Why Abby Stein—a transgender rabbi raised ultra-orthodox—stands up for Palestine

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Marc Steiner:

Welcome to the Marc Steiner Show here on The Real News. I’m Marc Steiner. It’s great to have you all with us. Now my guest today is Rabbi Abby Stein. She was born and grew up in Williamsburg in Brooklyn to an ultra orthodox Hasidic Jewish world to a family that lived in Israel for generations from about the age five. She knew she was a girl, but she was stuck as a 10th generation descendant of Basov, the founder of Hasidic Judaism. But in 2015, rabbi Stein came out as trans, and after being raised as a boy in Aida community, she went through an extremely difficult and powerful struggle to define herself and become who she is. She, as she says, was groomed to become a rabbi and community leader and she is, but not in the way her ultra orthodox community expected. Many ultra Orthodox Jews are anti Zionists, in part because they’re waiting for the Messiah to come to save them.

But for Rabbi Stein, it was an underpinning for her solidarity with the Palestinian people. She became an outspoken leader in the fight to end the occupation to free Palestinians and Palestine to tie the struggle of trans and queer communities to the struggle for Palestinian people. She lives the mantra of not in our name. She’s a tireless fighter to end the slaughter in Gaza and is a founding member and organizer with Rabbis for a ceasefire and she’s the author of the book Becoming Eve, my Journey from Ultra Orthodox Rabbi to Transgender Woman and welcome to the program.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Thank you, Marc. It’s really great to be here. I will say, just to start, in case you end up cutting out our pre-show part that I already love being here because we had a great conversation about the tallis—my tallis and your tallis, and that’s a great start to a conversation.

Marc Steiner:

We could just talk about the tallis and be done with it.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Well, I do feel that a tallis incorporates a lot specifically my, I’m very proud of my tallis, but let’s talk about other stuff as well.

Marc Steiner:

Yes. So there’s some things here I think that are really important for people to understand from the very top, and one has to do, and I’m going to start in a political way if you don’t mind.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Please. Life is political, specifically when you’re trans and Jewish

Marc Steiner:

Can’t get away from

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Reality. You can then you shouldn’t try to, I think in my opinion.

Marc Steiner:

I agree completely. I’ve been that way since I was a kid, so I understand, yes, but I want to talk about you as a Jewish woman and as a rabbi, as an activist. And so I really want to explore your journey as a Jewish person to stand up for Palestinian rights, which in many ways is very hard. I mean, I can remember decades back, it was very hard to do that. I mean, physical fights broke out sometimes in meetings around this. So I’m going to hear about your journey that opened you up to the very difficult subject as a Jew to say, Israel is in the wrong here and what we’re doing is wrong.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Well, here’s what I need to start just to place this for a second. So I will say over the past years I’ve been involved in this work even way before October 7th. First time I did a tour of the West Bank was back in 2017 already at the time Breaking the Silence, which are Israeli soldiers or former Israeli soldiers who are literally breaking the silence on a lot of the violations that come with occupations specifically in the West Bank. So obviously I’ve been doing this for a while, but over the past few years and I think it has gotten even more intense. So over the past 19, 20 months, I’ve had a lot of conversations with people who are trying in their own wards to deconstruct or undo the Zionist upbringing that they grow up with the way way they were taught about Israel. Usually not in a one most American Jews at least. I think that is changing a lot, but I don’t say most, A lot of American Jews didn’t necessarily grow up with anti Palestinian hatred so much. I apologize for the sirens. It is New York City.

Marc Steiner:

That’s okay

Rabbi Abby Stein:

A lot. Even people who didn’t necessarily grow up in a lot of them coming from families, which used to be, I don’t know, I haven’t seen any recent studies, but used to be the majority opinion of American Jews with dislike, quote unquote two state solution and so on. Even so, they grew up with this really utopian version of Israel, this a lot of Zionism, a lot of Israel is always right and we should never bash Israel. A lot of those ideas. There’s literally a film now called Israelism, which has a lot. I know Simone is a good friend who is the protagonist of the film, and then Aaron who was one of the producers, but also a good friend and another fellow queer Jew. So I have a lot of conversations with people around that. And one of the things that’s very interesting, because I think for the first time in my life there is suddenly something that I was told as a child that I am really happy about.

I never had to do that because I wasn’t raised Zionist quite the opposite. I was raised extremely anti-Zionist. If I go back into my ancestors and something that I guess now I can say with pride, neither one of my parents, neither any four of my great grandparents or any eight of my great great grandparents, and I can keep going though. I will say by the time I get to my great great grandparents, I don’t have 16, I have less because my family loves marrying cousins. But that’s a separate conversation. But the point being, as far as I know, I have no direct ancestors at any point that were ever Zionists and quite the opposite. Specifically a lot of people who were part of the religious anti-Zionist community, I wouldn’t even say a lot. Basically everyone who’s part of the religious anti-Zionist community in the US knows my grandfather.

