Gay pride 2015: Discovering my queer Zionism

As a Diaspora Jew, I had thought of Israel as a museum-like place, meaningful but not pulsing. Then I saw the rainbow flag across from my Tel Aviv hotel.

Brian Schaefer
Published 15:26 11.06.15
Years ago, during a family trip to Israel, I remember arriving at our seaside Tel Aviv hotel before the city was awake. I had taken a red-eye from Los Angeles and was as bleary as the sky. There was a rainbow flag hanging across the street, limp in the morning stillness, and it struck me as both entirely out of place and yet natural and welcoming. It surprised and thrilled me. I was 25 at the time, and had been out for several years, but the image was startling because of how swiftly and significantly it altered my perception of Israel.


As a Diaspora Jew growing up in California, I thought of Israel as a museum filled mostly with antiquities. It was a place you inherently respected, and knew you were supposed to visit – a meaningful but not a pulsing place. Then I spent two weeks there one summer in high school, during which I bought a Coca-Cola T-shirt in Hebrew, had an awkward fling with a girl named Lindsay and developed a serious crush on a boy named Matt. In that way, Israel played a small role in my blossoming self-awareness, and I started to think of the country differently: a place where you might discover new parts of yourself. But I also assumed exploring one’s sexuality wasn’t included; for Diaspora Jews, Israel is often placed on too sacred a pedestal to accommodate feelings that then felt so profane.

I had intended to study abroad in Jerusalem, but the second intifada foiled my plans. So it was eight years before I next returned to Israel to find those rainbow flags heralding the annual Tel Aviv pride parade. I didn’t get to participate in the festivities that year – our itinerary took us to some ruins in the north instead – but the image was enough to make me feel as if the country could recognize, and even celebrate, that aspect of my identity.

In the following years, I returned regularly – for a cousin’s wedding, for work, because I needed my fix. Gay bars became a kind of secret portal to penetrate the social scene and make Israeli friends. In 2010 I received a one-year fellowship and moved to Tel Aviv. When the program ended, I made aliyah. I did so because Israel inspired and challenged me, and because it allowed me to fully express every part of myself: my curiosity and my creativity, my adventurousness and my ambition, my spirituality and my sexuality.

http://www.haaretz.com/opinion/.premium-1.660356