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Jewish, gay and parents: making it work together
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BY: RICK PERLOFF Special to the CJN
When Claude Lewis was 2, he developed a quintessentially Jewish way of counting time: He did it by counting Shabbats.
His mother Malia Lewis recalls that when Claude asked when he would see his grandparents next, she would reply, “‘In three Shabbats.’ He could count that. It had a meaning to him.”
Claude is 7 now and well beyond telling time in this manner. If asked, however, he and his 6-year-old sister Ella could tell you that Shabbat dinner is served every Friday night and that they can recite the blessings over the food.
Their parents n Malia Lewis and Dr. Margot Damaser n are giving their children a rich Jewish upbringing. They are among a growing number of gay Jewish parents who are instilling in their children the same appreciation for Judaism they received when they were young.
to shed light on their experiences and perspectives, I interviewed more than a dozen gay Jewish parents and their children, as well as rabbinical experts, (See p. 50.) over the past three months .
What unites these parents n more than any perspective about child-rearing n is their unwavering commitment to Judaism. They speak of the sense of community that Judaism fosters, tikkun olam (repairing the world), spirituality and tradition. And while gay couples say that there has been immense progress in accepting homosexuality, many acknowledge that prejudice exists and it will affect their children when they get older.
The parents I spoke to belong to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender congregations n chauvurot or friendship groups that provide social support. There are such congregations in more than a dozen American cities. In some cases, like Chevrei Tikva at Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple here in Cleveland, the congregation is part of a larger synagogue. In other instances, the synagogue itself is geared to gay Jews.
What follows is a series of snapshots of gay Jewish parents. I relate stories of two Cleveland families and, in part 2, I trek eastward and westward to share perspectives of parents in other cities. Their experiences are different, but when stitched together, the strands of their lives n struggles, joys, parental achievements n offer a rich tapestry, a portrait of how gay Jewish men and women are rearing children in time-honored Jewish tradition.
They are a striking couple: Margot Damaser is tall, with sculpted features. She is formal, yet soft-spoken. Malia Lewis is shorter, more casual, dramatic and edgy, with a gift for mimicry.
Lewis grew up in Paris, a cosmopolitan child who was bat mitzvah in the oldest Reform synagogue in that city. Damaser, who was raised in Yellow Springs, Ohio, lived an hour from the nearest synagogue in Dayton. Yet her parents gave her a strong Jewish education.
The two met and fell in love in 1986, when they were undergraduates at Harvard. After a stint in San Francisco, where Damaser obtained her Ph.D. in bioengineering at Berkeley, they moved to Chicago and then to Cleveland Heights.
Lewis, who formerly worked as a theater designer and manager, is a stay-at-home mom. Damaser is a medical researcher at The Cleveland Clinic.
Lewis and Damaser both wanted kids and decided to adopt. There were many questions: Where do you obtain the children, in the U.S. or abroad? How does race figure in? How old should the kids be at the time of adoption?
“We decided we wanted to adopt locally, and the kids that needed adoption locally were black,” Damaser explains.
They adopted their two children in Oak Park, Ill. In an egalitarian spirit, Claude was given Malia’s last name, Lewis, and Ella became a Damaser, after Margot.
“When we adopted Claude, somebody asked us in an incredulous tone, ‘Are you going to raise him Jewish?’” Lewis recalls. “My answer was, ‘Well, yes, I can’t raise him Methodist or Southern Baptist or Catholic!’”
Damaser is teaching the children Jewish values instilled by her parents, notably appreciation of religious rituals and a sense of community. On most Fridays, wherever the family is (they travel a lot), they sit down for a formal Shabbat dinner, with candles, wine, challah, and the requisite blessings over each. The children attend religious school at Fairmount Temple.
On the night I met them, the children were in constant motion, jumping back and forth after participating in the temple’s annual Purim play.
