QUEERKEIT▽COVEN

hello again friends! i’m excited to share that my artwork “Feygele” & an accompanying poem from my chapbook - together a queer, trans love letter to Jewish demons - is representing the month of Tammuz in the Radical Jewish Calendar for 5781! 

as a contributing artist, i was allowed to choose a date in the calendar to mark in a way that felt important to me, so i chose to commemorate the August 3rd co-founding of this blog (and resulting community!) with the amazing @darkhei-noam in 2016. i can barely believe that this blog is 4+ years old - and our Discord server for LGBTQ+ Jews who study and/or practice Jewish magic & mysticism is 2+ years old and more active than ever with 80+ members (if you want an invite, message us)!

i am so grateful to each & every person who has been active here, and i’m especially thankful for @creekfiend & @kuttithevangu who together were a major guiding light on my way back into Judaism through the more marginal & magic aspects of our history. getting to know them & so many more incredible people through them changed my life. 

which is a long way to say that “Queerkeit Coven” is printed in a calendar now & all of you should feel proud! 

hi! can’t speak to this one from experience, but in a traditional Jewish context, Lilith is not a deity, so working with her would be more like working with a sheyd - which could still, i guess, be defined as idolatry in a very orthodox view? but i personally tend to think of idolatry as being defined by worship of something other than the divine (”false gods”). traditional Judaism forbids using a statue or image to represent the divine because it’s deeply limiting & may lead to the misunderstanding that the image IS the divine. if Lilith isn’t divine or being treated as such (beyond the general concept that EVERYTHING has divine origin / sparks of the divine), but rather as a spiritual guide in a similar context to, say, Elijah or another holy figure, that wouldn’t really fall under idolatry. 

that said, there certainly ARE Jewish pagans who practice forms of polytheism, and i’m sure there may be Jewish witches who do view Lilith as a “facet” of Hashem (we’re a diverse community)! if anyone wants to jump in with personal experience, feel free!

looks like we need to make an FAQ, because this keeps getting asked & answered in many ways!

i can’t speak to whether or not “Baal Kadmon” is Jewish in addition to clearly being a western occultist. i would bet money that he’s not, and has - like some historical western occultists, adopted a fake Jewish-sounding name (Baal Kadmon is nobody’s birth name, anyway) - though i could be wrong! but literally every single thing to do with “Solomonic” magic/seals is not Jewish.

whether or not they will “work” for you is very subjective - from a historical perspective, they are entirely made up by Christian occultists based on antisemitic tropes mixed with some mangled appropriation of actual Jewish mysticism. so if you’re looking for some kind of authentic cultural tradition dating any earlier than the middle ages (a time absolutely rife with oppression & violence towards Jews), this ain’t it. 

some people don’t seem to care about that, and appear to treat the “demons” and rituals in those books as spiritually useful in some way regardless of their origins, but i can’t say i really understand that line of thought & i certainly don’t have much respect for it as a Jew. those same people often seem to think that because ceremonial magic is not authentically Jewish, that means it’s not really appropriation, which is also fairly confusing to me because it literally wouldn’t exist without antisemitism. 

but it’s obviously entirely up to you what you choose to do with this information now that you have it!

If you are practicing some form of ceremonial magic (ex: i wanted to learn about planetary magic, but im not sure if thats culturally appropriative), do you think its a different tradition at this point? or can be practiced like one? I don't want to learn about planetary magic if it has appropriated aspects in it, and what that person said in the debate doesn't sit right with me, so I thought it would be best to ask someone Jewish (since we both arent) who has knowledge of the history. (2/2)

hi! where does your friend think all the Hebrew & “Kabbalah” in ceremonial magic came from? at what point does something taken from one culture by another culture actively oppressing & committing genocide against its living people become “a different tradition”? is it fine after several hundred years of “syncretism” (and ghettos, and pogroms, and the Shoah) even when it rests on a foundation of blood libel? does it matter that Jews, who originated Kabbalah as an inextricable part of our religious & cultural history, are still presently experiencing the same violent combination of antisemitism & fetishization that lead to the appropriation of our mystic tradition in the first place?

some questions to think about as you read our cultural appropriation tag & at least the first chapter of Joshua Trachtenberg’s Jewish Magic & Superstition (free online). for more in-depth history on who actually authored the original texts of ceremonial magic (and why), check out Grimoires: A History of Magic Books by Owen Davies, as well as Trachtenberg’s other major work on medieval & modern antisemitism, The Devil and the Jews.

hi! just to clarify - are you looking for the opinions of contemporary Jews who self-identify as witches, or are you trying to find historical evidence of Jews interacting positively with sheydim? 

if it’s the first one, i think the answers are going to be highly varied! but i’m sure there certainly ARE Jewish witches who incorporate demons/sheydim into their practices, though they may not be a majority. 

from what i’ve read, Jewish historical views on sheydim have ranged from total fear/rejection of them as dangerous or “evil” (though our concept of evil is decidedly not the Christian one - sheydim are part of the divine universe & have a distinct role to play, they aren’t in opposition to divinity or enemies of divinity), to considering them more like faeries in other cultures - something to be wary of, certainly something that could hurt you if angered & therefore something you should at least try to avoid or appease, but potentially useful in certain situations. the legendary relationship between King Solomon & Ashmedai (king of demons) seems to fall into this latter category. 

there’s also a story about 2nd century sage Shimon bar Yochai collaborating with a sheyd (some sources say “Ben Temalion”, some say Ashmedai again) in order to favorably influence the Roman emperor - the sheyd agreed to possess the daughter of the emperor so that bar Yochai could exorcise her & receive a reward, which was the abolishing of a decree against Jewish observance! 

something i put together pretty quick for Poetry Jam; February 2020 but i’m fairly proud of it! a condensation of lots of thoughts/feelings i’ve been having about queer/trans Judaism & Jewish myth/magic/mysticism, with a side of trauma processing (nothing queerer or more Jewish, etc.)

The Hadassah-Brandeis Institute is proud to present “Ich Bin Di Sitra Achra (I Am the Other)” by Shterna Goldbloom. Goldbloom’s wistful photographic self-portraits bridge memories and experiences of the artist’s own Hasidic upbringing, with historical and invented personae. As the artist transforms herself in each composed image through dress, posture and setting, her photographs come together to present a singular but complicated expression of self as a queer Jewish woman. 

Goldbloom reinterprets the Hasidic term “Sitra Achra,” used to describe things considered to be on the "other side" of holiness — like queers and women who don't fit traditional definitions of femininity. In “Ich Bin Di Sitra Achra (I Am the Other),” the artist presents the many faces that can exist between tradition and heresy. Her gesture before the camera makes these conflicting identities visible, giving agency to those who might otherwise be obscured.

are you Jewish, LGBTQ+, AND interested in the study and/or practice of Jewish magic & mysticism? we want to hear from you!

https://forms.gle/AvyVo3979zXNbaaRA

mod Ezra here - as you know, this community & the intersection of topics that brought us together is near & dear to my heart, so it’s been a goal of mine to try to understand that connection better in order to collect/create more resources specifically for us! this survey, which is mostly open-ended short written response, was created as a tool to help get bigger conversations rolling & collect some data for us to think about. there’s more info at the link about how the information will potentially be used/shared, but in short - it’s up to you if you want to be totally anonymous or if you want to be cited and/or interviewed at more length. 

i’ve got a couple of related projects in the works & possibly some opportunities for where this might go - right now i’m mostly interested in gathering info & keeping it open. please share widely & don’t hesitate to reach out if you have any questions or concerns about the survey!