Strangers Who Belong

Conversion, Queerness, and the Commandment to Love the Stranger

Most of y’all don’t know me from Adam. Or Eve. We’re strangers to one another. Being a stranger is something I know a lot about: I am a convert to Judaism, and the Hebrew word for “convert” doubles as the word for “stranger.” A contradiction at the heart of my belonging on Jewish community: to be labeled simultaneously as one who lives in the full embrace of Judaism (one metaphor for conversion is to be “taken under the wings of God’s presence”), and yet forever carrying the label “strange, foreign.”

As an introduction to me and to my writing, I am adapting here for all y’all strangers the “Coda” to my 2010 dissertation, Hello There, Stranger: The Performance & Politics of Intimacy & Belonging, submitted to NYU for my PhD in Performance Studies. I hope it helps you feel a sense of belonging in my own community of values, the community that loves the stranger while letting them remain, beautifully and wondrously, queer.

The stranger who lives among you shall be to you as one of your citizens; you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt. (Leviticus 19:34)

You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the soul of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exodus 23:9)1