The kids have not faced bigotry or prejudice, but occasionally they experience a stereotyped remark. Damaser notes that other children “are starting to use the word ‘gay’ as an insult in school, like ‘That’s so gay.’ We need to educate our kids, and they need to also educate their friends, and I believe all parents should do this,” Damaser says.
The two women are quick to acknowledge that their presence n two white mothers with two black children n captures attention. “We have managed to stop traffic, which is good fun,” Lewis says, with a tinge of sarcasm in her voice.
“In America, people assume all Jews are white, which is wrong. My kids are not the only black Jews, and that’s important” to point out. For the children’s sense of identity, their parents decided to go one step further than most in the conversion process. So when somebody says, “You can’t be Jewish. You’re black,” they respond that Claude and Ella were each converted by three rabbis. One of the rabbis led a Reform congregation, another was from Or Chadash, the gay congregation in Chicago, and the third was from an African-American Orthodox congregation in Chicago. The women also went to the mikvah with each child.
“My children are part of the tribe,” Lewis insists. “They belong, no matter what anybody says.”
So far, the discrimination the family has faced has not been homophobic or racist comments from individuals, but institutional prejudice. Although the women were married in Massachusetts in 2004, the marriage is not recognized in other states. The couple is also unnerved by the fact that Damaser’s previous employers would not provide health insurance for Lewis. “I was uninsured for seven years after my son was born, since I left the work force,” Lewis notes. “How many straight couples would put up with this kind of crap?”
Some synagogues might have been reluctant to welcome the family into the congregation. Not so Fairmount Temple. “Our synagogue is very welcoming,” Damaser says. Lewis adds that the temple rolled out a veritable red carpet to convince them to join. “They saw the lesbian couple, they saw the black kids, and they thought, ‘Let’s get them.’ And, of course, they got us,” she laughs.
Complementing their network of friends at the synagogue are professional colleagues who serve as role models for the children. Cognizant of the need to provide Claude with a male mentor, Lewis and Damaser cultivated a friendship with an African-American surgeon they knew in Chicago. “He expects Claude to go to medical school,” Lewis says.
The advent of children had salutary effects on Lewis’s and Damaser’s relations with their parents. Noting that each was the first of their siblings to have children, Lewis says, “the grandparents were falling all over themselves because we finally produced a grandchild.”
The children call Damaser’s parents Bubbie and Zayda, and Lewis’s folks are Nana and Grandpa. They have no trouble semantically differentiating their own parents: Lewis is Ima (Hebrew for mother), and Damaser is Mama.
Some 15 years before Malia Lewis and Margot Damaser became parents, Clevelander Brynna Fish blazed a path. Reared in a Conservative Jewish household, Fish went on to become a teacher at Temple Emanu El religious school. She also was one of the founders of Chevrei Tikva congregation, which began in 1983 and merged with Fairmount Temple in 2005. The congregation provided a supportive atmosphere for Fish and other gay Jews in what she describes as an often-hostile mainstream environment.
In 1987, Fish made a life-changing decision. Responding to her sister’s request for help in a difficult family situation, she decided to take in her 18-month-old nephew Shiah. “shiah” means gift in Hebrew. The etymology cut both ways, a mitzvah for Shiah and for Fish, who became his legal guardian when he was in second grade.
Reflecting back on his childhood, Shiah, now 23, says that Brynna Fish is “the one who raised me and took care of me. She’s the one who‘s always been there for me. Everyone was like, ‘She’s your aunt, right?’ ‘No, she’s my mom.’”
The road was rocky at times. Fish dated a long time before settling down with one woman. She was married n symbolically, if not legally n in a ceremony performed by a rabbi at a Reform temple. The couple split up a year ago.
Judaism was a constant presence in the family, providing solace in difficult times and offering a sense of overarching purpose. Fish and Shiah regularly attended services at Chevrei Tikva. In 1998, Shiah completed two bar mitzvah ceremonies, one on Friday evening at Chevrei Tikva, and the second Saturday morning at Temple Emanu El.
