I was always taught that part of the DNA of being Jewish was showing up for other Jewish people simply because they're Jewish.
Like this terrible restaurant opened up like three blocks away from us and it was kosher and like we went there three times in the opening week.
And I asked my mom, I was like, why are we eating at this terrible restaurant every day?
And she's like, because it's a Jewish restaurant and you like support the Jewish restaurants.
Adam Eli, welcome to I Weigh. How are you?
Thank you so, so much for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
We are so excited to have you here. We've been a fan of you for a really long time over at I Weigh.
And I think now with your book coming out it is the perfect time to showcase you to our audience.
I agree. And thank you.
Yeah, will you tell me what your book is about? In fact, you have it right here.
Sure. Yes, I do. This is my book.
It's called The Nuclear Conscience. And it basically attempts to use the structures of Judaism to re-imagine the queer community.
And so I argue in it that queer people anywhere are responsible for queer people everywhere.
And I try to look at what has made Jewish people successful.
And I talk about the different ways that Jewish people have survived so many different types of oppression.
And I try to take those tools and apply them to the queer community.
I think this is fascinating.
Thank you.
Could I have that?
This is such a cool idea. I think this is going to help so many people.
But I was wondering where this, where this decision where this inspiration came from.
So when we talk about being queer and religious or being queer and Jewish because that's the only experience I can speak to.
The story that we often hear is:
I was queer, everyone around me was Jewish and I was closeted and I couldn't come out and it was really hard for me.
And that is a part of my story.
And that story is valid and important.
But I think it's a story that.
Needs to change.
That one needs to change and two has been told a lot.
And so while that was a part of my story, what I like to talk about now, is how I genuinely believe that Judaism,
it fueled my queer activism and acts as like the cornerstone and the foundation on which it's placed
in like a theoretical and also like practical literal way.
And I wanted to ask you when it was that you came to realize that there was a direct correlation between the way that
Jewish people have used Judaism as a tool to kind of come together
and how you think that queer people could approach their own unity?
After the shooting in Pittsburgh last year,
I was taken aback as everyone was. And I was.
We'd actually planned a different pro- we had an intersex protest that day.
And so I was planning for a different protest. And we were all shocked.
And with, it Shabbos, it was the Sabbath.
And like before, the Sabbath had even ended.
So a lot of people weren't even on their phones or online.
Huge amounts of money has been raised.
People were going to Pittsburgh in droves, dropping off food.
There was outcry from like every Jewish politician, celebrity ever.
And it really and there was a huge memorial, rally in Union Square.
And it felt like everyone was on the same page.
An attack on one Jew is an attack on all Jews, period.
And then like two weeks later, there was a resurgence of a purge in Chechnya of where the Chechen government is openly kidnaping and killing its queer citizens.
And we got news, very solid news that that was happening again.
And within the queer community, there was not any real type of unified response that prompted action.
And from the time of the Pittsburgh shootings until Chechnya, until the resurgence in Chechnya,
three black trans women had been murdered.
And again, as always, there was no type of uniformed response.
So like here I am standing at the right firm intersection of both communities
and I'm seeing two different crises unfold and I'm seeing a very, very different reaction.
And it's not a criticism, it's a hope and a dream and like an outline for the future
that I believe that if queer people adopt the principle that queer people anywhere are responsible for, queer people everywhere,
we'll be able to one during the best of times, like shine like a beacon of hope and light and attract people to us.
And during the worst of times, it can act as a safety net.
And that idea comes from the Talmud, which is a piece of like ancient Jewish scripture that says *speaking Hebrew*,
which means all of the Jewish people are responsible for each other. And I just took that directly.
And just like me, gay-er.
I love that. I love that so much. I love this idea.
There's something so,
it's sad that it's so revolutionary, but there's something so revolutionary about this idea.
And it's something that hadn't even occurred to me until I'd heard you speak about it and I'd heard about this.
And I think that it's such a fascinating approach.
And so I also want to mention that you yourself, I hope it's okay that I'm bringing this up,
Yep.
were the victim of a hate crime. September last year?
Yes. Yes. This past September.
Yeah. And and I.
And I.
Am I right in saying that when you were contacted about being able to discuss it, you redirected people who were reporting on it to
the black trans community where they were more marginalized and less supported?
Absolutely.
And so basically I was attacked on the subway.
I was wearing bas- like exactly what I'm wearing right now, like my pink kippah.
And I did have like a patch on my butt that had a rainbow flag.
And like this purse, which I don't think this is like such an offensive, like glaring outfit.
You don't look dangerous to me.
And also, I would, I don't even know if this would be like like gender.
I wouldn't even call this like non-binary.
I think this is like pretty like male presenting.
And but the person realized, they were religious, and they realized that I was presenting as gay and Jewish and they asked me to take my kippah off.
And once I figured out what was happening, I was like, I spent so many years of people forcing me to put my kippah on and like
now that like I finally want to put it on.
I'm not going to just like, take it off.
And.
Can I ask if these people were themselves from within your community?
They were definitely Jewish.
Okay. So they were Jewish. And therefore, they wanted you to take your kippah off because they?
I couldn't be gay and Jewish and.
Basically so when people tried to talk to me about it, I was at first I was like, I'm not sure like what good that's going to do.
I wasn't sure.
I videotaped the whole thing because that was just like my millennial instinct.
And it went super viral.
And it went viral.
And I wasn't sure if I was going to post it because it's like, why am I putting this violence out there in the world like I experienced it.
