Queer Healing: AIDS, Gay Synagogues, Lesbian Feminists, and the Jewish Healing Movement

• In Event: Reframing Normative Judaism: Queer Jewish Ritual in the United States

Abstract

The contemporary Jewish healing movement, often described as emerging in the early 1990s as one of the central innovations of Jewish feminism, has less well-known roots among Jewish lesbian and gay activists in the 1980s. In particular, in the mid-1980s, gay and lesbian synagogues used healing services to comfort their own communities ravaged by AIDS. In this paper, I trace the origins of several components of the contemporary wave of Jewish healing services to their incubation in gay and lesbian synagogues and grassroots lesbian feminist networks. I also re-center the engagement with AIDS at the heart of Debbie Friedman's now ubiquitous Mi Shebeirach prayer for healing, and the context of AIDS and gay-male trauma behind the founding of one of the healing movement's most well-known organizations. Recovering these forgotten histories allows us to understand gay and lesbian synagogues, and gay and lesbian Jewish leaders from the 1980s and early 1990s, not as marginal figures accommodated by an empathetic Jewish "mainstream," but rather as actors actively and successfully re-imagining and re-inventing liberal American Judaism. Gay and lesbian synagogues in the U.S. have been grassroots centers of spiritual innovation, fostering revisionings of normative Judaism. Because of American Judaism's non-hierarchical and decentralized—but deeply networked—communal and denominational structures, gay and lesbian synagogues sparked new rituals and liturgy that have been adopted broadly within American Judaism. Gay and lesbian synagogues have thus helped reshape the relationship to gender, sexuality, identity, and the body among American Jews. This paper corrects an imbalance in our understanding of both the Jewish healing movement and gay and lesbian synagogues, not by decentering the role of Jewish feminist activists, justly celebrated for their contributions, but by attending to some of the lesser-known moments and actors involved in the creation of one of American Judaism's most dynamic and widely-disseminated innovations.

Author

• Gregg Drinkwater, University of Colorado Boulder