“The thing I’m proudest of is we lived a Jewish life,” Fish says. “It wasn’t just about attending services on the holidays. It was about lighting the candles on Friday nights. It was about acknowledging the values of how we lived our life, knowing those values have a source and come from our religion. There was no mistaking ours was a Jewish household.”
Fish was always up front about her gay orientation. “When Shiah began first grade at Fairfax Elementary School in Cleveland Heights, the first night they had parents’ orientation, I went up to his teacher and said, ‘I need you to know a couple of things. First, I am Shiah’s legal guardian. His name is Rosen, my name is Fish. (At that time she did not have permanent legal standing.) The other is I am an out lesbian.’”
Fish still marvels at the teacher’s empathic response. “She said, ‘Well, you might feel comforted in knowing that less than 4% of the class comes from in-tact heterosexual households.’ That had a profound effect. That helped me feel less strange.”
Although Shiah accepted that his mother was a lesbian, he frequently found it difficult to explain to elementary school classmates. They would ask him, “Where’s your dad?” He would have to say his dad was somewhere else. “My friends didn’t understand it, and what people don’t understand they tend to fear.”
The youngster did his best to explain his family situation. “There was our s a time when I kind of resented my mom for being a lesbian,” he admits. “I would go to my friends’ houses every day after school, and their dads would always be there. So I very much resented not having a father or male role model.”
When she learned of Shiah’s anger, Fish contacted Jewish Big Brother Big Sister Association and found a young man who served as Shiah’s big brother. “We still talk,” Shiah says. “That became the male influence in my life.”
Shiah is a robust young man who sports 10 tattoos, including a Jewish star and the word brother, written in Hebrew. “Jewish identity is very important to me,” he says. He spent a month in Israel and fondly remembers the feeling he had when he watched the sun rise over the Mediterranean Sea and set somnolently over the desert.
When he returned, his commitment to studying ancient Judaism strengthened. Currently a junior at Cleveland State University, Shiah plans to take as many courses as he can in Middle Eastern studies.
Perloff, a frequent contributor to the CJN, is professor and director of the School of Communication at Cleveland State University.
His mother Malia Lewis recalls that when Claude asked when he would see his grandparents next, she would reply, “‘In three Shabbats.’ He could count that. It had a meaning to him.”
Claude is 7 now and well beyond telling time in this manner. If asked, however, he and his 6-year-old sister Ella could tell you that Shabbat dinner is served every Friday night and that they can recite the blessings over the food.
Their parents n Malia Lewis and Dr. Margot Damaser n are giving their children a rich Jewish upbringing. They are among a growing number of gay Jewish parents who are instilling in their children the same appreciation for Judaism they received when they were young.
to shed light on their experiences and perspectives, I interviewed more than a dozen gay Jewish parents and their children, as well as rabbinical experts, (See p. 50.) over the past three months .
What unites these parents n more than any perspective about child-rearing n is their unwavering commitment to Judaism. They speak of the sense of community that Judaism fosters, tikkun olam (repairing the world), spirituality and tradition. And while gay couples say that there has been immense progress in accepting homosexuality, many acknowledge that prejudice exists and it will affect their children when they get older.
The parents I spoke to belong to gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender congregations n chauvurot or friendship groups that provide social support. There are such congregations in more than a dozen American cities. In some cases, like Chevrei Tikva at Anshe Chesed Fairmount Temple here in Cleveland, the congregation is part of a larger synagogue. In other instances, the synagogue itself is geared to gay Jews.
What follows is a series of snapshots of gay Jewish parents. I relate stories of two Cleveland families and, in part 2, I trek eastward and westward to share perspectives of parents in other cities. Their experiences are different, but when stitched together, the strands of their lives n struggles, joys, parental achievements n offer a rich tapestry, a portrait of how gay Jewish men and women are rearing children in time-honored Jewish tradition.
They are a striking couple: Margot Damaser is tall, with sculpted features. She is formal, yet soft-spoken. Malia Lewis is shorter, more casual, dramatic and edgy, with a gift for mimicry.
