Anyone in Seattle and want to be friends?? It’s been hard finding queer Jewish friends here so giving Reddit a try. I’m 34f, I work in HR, I like working out, kayaking/hiking, watching women’s sports, hanging out with my cats, I’m a yapper, and my mom thinks I’m funny.

Let’s be friends 🌈

How would you describe your practice/engagement/particpation in Judaism? I feel like, as I get older and settle down with a partner, I want to return more to my family's Conservative roots.

I went to this fantastic book talk about LGBTQ Jewish Holocaust history with Dr. Anna Hájková and the Museum of Jewish Heritage a few weeks ago. One of the first stories was from the founder of the Lesbian Herstory Archives, Joan Nestle (born in 1940 and still kicking!). One evening as she was beginning the project, a group of women at her kitchen table looked around and realized that not only were they all lesbians and all middle-aged, but they were all Jewish! One of the women was not only Jewish, but a survivor of the Holocaust and then spoke about having read The Well of Loneliness back in Poland before the war, and how that book (one of the first books with a sort-of-happy ending for its queer characters) and the drive to have a relationship like that kept her going through the concentration camps. Queer love, the hope and need for it, helped save her life.

I think this was an excellent quote to start off with. Even though that specific survivor’s identity has been lost to history, it shows not only a poignant overlap between LGBTQ and Jewish people but also gives some additional background on a queer leader. Joan Nestle wasn’t just any lesbian - she was a major community anchor, an archivist whose work has helped countless lesbians and other queer people find a link to their history.

After some Googling, I’ve found that it was around this time, in the 70’s and 80’s (AIDS crisis era) where some mainstream Jewish groups were also rapidly advancing on LGBTQ rights - a Jewish women’s group called for decriminalization of homosexuality in 1965 and two major Reform Jewish organizations called for human rights for homosexuals in 1977 (though it wasn’t until 2000 that “the Central Conference of American Rabbis made history by becoming the first major group of North American clergy, as an organization, to give its support to those in its ranks choosing to perform same-gender ceremonies”.

It’s kind of dizzying how recent all of this progress is. Though of course, queer history itself is far older. That’s starting to be recognized more now, as is intersectionality between queer and Jewish people. For years, Holocaust historians focused on Jewish victims of the Holocaust and LGBTQ victims of the Holocaust as separate groups. People who were persecuted and murdered for being Jewish were sometimes also queer, but this was largely overlooked, perhaps out of a desire to avoid attaching further stigma to Jewish people during years when there was ferocious backlash against increased queer visibility.

Several of Hájková’s sources were survivor memoirs that I now want to look up in addition to People Without History Are Dust itself. She also tried to end on as hopeful a note as possible. Obviously, a lot of the people she profiled were murdered by the Nazis for being Jewish, but she sought out their descendants and families wherever possible and was able to share some stories of connecting with them through history, senselessly violent as it was.

I definitely want to get the book now and the talk itself is on the museum’s YouTube for anyone else who wants to check it out.

Shalom everyone! 👋
I’m a solo indie developer based in Europe (Vienna), and I wanted to share a project that comes from a very personal place.
Originally, I started building this app because I always found it incredibly difficult to find welcoming, safe spaces whenever I traveled to a new city. But along the way, I realized I was stuck in my own little MLM (men-loving-men) bubble. Shortly after, my nephew came out as non-binary. It really hit me—how difficult must it be for them to navigate the world, find their people, and stay safe?
I wanted to build something better. A platform that genuinely respects its users and helps them find community, not just a party.
🗺️** How it works (The Mood Concept)
**Traditional directories only let you search by category (like "bar" or "restaurant"), which doesn't tell you the vibe. Instead, this app is organized entirely by mood, allowing you to find exactly what you need at that moment:
** ❤️ Support: For finding grassroots organizations, safe community centers, and places offering real solidarity.
** *🍃 *Reflective: Perfect for finding quiet, sober-friendly spaces, queer-owned bookstores, art galleries, and cultural spots.
** 💬 **Chatty: For cozy cafes and social spaces to meet and talk with people.
** 🖐️ Makers: Highlighting creative workshops, local artists, and community projects.
** *⚡ *Physical & 😈 Seeking: For sports clubs, active meetups, or high-energy nightlife.
🔒 Built with Respect:
No creepy tracking: No ad trackers, no selling of your data, and no social media noise. Your privacy is fully respected.
100% Free: No paywalls. I am a solo developer keeping this completely free for the community.
All-Inclusive: The app is non-discriminatory. Grassroots community groups, cultural spaces, and public organizations are treated with the exact same weight as commercial venues.
Right now, the app is in an early iOS public beta phase. I’m actively mapping out major European hubs—Vienna, Berlin, Amsterdam, Milan, and Munich are already live, and I am working hard to make sure local community-specific events and safe spaces are fully represented.
🧪 How you can help:
If you are on iOS and want to help me test the interface, check out the mood filters, or suggest local safe spaces/organizations that absolutely need to be on the map, I would be incredibly grateful!
** 📱 **TestFlight Public Link: https://testflight.apple.com/join/tHGbxCdx
** **(Note: You just need Apple’s free TestFlight app installed on your iPhone to join!)

