Ladin in Lineage: Through the Doors of Jewish Gendered Life at Yeshiva University's Stern College for Women

Abstract

Abstract: This article traces the crossings of religion and gender, American Orthodox and secular Judaism, teachers and students, religious educational institutions and the lives that inhabit them. Highlighting Jewishness and transness as intersecting forms of crossing, it explores periods of personal and institutional transition in the lives of Professor Joy Ladin, Yeshiva University's first openly transgender employee, and three of her former students. Experimenting methodologically with form and source, this piece combines interview with textual and theoretical analysis to link the Jewish gendered lives of its interlocutors—who emerge from different locations across the Orthodox-secular Jewish spectrum—with one another, and with larger communal and institutional forms of American Judaism they index. In doing so, this essay connects gender, religion, and education as intersecting forms of lineage, which pass through the interlocutors' and institution's historical and contemporary worlds. Activating crossing as a form of Jewish learning and queer scavenging, the piece enacts a method of Jewish institutional and embodied knowledge production that moves across lived and textual religion, articulating an alternate path through current struggles for queer/trans religious lives. This path does not opt to lose or loosen these lives from American Orthodox life and its textual discourse, but rather, it links them to both, and to one another.