Lewis grew up in Paris, a cosmopolitan child who was bat mitzvah in the oldest Reform synagogue in that city. Damaser, who was raised in Yellow Springs, Ohio, lived an hour from the nearest synagogue in Dayton. Yet her parents gave her a strong Jewish education.
The two met and fell in love in 1986, when they were undergraduates at Harvard. After a stint in San Francisco, where Damaser obtained her Ph.D. in bioengineering at Berkeley, they moved to Chicago and then to Cleveland Heights.
Lewis, who formerly worked as a theater designer and manager, is a stay-at-home mom. Damaser is a medical researcher at The Cleveland Clinic.
Lewis and Damaser both wanted kids and decided to adopt. There were many questions: Where do you obtain the children, in the U.S. or abroad? How does race figure in? How old should the kids be at the time of adoption?
“We decided we wanted to adopt locally, and the kids that needed adoption locally were black,” Damaser explains.
They adopted their two children in Oak Park, Ill. In an egalitarian spirit, Claude was given Malia’s last name, Lewis, and Ella became a Damaser, after Margot.
“When we adopted Claude, somebody asked us in an incredulous tone, ‘Are you going to raise him Jewish?’” Lewis recalls. “My answer was, ‘Well, yes, I can’t raise him Methodist or Southern Baptist or Catholic!’”
Damaser is teaching the children Jewish values instilled by her parents, notably appreciation of religious rituals and a sense of community. On most Fridays, wherever the family is (they travel a lot), they sit down for a formal Shabbat dinner, with candles, wine, challah, and the requisite blessings over each. The children attend religious school at Fairmount Temple.
On the night I met them, the children were in constant motion, jumping back and forth after participating in the temple’s annual Purim play.
The kids have not faced bigotry or prejudice, but occasionally they experience a stereotyped remark. Damaser notes that other children “are starting to use the word ‘gay’ as an insult in school, like ‘That’s so gay.’ We need to educate our kids, and they need to also educate their friends, and I believe all parents should do this,” Damaser says.
The two women are quick to acknowledge that their presence n two white mothers with two black children n captures attention. “We have managed to stop traffic, which is good fun,” Lewis says, with a tinge of sarcasm in her voice.
“In America, people assume all Jews are white, which is wrong. My kids are not the only black Jews, and that’s important” to point out. For the children’s sense of identity, their parents decided to go one step further than most in the conversion process. So when somebody says, “You can’t be Jewish. You’re black,” they respond that Claude and Ella were each converted by three rabbis. One of the rabbis led a Reform congregation, another was from Or Chadash, the gay congregation in Chicago, and the third was from an African-American Orthodox congregation in Chicago. The women also went to the mikvah with each child.
“My children are part of the tribe,” Lewis insists. “They belong, no matter what anybody says.”
So far, the discrimination the family has faced has not been homophobic or racist comments from individuals, but institutional prejudice. Although the women were married in Massachusetts in 2004, the marriage is not recognized in other states. The couple is also unnerved by the fact that Damaser’s previous employers would not provide health insurance for Lewis. “I was uninsured for seven years after my son was born, since I left the work force,” Lewis notes. “How many straight couples would put up with this kind of crap?”
Some synagogues might have been reluctant to welcome the family into the congregation. Not so Fairmount Temple. “Our synagogue is very welcoming,” Damaser says. Lewis adds that the temple rolled out a veritable red carpet to convince them to join. “They saw the lesbian couple, they saw the black kids, and they thought, ‘Let’s get them.’ And, of course, they got us,” she laughs.
Complementing their network of friends at the synagogue are professional colleagues who serve as role models for the children. Cognizant of the need to provide Claude with a male mentor, Lewis and Damaser cultivated a friendship with an African-American surgeon they knew in Chicago. “He expects Claude to go to medical school,” Lewis says.