That’s my father’s father’s father who was kind of the lead speaker at anti-Israel protests going back to the early 1950s. So I was raised in a religious anti-Zionist community. Now I have to say a few things, religious antis, Zionism is very different than kind of what I call social justice and but they are not unrelated, but specifically the parts that I’m so grateful for as much as I with a lot of the reasoning and a lot of the other ideas that I grew up with generally and including around Israel and Zionism. One admittedly really easy part was that I just was never Zionist. Israel was never great. Israel was always a horrible, and I was told stuff that I wouldn’t repeat to this day negative stuff about Israel and about Zionists that I wouldn’t repeat and I’m not going to repeat stuff that involved the Holocaust

Marc Steiner:

Can I ask you a question? I’m not going to ask you to tell me what it is. What do you mean you wouldn’t repeat it? I mean, what’s

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Meaning some things… like, I was told to blame Zionism for certain atrocities that I don’t want to even want to do to this day.

Things that happened to the Jewish people and things, I think people might figure out what I’m talking about. And people who know religious anti Zionists, at least the ones that I grew up with in Williamsburg could have a sense of that. But at the core, what is so important, because you asked me to talk about how I got to this journey in some ways I had a leg up. I was never indoctrinated. I think specifically after watching Israelism, I feel very comfortable saying I was never brainwashed into liking Zionism, into liking Israel in any way or form. The reasoning might’ve been different than where I am today, even though it has similarities, but I just was never there. It was a very brief second, I would say between 2012 to 2014, where as part of my rejection of what I was told growing up and part of leaving the Hasidic community, I kind of was like, okay, I guess now I have to be a Zionist, which is something that happens to a lot of people who leave an anti-Zionist religious community because such a big part of your identity.

So if you reject, you reject everything. But then as soon as I got to know what secular religion, what Zionism really is, it never worked for me. I never bought into. And I would say for me, the final breaking point of my very short attempt to be like, oh, maybe design thing is interesting, was ironically going on a birthright trip, which I feel very complicated about and I don’t think people should go on that trip, but that’s a separate conversation, which I didn’t know much at the time coming directly out of the Hasidic community. But that was kind of the end of it, kind of seeing the really unrealistic version of the land that they were given. But I will say though the core of religious anti-Zionism, there’s two main parts to it. Almost all Hasidic communities, maybe Haba notwithstanding though, even though Haba is very nationalist, they’re rather Jewish nationalists and they are Zionists, they don’t fully adhere to what we call today modern political Zionism either, but I’m not going to talk about Habad.

But outside of Habad, the vast majority of Hasidic communities are at least nominally anti-Zionist or non Zionist, and most of them don’t support the Israeli government. My government, I don’t just mean the current government, any government and Israeli government of everything. And there’s two parts to it. There’s the fact that Israel is not a religious state and Hebrew does a term for that which is called Medina, which means a state that fully follows Jewish law. We’re talking to an extreme where people break Shabbat are punished, where all the laws are basically they have an issue with Israel not being a theocracy. That is a problem that exists basically for all Hasidic and most Haredi, most ultra orthodox people across the board. But then there’s an additional part which is a belief that again, most Hasidic communities have, which is that the state or the idea of what we have been praying for the ion Zion that we have been praying for three times a day, this idea of a Jewish state of redemption of what’s called the gula that we have been waited for, this is not it.

And more importantly, they believe that that is something that will become directly from heaven as opposed to something that we will fight for. And this is actually something very interesting because in many ways when people bring up this, how can you not be Zionist and bring up this, we pray about it three times a day and bring up this consistent Jewish yearning and I’m like, are you out of your mind? This is what we’ve been waiting for. I grew up with a very exotic version of the temple, like the times when the temple existed and this yearning for a better word, I was told that when the Messiah is going to come or they have a term La Lavo and the world to come, not necessarily in heaven the way a lot of Christianity thinks about it, but just like in a world to come on earth, even like in a perfect utopia, there will be no wars, there will be no violence.

Everything that we want will grow on trees. There will be an economy that it’s very much not capitalist and so many ideals in this yearning that we have persona to come and tell me that modern Zionism and Israel, this is what we have been waiting for. It is emotionally extremely disappointing and unacceptable, but also I think it says something really bad. You think this is what we’ve been waiting for D. But that is the part where I think religious anti Zionism has something to tell any person who thinks about Z Zionism in Israel on an emotional level, but their biggest concern is religion. The biggest concern is that Jews are not allowed the very short version. Jews are not allowed to have a state until it’s given by God usually through a messiah that’s going to come riding on a donkey from heaven. I’m not sugarcoating or anything. I do not believe that there is going to be a messiah coming riding on a donkey from heaven.

Marc Steiner:

Wait, wait, wait, many of you don’t believe Messiah is coming.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

I said, I do not believe in a messiah that’s going to come riding on a donkey. I think that as a human part, I think Messiah to a lot of people throughout history for 2000 years has been a wish that was more abstract than specific. It was more this idea of an idealistic time, which you already be seen in the prophets where everyone sits in their vineyards and under their F vines and there’s no war and so on. All of those beautiful things which are beautiful ideals, but to me that’s not a belief. I think it’s a world that I want to work towards and a world that we should work towards. But again, this is another part where I think it’s very easy and people love to take religious anti Zionists and be like, they’re different. Some of it is different, but some of it is actually ideas that we can relate to it.

