The Self Struggling To Be Seen: A Review of “Homosexuality, Transsexuality, Psychoanalysis and Traditional Judaism,” edited by Alan Slomowitz and Alison Feit: A review of Homosexuality, Transsexuality, Psychoanalysis and Traditional Judaism, edited by Alan Slomowitz and Alison Feit (2019), Routledge, New York, 332 pages

Much like a psychoanalytic inquiry that seeks understanding by investigating the details of experience, Alan Slomowitz and Alison Feit’s Homosexuality, Transsexuality, Psychoanalysis and Traditional Judaism illuminates universal struggles for recognition and acceptance through a kaleidoscopic series of chapters that explore in detail the circumstances and contextualizing forces affecting LGBTQ Orthodox Jews, their families, their communities, and the rabbinic authorities charged with interpreting and applying Jewish law to its contemporary adherents.

Surprisingly, for a book edited by psychoanalysts and published under the imprint of a longstanding and esteemed series of books on psychoanalysis, psychoanalysis itself is allowed to play a supporting role in a way that expands the scope and purpose of the volume. This is not a book about psychoanalytic understanding of homosexuality or gender identity, nor is it a book about psychoanalytic treatment. It is a book about individuals whose lives are shaped by seemingly incompatible identities and the roles their communities play, for better and for worse, in addressing these seemingly contradictory memberships.

A question is posed more than once in this book: What happens when an individual simply is, in the face of a tradition that denies, mutes, or erases even the possibility of their existence? What does it mean to exist in a community that does not or cannot conceive of this existence? In the most hopeful moments, the authors detail the Orthodox community’s efforts to make room for, to

acknowledge, and to wrestle with what really is, and to do so with compassion, despite a tradition that relies so heavily on binaries, and on policing the boundaries of what is acceptable. LGBTQ Orthodox Jews stand in between these binaries. More than once, Philip Bromberg’s language of “standing in the spaces” is invoked.

The division of this volume into two sections, one devoted to sexuality and the other to gender identity, structur