Fire, and the Prairie

April 17, 2015 Irwin Keller

We drove ten blocks south to the old Oak Woods Cemetery. We looked at its burial mound of Confederate prisoners upon which someone had scornfully (I presume) placed an empty bottle of Southern Comfort. And then we looked for graves of trailblazers who rest there. Ida B. Wells, the radical turn-of-the-century African-American journalist; Jesse Owens, the African-American runner whose prowess shamed Hitler at the 1936 Olympics; and Hyde Park's own Harold Washington, Chicago's first black and first progressive mayor, whose ethos made possible gay rights in that city, and whose election so rocked the world that while I was on a 1983 visit to Eastern Bloc Czechoslovakia, the mere mention that I came from Chicago, which would have once produced an Al Capone pantomime, now elicited the amused observation, Ah, Chicago. Negri Burgermeister.

Reflections of a Retiring Drag Queen

October 9, 2014 Irwin Keller

Winnie and I have stuck together for 21 years now. She’s seen me through a lot: legal practice, new love, marriage, children, the boomeranging of a long cast-off rabbinic calling, and the loss of both my parents. And she’s no picnic either. I’ve seen her through meltdowns, relationships, hairdos, artificial insemination, Republicanism, cleaning obsessions, and even prison (trafficking in Julia Child pornography, if you don’t recall). But sometimes it is time to say goodbye, and you may be surprised (or relieved, or sad, or indifferent) that Winnie and I are, at long last, bidding each other farewell.

The Rabbi's Dress (Or Why I Wear a Skirt on the Bimah)

March 14, 2014 Irwin Keller

When I was growing up, I had a remarkably keen awareness of gender codes in our culture, like a little gender-role prodigy. I never felt terribly boyish, and so the way that the world was poking and prodding me toward a set of male behaviors, affects and preferences always felt artificial to me. Boys had to act and dress and behave in specific ways, and mostly these ways made no sense to me. Aggression? Athleticism? Taunting girls? These values were alien and distasteful to me; my experience of them was something like what a Jew feels observing an activity that our people curtly dismiss with the term goyim naches.

Marriage and Mysticism in a Less-Gendered World

June 28, 2013 Irwin Keller

The thought of all these bearded mystics, all men, in their male-only academies, imagining themselves to be God's bride - well, that just pleases me in all sorts of ways. They were able to see the gendering of the system as a metaphor not tied to biological sex or lived gender perhaps more than we can. Whether or not that made a difference in the lives of their real-life wives is unknown. But still, they used their male privilege to imagine themselves not-male. And that's worth something in my book.

The Kedoshim Question: Aural Argument

April 19, 2013 Irwin Keller

Rabbi Hillel had been in happy retirement since his death, spending slow days playing Scrabble with Rabbi Shammai, who always complained that Hillel was making up words; Hillel insisted that if he had a plausible definition, especially a humorous one, his words should count. But now Hillel had been persuaded out of retirement in order to argue this most unusual case. He stood at the bench and beamed, despite his slightly disheveled appearance, compounded by matzah crumbs from the sandwich he'd snuck into the chamber in his pocket.