by Elizabeth Grenier for Deutsche Welle
“Being gay and demanding my place at the Jewish table gave me the permission to talk back to Judaism over homophobia and racism, over Gaza and over misogyny,” says Rabbi Amichai Lau-Lavie.
The Israel-born social activist and New York City community leader has been hailed as a “maverick spiritual leader” by The Times of Israel and “one of the most interesting thinkers in the Jewish world” by the Jewish Week. He is portrayed in the documentary “Sabbath Queen.”
Lau-Lavie and director Sandi DuBowski were in Berlin to attend film screenings at the Doxumentale film festival, which runs until June 22.
Finding his own voice as a spiritual leader amid a rabbinic dynasty
Lau-Lavie was still a young man when he decided to leave Israel for New York in the late 1990s. His move was prompted by the backlash over a newspaper profile of him. The nephew of Israel’s then-chief rabbi, the young man said he was exploring a path outside the Orthodox community before the piece outed him — without his consent.
In New York’s gay subculture, Lau-Lavie found his chosen family, particularly an activist group known as the Radical Faeries that fused radical queerness and spirituality.
But beyond this freethinking community, Lau-Lavie also strived to honor his family’s religious legacy. He is the heir to a 38-generation Orthodox rabbinic lineage going back to the 11th century.
One of his grandfather’s last wishes before being deported to a Nazi concentration camp was that this rabbinic dynasty be upheld. The grandfather, along with many other members of the Lau-Lavie family, didn’t survive the Holocaust.