But I want to say another part to it. My grandmother was born in Jerusalem, raised in Jerusalem pre state, my grandmother’s family, basically all of her siblings, she has I know eight to 10 siblings, I’ll have to count, but they all live there. She comes from a family that is part of what’s called the old issue. They’re part of this core religious community that predates not just the state, they predate modern Zionism. You’re usually defined as communities that have been there since before 1880, which is when the first modern political Zionism began and the first organized what they call aliya going up to the land began. And they have a very strong connection to the land. Give you an example. My grandmother has a brother who tries never to sleep outside of Jerusalem and never to leave the holy land. And to him that means he wouldn’t even go to yah because that’s not considered a holy land.

These people who are very attached to the land have been for a very long time, but their attachment to the land to me sounds a lot more to when I talk to Palestinians and here dare attachment to the land then Zionism. And to give an example two, actually two of my grandmother’s siblings are currently judges and one of them is part of the chief kind of high court of what’s called, which is the flagship anti-Zionist institution in Jerusalem. So there are these people who have a very strong relationship to what it means to be attached to the land or what it means to have a big part of it, both as Jews for 2000 years and as people who have literally been there their entire lives while at the same time a very clear and I would say a moral clarity and opposition to any form of political Zionism and to the state. And there is a part in that that is just political. It’s not just religious. My grandmother more than once would say stuff like Zionism destroyed my country.

And I will be honest and say that every time my grandmother said that as a child, we all made fun of her and we would be like, come on Bobby, what really we did grow up the Hasidic community is unfortunately quite racist. And we’re like, yeah, really you want the Arabs to be in charge? And I’m not going to go into that whole thing. I was definitely, I was not a well-behaved child and teenager. I’m not going to pretend otherwise, but the point being, the point I’m trying to get to, and I think for me it allowed me to have both a strong relationship to what it means to be related to this land, both from a historical perspective and from a very little like my dad was born in Jerusalem. My grandmother’s great-grandmother is buried on the Mount of olives. I can go back to any point basically since the 16th century and I will have a direct ancestor that is buried somewhere either around Jerusalem or earlier they lived up north around fer.

The point is there’s this very strong connection. There’s very strong boat, religious, spiritual, and just human connection with a very strong understanding that the state of Israel is just not it. And as a result, I will say, and people always like to tell me that most religious anti Zionists outside of the Tura character, which is T character, is the kind of people that you will see showing up at a lot of pro-Palestinian protests and so on. I will say it very clearly, I do not like them. Their motivations are far from good and I have a lot of opinions about them, but outside of them and I did not grow up with them. I grew up just in general. I knew a lot of them, A lot of them live in Williamsburg, but it’s not what I was raised with. But just general anti-Zionism, it’s very easy to write it off.

That has nothing to do with kind of caring for Palestinian based anti-Zionism and it doesn’t fully because those are they religious people whose religious beliefs don’t really let them care for anyone who isn’t them, which is unrelated. I will say a lot of Hasidic people unfortunately are equal opportunity haters. They’re not necessarily racist, they’re just everyone who isn’t them in a both spiritual and human way. But we’re not going to talk about that. But there are parts of it. For example, even this religious anti-Zionist rabbinical cord that I mentioned that I have two great uncles who are judges on it and so on, and I disagree with 99% of what those people stand for and what they do. But one of the things for example that I saw after about a few weeks after October 7th, which is a letter that they released and to them because Israel they believe has religiously no right to exist.

The actions that Israel is taking like killing Palestinians is unjustifiable because who gave you the right to kill people? And that is a part that is very relatable. So I wanted to just put that out there. So for me, as much as I had to redefine and rethink a lot of my ideas and I would say my anti-Zionism and the way I approach Israel today has a lot more to do with the fact that I have gotten to know how Palestinians are treated and I’ve gotten to see really what’s going on on the ground in the West Bank in Gaza and I’ve gotten to most importantly actually make friends. I’m not talking people acquaintance, I’m talking really close friends who are Palestinian. It was definitely easier to get to that point when I never had to deconstruct Zionism. I wasn’t raised with Zionism, I never had to get rid of it, so to speak. What I will say is that for me really getting to know what’s going on on the ground it’s about has really galvanized me to fight for it. There is a world in which if Zionists love to say that it was like a land with no people for people with no land, which obviously we all know was never accurate,

