by Peter Fox, Tablet Magazine
Amichai Lau-Lavie is not your typical rabbi. Born in the suburbs of Tel Aviv to a family dynasty spanning 39 generations of rabbis, he’s spent his life’s journey breaking away from the mold of traditional Judaism. He is a spiritual shapeshifter on a mission to jazz up Judaism for the modern era. Part of that journey has involved performing Jewish rituals in drag.
This may sound like the plot of a quirky indie movie—and it’s not far off. Lau-Lavie’s life is the subject of a new documentary called Sabbath Queen, which premiered at the Tribeca Festival in June and opens theatrically at the IFC Center in New York on Nov. 22.
Director Sandi DuBowski started filming Lau-Lavie in 2003, initially drawn to his drag persona, Rebbetzin Hadassah Gross. With her towering blond bouffant wig and larger-than-life persona, the rebbetzin became a kind of spiritual diva for people seeking a more unconventional approach to Judaism. Lau-Lavie even invented a backstory for the character: Born into a Hasidic family of Hungarian dancers in the 1920s and now the widow of six rabbis, she acts as a guru for the spiritual elite. Whether gracing the stage at Burning Man, BAMcafe, or various JCCs across America, Hadassah has captivated audiences with her blend of irreverent wisdom and theatrical flair.
But Sabbath Queen, ironically, focuses very little on Lau-Lavie’s drag persona. As the years passed, DuBowski shifted the narrative to focus on Lau-Lavie’s spiritual journey—a man balancing the weight of his family’s legacy with his own vision of Judaism. The result is a 105-minute film, distilled from a staggering 1,800 hours of footage, that tackles the tension between tradition and modernity, and the courage it takes to navigate the gray areas in between, especially within one’s own family. For Lau-Lavie, the son of a Holocaust survivor—who served as Israel’s consul general to New York in the 1980s—and the nephew of Israel’s former chief Ashkenazi rabbi, breaking the mold is more than a personal journey; it’s a public act that draws attention.
The film delves into various aspects of Lau-Lavie’s quest for personal truth. His first act of coming out was not about his sexuality, but rather his religiosity. While serving in the IDF, he stopped wearing his yarmulke—a quiet rebellion against his Orthodox upbringing. Around the same time, when he came out as gay, his family sent him to therapy with hopes of “correcting” his gay identity, but the experience had the opposite effect. “It completely failed to convert me from being gay,” Lau-Lavie told me, “but it did help me really own the fact that I’m no longer Orthodox.”
The film shows his family’s evolving support, especially by his mother, Joan, and older brother Benny. Lau-Lavie praises his mother as “an amazing woman who understood you’ve got to hold the family together.”
Benny, an Orthodox rabbi himself, emerges as a key figure in Sabbath Queen: both a supporter and a foil to his brother’s approach to Jewish practice. “I think he’s playing a game with Judaism,” he says in the film.
In 1997, Lau-Lavie left Israel for the U.S. to start a new life, driven by a desire to figure out what it means to be a Jew. Having seen the Jewish world from the perspective of his Orthodox Israeli family, he wanted to finally experience Jewishness in the biggest Jewish city in the world: New York. “I wanted to explore what it’s like to live Jewish first, and Israeli second,” he said.
