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Jen: Hi! It's Jen Richler. Welcome back to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women's Archive, where gender, history, and Jewish culture meet.

For more than a quarter century, Idit Klein’s mission has been to help Jewish communities embrace and support queer Jews.

Since 2001, she has led Keshet, which is now the largest organization for LGBTQ+ Jews in America. (Keshet is the Hebrew word for rainbow.) Idit transformed Keshet from a tiny Boston-based volunteer group into a national organization that works with youth, Jewish community leaders, and educators to celebrate queer Jews and fight for LGBTQ+ equality.

Idit will be stepping down from her role as Keshet's CEO this summer. She spoke recently with JWA’s Judith Rosenbaum about her years leading Keshet, the impact of today's political climate on her work, and how much has changed for queer Jews in her lifetime.

Idit and Judith are dear friends who met at Yale in the early ‘90s. That’s where Idit first came out publicly on National Coming Out Day, a tradition that was just a few years old at the time. Many campuses still mark it, but it was particularly popular in the late '80s and early '90s, when groups for lesbian, gay, and bisexual students were first forming at campuses across the country.

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Idit: On National Coming Out Day, October 11, people would put a big mic in the middle of a campus green. And people would walk up to the mic and declare their queer identity. And… sometimes just say it, sometimes tell stories, sometimes cry, sometimes laugh.

Judith: But people didn't really use the word queer then.

Idit: No. People didn't use—no, people didn't use the word queer at all. Yeah, no, I'm being anachronistic. Thank you, historian [both laugh]. So—and people would be cheered and celebrated. So I decided it was time for me—you know, I'd come out kind of privately to people in my life, but I decided it was time for me to come out publicly.

And I remember standing, waiting to speak at the mic. And there were probably five steps that separated me from the line of people. And it felt like this enormous gulf that I really felt terrified to cross. And I just stood there. It was probably for five minutes, but it felt like five hours, looking at that space between me and that line, and contemplating how once I was in that line I could never go back and, like, that would be it.

And, you know, of course I stepped into the line and, you know, spoke at the mic and declared my proud bisexuality and was cheered, and that was important. But the moment that for sure was most significant was when I stepped into the line.

You know, on the one hand, you know, I had a largely positive experience coming out, as did most people whom I knew at Yale at the time. On the other hand, you know, when we—broadly the LGB community at Yale—would put up flyers for events, dances, whatever, you know, they were torn down all the time. You know, I heard homophobic things in my classes. There was absolutely not a norm of acceptance, never mind embrace.

And you know, in those days, most of us, when we came out to people close to us, we cried, because we were afraid of being rejected. And within the Jewish community at Yale, I knew of people who were queer, who were closeted. I didn't know of anyone who was involved in Hillel who was out. And I remember walking back from that National Coming Out Day speakout and my, kind of, soaring spirits starting to plummet a bit because I realized that I hadn't come out in the Jewish community and I needed to do that. And that felt scary.

And so I did choose a Hillel executive committee meeting to declare my identity. And, you know, and interestingly, unlike when I spoke before 100, 200 people or whatever, on the campus green and, you know, came out publicly for the first time and my voice was steady.

I don't know if you recall this, but when I came out at the executive committee, my voice was shaking the entire time.

Judith: Yeah. I don't think I'd ever heard you sound so nervous before.

Idit: Right. And, you know, and it was because, like, this is my home. These are my closest people. And if they're not gonna stand by me, then, then how will I be?

You know, and of course I had you and a bunch of, you know, other friends and I had the Hillel rabbis who were all supportive of me, you know, and there, you know, was a minority of people who were not supportive and started making noise that I shouldn't be allowed to continue to be in various leadership positions at Yale. And, of course, it was hard not to focus on those responses. Right? But that was an important beginning. And what that led to, in addition to my organizing, kind of, the first queer Jewish, you know, events on campus, it led a bunch of LGBTQ Jews—or LGB Jews—who were involved in Hillel to quietly come out to me.

And then it led—as I got involved in what was called the LGB Co-op on campus—it led a lot of Jews who were involved in queer life on campus who were not at all involved in Hillel to declare with astonishment that they couldn't believe I was active in Hillel.