But in a hypothetically if that was the case, if really if Zionism was founded on an actually actual empty land, which it wasn’t, and if the state of Israel existed on a land that really didn’t have any other occupants, which very importantly again that was never the case, it’s still very possible that I wouldn’t be a huge supporter with the way I grew up and I probably would’ve still grown up with an opposition to it, but there wouldn’t be anything pushing me to fight it. It sounds really cool, even emotional, I admit to this day, every time I go visit even now I spend a month in Palestine with rabbis for ceasefire in a lot of other groups on a tour that was organized by a Palestinian group underground and I still get emotional. I grew up only with the Hebrew alphabet speaking Yiddish and Hebrew, and it is emotional to see people who think that they have accomplished what they have yearned through for 2000 years, which again, I think it’s very sad that that’s what you were yearning for. I think we were yearning for something way better and more important, but there is a lot of emotions to it. So what really has galvanized me, what keeps me going to keep fighting is Palestinians is the plight of Palestinians, is the fact of people being kept under occupation, under siege and now genocide for so long. So that is kind of my own personal journey, which is constantly evolving

Marc Steiner:

What you concluded with at this moment. Before we jump into the other part of this conversation, I want to explore a minute because it goes to the heart. I think of the dilemma for a lot of Jewish people when it comes to Israel and Palestine, which what you described is your emotional attachment to a place, and I relate to that completely. I mean you grow up with a prayer next year in Jerusalem, it’s always in your head, even if you’re not a Zionist, it’s in your head.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

I would say I want to you mention next year in Jerusalem. There’s something very interesting that I love to tell people about it because people always try to use that against anti-Zionist Jews and I’m like, I don’t know what you’re talking about because I have been holidays in Jerusalem with my family. I’ve been both in religious context for holidays in Jerusalem and in after leaving the community, and we still say next year in Jerusalem while being in Jerusalem, which makes it very clear and obvious that the Jerusalem that exists now, that the state that exists now is not what we have ever meant when we sat next year in Jerusalem.

Marc Steiner:

I like that

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Analysis. The prayer of Hanah Ian is an anti ionist prayer because we are saying it right now and it’s said for people who live in Jerusalem and the old city and in the new city to this day as they are dear, which makes it very clear that we’re not talking about the current state of Israel. We’re not talking about current Zionism, we’re not talking about current Jerusalem, we’re talking about something different.

Marc Steiner:

I have to digression, which is not unusual for this kind conversation. But so what you just said, have you ever used that in shul in a sermon in synagogue talking

Rabbi Abby Stein:

About I have. I have, yes,

Marc Steiner:

I’m sure you have.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Yes,

Marc Steiner:

Because I’ve never really heard it expressed that way.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

I mean, it’s everything about it. It’s like every prayer, the fact that religious and even not just, I’m not talking about religious ISTs. I’m talking rated people, even religious people are not outside and religious Zionists and conservative Jews and reform Jews, everyone you say all of these prayer, I mean there are some people, very hardcore religious Zionists, usually the same people who are pushing to go up to the temple mountain and so on, but they are a tiny, tiny, they make up probably 1% of 1%. They’re very small. They maybe have changed some of the things, but for most people, I mean there’s the reform movement which had originally removed all of it because they didn’t believe in an attachment to a land, which is a whole other conversation. But people who do say those prayers say it even on the ground, they pray about it right now, which makes it very clear that they have that they know and believe that we haven’t gotten to any of this yet, that whatever this modern state is is not what we have been praying for.

Marc Steiner:

So I’m going to come back to what you just said, but I want to talk a bit about your own journey and struggle

Inside the Jewish world. Inside the Orthodox world as a young transgender woman and the pain of that struggle, but also the journey you took. It was pretty amazing. I mean for you to have done what you’ve done and to stand out and affirm who you are as a woman and stand up to the power of this super orthodox, Hasidic Jewish world and losing so much of those around you who loved you because you stood up. Describe that journey for us so people can really understand who you are and what you went through to get to the place that you are.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

How much time do you have? We

Marc Steiner:

Got about 10.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

You got about 10 minutes. You were going to say 10 minutes.

Marc Steiner:

I was going to say the thing with smart ass, but I decided not to

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Because obviously this is a long story. I wrote a book about it you did called Becoming Eve, which came out in 2019. I have a second book coming out in September and I’m working on a few other ones. My book Becoming Eve was just a play also named Becoming Eve that just ran off Broadway through the New York Theater Workshop. The point that I’m trying to get at, I’ve been telling this story for 10 years and still haven’t told everything.

Obviously there’s a lot and I think that’s the case for everyone. I think, and I want to say this, I think every human being has an interesting story. I do admit that I tell people a lot that my before and after pictures tend to be a lot more eye catching than a lot of other ones, but that is to no credit of my own. It’s just by chance of where I was born into and so on. So I want to put that out there. What was it? I want to try a very basic, let’s see, maybe I can get it down to a few minutes of what it was to grow up and the struggle around that. So I think one of the things I like to say a lot is that a lot of L-G-B-T-Q people, I think that is true for gay lesbian and bisexual pansexual people and so on.

