Faced with widespread antisemitism in the gay rights movement, 'We're not going to let them take Pride away from us,' says one Jewish activist

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People march along the National Mall towards the U.S. Capitol as part of the WorldPride International Rally and March on Washington for Freedom at the Lincoln Memorial on June 08, 2025 in Washington, DC.
In early June, Rabbi Eleanor Steinman wrote to members of Temple Beth Shalom, the Reform congregation she leads in Austin, Texas, sharing the synagogue’s plans to celebrate Pride Month with several events in June.
Steinman also revealed that, for the first time in more than two decades, her congregation would not be marching in the Austin Pride parade, which event organizers say draws 200,000 people each August, because of concerns about antisemitism.
“The Austin Pride organization took an antisemitic stance in the midst of the Pride Parade and Festival last year,” wrote Steinman, who is gay.
Ahead of last year’s Pride parade, slides were leaked from a presentation in which Austin Pride organizers said hate speech against Jews wasn’t welcome, including “symbols, images or flags used by terrorist and hate groups.” An accompanying image showed people holding a “Globalize the Intifada” sign, a Hamas flag and a “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” banner. It was part of an education campaign for queer activists as anti-Israel sentiment exploded in the queer community after the Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks and the ensuing war in Gaza, as it did in many other progressive spaces.
But the effort to educate about antisemitism backfired. Anti-Israel activists pressured Austin Pride to disavow that message. Austin Pride not only backtracked on barring those slogans; it issued a statement pledging to support the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and stating that the organization does not work with the Anti-Defamation League. In the months that followed, Jewish leaders and LGBTQ activists pushed Austin Pride’s leadership to consider changing this stance, but they did not.
“Despite attempts to meet with Austin Pride since then, a coalition of Jewish leaders were unable to create an environment where we felt we would be both safe and respected as Jewish LGBTQ+ and allies,” Steinman wrote in the email.
It was a remarkable statement, tinged with bitter irony: The synagogue first started marching in Pride so that LGBTQ congregants would feel that they could bring their full selves to the Jewish community. Now some of those same congregants feel that they need to suppress their Jewishness in order to fully belong in the queer community.
“It’s putting people back in the closet,” Steinman told Jewish Insider in a recent interview. “It makes me so angry and so sad that Jewish queer people are having to choose between those two identities, almost in a hierarchy — Which one am I more? — and decide how they want to live their truth.” (Micah Andress, president of Austin Pride, said in a statement that he was “saddened that members of the Jewish community may have been misled about our intentions,” and said “misinformation” was circulating. “Everyone is welcome at Austin Pride. Hate speech, of any kind, is not,” said Andress.)
Temple Beth Shalom was joined by two other synagogues, the local ADL branch and the leadership of Shalom Austin — the umbrella organization encompassing Austin’s Jewish federation, JCC and Jewish Family Service — in pulling out of Austin Pride and announcing a suite of Jewish Pride events instead, including a “Jewish queer joy and resilience” happy hour and two different Pride Shabbat services.
“There aren’t really very many queer spaces in this city that allow queer Jews to exist without being interrogated about Israel, Zionism, the war, things like that,” said Emily Bourgeois, director of public affairs at Shalom Austin. “We decided that this was a good moment for us and our community, knowing just how isolated the LGBT Jewish community specifically is, to really uplift and celebrate queer Jews.”
Austin is not the only place where Jewish members of the LGBTQ community are opting out of large Pride events because of fears of antisemitism and worries that they will face exclusion and ostracization. Similar monthlong Jewish Pride festivities are also taking place in San Diego and Raleigh, N.C., where organizers of the citywide Pride festivals have taken stances that Jewish leaders say put LGBTQ Jews at risk. In New York and San Francisco, grassroots “Shalom Dykes” parties are being planned as alternatives to the cities’ Dyke Marches, where anti-Zionist sentiment is de rigueur.
“We’re not going to let them take Pride away from us. We’re going to create a really inclusive Jewish Pride,” said Rabbi Denise Eger, interim executive director at A Wider Bridge, which builds ties between LGBTQ communities in the U.S. and Israel.
Even amid rising antisemitism, Jews in many places have and will participate in large Pride celebrations. At WorldPride in Washington early this month, a large Jewish contingent marched together.
“We encouraged people to show up to the parade, especially wearing Jewish pride and not being afraid of showing the world that we are LGBTQ Jews,” said Josh Maxey, executive director of Bet Mishpachah, an LGBTQ synagogue in Washington. “We have every right to be in the Pride march, just as anyone else.”