Judith: Hmm.

Idit: Because they would never walk into any Hillel event because they knew that they, you know, would not be treated well.

Judith: Two questions that stem from that. One is, you said as you were coming out to the executive committee, you talked about your experience at Hillel, what it had been. Say a little bit more about what that experience had been.

Idit: Yeah, so I had a girlfriend around then, and she was one of those people who would never have stepped foot into Hillel except, you know, I made her come with me. And I was someone who was at Hillel for every Shabbat dinner and every major event.

And, you know, we walked into Shabbat dinner holding hands, and I'm sure that not every pair of eyes in the room was upon us, but that's what it felt like. And the gazes were unfriendly, and that felt awful.

And also I felt a level of outrage. Like, you know, I'm a senior, I have given to this community—like, this is my home. I can't walk in here holding my girlfriend's hand without everyone staring at me?

Judith: The other question I wanted to ask was around if you could say a little bit more about what the relationship was like between the Jewish community and the queer community and sort of the overlaps or lack of overlap. And I ask that as a presentist question, because—and we'll talk more about this later—about the moment we're speaking in, where there is...It's a time of a lot of tension between queer and Jewish communities, and it's really painful for queer Jews for that reason.

Idit: Yeah. There weren't many formal intersections. I mean, I think I was the intersection [both laugh]. And then that changed because more people stepped into the space. But initially, when I started getting involved in the LGB Co-op on campus, some told me negative experiences that they had growing up—being bullied in Hebrew school or rejected by childhood rabbis.

And so that's why they didn't go, and that's why they assumed just the Jewish community in general was not a place for them. I mean, it could very well be that there were other intersections that I was unaware of, but what I remember is people's shock and eagerness on some parts to hear that I had a largely positive experience at Hillel and that that was where I had made my home in college.

And when I proposed to Hillel and to the LGB Co-op various joint events, I mean, there was zero resistance. I mean, people were very eager to move forward. And so, those were fascinating conversations.

Of course, never did I think for a moment then that I was getting my first professional training for what I would end up doing. But it turns out that I did.

Judith: You've led Keshet through what has been a time of, obviously, major change in LGBTQ life, which also has been a time of major change for Keshet—growing from you being the sole employee with a budget of under $100,00 to now—are you at 34 employees?

Idit: 35.

Judith: 35. And a budget of more than $6,000,000. It's a lot of time to cover—[laughs] we won't go year by year—but looking back over your time at Keshet, what were some of the major inflection points in your work?

Idit: So the first inflection point was a really challenging moment for me, and that was within a few months of my officially launching us as an organization with an executive director. I realized that my community of queer Jews largely did not share my vision for creating change in Jewish life.

And the way this came about is, when I first put out the word—are you interested in creating a more inclusive Jewish community? Are you interested in working for change in Jewish life?—you know, contact me. And I started meeting people for coffee, and what would happen—and in those days, it was mostly gay- and lesbian-identified Jews with whom I met. And what would happen when I'd be seated with some, let's say, 37-year-old gay Jewish man, is within about ten seconds, it would become clear that he had very little interest in being an advocate for change in Jewish life. At least then.What he really wanted to know was, did I have a nice Jewish boy for him? [Judith laughs]

And when I'd be seated for coffee with some queer woman, sometimes she thought we were on a date, so I'd have to explain that we were not, and then she would say, "Well, do you have a nice Jewish girl for me?" [Judith laughs]

So at first, I was very irritated by this because this was not what I wanted. Thankfully, within a short while, I was able to get over myself and recognize that people were expressing a need—a need that wasn't being met in the broader Jewish community. There weren't places for people to go to find dates or friends or community.

And so I recognized, you know, sure, there probably are some people out there who would want to join me on the barricades today, but mostly, right now, people are just interested in finding community. And so that was how I supported the creation of a committee to plan what became the first LGBTQ Jewish speed-dating event in the country, called Keshet Quick Dates, held erev Christmas 2001.

In retrospect, it was a really important moment—and lesson to myself as a leader—about listening.

