wear a woman's garment. So, this is the passage that is usually cited among those who denounce drag or cross dressing.

But like any piece of Jewish law, this prohibition isn’t so simple.

Amichai Lau-Lavie: In the original biblical context, cross dressing, at least on some level, is prohibited. That is right there with all the other prohibitions on things like same-sex love and general sexual permissions.  

This is Amichai Lau-Lavie, the co-founder and spiritual leader of Lab/Shul, an activist and 38th-generation Rabbi, and, as I mentioned earlier, a pioneer of Jewish drag.

Lau-Lavie: And over the generations of readers of Bible, as our culture does, there has been many references to it. Is it about deception? Is it about idolatry? Because some kind of cross dressing, two-spirit, indigenous worship must have been part of the Canaanite and the Semitic canon from which the Hebrews and the Jews hail. So, we know there was ritual and cult context. The prohibition might refer to that. And over the generations, different rabbis say, Well, maybe it's only in the context of an actual idolatrous context. Maybe it's only forbidden in the context of pure seduction, where there is a deception there, and we're pouncing on the innocent men who must stick to their wives with sexual seductions that will confuse and delight, and yet, boundaries.

Some rabbis are adamant this passage prohibits cross-dressing entirely. But some ultimately argue that cross-dressing is allowed when its aims are benign or productive – like disguising oneself to avoid danger. Or, as Golan Moskowitz explains, celebrating the holiday of Purim.

Moskowitz: The longstanding association of drag and the holiday of Purim has its roots in the Babylonian Talmud, where Rava, one of the sages, one of the prominent voices, is writing that Jews on Purim should drink wine until they cannot tell the difference between the Jewish hero, Mordecai – which was the uncle of the protagonist, Queen Esther – the difference between Mordecai and Haman, the villain, who is aiming to destroy the Jews of Persia. And this verse, which seems to encourage drunkenness, also relates to the idea of radically transforming one's appearance, and leads to a celebration of radically altered appearance that we should not be able to tell this from that on, right, on Purim.

While Purim has always been a holiday of celebration, drunkenness, and transformation – a time for drag-like transcendence of identity boundaries – Amichai Lau-Lavie observes that the extravagance we associate with Purim today really took shape in the Middle Ages.

Lau-Lavie: Purim has also been the opportunity to explore boundaries, to go beyond boundaries, to try out a masquerade. And that's probably coming from Europe in the 14th century, according to scholars, inspired by the Venetian carnival, which is also a way for the very strict Catholic system to, like, let loose into Lent. Like, the whole carnival notion of the pauper becomes the king, and the king becomes a pauper, and the mistress becomes the master, and we flip things upside down. It’s got so many ramifications.

As the theatricality of carnivals became part of European Jewish Purim celebrations, so, too did actual theater, creating even more opportunities for the performance of drag. The first documented Purim spiel, or play, was in 15th century Germany, with the tradition quickly taking root across Europe.

Naomi Seidman: This is part of a tradition of Jewish theater associated with the whole month of Adar.

This is Naomi Seidman, the Jackman Humanities Professor at the University of Toronto, in the Department for the Study of Religion and the Centre for Diaspora and Transnational Studies. She notes that due to traditional gender roles and separations in Jewish communities, Purim shpiels of this time were performed only by men and boys.

Seidman: At least in Ashkenazic circles, yeshiva boys would put on plays and perform them in rich people's homes. And this is a kind of same sex theater where it's all boys putting on plays that are Biblical plays, often. And Biblical plays require female characters, so some of the younger, prettier boys would be girls. And this was just understood to be part of the tradition. And you know, there are some records of the rabbis going, where did this become permissible? But it continued nonetheless. And it certainly continued well into modernity and it’s still the case.

Jewish theater traditions continued to grow beyond Purim over time. In Europe, traditional communities continued to follow careful rules of gender segregation that often, ironically, facilitated cross-dressing performances – and not just for men.

Seidman: The woman who founded the Bais Yaakov schools – which are historically the biggest, continue to be the biggest school system for Orthodox girls – she herself was kind of theater crazy, wrote many plays. And these plays often, almost always, I think, had male and female characters, and she wrote them for production in her school system.. And I mean, one of the strange things about these school plays is not only that they involved girls putting on beards, which we have many, many, many photos of these girls cross dressing. As a matter of fact, one of the most popular plays in the school system was Joseph and his brothers. And I think one of the reasons why that was such a popular play is because it provided opportunities for so many girls to play boys. And we have all these stories in the press of boys cross dressing in order to sneak into the play, which was only open to girls and women. And so, you have this very queer Orthodox phenomenon, which is cross dressing boys sneaking into the audience of plays in which what they were seeing on stage was a bunch of girls dressed like boys.