🇮🇱*** Israel Mapping — Where should we go next***?

Although I am currently focusing on European hubs, I would love to expand and map the spaces that matter most to you.

Which cities in Israel would you like to see mapped first? Whether it’s finding the best spots in Tel Aviv, safe community spaces in Jerusalem, or grassroots organizations in Haifa, let me know in the comments! I want to make sure I’m building this out where the community actually needs it most.

Thank you so much for reading and for supporting a solo developer trying to build something safe for the community. 🩷

How escaping Israel through Jordan changed my understanding of Pride,
by Michael Valdes, Unpacked, 2026-06-30.

I went to Israel for Pride. Days later, war forced me to flee through Jordan, changing the way I think about freedom, safety, and identity.

So I’m not jewish, I’m actually atheist and ex muslim (thankfully) and I’m queer (asexual) and I wanted to know more about queer people who support Israel or at least who don’t support Palestine since most of the queer community supports Palestine for some reason, which I find really strange when gay people in Palestine literally get killed and I heard some people say that “in Israel gay marriage isn’t legal” and I’m like you can’t compare a country where gay marriage isn’t legal and a country that criminalizes being gay, at least in Israel there’s actually pride parade and stuff, I just find the queers for Palestine thing so disturbing

Hello all, I hope I'm not doing this wrong, I'm brand new to Reddit. I was wondering if anyone here knows if the Jewish DnD group Dreidels and Dragons is still active? Please let me know if you have any idea, I'd really like to join if it is.

For this bi-weekly post, we shift focus to create a space for folks to talk, even if the subject is not specifically LGBTQ/Jewish-focused. As a space made up primarily of LGBTQ+ Jews, we hope this will be a good place to find and provide support with all that's going on in the world right now.

Please note: Our quality standards and expectations of civility are still in place, and this isn't a thread for name-calling or insults. This is a place to process feelings and be in community with each other and share what's on your mind.

Shabbat shalom!

My partner and I are planning a wedding very soon, and we are looking for someone to officiate. We are both Jewish women, not affiliated with any particular community now, but we both grew up very religious in the Chabad-Lubavitch community and then became OTD but are still very Jewish. We would love to incorporate some traditions from our former community's weddings, but we're not very particular about whether the officiant is conservative, reform, or something else. The wedding will be in Queens.

Do you know of anyone who would be interested in officiating? We don't have a lot of money, but we're happy to pay or make a donation to a congregation. We would like a rabbi, but it doesn't have to be. Thanks in advance for your help!

im not Israeli, but I have many Israeli friends. Unfortunately, extremism exists in every religion. I have friends who support the kahane/kahanism, and I don’t agree with them, but Ive never distanced myself from them either. I’m afraid to repost or share anything that might reveal my sexual orientation because I’m worried they might see it and pull away from me. In a way, that makes me feel that, unfortunately, we’re not as evolved as a people as we’d like to believe

She was so excited to see us and honestly it made it all worth it

Definitely received some baffled looks, but one lady from the Kabbalah center gave me a mini Zohar, that is probably what protected me.

A tale of two marches: LGBTQ Jews face cheers and heckles at NYC Pride,
by author, NY Jewish Week, 2026-06-29.

Dillon Perez was both heckled and embraced for being Jewish as he waved a large rainbow flag with a Star of David at New York City’s Pride March on Sunday.

Marching earlier in the day with “Jew York Pride,” Perez was greeted with cheers and cries of “Jewish pride” from spectators. But hours later, after joining a second Jewish contingent hosted by the liberal pro-Israel group Zioness, Perez endured booing and spectators shouting “free Palestine, f–ck Israel.”

Shavua tov, khaverim,

Are there any other Toronto/GTA Jews just…not feeling like engaging with/cheering on (let alone marching in) the main Pride parade today after years of hostility. Two years ago, Pride decided to tell everyone to go home when they held up the parade, rather than let the Jews - who they’d already placed at the end of the line - march.

So I am just not feeling it. Still, I kinda do wanna feel a bit of that energy and excitement of queer folks taking up space, ya know?

Are there any Jewish queer *NOT antizionist* meet ups happening today here in Toronto/the GTA?

Happy Pride, le’kulam!

For years, Jewish activists tried to get the NYC Dyke March to accept Zionists. Now, they’re moving on.
by Hannah Feuer, Forward, 2026-06-26.

