from outsmartmagazine.com

One of the most powerful books I’ve ever read, Keep Your Wives Away from Them is an anthology of queer Jewish women’s writing about their personal journeys with Judaism and queerness. One of my best friend’s sisters wrote a piece for this work, which is how I heard about it. Therein lies one of the things that’s so magical about a lot of community-specific life writing: you learn about it through your community and it comes to validate so much of your or your chosen family’s lives.

Too often, narrative space is dominated by straight cis men, and too often in queer communities – perhaps especially Jewish queer communities, of which I am a part – gay cis men dominate both narrative space and social space. Keep Your Wives Away from Them – a bone-chillingly powerful title for anyone whose family’s (or whose chosen families’ non-chosen families) have heard this warning from rabbis and listened – breaks open an opportunity for queer Jewish women to, for once, occupy the fore in the narrative.

Because of my position in life, I can’t know for sure if reading this would be accessible to people without intimate knowledge of queer Jewish worlds, though everything in it is incredibly written. However, I imagine that the strength of the writing alone can open proverbial doors to Shabbos meals and first hugs even for people whose life experiences don’t include an understanding of the power of these things.