As religiously observant Jews were grappling with theatrical experimentation and taboo in schools, others were pushing the boundaries even further. Pepi Litman was a gender-bending star of the Broderzingers, a 19th century Yiddish vaudeville troupe that was a precursor to the Yiddish theater. Here’s Golan Moskowitz again:

Moskowitz: In the example of Pepi Litman, who was a singer and performer who sang in Yiddish and performed to Jewish audiences, both in Europe and some have argued in New York, her performances involved embodying a Hasidic rabbi and kind of poking fun at some of the traditional patriarchal assumptions as Jews during that moment in history were acculturating and modernizing.

Just as the Broderzingers paved the way for Yiddish theater, Pepi Litman’s proto-drag paved the way for gender-bending roles and performances – especially as Jews immigrated to the United States. But while the U.S. appeared, to Jewish immigrants, as a land of seemingly boundless opportunities and greater freedom, there were limits. Gender experimentation continued to follow more subtle, less explicitly queer tropes throughout the early 20th century, such as cross-cast roles or so-called “temporary transvestite” stories. Naomi Seidman explains. 

Seidman: So, the temporary transvestite story is where somebody for some non-sexual reason, let's call it. Let's say what we would call a straight person cross dresses for some strategic reason. And what happens after they cross dress for this strategic reason is that something that looks like gay sex happens, or gay flirtation happens, and there's a kind of panic, and then there's an unmasking, and then everybody's returned to their proper heterosexual roles.

Some of the standout Jewish stars of the stage, and by the 1930s, the screen as well, became known for crosscast or temporary transvestite roles. Here’s Golan Moskowitz again:

Moskowitz: Boris and Bessie Tomaszewski and Molly Picon in the Yiddish theater – she also did Yiddish films into the 30s – they are cast as temporary transvestites or cross cast. So, they are placed in the garb of a gender not associated with them off stage, whether throughout the entire film, or as an intentional form of disguise during the film. And in some ways, again, these reinforced binaries that already exist and social structures that already exist about certain dominant categories – the need to, for example, submit to heterosexual love and marriage by the end of Picon's film Yidl Mitn Fidl in the 30s.

Brief musical segment in Yiddish from the film, Yidl Mitn Fidl.

As the 20th century progressed, the temporary transvestite and cross cast tropes popular in Yiddish theater and film also made their way into American movies. And while these stories may seem more like straightforward cross-dressing than drag, Naomi Seidman notes that these figures, much like drag artists today, transcended the boundaries of established gender roles for their time.

Seidman: Molly Picon, you know, the greatest star at the same time that Hollywood was was adoring traditionally feminine – or I would say traditionally feminine, according to the other way of understanding what women are – Jewish audiences were in love with a cross-dressing woman who was, you know, “boyish,” quote, unquote, well into her 30s and 40s and playing out a certain kind of attachment to attachment to traditional gender roles, specifically through cross dressing and critique of the European models that supposedly were so appealing and that were spreading their message through Hollywood.

The mid-20th century was a Golden Age for Hollywood as well as American and Yiddish theater. Performance culture flourished both in support and defiance of traditional European gender roles. It was amidst all these influences, in underground bars and nightclubs, that drag as we know it today was born. Performers calling themselves drag kings and queens began donning exaggerated costumes and playing with the gender and identity stereotypes that were being enacted on the stage and screen. Some drew on both subversive queer and Jewish identities to create their memorable personas.

Moskowitz: In the 40s through the 60s, Jewish American drag, or proto-drag, performers like Malvina Schwartz, who performed as Buddy Kent in drag, or sometimes Bubbles Kent, are headlining mafia-run bars in big American cities, and at a time in which, again, queerness is very much policed, this is also, you know, the era of of the Lavender Scare, and it's a time in which Jewishness is, of course, on people's minds with regard to the war.

Drag provided a crucial outlet for queer and trans people during these decades of profound stigma and hardship. By the beginning of the 1960s, drag competitions known as pageants were being held across the United States. And as the decade progressed, they became increasingly popular thanks to electric hosts and organizers like Mother Flawless Sabrina.