Tens of thousands of queer women, nonbinary and trans people are expected to take to the streets of Manhattan on Saturday to celebrate the women who fought for their right to celebrate safely and to declare equal rights for all. Some will also be there to condemn the state of Israel, as organizers of the renowned Dyke March insist for the second year in a row that anti-Zionism has become a core value of the event.

But the bitter internal fight that shift sparked last year has vanished, along with many of the march’s longtime Jewish participants. Many will attend a separate event on Saturday hosted by Shalom, Dykes, a group created in 2024 by former Dyke March participants who have been shut out of the celebration.

“There has been an exodus,” said Nate Shalev, who spent a decade on the march’s organizing committee. Shalev stepped down when the organizers turned on them and other Jewish supporters of Israel after the Oct. 7 attacks. “Anyone who has dissented, anyone who has any sort of connection to Israel, anyone who is quote unquote not a good Jew.”

An earlier report, written by Nora Berman, and published in Forward on 2025-05-17, is also worth reading: ‘How the Oct. 7 aftermath splintered the New York Dyke March’.

1200 words. In full below, or also readable in full here.

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Of course, each child is a blessing – go forth and multiply – but who knew so many blessings could fall on one household, and that they should be so very loud?

Velvel should be grateful really, he knows – each child that blesses Freyda and Toiba is another distraction for his mother, keeping her too busy to worry about if Velvel is going to marry any time soon, about pushing a suitable wife on him, that he should do his duty and supply her with grandchildren as well. Without his mother’s focus on the matter, it is a little easier for him to quietly sidestep that particular mitzvah and its attendant expectations, to go relatively unnoticed.

A bachelor, yes, and perhaps even a prospect for those who would have their daughters married off to a fellow like him – on the fatter side, quiet and unassuming, who lays floors for his work and quite enjoys it, and who attends a certain discrete men’s bathhouse far more often than a wife would accept.

His hands in his pockets to keep them somewhat insulated from the biting chill on the air – not that it does so much to save them – Velvel’s fingers twitch, his thumb touching against the somewhat rumpled carton of cigarettes nestled against his palm. He only allows himself one per day, and ordinarily he goes without on the Sabbath, nearly down to the end of the pack, but his ears are ringing still from the sound of two dozen little children laughing and playing with one another, and he craves the peace of mind the rush of nicotine will give him.

Eyes alighting on a stranger, he lets his mouth move before he can stop himself and let the promise of relief pass him by.

“Excuse me,” he says, and the stranger, ahead of him on the sidewalk, turns to look at him.

Velvel had thought him an appropriate prospect by the tightness of his trousers and his unadorned head, but now he is struck dumb, his tongue frozen in the bed of his mouth by more than the cold. This fellow is taller than Velvel by nearly a head, lanky with skinny arms and legs, but his face is beautiful: his dark eyes glitter in the early evening light, and the cold has put a little redness into his cheeks and his plump lips. These and his other fine features – rounded cheekbones, a chiselled nose with a natural arrow formed by its tip and nostrils, curving eyebrows – are framed by loosely formed dark curls that bounce with his breaths and are tousled by the breeze.

He wears a gold ring through one ear, and Velvel stares at it a moment, the better to keep his gaze from roving down the length of the stranger’s body, which is almost as enticingly proportioned as his handsome face: square shoulders, a plump arse despite his narrow frame, a slender neck. Under an open slate grey coat and tucked into the black skinny trousers, which are tucked into black boots too shiny and unscuffed to actually be work boots, he only wears a black t-shirt, with a scarf tied loosely about his neck.

Velvel thinks for a moment he must be very cold, wearing so little, and then he knows that is cold, because he can see one of the stranger’s nipples through the fabric of the shirt, hard and peaked in response to the chill.

“Yes?” the stranger presses him gently.

“Sorry,” Velvel mumbles, eyes going from where they had wandered downward (skinny jeans don’t reveal so much about the groin, what with the relative stiffness of the denim; skinny trousers like this, made of tailored cloth, show… more) and back up to the stranger’s face. “I— It’s the Sabbath: I cannot make fire.

As the stranger’s eyebrows slightly raise and his head tilts slightly to the side, Velvel pulls out his rumpled box of cigarettes and holds it outwards demonstratively.

“Please, could you possibly…?”

The light of recognition flickers in the other man’s eyes. They’re a very pleasant hazel, green-grey flecked through the pale brown.

“Of course,” the stranger says, and then leans in, a secretive smile pulling at his lips, and adds, “if you don’t mind me bumming one.”

“Yes,” Velvel says. “Please.”

He opens the carton, and the stranger’s face falls. “You only have two left,” he says. There’s a moue on his lips now, his expression rather stricken, as though he cannot conceive of doing something so awful to Velvel as to deprive him of his carton’s last cigarette. So expressive is he: is it any wonder that a man’s mind should wander to where else he might be as expressive as this, how his tone might change or shift in one circumstance or another?

