NUJLS, heather + me

NUJLS was awwwesome. Sadly, I didn't hang out with NUJLS people much outside of the conference events, because I was with Heather. But I didn't hang out with Heather much, because I was at the conference most of the time. My failure lay in not uniting the two.

Highlights:

+ S. Bear Bergman performed. This might be pathetic, but I've wanted to see hir perform for years. Ze did the theater piece called Clearly Marked, and it was thought-provoking and moving and hilarious. Bear was also happy to be speaking to other queer Jews.

+ Bear's workshop the next day. I went, not because I wanted to learn amazing new things about the way current concepts in gender theory are destabilizing the concept of sexual orientation (which was the topic) but because I wanted to see Bear's teaching method, the way the material was talked about and presented, what particular definitions ze'd use, and so on. Bear was super engaging. The session spawned numerous inside jokes. ("STEER? Ohh, sphere." "Maybe a steer, and a spear! And a sphere. Here, hold this." Asher holds it. Later: "What's the international symbol for complex gender?" HUH!)

+ Surprisingly good food. Light years better than what they had last time.

+ Didn't feel totally excluded and cut off from everyone.

+ A couple of cute girls.

+ Networking with upstate NY people -- Cornell, Bard, and RIT? -- though who knows what'll come of that.

+ Vinny's cool discussion on passing, where I met

+ the incomparable Susanna Cohen, who ran an amazing workshop called "Straddling the Mechitzah". She gave us excerpts from texts about Queer Jews, and divided us into three groups. Each group read one text and discussed, then shared with everyone. Susanna was extremely professorial about it! The passage my group read was a conversation between two people about their experiences at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. One of the speakers was a trans man who went to Israel right after changing all his paperwork and stuff to male, and passed full time even though he wasn't out to the friends he was with. (Though I do not see how that is possible?) The other speaker was genderqueer, I guess, and female-assigned. Exactly what happened to hir at the wall happened to me with the airport bathrooms on my way to Chicago -- though obviously there is a huge difference between airport bathrooms and the holiest geographical location in Judaism. And the whole thing reminded me of why I feel like I should put on a skirt in religious Jewish contexts.

+ Randy's "accidental Bar Mitzvah"! And all of the singing that ensued. Plus the singing durings bentsching. Man, I wish the JSU would bentsch. We wouldn't know what the heck we were doing.

+ Havdallah involved a big circle on the lawn in front of the Hillel house, and exhuberant dancing.

+ Realization: NUJLS is Jew Camp for me. Hey, my parents couldn't afford to send me to camp with y'all, but here I am now.

+ Seeing Haymarket people, especially meeting that porn star kid. He was very nice and entertaining. (He also hasn't actualy been in a porn -- yet.) Also the food at Haymarket is generally fantastic. Heather's cookies are a highlight, of course. Mmm peanutbutter cookie addiction. I got to see a hookah up close and personal. Also we went to scary parties and my feet killed. It was fun though!

+ NUJLS board looks like it might actually happen and get things done this time!

Lousy crap happened too, but I'm gonna ignore it right now.