Moskowitz: By the 1960s the drag pageant in America became a sort of underground phenomenon, and it had grown so much by the late 1960s although it was still considered an alternative, sort of subversive place, but it had grown so much as American counter culture is growing, to attract stars like Andy Warhol to serve as guest judges at these pageants. And this is documented in a film called The Queen, which is about the, I believe, the 1967 drag pageant in New York. And these pageants were the brainchild of an Italian, Jewish American performer and entrepreneur – and activist later – named Jack Doroshow, who went by Flawless Sabrina in drag. And Sabrina was interesting. She was sometimes referred to as Mother Flawless Sabrina, she was based on this idea of a bar mitzvah Jewish mother emcee, someone who kind of took the mic at the event and loudly and confidently and charismatically ran the show, somewhat based on Jewish comedians like Belle Barth, who in the 50s and 60s were already, kind of speaking truth to power and and with some cynicism and a lot of humor, talking back to the pressures to assimilate and to erase oneself in the process of becoming American.

Like Flawless Sabrina, many queer Jews of the time used drag as a tool for activism, especially in the context of the gay liberation movement, which stretched from the 60s to the 80s.

Moskowitz: In the 1970s and 80s, Jewish drag performance also exists in the protest scene, as far as social revolutions and progressive movements. So, figures like Harvey Fierstein and Gil Block are performing in drag, not only on stages, but also out in the public sphere. Fierstein was friends with Marsha P. Johnson, the gay liberation activist and drag queen, and got involved in STAR, which stands for Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, which was a gender non-conforming organization that Johnson had co-founded with Sylvia Rivera in 1970. And there are pictures of Fierstein marching in a dress, you know, picketing with signs that say slogans like, “gays demand their rights.” This is in the 70s. And then we also have Gil Block, who performed as Sadie Sadie, the Rabbi Lady with the Sisters of the Perpetual Indulgence in San Francisco in the 80s. 

Also in the late 70s and early 80s, a collective of gay men founded the Radical Faeries, a queer group engaging in both drag and social activism that stood out for its emphasis on spirituality – an emphasis that made it highly appealing for many Jews, including a young Amichai Lau-Lavie, the Rabbi and Jewish drag queen we heard from earlier.

Lau-Lavie: I can say for myself that discovering drag was partially inspired by me being exposed to the Radical Faeries. That is a queer, unruly collective that is all over the world – queer and spiritual, embodied in Earth traditions and very new queer politics, which includes a lot of cross dressing and drag and anything really to feel one's free expression. And I encountered the fairies in the late 90s and found a nexus of both spiritual presence and ritual and reverence to mystery of whatever religious, often combined paths. 

Amichai Lau-Lavie’s experiences with the Radical Faeries would inspire him, in the late 90s, to channel his pivotal drag persona, the Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, combining Jewish ritual, religious tradition, and spirituality with the transcendence and playfulness of drag to push boundaries. 

Lau-Lavie: We were supposed to host this cabaret about, what is Purim about and Esther about. And I was asked to emcee it. I was involved in theater and stuff. And I had not really done drag before. And it just became clear to me that I'm gonna be this character. My popular belief – memory – is that a couple of vodka tonics later, which is her medicine of choice, turns out, she showed up. And I'm a writer, I'm an artist, I'm a teacher. I write things, I come up with things. I don't know whether I came up with it or she just channeled her identity. It was known that she was Hadassah gross, the Rebbetzin Hadassah gross, a renowned teacher of Jewish knowledge, a widow of six illustrious rabbis, a Holocaust survivor and a mystic.

Audio excerpt from a live performance of the Rebbetzin Haddassah Gross: I am the widow of six prominent rabbis. [Audience laughter] This is funny? Avram Gross, Yitzhak Gross, Yankele Gross, Yasef Gross, Dovid Gross and Moishe Gross. Four of them left me rings. Avram and Yitzhak – it was back in the 40s, they didn’t have much money.

For Naomi Seidman and other scholars, Hadassah and Lau-Lavie, who are the subjects of a new documentary film called Sabbath Queen, brought together decades of intertwining queer, Jewish, and theatrical histories. 

Seidman: Rebbetzin Hadassah, the character of Rebbetzin Hadassah expresses both a fantasy of the acceptance, the full acceptance by the Orthodox – suddenly the wig, right, the Orthodox wig that women wear, suddenly gets a certain kind of glamor through its association with the drag wig. And the other thing is, she embodies the acceptance by the Orthodox mother of her gay children. She's a kind of model of family and kinship ties – both queer and traditional kinship ties. You know along with her accent, she tells you that it's possible to be the bewigged grandmother or whatever and also, you know, be hanging out at a gay bar.

Audio excerpt from a live performance of the Rebbetzin Haddassah Gross: So anyway, I’m a pious Jewish woman. I’m a rebbetzin. Many of you heard about me. I travel the world. I have many celebrity students, you know, Esther, kay, who you call Madonna.

Hadassah pushed boundaries by not only upending gender roles, but being Orthodox while doing it. Her character challenged entrenched narratives of queerness and patriarchy. And she often confronted unaccepting corners of the Orthodox world directly.