And even more so for people who try to figure out their gender and deal with their gender. A lot of people identify a moment, an aha moment, a light switch moment, whatever you want to call it, where they’re like, oh, okay, this is not who I am. And what’s interesting to me is that I tried and I tried a lot, including in therapy, which I’m a huge fan of to sometimes I go back to was there a moment in my life where I ever internally identified or was a boy? And there the first earliest memories that I have are me thinking why does everyone think I’m a boy? Which again, everyone has their own story, but that was for me, the case. It was a struggle. People tell me a lot, oh, you must’ve been struggling with your gender. And I’m like, my sexuality took me a while to figure out exactly my gender. I never struggled with, I think people were struggling with my gender and I struggled on how to express that and how to live

With that gender, but to me, there was never a time where I was like, okay, I’m a boy. Fine. And then something happened and I’m no longer fine with that. I just was, it never made any sense to me. And there’s this conscious memory that I have when I was four of this very strong realization that, oh, everyone thinks that I’m a boy and now how do I deal with this? Because I don’t think that’s true. And there was a lot of different stages throughout my life. There’s a prayer that’s also in my book, something I wrote when I was six years old of I want to wake up as a girl growing up with this very strong religious belief that God can do everything, which is what I was told as a child. And I was like, okay, so why can’t I just be a girl?

Then at some point it involved my own, I was eight or nine years old at the time, but this idea that I can do a full body transplant, which is one of those things that I was thinking about at some point, and then all of those ideas struggling at least consciously for a good nine years. And I remember then when I was 12 and I remember the moment that it happened because that I guess was light bulb going off moment where I was just like, when you grow up in such a gender segregated community that in just the segregated community as a whole, I would say there were two segregations in the community I grew up in, I grew up in Williamsburg in New York City, but everything and everyone around me was specific. So the Hasid community as much as I can specifically for children and for teens, they keep you segregated from the outside world.

And there’s some people who go their entire lives like that. Both of my parents don’t have a single friend that isn’t part of the community. And I mean, I’m not saying there are some adults in the community that work outside the community and maybe do have friends, but at least the ideal is to just be on their own. So there’s that segregation of we are Jewish, we do talk a lot about us being Hasidic Jews, but we don’t necessarily separate ourselves from other Orthodox Jews are nots. So there’s this Jewish identity that’s very big part of who we are. And then within the community there is this really intense gender segregation. I’m talking like at every community gathering a literal wall at weddings, there is a wall, men and women.

So there’s this two parts. There’s like you are a Jew, you are a boy. And I would say for me in that moment, the closest thing that I can identify to an aha moment was when I was 12 and I remember very clearly it was the first time I got kicked out of classroom because of questions that I asked that resulted from this idea of I can no longer trust anyone because I have this very strong, supposedly I’m a boy, I’m going to an all boy school, I am in synagogue, I’m on the men’s side at weddings, I’m on the men’s side. I always belong to one side and that is 100% wrong. I never really struggled with that that much. It was just like everyone is wrong and that’s it. Why would I trust and accept anything else that I’m told around religion?

That was a really big moment because here’s what I’m going to say. By the time I left eight years later when I was 20, it wasn’t just because of my gender and sexuality. It was almost, it was a religious decision, it was a theological decision. But what put me down that kind of track of to start asking a lot of those questions was that moment. And then I remember it was in eighth grade and I asked a question about something in the Talmud that we were studying, if it’s real, basically questioning the validity of something that Talmud says, which again, I’m not going to say there are no other specific people who question it, but I will say there aren’t many 12 year olds who do. I think a lot of people who do question, which for me later ended up leading down to questioning everything, the validity of the Bible.

Does God exist as Judaism? Right? All of those questions, I think a lot of people get to that, but usually it takes a bit longer. It would’ve taken me a lot longer if I didn’t have that moment of realizing that I just can’t trust what I’m being told. I will say there’s a lot of traumatic moments. There’s a moment when I was writing my book for example, I had a vague memory of something that happened when I was four that involved me trying to take matters into my own hand, more details in the book, but we’re going to keep it PG 13 on here. And I had this memory and I remember that my mom caught me and to this day, and I’ve tried by myself, I’ve tried exposure therapy, I’ve tried talk which tried different ways of trying to uncover that memory and I start shaking physically if I try to do that, there’s a lot of trauma attached to it.

And throughout my life there was because gender plays such a strong role of who you are, it was very traumatic. My entire wedding is a blurb. I got married when I was 18, arranged marriage, and it was a blurb because I was feeling, for lack of a better word, traumatized by the fact that this is not who it’s supposed to be. I’m on the wrong side of this literal wall separating men and women. It was constantly there. But those were those from when I was 12 to 20. There were those two parts that went together. I tried to find different ways of dealing or praying or I am wearing the shirt that says Gay the pray away. I dunno if you can read that.

Marc Steiner:

It’s “Gay the pray away.”

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Yeah, it’s a twist on pray the gay away. This is gay. The pray away. I would say for a very long time I tried to pray the trans away, literally trying or just trying to figure out different ways of how can I deal with this reality? And obviously there was no way in the Hasidic community, the Hasid community is, I used to joke when I started doing my activist work that I want the Hasidic community to become transphobic and what do I mean by that? I don’t want anyone to be transphobic. But growing up in the Hasidic community, I didn’t know that trans people exist. I didn’t know that there were other trans people until I was 20. When I went on the internet for the first time, there was no conversation. No one said anything negative. No one even said anything homophobic to be honest, really, but homophobic.

