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By Donald H. Harrison
 SAN DIEGO—With the help of Hineini (Here I Am), a documentary about a Jewish high school student coming out as a lesbian, and other materials produced by Keshet (Rainbow), a Boston-based non-profit organization, J*Pride of San Diego will soon be embarking upon an advocacy program for greater inclusion of lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender individuals in various institutions of San Diego’s Jewish community.
The effort will be coordinated by Mickey Stone, the new executive director of J*Pride, from the organization’s new offices at 3777 Fourth Avenue in the LGBT Community Center in the Hillcrest area of San Diego. Stone, previously of Orlando, Florida, had worked with Keshet in Boston on similar programs. J*Pride recently moved to the LGBT Community Center from the Lawrence Family JCC in La Jolla in order to interact more closely with agencies in the gay community, Stone said.
He told San Diego Jewish World that he anticipates the documentary will be screened four or five times in San Diego County over the next eight months, with this summer being utilized for organizational purposes. Target audiences will be “students, parents, Jewish educators and the general public,” he said.
Bonnie Rosenbaum, Keshet’s deputy director, also served as associate producer of Hineini. She said the film made early in this decade followed Shulamit Izen as she began forming a gay-straight alliance at the pluralistic New Jewish High School of Greater Boston, a school in Waltham, Massachusetts, that t0day is also known as the Gann Academy.
Izen’s efforts prompted changes in that community’s attitudes towards gays, lesbians, bisexuals and transgender individuals, and “in the process four of the 30 teachers also came out,” Rosenbaum said. Additionally, she said, the rabbi who served as the headmaster of the school had a big change in his attitude toward LGBT individuals.
The movie had its premiere in 2005 and has been shown perhaps 300 to 500 times in various locales around the nation, especially at Jewish film festivals, Jewish community centers, and synagogues, Rosenbaum said.
Today Izen is in her last year as a student at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in Philadelphia.
Along with the documentary, Keshet has provided a study guide suggesting ways that educators can deal not only with issues of sexual orientation but also with pluralism, activism, and Jewish communal issues, Rosenbaum said.
One of Keshet’s greatest concerns is the “bullying” that students of different sexual orientations sometimes suffer from their classmates. Rosenbaum said that she knows of two cases in the past two months of “kids who committed suicide.”
One taunt that is all-too-common, she said, is the expression, “Oh, that’s so gay” said derisively about someone's clothing or
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an action or an attitude.
The documentary and study guide are points of entry into a program Keshet has named “Jewish Safe Schools and
Supportive Communities,” in which educators and other school authorities are taught “concrete strategies for combating anti-GLBT bias, supporting GLBT youth, and creating fully inclusive experiences annually for Jewish educators and community leaders.”
Rosenbaum said Keshet is fostering similar programs with the Jewish Gay Network of Michigan, in Detroit, and with JQ International in Los Angeles.
Stone said that after meeting with San Diego area rabbis and communal leaders, he believes San Diego to be “ahead of the game” in terms of Jewish communal inclusiveness. “I hope that what I will be bringing in will be reinforcement rather than first-time learning,” he said.
Another Keshet initiative concerns working with clergy and lay leaders to follow up the Conservative movement’s decision in 2006 to ordain gay and lesbian rabbis and also to permit rabbis to officiate at same-sex weddings.
Rosenbaum said Keshet recently “ran a Day of Study for clergy and lay leaders in nine Conservative synagogues in Massachusetts. Participants had the opportunity to explore Jewish texts on homosexuality and discuss steps for creating an inclusive community at their institutions.”
"While every New England state except Rhode Island has legalized same-sex marriages, transgender citizens in Massachusetts (and others who do not conform to notions of how “real” men or woman should look or act) do not yet have equal right," Rosenbaum said. "Transgender and gender non-confirming people can still be fired, denied housing, education or credit simply because of bias against their gender identity or expression. Keshet is backing a bill in the Massachusetts Legislature and mobilizing the Jewish community to outlaw this discrimination."
In California, the state Supreme Court earlier this year affirmed the constitutionality of Proposition 8 of 2008, by which voters prohibited same-sex marriages in California. The court said those who had such marriages while they were legal in the state could continue to have the legal protections of married couples.
Stone said he anticipates that the J*Pride board will decide to become involved in advocacy work to overturn Proposition 8—an activity that will be easier at the LGBT Community Center, which is on private property, than at the Lawrence Family JCC, which is on city-owned property.
J*Pride board members include Dr. Seth Krosner, chairman; Jane Fantel; Debra Stern-Ellis; Rochelle Robins; Brian Schaefer and Michael Sonduck.
The organization may be reached at (619) 497-2920, or via its website, www.jpridesd.org.
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