But in other communities where Pride organizers have aligned their organizations with anti-Israel movements or failed to offer support to concerned Jewish community members, the counterprogramming is a way for queer Jews and allies to express support for the LGBTQ community without having to hide their Jewish identity.
“We’re not going to let them take Pride away from us. We’re going to create a really inclusive Jewish Pride,” said Rabbi Denise Eger, interim executive director at A Wider Bridge, which builds ties between LGBTQ communities in the U.S. and Israel. (Eger is married to Steinman, the Austin rabbi.)
Even if the events are meant to be joyful, they will be enjoyed with a hint of discomfort. After years of fighting for inclusion, many LGBTQ Jews worry that excluding Jews is becoming accepted in queer spaces, particularly if those Jews are believed to be Zionists.
Seth Krosner, a trauma surgeon in San Diego, has seen enormous progress in Jewish spaces when it comes to LGBTQ inclusion. That makes it even harder for him to watch anti-Jewish sentiment become more common in LGBTQ spaces.
“I’m in my early 60s, and it wasn’t always that you could easily have a husband and be a surgeon, or have a husband — well, if you’re a man — and be president of a Conservative synagogue,” Krosner told JI. He lives near the city’s Pride Parade route, and for years he has hosted his rabbi overnight on Shabbat to enable the rabbi to walk to the parade.
San Diego Pride has stood by its decision to feature R&B singer Kehlani as its headliner, despite facing pushback from the Jewish community over the singer’s lengthy history of violent rhetoric targeting Israel and Zionists. Five synagogues, along with the San Diego JCC and the San Diego Jewish Federation, formally pulled out of San Diego Pride as a result. They will be collaborating on a weekend-long Jewish Pride event the same weekend in July. San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria also pulled out of the event over Kehlani’s role in it.
“I’m still happy to be a gay man with a wonderful husband. I’m proud to be a Jew, and I insist on being both. I’m not going to be forced to choose. But I can’t go to the parade in all good faith,” Krosner said. A spokesperson for San Diego Pride said the event is “an inclusive space that centers on and celebrates diverse queer identities, voices and joy [and] remains committed to ensuring a welcoming and, above all, safe Pride experience for the entire community.”
“While we respect those from our local Jewish community who have made the decision not to participate in San Diego Pride’s programming this year, we hope everyone will gather during Pride as a sign of solidarity for our queer community,” the spokesperson said.
“We have been aware for some time of antisemitism within the LGBTQ community,” Rabbi Lucy Dinner, Temple Beth Or’s senior rabbi, told JI. “This promotion of antisemitism by the OUT! Raleigh event leaders is a profound escalation of that expression, so much so that a local police officer advises that our safety may be at risk if Jews participate.”
Jewish communities are already on high alert, following the killing of two Israeli Embassy staffers outside a Jewish museum in Washington last month and the firebombing of a Boulder, Colo., protest for the Israeli hostages in Gaza soon after. A statement by the San Diego Jewish organizations referenced those incidents. “Kehlani’s hateful messages, including calls to ‘eradicate Zionism’ and for an ‘Intifada Revolution’ are not only dehumanizing, but history has shown that when they are normalized and platformed, they can lead to real-world violence against Jews,” they wrote.
Sometimes, community leaders must take into account security needs and make difficult calls about when it’s better to be safe than sorry.
Temple Beth Or, a Reform congregation in Raleigh, announced in an email to community members last week that the synagogue would not be formally participating in the OUT! Raleigh pride festival after a conversation with a police officer about security concerns. That decision followed the recent uptick in antisemitic violence, but it also came after OUT! Raleigh released a sharply anti-Zionist statement last year adopting BDS and pledging to “unequivocally stand with the Palestinian people” and demand an “end to Israeli occupation of native Palestinian land and the unjust apartheid system.” (JI did not receive a response to an inquiry sent to OUT! Raleigh.)
“We have been aware for some time of antisemitism within the LGBTQ community,” Rabbi Lucy Dinner, Temple Beth Or’s senior rabbi, told JI. “This promotion of antisemitism by the OUT! Raleigh event leaders is a profound escalation of that expression, so much so that a local police officer advises that our safety may be at risk if Jews participate.” (A Raleigh Police Department spokesperson disputed that the detective in question told the synagogue to pull out of the Pride event. “I want to affirm that RPD fully supports the right of all individuals to come to Raleigh and peacefully exercise their First Amendment rights,” Chief Public Information Officer Lt. David Davis told JI.)