Marc Steiner:

How old were you then?

Rabbi Abby Stein:

I was 20. I was married and I have a son. Yes. I was 20 when I first got on the internet. Yeah,

Marc Steiner:

So you were 20 years old before you even understood,

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Before I even have words for it before I knew there were other people like me. And I will say the closest that I got when I was 16, I got very into Kabbalah. I got very into Jewish mysticism and I was reading and specifically there’s a book called The Doors to Reincarnation, and I have that text, it’s going to be actually my book coming out in September, this actual text that talks about how sometimes there’s a mismatch between someone’s body and someone’s soul, which to me was very easy to just be like the soul is identity. It very much is the soul, is basically the kaist idea to talk about who you are beyond your flesh and blood. And that had a very positive impact on me because it was, and I think it’s part of the reason why even stayed in the community for an extra few years between 16 and 20, was the fact that I started finding some texts that started making sense to me.

I still didn’t know that there are trans people out, so it wasn’t like I knew that if I leave the community I will find more support and those texts talk about what made a bit sense to me. But other than that, I had, I didn’t know the word trans. I didn’t know there’s other people. I really objectively had no idea that it exists and a big part of the work that I’ve been doing, including sometimes making noise, which some people are like, oh, you’re just trying to make trouble. And I’m like maybe a bit. But the bigger part of it is that I want Hasidic people to know that trans people exist and that has been accomplished. Probably one of my biggest accomplishment accomplishments, I would say it out loud very clearly that I consider is the fact that Hasidic people, kids and adults right now know that trans people exist.

It comes with a lot of hate. It doesn’t come with a lot of acceptance. It’s not in any way in a positive way, but just to look on the fact that I was the first person has been raised Hasidic as far as I know, and I think I would know. I don’t think there’s any other person who has been raised Hasid who came out before I came out. There was a lot of trans people in the closet, but one who came out publicly and since there have been more than a dozen, so it’s very obviously changed something and I’m very proud of that.

Marc Steiner:

It should be.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

But the struggle in the community wasn’t as much a struggle with transphobia than a struggle for I exist.

Marc Steiner:

I mean because what you’re describing for people who don’t know it, I mean the hasta communities, the super Orthodox communities are like these isolated medieval worlds.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Yeah, well, I would say by now, not as isolated as the community leaders want because of the internet,

But still very, I would still say that I don’t know, this is I would say an educated guess, but I would imagine that about 50% of the community have no internet access whatsoever, and the other 50% have versions of a lot of people just have what they call the kosher filtered internet, and then there’s a lot of people who secretly and publicly have full internet access. I’d say as far for the community leaders, the fact that 50% do have internet access is a huge problem. They have literally, you can look that up in 2012, which was actually the first time I ever went to a stadium. The first time I was ever at a stadium was to protest the internet. I’m not kidding. Look up the city field anti internet gathering in 2012, which is almost ironic. It’s a fair nory stating of the protests, the internet. Yeah.

Marc Steiner:

So your transformation out of a deeply religious Hasidic and non Zionist world as a Jew…

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Not just “non,” an anti-Zionist world,

Marc Steiner:

Yes, anti, and your transition and the struggle you went through to transform into who you are as a woman. And when you see the struggle of Palestinians today, to me there’s kind of a thread here that ties them together.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

There is

Marc Steiner:

Because I can remember,

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Can I add some more to maybe it’s me adding words into your mind. I think for me, a big part of what I’m seeing as the struggle is the struggle to get people to listen to your struggle and to believe you.

So much of the conversation in the US, at least around trans people and so much about the conversation about Palestinians revives around people not believing the struggles and or blaming you for your struggles saying that it’s your fault you did something wrong. And that’s why I occupy that kind of like this old abuser note of, look what you made me do. The amount of time, the amount of people that I hear saying that the reason there is all these pushback against trans people coming from the person who shall not be named running this country and all of this hateful, racist, and harmful people. The amount of times they say, oh, all of this pushback comes because you asked for it because you started talking publicly about who you are because you did something wrong. And that’s why we need to discriminate against you is so similar to what the same kind of talk around Palestinians, you are occupied because you did something wrong, because you refused. That’s me saying it. It’s not exactly how they say it, but ultimately they’re saying you refuse to let your land get taken away peacefully or get split up peacefully. You refused to. The rule of this country that we have decided to support and so much is what we would call blaming the victim. And that is one of the ways where I see it so aligned. But ultimately I think the very short version to, I spent a lot of time out in college and after to study the history of empires and the history of power and imperialism generally, and I know the US is not technically an imperialist power because we don’t have a kink even though it looks like we’re about to have one.