Lau-Lavie: Hadassah got into trouble a year or two later, when she did the Megillah guerrilla Purim brigade. And Hadassah, with a troop of fabulous freaks, raided all the synagogues on the Upper West Side unannounced in the middle of the Purim ritual to just say, “Come and say hello, happy holidays. We're here to give wishes.” And some were hilarious, and we went in, and danced and sang and celebrated. Some were a little less welcoming.

Hadassah was adept at winning hearts and minds, even in stricter communities that continued to struggle with queerness. She appealed so deeply to Jews of all stripes in part because her humorous performances also tackled Jewish trauma. Amichai Lau-Lavie credits this experimentation with both light and dark for the broad acceptance Hadassah gained in religious spaces, including his own family.

Lau-Lavie: My father was previously interviewed in Haaretz, and they asked him – there was a cover story on Hadassah – and they asked him, like, “what do you think about the fact that your son is this drag queen?” And he said, “Hadassah has great legs.” And I read that, and I thought, okay, my job here is done. There was something about my parents being able to be there, hear her jokes, know that she's making jokes about the Holocaust – my father was a Holocaust survivor –, talk about life and death, and one of her dead husbands, who died of HIV – one of the rabbis, my lover died of HIV –, to sort of like see this mishmash of dark and light and taboo and tragedy and positivity and faith and celebrating Jewish tradition with this crazy twist for a room full of people who loved it and wanted it and felt it. They were both horrified but very moved.

Audio excerpt from a live performance of the Rebbetzin Haddassah Gross: So, Rosh Hashanah is coming up and I do many teachings around the world to get you all with your heart open. You have to look yourself in the mirror and answer yourself the question, “am I the person I want to be?” And if the answer is no, then it’s plastic surgery for you. [Audience laughter]

Amichai Lau-Lavie sees many of today’s Jewish drag stars carrying on this legacy of combining humor and the exploration of trauma.

Lau-Lavie: And nowadays, it's 2025 I am a retired drag queen, and I'm seeing so much in the field of both sophisticated, smart, political, impactful drag, which is any kind of blurring of the boundaries, and good old silly drag that happens in so many ways and so many young people of all ages who are experimenting with different ways of expressing and performing and dressing and speaking that is much, much more fluid and healthy than the very strict binaries that I grew up in. 

Jewish drag is a bigger and more diverse umbrella today than ever before. It includes DIY troupes like Turmohel and Ain’t Mitzvahavin, both based out of Boston; as well as drag personalities like Lady Sinagaga and The Empress Mizrahi. Golan Moskowitz notes popular Jewish drag performers today, like New York’s Pink Pancake, often use their performances to explore Jewish themes in complex and compelling ways.

Moskowitz: Pink Pancake had a one woman show, as it was called, that was named “Today, You Are a Man.” And Pink Pancake’s show is about revisiting their bar mitzvah, which for them, had been a traumatic experience as a queer, closeted, feminine boy expected to suddenly become a man, someone who was bullied in school for being queer. And so, in this show, Pancake lip syncs to clips of themself singing during their actual bar mitzvah, and kind of revisits this ritual and reinvents it as a time to transform into one's fully realized self, in this case, as a drag performer, as a an out queer man living in New York City, a genderqueer performer and and does so with the help of Broadway anthems, anthems from popular television like Glee and in a way that is really empowering and participatory with the audience members.

Jews have also made frequent appearances on Rupaul’s Drag Race, launching them into broader cultural stardom. Miz Cracker, the runner up of season 5, described herself using the classic trope of the Jewish American princess. And Sasha Velour, the winner of season 9 of Drag Race, has both spoken and written about how their Jewish heritage informed their drag.

Moskowitz: Sasha Velour is someone who was a Fulbright scholar in Russia studying political art before they began working as a drag queen, and their drag also is usually oriented toward community ethics. So, they began a show in Brooklyn called Nightgowns that was specifically oriented toward inviting and celebrating those less represented in mainstream drag spaces. So, drag kings, drag performers of color, trans drag performers. Sasha Velour is someone who talks about the Talmud, the ancient Jewish body of legal texts and ethical debates about how to live one's life and how to interpret scripture in Jewish communities as a text that inherently holds multiplicity, and that values and demonstrates the value of improvisational debate and a multiple way of being in the world. And this was a kind of quilt, which is a metaphor that Velour uses for their own drag, something pieced together from different inspirations and influences of drag performers of the past, of different movements in politics, in history.

