Last weekend college students from around the country came to campus to attend the 2006 National Union of Jewish Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender Intersex Queer and Questioning Students (NUJLS) Conference.
Approximately 80 students from 35 different schools attended this year’s three-day conference and took part in activities including 15 workshops in the Science Center, a movie screening, a film and panel discussion, a keynote address by Rabbi Joel Alter, and a dance party at Mocon.
In addition to standard Friday Shabbat and weekend morning services, the conference offered a Friday night “Un-Service” as well as an alternative Jewish renewal service on Saturday morning.
“Jewish culture kind of seems to me like ice cream,” said participant Bryan Dunncan, speaking at a workshop entitled “Gender Theory from a Jewish Perspective.” “You know how there’s the basic chocolate-vanilla, and then there’s Baskin Robbins where there are many things mixed in, but it’s still ice-cream.”
The workshop studied the work of prominent Jewish theorists such as Judith Butler and Alisa Solomon, their philosophies on Jewish identity, their attitudes toward gender roles, and their opinions on Jewish gender roles. Led by Lynley-Shimat Lys, a Masters student from NYU’s film archiving program, the participants discussed topics such as essentialist versus constructionist gender theories, the role played by language in creating gender dichotomies, and the hyper-gendered nature of today’s world.
The discussion also delved into stereotypes of Jewish gender roles within a family and the lingering practice of using soft and hard adjectives when describing women and men respectively.
The other workshops covered topics such as “Homosexuality and Judaism from an Evolutionary Perspective”, “Queer Jewish Television,” “Gay Passover-Beyond Liberation,” and “LGBT Life in Israel.” A diverse group of activists led the workshops, including a rabbi, writers, performers, a Wesleyan alum, students from other colleges, documentary producers and a former board member of the UCLA Queer Alliance.
Margaret Buck, a sophomore from Washington University at St Louis, and Sarah Baracks, a freshman from American University, were impressed with the conference. They emphasized that each workshop had been filled to capacity on Saturday, and that attendance was slightly lower on Sunday morning only because people were still recovering from the “My Big Fat Gay Jewish Wedding” dance party at Mocon the previous night.
“[The party’s music was] a mixture of bar mitzvah music and gay music,” said Buck.
Planning for the conference began in September. It was co-organized by the NUJLS Board of Directors and an executive team of about 15 Wesleyan students. An additional 10 Wesleyan students were recruited specifically to help out with the three days of the conference itself.
The annual conference was unique this year for being on a small residential campus instead of in a major city, as has been the case with conferences in previous years.
“The immediate feedback we received was that holding the conference on a residential campus set away from the draws of a city kept participants at the conference and interacting with one another, rather than losing them to attractions of museums and clubs when it’s held in a bigger city,” said Conference Chair and organizer Daniel Heller ’06.
The cost of attending the conference was $80, and scholarships were available for participants who required financial assistance in order to attend.
The conference has been hosted by different universities in America as part of NUJLS’s goal to build a welcoming atmosphere for LGBTIQQ/Jewish community building. This is the ninth year in the history of the conference.
NUJLS is a project of the World Congress of GLBT Jews (Keshet Ga¹avah), which hopes to create and promote an environment in which Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender (LGBT) Jews worldwide can enjoy free and fulfilling lives.
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