“Please,” Velvel repeats quickly, his mouth dry, taking one and offering the stranger the carton, and after a moment’s hesitation, the stranger does take it. Squeezing the carton flat, Velvel stuffs it into his other pocket, but before he can exchange it for his own lighter, he sees that the stranger has produced his own.

It’s rather a nice one, a refillable golden one that shines in the dying light, kept to a similar shining polish as the ring through his ear. Velvel puts out his cigarette, held loosely between two fingers with his thumb holding it steady, and the stranger bends down as if in a bow, and with the butt of the cigarette against his lips, he touches its tip to the tip of Velvel’s own.

Velvel stares, his mouth slightly open, as light from the flame flares between them, sees it flicker to light both their cigarettes at once, taking on twin glows. Would that he were a braver man, brave enough to lean in in a mock-bow like the stranger is, their mouths connected by the two tobacco links, an indirect kiss.

Standing up straight, the stranger says smoothly, “Ich hab dos gedarft – a dank.”

Velvel stares at him, the cigarette dangling loosely from his fingers and his jaw dropping a little further open – he speaks Yiddish easily, fluently. It’s his first language, Velvel knows immediately, as sure as it is Velvel’s own, and he feels awful, all of a sudden, feels horrendously guilty, that he assumed this handsome creature was just a passing goy, that he’s enticed him to—

“Gut Shabbos, khaver,” the stranger says pleasantly, and winks, he winks, before turning away once again and going on his way, Velvel’s proffered cigarette dangling from his lips.

“Gut Shabbos,” Velvel mumbles back, rooted to the spot and staring helplessly after the stranger as he disappears from view.

A little ash drops from the head of the burning cigarette and drops onto the back of his hand, and he absently wipes it away before he brings the cigarette up to his mouth and takes a drag. The relief settles over him, tension melting from his shoulders as he inhales and then blows out smoke.

He’s smiling, he realises, and with his other hand he touches his lips, feeling the curve of them, the natural joy that takes over his expression, the euphoria of an evening cigarette entangled with the joy that comes with a friendly smile and a wink from a handsome man.

What was that he was thinking before?

Something about… blessings?

Hi! I just finished reading when the angels left the old county & the forbidden book by sacha lamb, and the city beautiful by aden polydoros and I was wondering if there are any other books with that vibe anyone can recommend??

Doesn’t need to be fantasy, i’m just obsesseddd with queer jewish historical fiction now.

I might need to write one if not…

I’d also be happy to read contemporary jewish books if anyone has one they really liked. I recently read kissing girls on shabbat by sara glass which was insane too.

Thanks in advance :)

Gen X bisexual reform childfree cisgender woman here, wanting to show a lot of love for the community. You belong in queer spaces, and you deserve to be fully accepted for exactly who you are. It's rough out there right now. Big hugs.

I recently moved to NYC and I have been wanting to go to a LGBT bar for the first time to meet people and have fun but I wear my Magen David everyday and refuse to hide it. I am also ver obviously Jewish even without it. I have heard stories of LGBT Jews being kicked out of LGBT bars or at least being made extremely uncomfortable in them. and it has been making me nervous.

I was wondering if anyone knows of any LGBT bars in NYC that are safe for Jews?

Thank you!

Edit: Thank you all for your answers! I am definitely new to a bunch of this so it’s so wonderful hearing from so many! I am very much a Lesbian so I guess it is a bit different from the Gay men world.

Hello! As the title says, I'm working on a short story. I would like to ask some questions if thats ok?

One of my main characters is Jewish, gay and from a long line of military veterans. For context, I'm a trans man, I'm AroAce, I grew up Christian, and I'm a veteran.

The character feels pressure to be straight and to serve in the military. He is also from a mixed faith family. I can write from a Christian and veteran perspective easily, along with the pressure to be straight. I don't know what its like to be Jewish or what it may be like living at that intersection.

Additionally, MC will find out about a great grandpa who served in WWII. The g grandpa is suspected to have been in love with another man during the war. It will be based on some old letters. It will make MC feel less alone. He'll find out later from another source that it was true. This side of the family is Jewish. MC is named after this grandpa.

Given the time frame, the subject matter and that I'm not Jewish, I don't want to come off offensive. I do want to give as accurate a portrayal as possible. MC is an adult and not practicing, if that helps.

Any feedback is appreciated.

The Jerusalem Post has an article about an attempt to build a community for LGBTQ+ olim at https://www.jpost.com/aliyah/article-899879.

Happy pride!🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️

Remember to love all of yourself! Your sexuality, gender, and Jewishness!
Sporting my Magen David and my tattoo to show off my pride for my Judaism!
As a bi (maybe enby/a-gender) androgynous Jew I wish all a happy pride month! 🏳️‍🌈🏳️‍⚧️✡️