ABSTRACT
standing at the front of her fifth grade classroom, Jennifer Levinson, a long-time teacher at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav's Kadimah religious school, introduced a lesson on family history “Today we are going to be making family trees,” said Jennifer to her class of energetic, bright Jewish children. She had examined the materials that were part of a curriculum used for Jewish family history projects. The trees she was to hand out to her children had prepackaged spaces for them to fill in: two slots labeled “mother” and “father,” and above that, grandparents, and so on. Before class began, Jennifer went through her class list and realized that only one of her eight children would be able to fill in the slots as presented on the curricular materials. In the end, this creative teacher did not hand out the trees. Instead, she asked her students to create their own models of their families, and what resulted was revolutionary. They produced bushes, multibranched trees with vines growing in various places. One student produced a spider web-like image with intersecting lines and round forms encircling the student whose name was at the middle of her “family web.” What we were witnessing was the queering of Jewish education, and the queering of Jewish families.