Idit: Another one was, we supported a student at what was then called the New Jewish High School—what today is called Gann Academy—who came to us wanting support around organizing to create a gay-straight alliance at her high school.

And her campaign led to a really transformative impact on the school as a whole. And it led us to decide to chronicle her story in a documentary film that got the name Hineini: Coming Out in a Jewish High School. And that premiered—actually, this coming November, twenty years ago.

And so when it premiered, we were still a local organization. We were, at that point, staff-wise, it was myself and one other person. It premiered to sold-out audiences at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. And then we were immediately bombarded with requests for film screenings from all over the country. And along with requests for film screenings came requests for trainings and consultation. So that was what led us to then take the time to come up with a plan for how to become a national organization.

Judith: How would you describe the changes that you’ve seen in the Jewish community around LGBTQ issues during this period of your leadership at Keshet?

Idit: When I first started building Keshet and would reach out to straight Jewish community leaders, most of them really didn’t understand—like, they literally didn’t understand what I was talking about, because they had no frame of reference for it.

And they would say things to me like, “Are there really many gay and lesbian Jews to even make up an organization?” It was like these were new words and concepts to be bringing together with the Jewish community.

And no one, no one responds that way anymore. I mean, there are still plenty of communities where there’s work to do. There are plenty of people who, I would say, have their own individual work to do. But we are, on the whole, not only no longer absent from the communal radar screen—it’s not even that we’re on the margins of the Jewish communal radar screen. You know, we’re part of the mix of what it means to be a Jew in the American Jewish community.

And that, I think, is the most profound change, when we speak about what it means to be a Jew.

Judith: When I was listening back to your last interview from 2005, I was really struck by—you gave an example of change at that point already, where you said a great sign of the progress that you’d made was that when Rabbi Dan Judson was organizing rabbis in Massachusetts in 2004 during the campaign for equal marriage, there were all these rabbis who wouldn’t sign on to the ad saying that Massachusetts rabbis support the freedom to marry. But they were calling him sort of apologetically about it. 

But for you, the fact that they felt bad about it, even though they still weren’t signing on, was a sign of great progress. Because as you said, before that, people would’ve been like, Why would I—

Idit: What does that have to do with us? 

Judith: Right, what does that have to do with us? And feel no sense of shame. So even just having the sense of shame that they couldn’t sign on was a sign of progress. But now, I think things would be in a very different place.

I think sometimes about another story you tell that’s also around the freedom to marry campaign. Well, maybe you tell the story about people standing in front—and what people can’t even remember about that now.

Idit: Sure. Back in the spring of 2004, marriage equality was legalized in Massachusetts, and there was an immediate attempt to rescind that right. And so from 2004 to 2007, Keshet and many others were fighting this attempt to pass a constitutional amendment that would’ve rescinded marriage equality.

And in those years, we from Keshet spent a lot of time standing in front of the Massachusetts State House holding a banner that said, “The Massachusetts Jewish community supports equal marriage.”

And people would regularly rush up to us and they would shout at us, “How dare you stand here with this sign? This isn’t what Jews believe.” And just—that happened every day.

And today, when I tell that story, including to people who were active in the Jewish community at that time, I have literally had to convince people that I’m telling the truth [Judith laughs], because they can’t conceive that people ever behaved that way.

But the reality is that back in 2004-ish, it was not the norm in Jewish life to support marriage equality. It was not the norm in Massachusetts. It was definitely not the norm nationally.

Today, it is a norm. It’s completely a norm in Jewish life. Not that there aren’t exceptions, but it is largely a norm to support marriage equality, and people can’t conceive of it being any different.

Even in times that feel so bleak, we know that it’s possible not just to better our society, not just to create social change—we know that it’s possible to create change that not very long ago people thought was inconceivable.

I said at the gala to the audience, I said, “How many of you have kids who are growing up in a world in which they can’t imagine everyone not being able to marry the person they love? How many of you have kids growing up in a world where, of course, there are openly trans people in their lives, of course there are LGBTQ-affirming rabbis?” And it was dark, so I couldn’t see [both laugh], but I think a lot of people raised their hands. 

