by Nadine Epstein in Moment Magazine

As a teenager in West Hempstead, NY, on Long Island, Oliver Paneth loved spending time at their family’s shul and was a popular babysitter in the Orthodox community. They also attended Yeshiva University High School for Girls in Queens. “I was never the girlie girl, I was way more into sports,” recalls Paneth, whose gentle round face is fringed with a wispy brown beard. “I thought I was gay, and that was what was different about me, and then I went to college and met other trans people. Before that I didn’t know that being transgender was a possibility. Once I heard their stories, I realized that is how I felt my entire life.”

Opposition to the inclusion and integration of LGBTQ+ people in the Orthodox world remains strong. For example, the Coalition for Jewish Values (CJV), an organization representing more than 2,500 traditional American rabbis, has been adamantly opposed to a negotiated agreement at Yeshiva University to allow an LGBTQ+ club on campus, due to “the Torah’s prohibition of homosexual conduct, its exclusive promotion of marital relationships between a man and a woman, and its rejection of the false notion that a person’s desires and preferences are immutable identity characteristics that are inherently legitimate and must be accepted by Jewish society.” On its website, CJV calls itself the largest rabbinic public policy organization in America and says the group leads “the fight against those who cloak their own secular, left-wing ideals in the mantle of ‘Judaism,’ misrepresenting Judaism’s actual beliefs and values.”

CJV proudly stands in the breach. For those who regard Orthodox Judaism as designating an ideology rather than an arbitrary social construct, Leviticus, VaYikra, is eternally the last word.