It’s no surprise that Rupaul, the creator of the Drag Race television show, would feature Jewish queens like Sasha Velour. His longtime friend Michelle Visage, a Jewish woman, sits next to him on the judging panel. And his own drag was inspired by a number of Jewish influences.

Moskowitz: RuPaul also draws from some Jewish inspirations, having grown up watching Bugs Bunny, who is a sort of Jewish inflected character voiced by a Jewish performer, Mel Blanc, and considering that one of the inspirations for their drag, along with figures that RuPaul continues to reference on air, like Judge Judy Sheindlin, Barbra Streisand and others. And RuPaul’s said to have kept a Yiddish to English dictionary under their desk while filming. There's a lot of Yiddishisms that are used throughout the show. And at times, RuPaul has even worn a Jewish star, Magen David, necklace on the show, kind of expressing solidarity with Jewishness.

RuPaul may be adept at Yiddishisms, but not everyone in America is. Jewish drag performers in diaspora are often constrained by U.S. audience understandings – or lack thereof – of Jewish culture and texts, which makes their experiences radically different from those of drag performers in Israel, where a majority-Jewish society provides much more leeway to explore nuance.

Lau-Lavie: I mean, I've seen so many Israeli performers because of the elasticity and the familiarity of Hebrew, feeling much more comfortable going towards traditional sources, whether that's prayers, the Bible, Hebrew poetry. So, there is already the subversion of taking the biblical and its original in some kind of a dragged out, eroticized, perhaps, humorized – there's already a subversion in that with the language and then the choice of materials.

While Israeli drag performers are able to delve deeper into nuances of Jewish identity, they also face a different set of cultural stigmas.

Moskowitz: I think it's important to note that while in America, it's the Christian right that generally leads the religious opposition to American drag and queerness in general, in Israel, it's usually the Jewish Orthodox rabbinic establishment that opposes Israeli drag or queerness in general. So, there's that difference also.

Religious authorities have long struggled with cross-dressing and drag outside of Purim, as well as queerness in traditional Jewish society. But for Naomi Seidman, this vocal opposition to drag in Israel, the U.S., and elsewhere is a symptom of a new kind of homophobia and transphobia – one that’s indicative of a political realignment of certain segments of Orthodox Jews.

Seidman: That's not close reading of the Torah or deep attachment to traditional ways. The gayness, if you want to call it that, of traditional Jewish life, it was evident in earlier generations. And you know, people knew about it. And I heard my mother, who recently died at the age of 101, talk about how her grandfather wasn't allowed to go to yeshiva because everybody knew that there was a lot of sex in yeshivas. So, those things were known, but they weren't accompanied with the same kind of panic, I think, which seems to be, you know, the culture wars of today – which are just putting trans people's lives at risk. And the adoption of these attitudes within Orthodox society, they're skin deep and they're just about joining a Trumpian mainstream.

Naomi Seidman’s perspective speaks to the queer Jewish experiences that have made Jews and drag so interconnected throughout history. She argues that researching these connections through the lens of queer studies offers both opportunities and challenges for understanding its relationships to broader Jewish identity.

Seidman: Queer studies, I think I wrote somewhere that it's kind of the last gap of Jewish Leiden Geschichte, which is, you know, the kind of lachrymose study of Judaism. So, it positions Jews as a kind of persecuted minority. Queer people, well, certainly are, increasingly now. But this is a way, when Jews are just moving into the mainstream, moving into the middle class, upper-middle class, where association with the category of queer allowed them a measure of counterculture and a measure of, yes, we too are persecuted, that Jews have a hard time letting go of. I think the reading queerness, or Jewish queerness, not only through community, but also through power, the power to create cultural conversations and acknowledging the power that we have.

Drag, through its history of upending norms, has proven its cultural power. Jewish drag performers and activists have brought about real social and political change, from the early 20th century to today. Amichai Lau-Lavie expresses the power and potential of studying this art form and history, quoting Saul Lieberman, head of the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York.

Amichai Lau-Lavie: “Nonsense is nonsense, but the history of nonsense is scholarship.” You can almost hear Lieberman saying it in Yiddish – “narishkeyt ist narishkeyt.” And I think many people think that drag is narishkeyt. It's nonsense, but yes, it's no sense. It's making sense of things in a new way. I'm sure scholars of the 21st century – as it is unfolding in its horror and innovation, redefining who we are gender wise, politics wise, AI wise, climate wise – will find a rich, rich reservoir of information in what drag is to the fast evolving human identity and Jewish identity.

“Adventures in Jewish Studies” is made possible with generous support from The Salo W. and Jeannette M. Baron Foundation and from the Diane and Guilford Glazer Foundation. The executive producer of the podcast is Warren Hoffman. I’m the lead producer for this episode.

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