Transgender Jews are finding a safe haven in an unexpected place: the farm Shoshana Mackay lives on a Jewish farm in North Carolina. (Courtesy of Mackay)
Advertisement
(JTA) Alex Kohanski began using the gender-neutral they-them pronouns on their first day of the Jewish farming fellowship Adamah in the fall of 2019.
Though they were assigned a male identity at birth, Kohanski had never felt fully at home in their body. As a child, they once looked at their naked body in a mirror and thought God had made a mistake.
But over the course of the three-month program that has graduated scores of Jewish farmers, Kohanski grew more comfortable both with their choice to pursue farming as a profession and with their transgender identity, even wearing a dress in public for the first time. In one particularly poignant moment, Kohanski was invited by the women in their cohort to join them for a pre-Shabbat mikveh dip in the lake.
Transgender Jews find safe haven in an unexpected place: the farm
jweekly.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from jweekly.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.
Transgender Jews are finding a safe haven in an unexpected place: the farm
haaretz.com - get the latest breaking news, showbiz & celebrity photos, sport news & rumours, viral videos and top stories from haaretz.com Daily Mail and Mail on Sunday newspapers.