In 2025, the exclusion of Jews is rarely so cut-and-dry as someone saying “Jews not welcome here,” particularly on the political left. But the New York City Dyke March, an event focused on queer women that draws between 15,000 and 30,000 people to Manhattan every June, came close: It said this year that Zionists aren’t welcome, even as polls show that an overwhelming majority of American Jews feel a connection to Israel.
“We oppose the nationalist political ideology of Zionism,” Dyke March organizers affirmed in a statement of values adopted this year, over objections from some Jewish activists. One of the activists, Jodi Kreines, was voted off the planning committee as a result. She was not removed for being a Zionist — Kreines never told her fellow committee members if she is or is not a Zionist — but rather for simply voicing that Zionists should be allowed at the Dyke March.
“Recent public statements attributed to you, expressing support for Zionist inclusion and collaboration, are in direct conflict with our mission and have caused deep concern in our community,” a group of committee members wrote in an email to Kreines that was viewed by JI. “We’d like to ask you to step down from the committee.” When she did not respond to their email, they voted to remove her.
“What crazy bizarro world is this, where calling for inclusion is a reason to be ousted from an organizing group, from a progressive space?” Kreines told JI on Monday.
This year, many queer Jewish women and nonbinary people will attend a “Shalom Dykes” party instead of the New York Dyke March. Nate Shalev, who organized the first “Shalom Dykes” event in 2024, is excited that it is happening again. But Shalev, who uses they/them pronouns, struggles with feeling they don’t belong in larger activist communities at a time when they want to protest against anti-LGBTQ policies being promoted by conservative politicians.
“If we set that precedent this year, that we’re siloing Jews to their own spaces, that’s going to continue, and are we ever going to be able to return?” Sarah Haley, a labor organizer in San Francisco asked. “I do think this type of hatred has gone very mainstream. I don’t think it’s fringe anymore. I think it’s pretty popular to be anti-Zionist, to say ‘Zionist scum’ and things like that. To not recognize this as a slur, I think, has become mainstream. If that’s where we are this year, next year, where will we be in five years? Will it be just no Jews allowed, period?”
“I want to be out there protesting and building coalitions around the values and issues that I care about, and I don’t feel like I’m able to do that,” Shalev said. “I don’t know how much we align anymore. Knowing that folks would possibly want to push me out if we had a conversation about it, and my Israeli wife wouldn’t be able to attend these.”
Sarah Haley, a labor organizer in San Francisco, faced harassment and name-calling from other San Francisco Dyke March volunteers when she argued in a planning meeting that Zionists should be allowed to attend the event.
“In some ways, it feels like we’re backsliding into a time period when Jews were only able to exist in their own spaces, only in their own businesses and their own groups,” Haley told JI. She does not plan to attend the march this year, but worries about what that means for queer Jews in the future.
“If we set that precedent this year, that we’re siloing Jews to their own spaces, that’s going to continue, and are we ever going to be able to return?” Haley asked. “I do think this type of hatred has gone very mainstream. I don’t think it’s fringe anymore. I think it’s pretty popular to be anti-Zionist, to say ‘Zionist scum’ and things like that. To not recognize this as a slur, I think, has become mainstream. If that’s where we are this year, next year, where will we be in five years? Will it be just no Jews allowed, period?”
For the many queer Jews who do choose to participate in larger Pride gatherings this summer, doing so is often a celebration of their identity — mixed, increasingly, with a quiet apprehension about antisemitism. Idit Klein, president and CEO of Keshet, an organization that fights for LGBTQ inclusion in the Jewish community, marched in WorldPride in Washington this month.
“It really was a day of queer Jewish joy, with these flashes of vulnerability, and looking around, and anxiety about what might happen, and then profound relief and gratitude,” Klein told JI. “I’m really kind of amazed by this: There wasn’t a flicker of negativity.”
As the WorldPride parade marched down 14th Street the first weekend in June, several announcers situated throughout the parade route shouted out the name of each contingent that marched past.
“Happy Pride, queer Jews of Washington, D.C.!” the announcers said.
Except one of them didn’t see the group’s banner, and chimed in with a different name, deduced from the sight of an Israeli flag.
“Happy Pride, LGBTQ people from Israel!” the announcer stated.
The Jewish marchers paused and held their breath, hoping the reaction from spectators wouldn’t be too harsh.
“All of us froze for a moment and wondered, what is going to happen now?” Klein recalled. Would this be one of those bad stories?
Then everyone cheered, just like they did for all the other floats and groups. And they kept on marching.
“To have an experience of a parade, and all the more so in Washington, D.C., given the murders that just happened there, that really just felt embracing and celebratory — that felt quite extraordinary,” said Klein.