By Clémentine Goldszal – Le Monde
Amichai Lau-Lavie is a rabbi, Israeli, American, father, gay, and… a drag queen. From the age of 13, on the day of his bar mitzvah, he realized that his personality was incompatible with the “Orthodox bubble” in which he had grown up.
“I was chanting the Torah portion assigned to me: a passage from Leviticus stating that, as a homosexual, I was an abomination and deserved to be destroyed. I remember thinking: What am I supposed to do with that?”
The life he has built since—marked by successive acts of liberation and commitments, against the backdrop of debates about Judaism and Zionism as well as the rising tensions in Donald Trump’s America—has been his lifelong answer to that existential question.
