The most popular queer-themed event at the conference, next to the queer Jewish wedding, was Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross’s The Rebbetzin’s Tisch, which combined camp with kiruv (religious outreach). Dressed in a platinum blond wig and a loud sequined woman’s jacket, Amichai Lau-Lavie gave an extremely funny, partially improvised performance as the flamboyantly frum six-times-widowed Jewish matron, Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross, who talked frankly about her PSS, or pre-shabbos stress, which thankfully never interfered with her love of the “shabbos-dick.” Gross/Lau-Lavie's marriage of Jewish teachings (e.g. about the importance emptying oneself out to allow the soul of Shabbos to come in) and camp showed, for one magical moment, how queerness might transform Judaism into a religion that welcomes otherness instead of shunning it, all the while remaining rooted in tradition without sacrificing the best aspects of queer culture. The tisch was both fun (for gay and straight Jews alike) and combined, in Susan Sontag’s words, “Jewish moral seriousness and homosexual aestheticism and irony.” Consider Gross in light of what Sontag says in Notes on Camp:

Camp is a vision of the world in terms of style—but a particular kind of style. It is the love of the exaggerated, the “off,” of things being- what-they-are-not. . . . To camp is a mode of seduction—one which employs flamboyant mannerisms susceptible of a double interpretation.

This kind of doubleness is a much more fertile form of cultural reappropriation than the tired dichotomies of "secular Jew" and "cultural Jew." While Jews certainly have a right to use such terms to self-identify, they unfortunately build and perpetuate an unnecessary schism between the rabbinical Judaism that, despite its warts, successfully sustained Jewish life for 2000 years and the “New Jewish Culture” of today. This paints the Jewish religious heritage in a monolithic light, and renders feminism, gay rights, peace activism, socialism or social democracy, environmental justice, and artistic freedom as separate, foreign entities to traditional Judaism.

Gross's play with the boundaries of inside/outside, permitted/forbidden, even male/female, is a much more useful form of a bridge, and serves to link the new “New Jewish culture” with the old new one. In the tradition of I.B. Singer, Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross preserves the finer aspects of Judaism and connects them with contemporary egalitarian ideals, not by a marriage of convenience but through camp, including both irony and sincerity in her shtick. As Singer had, Gross/Lau Lavie has extensive knowledge of and reverence for traditional Jewish works, as well as for modern secular philosophies. Like Singer was, Lau Lavie is both an insider (as part of a famous Israeli rabbinic family) and outsider (as, essentially, a drag queen performance artist). And whereas Gross uses performance, Singer used literature to write about the perceived schism, and to reconcile the two.

In his lovely story Grandfather and Grandson, an old Hasidic man considers the actions of his secular, communist grandson, Fulie, who has just been killed by police. In this one short paragraph, oneness in the spirit of Shema Yisrael shines from the page and weaves together two seemingly disparate worlds:

Reb Mordecai Meir was thinking about Fulie. His intentions were good. He wanted to help the poor. Perhaps that was his salvation. In Heaven everything is judged by intention. Maybe his soul is already cleansed.

[1]       [2]       3 Image: Hadassah Gross

Mordecai Drache is a freelance writer based in Toronto.

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