The advent of children had salutary effects on Lewis’s and Damaser’s relations with their parents. Noting that each was the first of their siblings to have children, Lewis says, “the grandparents were falling all over themselves because we finally produced a grandchild.”
The children call Damaser’s parents Bubbie and Zayda, and Lewis’s folks are Nana and Grandpa. They have no trouble semantically differentiating their own parents: Lewis is Ima (Hebrew for mother), and Damaser is Mama.
Some 15 years before Malia Lewis and Margot Damaser became parents, Clevelander Brynna Fish blazed a path. Reared in a Conservative Jewish household, Fish went on to become a teacher at Temple Emanu El religious school. She also was one of the founders of Chevrei Tikva congregation, which began in 1983 and merged with Fairmount Temple in 2005. The congregation provided a supportive atmosphere for Fish and other gay Jews in what she describes as an often-hostile mainstream environment.
In 1987, Fish made a life-changing decision. Responding to her sister’s request for help in a difficult family situation, she decided to take in her 18-month-old nephew Shiah. “shiah” means gift in Hebrew. The etymology cut both ways, a mitzvah for Shiah and for Fish, who became his legal guardian when he was in second grade.
Reflecting back on his childhood, Shiah, now 23, says that Brynna Fish is “the one who raised me and took care of me. She’s the one who‘s always been there for me. Everyone was like, ‘She’s your aunt, right?’ ‘No, she’s my mom.’”
The road was rocky at times. Fish dated a long time before settling down with one woman. She was married n symbolically, if not legally n in a ceremony performed by a rabbi at a Reform temple. The couple split up a year ago.
Judaism was a constant presence in the family, providing solace in difficult times and offering a sense of overarching purpose. Fish and Shiah regularly attended services at Chevrei Tikva. In 1998, Shiah completed two bar mitzvah ceremonies, one on Friday evening at Chevrei Tikva, and the second Saturday morning at Temple Emanu El.
“The thing I’m proudest of is we lived a Jewish life,” Fish says. “It wasn’t just about attending services on the holidays. It was about lighting the candles on Friday nights. It was about acknowledging the values of how we lived our life, knowing those values have a source and come from our religion. There was no mistaking ours was a Jewish household.”
Fish was always up front about her gay orientation. “When Shiah began first grade at Fairfax Elementary School in Cleveland Heights, the first night they had parents’ orientation, I went up to his teacher and said, ‘I need you to know a couple of things. First, I am Shiah’s legal guardian. His name is Rosen, my name is Fish. (At that time she did not have permanent legal standing.) The other is I am an out lesbian.’”
Fish still marvels at the teacher’s empathic response. “She said, ‘Well, you might feel comforted in knowing that less than 4% of the class comes from in-tact heterosexual households.’ That had a profound effect. That helped me feel less strange.”
Although Shiah accepted that his mother was a lesbian, he frequently found it difficult to explain to elementary school classmates. They would ask him, “Where’s your dad?” He would have to say his dad was somewhere else. “My friends didn’t understand it, and what people don’t understand they tend to fear.”
The youngster did his best to explain his family situation. “There was our s a time when I kind of resented my mom for being a lesbian,” he admits. “I would go to my friends’ houses every day after school, and their dads would always be there. So I very much resented not having a father or male role model.”
When she learned of Shiah’s anger, Fish contacted Jewish Big Brother Big Sister Association and found a young man who served as Shiah’s big brother. “We still talk,” Shiah says. “That became the male influence in my life.”
Shiah is a robust young man who sports 10 tattoos, including a Jewish star and the word brother, written in Hebrew. “Jewish identity is very important to me,” he says. He spent a month in Israel and fondly remembers the feeling he had when he watched the sun rise over the Mediterranean Sea and set somnolently over the desert.
When he returned, his commitment to studying ancient Judaism strengthened. Currently a junior at Cleveland State University, Shiah plans to take as many courses as he can in Middle Eastern studies.
Perloff, a frequent contributor to the CJN, is professor and director of the School of Communication at Cleveland State University.
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