Transgender scholar Joy Ladin examines gender and Torah at Dor Hadash event
Joy Ladin was the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish institution.
Joy Ladin, a poet, creative non-fiction writer and nationally recognized thought leader on gender and Jewish identity, will be the featured speaker at a brunch sponsored by Congregation Dor Hadash on Sunday, March 30, at Rodef Shalom in Oakland.
A prolific author whose genre-defying “The Book of Anna” was a National Jewish Book Awards winner in 2021, Ladin, 63, was the first openly transgender professor at an Orthodox Jewish institution.
Because of an illness, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, Ladin, who lives in New York, will appear remotely at the event, which is free and open to the public.
In her lecture “Gendering God: A Trans Jewish Perspective,” Ladin will examine the many ways God is gendered in Jewish tradition and how a transgender perspective can enrich explorations of the Bible and Torah. “Understanding the way divinity is gendered can help us understand human gendering and open the door to dialogue and mutual respect,” she said.
Part of Ladin’s mission to help people find common ground in discussing gender outside of the politically charged discourse on trans and non-binary identities, she said. “We all know that we share the world with people who do gender in very different ways, and we have to get along.”
Ladin’s virtual visit is part of an occasional series, Learning with Liv, underwritten by the family of Olivia Zane, a young queer member of Dor Hadash who took her own life in 2021, said Steve Zupcic, who serves on the congregation’s learning and program committee.
“I met Joy when I lived in Tucson and she came to do a trans poetry conference,” he said. “She has never done anything in Pittsburgh, and I thought now is the time, in our current political climate, to invite her to speak here.”
Ladin, who realized as early as preschool that she was living the wrong gender, has written extensively about her transformation from a married father of three named Jay to a female self — a process that ultimately was “the greatest miracle…intoxicating,” she said, “but also linked to agony, sorrow and grief, for myself, my children and my ex.”
Her memoir, “Through the Door of Life: A Journey Between Genders,” was a National Jewish Book Awards finalist in 2013.
“Emotionally, transitioning was the hardest thing I have ever gone through, a very costly process,” she said. “I lost my home, my marriage, and physical custody of my kids. I couldn’t see them every day, which often happens with divorces. But everything was heightened by my gender transition.”
Choosing to live her truth almost cost Ladin her job as a tenured professor of American literature and writing at Yeshiva University’s Stern College for Women.
When, in 2007, she announced that she was changing her gender, the university’s administration put her on leave and barred her from campus. With support from lawyers at Lamda Legal, Ladin successfully pushed back and returned to work in 2008 as the David and Ruth Gottesman chair in English.
“I admire her courage not only to stand up to the administration of Yeshiva but to become more and more honest with who she was and is,” said Zupcic. “Her courage and honesty impress me.”
Today, Ladin is married to Elizabeth Denlinger, a curator at the New York Public Library, whom she met at the now-defunct Nehirim Queer Jewish Women’s retreat in 2010 and fell in love with over dinner.
“I found someone who loves me as I am,” she said. “I am delighted to be in this marriage.”
Still, Ladin said, the process of ‘becoming’ is ongoing and includes more than gender identity.
“Transition is continuous,” she said. “We don’t just become X and live happily ever after. I want to always be changing and growing, from birth to death.”
Ladin grew up in Rochester, New York, with social worker parents. Although they were non-observant Jews, her mother encouraged her to attend synagogue and Hebrew school to develop a Jewish identity.
She enrolled in Sarah Lawerence College at age 16, majoring in creative writing and social science. As a young married man, Ladin moved to San Franciso where she worked at the state bar as an administrator before returning east to pursue an MFA at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and to write poetry. She went on to earn a doctorate in American literature at Princeton, writing her dissertation on Emily Dickinson and modern American poetry, and graduating in 2000.
Although she taught at Princeton, Ladin eventually decided that life as an academic scholar no longer suited her.
Since leaving Princeton, Ladin has published, among other works, nine books of poetry, a memoir, and her first full-length academic monograph, “The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective.”
Ladin reads Torah practically every day and observes the Sabbath in her own way. “Because I am housebound by illness, rest is enforced all the time,” she said. “But I go into my Sabbath rest, where I don’t look at email or read the news or do anything involving money. I read Torah and I focus on what is good in the world.”
She is planning to write another book of poetry, one inspired by a desire “to help people recognize what we have in common and learn to live with one another’s differences,” she said.
To register for the March 30 lecture and light brunch, visit https://congregationdorhadash.shulcloud.com/event/gendering-god.html. PJC
Deborah Weisberg is a freelance writer living in Pittsburgh.
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