Lee Walzer documents a transformation that shouldn’t have happened as quickly as it did. In the 1990s, Israel—a country built on religious law and national survival instincts—began dismantling its legal barriers to LGBTQ+ life. Spousal benefits. Anti-discrimination protections in the military. Rights that many Western democracies were still fighting over.
The book is built on over a hundred interviews: lesbian politicians, gay soldiers, kibbutz members, Palestinian activists. People living the contradiction directly. What emerges isn’t a simple liberation narrative. Instead, Walzer traces the tension between secular legal reform and religious tradition that refuses to disappear. Israeli culture didn’t become homophobic in the classical sense—it became something more specific: heterosexist. The legal system stopped criminalizing homosexuality while the social machinery kept working to enforce heterosexual life as the default, the normal, the expected.
The intersectional realities are even more complicated. Being gay in Israel is one thing. Being both gay and Palestinian is another entirely—the national security state doesn’t care about your sexual identity when your ethnicity already marks you as a security threat. The book doesn’t smooth over these contradictions. It sits with them.
What Walzer ultimately maps is how sexual identity gets negotiated in a society where national security, religious heritage, and collective survival are the primary frameworks. LGBTQ+ Israelis didn’t win acceptance the way Western activists imagined it. They navigated the specific pressures of a militarized, religious state and extracted rights from a system that was never designed to grant them. The progress is real and incomplete and fragile—shaped by forces much larger than individual desire or identity.
Details
| ISBN: 9780231113946 |
| Subtitle: A Gay Journey Through Today’s Changing Israel |
| Genre: Jewish Interests; LGBT Studies/Social Sciences |
| Subject(s): Gays; Gays/ Israel/ Social Conditions; Homosexuality/ Israel; Lesbians; Lesbians/ Israel/ Social Conditions |
| Publication Date: 2000-04-15 |
| Original Publication Date: |
| Publisher: Columbia University Press |
| Language: English |
| Format: Hardcover |
| Pages: 368 |
| Rating: |
| Notes: This is a non-fiction work of LGBTQ+ sociology and history. It is part of the Between Men—Between Women: Lesbian and Gay Studies series and includes extensive interviews and chapters specifically focused on the lives of Israeli and Palestinian lesbians. |
| Book_ID: 105910 |