Judith: Yes, that’s right.

Idit: And I—I mean, I have a ten-year-old and, you know, I know the world that he’s growing up in. And in a time in which we are experiencing not just attacks on LGBTQ rights, but vicious, mean attacks—heartless attacks on LGBTQ rights—

Judith: Existential kinds of attacks.

Idit: —existential kinds of attacks, exactly—I hold onto these lived experiences of change that felt unimaginable, that today I need to tell the story of how it happened because people accept it as a part of what they take for granted in their lives.

I feel like there’s something that’s really critical there for us to look at and hold onto—to remember that this is possible, and even in the face of threats that present dangers that seem unfathomable to battle, it reminds us that we can and we will.

Judith: Do you want to say anything about how Keshet’s programs have evolved as the landscape has changed?

Idit: Sure. So for many, many years, when asked, “How do you work with queer youth?” our response would be, “Well, we don’t work with queer youth directly. We work with the staff of synagogues and youth movements and day schools, et cetera, so that the adults who work with queer youth know how to be supportive.”

And then in winter 2012, I got two emails from two high school kids within two weeks of one another. They each basically wrote me the same email. They each said, “I can tell that the work that you’re doing today is making things better for someone like me five years from now. But what about me today?”

And so that led me to be in conversation with the then-head of the Isabella Freedman Jewish Retreat Center, David Weisberg, around planning what became the first LGBTQ Jewish Teen and Ally Shabbaton. 

And within minutes of being there with those kids and watching kid after kid, at various points, just kind of stop in their tracks and declare with this tone of wonderment, “Wow, it feels so amazing to be somewhere where I can be myself, where I can be a queer Jew.”

And today, you know, we work with—we bring together in person hundreds of kids a year. We also bring together kids online. The online work didn’t start until COVID. We discovered, sadly and very importantly, that there were kids who were showing up online who said to us, “Thank God you are finally doing something online, because I’ve been begging my parents for the last three years, four years, five years, to let me go to a Keshet Shabbaton. I don’t think they’re ever gonna let me go. But now I’m connected to other kids. And even though I’m sitting on the floor of my bedroom closet with the door closed and earbuds in and whispering for fear of my family hearing me, at least now I have this lifeline.”

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Judith: We are speaking in a post–October 7 world, which has been very hard for leaders of Jewish organizations to navigate. Can you share some of the particular challenges of leading an organization for queer Jews during this time?

Idit: Absolutely. You know, it’s nearly two years later, and yet of course it remains a very pertinent and very painful question.

Not too long after October 7, we saw that a major national LGBTQ rights organization that has been a longtime partner of ours put out a statement—as so many were and continue to do—about Israel and Gaza that, in our experience, really didn’t see the humanity of Israeli Jews. It didn’t condemn the atrocities of October 7. You, that on a lot of levels, it was a statement that, to us, was really hurtful and problematic.

And honestly, at the time, my first instinct was just not to engage, because it felt too hard. But as I said, this is an organization with whom we had a long history. And so I took a deep breath and I reached out to their CEO. And we made a plan to meet and ended up having a very long conversation in which I answered a lot of her questions about Jewish history and antisemitism and Israel, and my own story as an Israeli American.

And we just talked and talked and talked. And at the end of a lunch that went much longer than either of us had planned for, she said to me, “I learned so much. There’s so much I understand now that I didn’t understand before. And I can promise you, you will not see this language from us again.” And we have not.

Now, I can’t promise that every vulnerable, honest, searching, poignant sit-down conversation is going to lead to such a resolution—because that was a resolution. But what I can say is that, in our experience, reaching out to LGBTQ movement leaders, most of the time those conversations—when they’ve been not reaching out to attack, but reaching out to say, “Can I talk to you and share my perspective on why this is painful, or on why this doesn’t represent my perspective, or on why I have a story that I feel isn’t being treated with dignity here?”—those conversations have led the other to say, “I see it differently now.”

Judith: Right, and I think it speaks to the power of the relationships that you’ve built, because that’s what you need—the ability to sit down and have an open and trusting conversation.