So there’s all the way they only survive on creating very specific in and out groups and by having people behave a certain way. And in that way, both every minority, every group that dissents from the consensus is a threat. It’s why authoritarian societies are almost exclusively homophobic and transphobic because it tends to be that people who fight for their identities and fight for their own lives are not controlled that easily. To give you an example, something that hit me yesterday, I was at a big ice rally yesterday, marched for four hours, not fully squared. Then we went to the federal building all the way ended up in Washington Square Park and I was out and looking around. It was massive, thousands if not tens of thousands of people out. And I’m looking around and I tell my friend, this feels halfway like pride.

There were rainbow flags just looking around. There’s so many queer people. I would gander to say, and I don’t think it would be a lie, that maybe as much as at least a third, maybe even half of the people there were queer. And it wasn’t an L-G-B-T-Q rally in any way, a form, I mean obviously it’s attached in the homophobia and transphobia of this administration and their anti-immigrant rhetoric goes hand in hand. But this was a rally about ice and we were all there for that reason. But it ends up being so many queer people, and I don’t think that’s by chance throughout history, civil rights movements and people that movements that have fought for justice has had a lot of queer people. And the reason for that is because queer people know what it means to struggle against the government, know what it means to struggle against the status quo.

Well, and most importantly, we’re not as easily controlled. Similar to what I mentioned earlier, how in school I started questioning religion because of my identity being like, I can’t trust you. L-G-B-T-Q people and queer people have a very similar distrust of power, distrust of government, rightfully, and as a result, we’re not easily controlled. A big reason why authoritarians hate L-G-B-T-Q people is exactly that in part, sometimes it also has a religious part to it and just bigotry generally and hating of the other. And sometimes they don’t actually care about queer people. They just use queer people as a wedge issue and so on. All of those are real facts, but the reality is that we understand the struggles of minorities. We understand the struggles of the oppressed people. That’s why the fight for immigrants and the fight for Palestinians and the fight against occupation all over the world, whether it is in Palestine or in Ukraine or in Sudan or in Haiti and so many against imperial power in West Africa and so on. All of those things are intertwined both in the sense of we understand, which is something very interesting because it’s also very biblical. It’s very Jewish.

We’re told to use an example. There’s literally in the Torah when we’re told that we have to be nice to the stranger. There’s one of the commandments that is repeated the most in the Torah. The first five books of the Bible is a version of you should love the Stranger. And one of the times the reasoning given for that is, is because you understand the soul of the stranger for you strangers in Egypt. And I think that goes beyond just that one historical memory of something that let’s beyond a theater didn’t happen, which is beside the conversation, but it’s part of identity, but it’s also a general, something that is true for Jews. There is a reason why throughout history, at least since emancipation Jews were generally more liberal, more progressive. Why the bun? You have something like the bun. It’s like Jewish socialist, progressive, why

Progressive politics have always had so many Jews, everyone from Bernie Sanders to down on the ground in New York City and so on. Because we really understand these are all intertwined, not just as a moral issue when we say no one is free until everyone is free. It’s not just a moral statement, it’s a reality. So yes, we know that the same people who want to oppress Palestinians are also transphobic and homophobic are also are also sexist and misogynistic and so on. Yes, there are some people maybe who only carry some of those prejudices and not all, but as a bigger picture. They are all related. And I will dare to say that it’s also related to antisemitism

Marc Steiner:

So much there. The time we have left, I want to pick on something you said and please kind of tie some of these things together. I mean, I was thinking as you were throwing your stats out as well, that people don’t realize that 70% of all the white civil rights workers in the South were Jews.

I mean, there’s a reason those things happen. Course. So the question is, given everything you’ve just said and that reality, what does it take to touch that root of Jewish life of being Jewish to come to the understanding that we have to end the oppression of Palestinians and unite to build a different place where we all live together. I have this poster that I got in Cuba in 1968 and still sits on my wall on my study. It’s a map of the entire holy land. It’s got a Palestinian flag on one side and an Israeli flag on the other. And it says one state, two people’s, three faiths, which has kind of been my mantra since then. What does it take to turn around the division and the hatred that allows us to see what we’re seeing now inside of Israel Palestine and how do we turn the Jewish community into understanding who we are and how we have to embrace a different future?

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Well, I don’t think there’s one answer of what it takes. I do think there are a few things that can be said. I mean, first and foremost, I need to say that there are some amazing groups that are doing this work very successfully.

Those people love to talk about how we’re still a minority, how anti-Zionists or even non Zionists or even anti well anti occupation is actually probably a majority opinion, at least according to the latest pose. I think anti is a majority opinion amongst American Jews. Not talking about Israel, that’s a whole other conversation. But even the other parts, we have grown extremely fast. If the trend in the growth of percent, the percentage growth of anti-Zionist Jews or just non Zionist Jews involved with groups like JVP and if not now, and Jewish racial economic justice and so on, EAPs going the trend in percent and how fast we have grown. We’re going to be the majority of at least non-Orthodox Jews in the US fairly quickly, a lot sooner than the establishment would want to admit. The reality is that a lot of the work that has to be done is being done very successfully.