Idit: Exactly.

Idit: Do you remember the story I told at the gala about Miami Pride?

Judith: Yes. I was gonna ask if you want to tell that story.

Idit: Sure. So in advance of Pride 2024, which was the first Pride post–October 7 and was in the midst of increased protests around the country—particularly on university campuses against the war—and some felt, even expressing support for Hamas in some circumstances, there were a lot of queer Jews who, for the first time in their lives, were afraid to go to Pride. And not as many of us have been in the past, in terms of being afraid of being attacked or harassed by homophobes or transphobes, but actually being afraid of our own queer community. And that was really, really awful to recognize.

And we went through this whole process internally among our senior staff of having very hard conversations in which some felt strongly we should skip Pride this year because we cannot keep our people safe. In the end, that isn’t what we decided to do. We felt like we were not going to hide.

We reached out to the seventeen Pride organizers in cities and towns where we were holding Prides. And we amazingly had one conversation after another, sharing our recommendations, in which they expressed gratitude to us and said, “We will do whatever we can to implement these recommendations and make sure that your people are safe.”

Well, one place where that showed up really dramatically was in Miami. When we showed up, we discovered that Equality Florida—the statewide LGBTQ rights organization in Florida that has been a longtime partner of ours—that they were right in front of us. And they, too, had heard in conversation with us that Jews were feeling afraid.

And so one of their senior people approached our lead Florida staff person and said, “I know that things have been rough for the Jewish community, and I have heard that your people may be feeling vulnerable. So I want you to know that if things heat up today at all—I want you to know and I want you to tell everyone in your contingent—if things heat up, please feel free at any point to merge into us, and we will surround you.”

And as you can imagine, that was this extraordinary moment of someone from outside the queer Jewish world kind of seeing the fear that some of us were experiencing and saying, “We’ve got you.”

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Judith: What are your hopes for the future? What do you hope the world looks like for LGBTQ Jews 25 years from now?

Idit: You know, certainly I pray and hope and believe that in 25years, the ways in which trans and nonbinary people have absurdly and outrageously been, kind of, put at the center of culture wars and exploited for other political purposes, that that will be a distant memory. And how extraordinary if it will be such a distant memory that it fades from memory and people cannot imagine that that was ever the case.

Judith: Kein yehi ratzon. I know you as a deeply hopeful person [both laugh], as does pretty much anyone who knows you. Where do you think that comes from?

Idit: [Sighs] I mean, it comes from what my family survived coming out of Auschwitz. Each of my grandparents found love again, including my father’s father, who was married before the war to, like, the love of his life, who was killed in Auschwitz. And he found love again. And that they were able to rebuild their lives. And so, whenever I’ve gone through hard times in my life or look kind of outside of me at hard things in the world, I think back to what they experienced. And I just feel like, Who am I not to feel hopeful?

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Jen: Idit Klein is the outgoing CEO of Keshet. Jaime Krass will soon become the new CEO. Mazal tov to them both!

Idit’s conversation with Judith Rosenbaum will be archived in JWA’s Oral History Collection at jwa.org/oralhistories. You can also hear her 2005 interview with JWA there.

And you can learn more about Keshet at keshetonline.org and on Facebook and Instagram.

Thank you for listening to Can We Talk?, the podcast of the Jewish Women’s Archive. Our team includes Nahanni Rous and Judith Rosenbaum. Our theme music is by Girls in Trouble. You also heard “Taoudella” from Blue Dot Sessions.

That’s a wrap on our spring season. We’ll be taking the summer off to catch our breath and prepare for our fall season. In the meantime, you can catch up on episodes you missed at jwa.org/canwetalk or on your favorite podcast app. You can also sign up for our newsletter at jwa.org/signup so we can stay in touch over the summer.

This is also the end of JWA’s fiscal year. If you enjoy listening to Can We Talk?, please consider making a donation to help us produce more episodes. To contribute, go to jwa.org/donate. Thanks so much for listening and for being part of the JWA community.

I’m Jen Richler. Wishing everyone a Happy Pride Month and a rejuvenating summer. We’ll talk to you in the fall.

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