Groups like JVP and if not now, and JF Fresh have more than doubled just in the last two years and they’re growing extremely fast. The amount of Jews are becoming more and more open to something fundamental needs to change. And I’m talking beyond just, oh, the government needs to change. The majority of American Jews are Antibi B and anti-car, Israeli government. Every study shows that, again, American Jews. But to go even deeper than that, to the fundamental problems, a lot of the work that’s already being done is being done well. And those include education. Those include providing people with resources, providing people with a solid alternative, which again, I wasn’t raised like that, but there are most American Jews my age were raised with a very strong Zionism. So really to show Jewish community. And I have these conversations with people daily who are part of those communities and I see that people who are becoming more open.

So I want to say education is a very strong part, providing an alternative of a Judaism. That to me is so interesting because I grew up being told that Zionism is the antis of Judaism. That’s where I was raised being told in the Hasidic community, obviously it exists, but even on a progressive Judaism, not just a religious Judaism that is anti-Zionist, but a progressive Judaism that is anti-Zionist, that is growing extremely fast and it’s truly beautiful. And I’m not just talking beautiful on that, but I’m talking like events that I do. I’ve hosted meals for every holiday. I have been with people singing together. To use a random example, we had a group of people who wanted to celebrate Shabbat at the JVP national meeting that had over 2000 people this year. And the conversation sometimes got down to the nitty gritty of how to practice and how to observe for ourselves that had nothing to do with outsiders, just like there’s a rich Judaism.

And the final thing that I would say about them that I think would be the most helpful is the same thing that I say about L-G-B-T-Q people and about trans people. It’s sharing personal stories and actually getting to know people. Every study has shown that people who know trans people in real life actually know them as friends are way more likely, I don’t know the exact numbers, but by a long shot to be accepting and to be welcoming. And I found the same to be when it comes to Israel, when it comes to Palestine, when it comes to the occupation, when it comes to so on, people who actually know Palestinians. And I’m talking beyond just knowing, for example, in Israel, most people, the Palestinians they know are the service workers and so on, which is a whole other conversation to talk about. I’m talking really getting to know, because I know for me that was a huge change.

And it is. I constantly see it. It’s like I want to use one of my friends just because every few months someone else decides that they’re going to get me. We’re talking about the fact that I’m friends with Linda Sarsour. I don’t know if you know who she is, but someone who I got to know really well as a friend. And I keep getting, literally yesterday someone said that I support Zoran for mayor in New York because of my support for Linda. A very weird statement to make. But for me, it’s like you can’t come and tell me that she’s a hateful person because I know her. We have had real conversations, not in public, just actual conversations and so many others. You cannot tell me that all Palestinians, hey Jews, when I know dozens, if not hundreds of Palestinians, and I’ve met counts of Palestinians, who are some of the most amazing people that I know.

Marc Steiner:

Yeah, me too.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

So really I think building those bridges. And I want to say I don’t think that that’s what’s needed. Sorry, I don’t think that’s what should be needed. We shouldn’t need, we should listen to people who are being oppressed. And as I said earlier with trans people, so much of the struggle here is that people refuse to listen to us and to believe us. But if we’re asking just realistically, what I think would be very helpful is to actually build those connections. I have friends, well, I’m trying to think if I still have friends who are hardcore Zionists. I feel like most of those people either stopped talking to me or I stopped talking to them per se. But people who would still say they are vaguely supportive of Israel’s existence are supportive of versions of Zionism. Those who know Palestinians are extremely ANC occupation, extremely opposed to the war, extremely are a lot more people that we can work with. So I think that is the other big thing that we need to focus on.

Marc Steiner:

Well, I think it’s incredible how you weave together the parts of your life that are also parts of the struggle.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

They are, I want to say I didn’t even have to weave them together. They have always been related. We just need to realize it.

Marc Steiner:

To say that what I meant was that the struggle for Palestinian rights, the struggle and the oppression of Palestinians, the struggle of trans and queer people in this country and the world, and to do it while maintaining and bringing the soul of Judaism through all of that and tying it together

Rabbi Abby Stein:

And rainbow colors. But

Marc Steiner:

Yes, and you tell us so about then. So I just want to thank you so much, rabbi ab Stein for being here today. It’s been really a pleasure to talk to you and hearing your ideas and thoughts. I look forward to staying in touch and thanks for all that you’re doing.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Thank you, Marc, so much. It was an honor to talk to you and I’m looking forward to yes, to seeing you more.

Marc Steiner:

Yes.

Rabbi Abby Stein:

Thank you so much.

Marc Steiner:

Thank you. Once again, thank you to Rabbi Abby Stein for joining us today and for all the work that she does. And thanks to Cameron Granadino for running the program, our audio editor Alina Nelich, and producer Rosette Sewali for making it all work behind the scenes. And everyone here at The Real News, we’re making this show possible. Please let me know what you thought about, what you heard today, what you’d like us to cover. Just write to me at s the real news.com and I’ll get right back to you. Once again, thank you Rabbi Abby Stein for all you’ve done for being with us today. So for the crew here at The Real News, I’m Marc Steiner. Stay involved. Keep listening, and take care.