It was not fun.
Why do- why does anyone else need to see it?
And I realized because I want to show that, like this is what a white male passing cis gay guy is getting.
Like, can you possibly even imagine,
the scope of violence that trans and gender nonconforming people and especially gender nonconforming people and trans people of color are getting every single day?
That's the hate that I'm getting.
Can you imagine what it's like for the other members of our community?
And so when you were redirecting people to pay their attention to the trans and queer people of color who were receiving violence,
what was their response?
So some of the response was good and some of it was bad.
Bad in what way?
Well, the mayor- the mayor tweeted at me like, "Thank you, Adam like, for your bravery. This is like how we New Yorkers deal with that stuff"
and I was like.
No.
Maybe.
So I tweeted at him, back at him saying, "Thank you so much. Homophobia is one of the issues we have to work on. But like in order to solve queer phobia, we have to, we have to work for our entire community."
"And so maybe if you're really dedicated to this cause me, you and Layleen Polanco's family can all meet up and speak together because I know that you've been avoiding meeting with her family."
"Maybe we can use this as a time to do that."
And Layleen Polanco is a Afro-Latinx woman who died in Riker's Island during Pride Month.
It's like 10 miles away from the Stonewall Inn.
And the mayor had been refusing to meet with the family.
And there was radio silence,
obviously.
And so that was not good.
But otherwise, I think that it was good, something that was really interesting that happened there,
and it speaks to the tremendous amount of privilege that cis people have over trans people,
when I was speaking about how we should be listening to trans people and trans people of color, we should be reporting on those incidents instead of just this one.
That ineffect, like made me look good. And like I got a bunch of followers and I got a bunch of press around it.
But when black trans people talk about how they want people to listen to their stories and their stories of harassment,
they're like, "Oh, you're loud and you're angry."
"Aggressive."
"And aggressive."
And so we're literally, literally saying the same exact thing.
And I'm being praised with press and followers.
It's the same thing when I talk about women and fat phobia or anyone and fat phobia.
People will listen to me, a slender woman saying the same thing that they are saying.
Or, that I said when I was a fat activist, when I was myself fat, no one listened to me.
Absolutely.
It's the craziest, and most infuriating part of our culture that we only listen the privilege.
But then also at a certain point, then cut off the privilege and say, no, you're virtue signaling or you don't get to talk about this.
You don't get to talk about this community that you don't come from.
So we find a way to silence the oppressed and then silence the privilege that no one gets to have the conversation.
And so I love that you are pushing that conversation through regardless.
Totally. And it's all about like redirection and push.
Push like passing the mic on.
And sharing.
Yeah.
Really. That's all it is.
How are you since that attack?
Thank you for asking.
I'm okay.
I used to do a lot-
the way I started.
I started organizing after the Pulse massacre.
And I basically before I had any type of following online,
I just posted online.
Like, if you're sad and upset about what happened, you can meet me at this street corner.
And like thirty people showed up and we all went to the memorial together.
And I was like, "Oh. Turns out that social media can be used as a tool for like real life organizing. Who knew?".
And then throughout my activist career, I did a lot of that.
And a huge amount of a number of protests I organized were like "Meet me here at this time, this place".
And it really worked.
And since that attack and since the sharp, sharp rise in anti-Semitism in the past, like fifteen months in the US, I've been nervous to do that.
I've been nervous to say, like, meet me on the street corner at this time and like show up alone,
which is something I used to do like twice a month.
So you're not just endangering yourself, you're endangering, I guess, everyone, unfortunately.
Oh, my God. Absolutely.
And especially I'm so grateful and excited and blessed that a lot of the voices for membership is generally like sixteen to twenty three, which is like a dream come true.
But at every protest, I'm sitting there like terrified.
I'm like, always counting the minutes to end because it's just one more minute that someone can, like, show up with a gun or show up
In a car.
[Adam] with a knife.
Everyone has access to my Instagram and that location.
So I've been nervous to do that since.
Yeah.
So tell me about Voices 4.
Okay, so Voices 4 is an activist group.
We now have three chapters, New York, London and Berlin.
And it was sometime in 2017 and the news about what was happening in Chechnya broke,
which is that the Chechen government is and still is rounding up queer people and torturing them and beating them and putting them in holding cells
or what they were calling them at the time, concentration camps and
forcing them to out each other and then murdering them or asking their families to
honor murder them.
And so my great grandparents came from Russia because of the pogroms.
The pogroms were a series of government sanctioned
anti-Semetic
like attacks.
And my mother worked within the Soviet Jewry movement fighting for the rights of Jewish people in the former Soviet Union to leave the Soviet Union.
And so all the pieces were just there in front of me.
Like Russian or Russian.
Russian affiliated, state sanctioned violence, concentration camps
because of people who they are and I feel like this metal plate, just like rattled off in my head and was like, never again is now like this is what I've been training for during
for- in Hebrew school, you know.
And so I looked around for a direct call to action. And there was nothing.
There were petitions being signed.
And I don't think petition signing is the most effective way to deal with genocide.
So I found a group of people that were working that had experienced the violence directly.
And I said, you know, "What can we do?"
And they said, "We need attention and we need money.".
And I was like, well, me and the bunch of like other like white insta-gays in the city that I hang out with, like we can definitely do that.
You know, like we can get a bunch of attention and get it raise a bunch of money.
So we demanded emergency visas and we started at Stonewall and marched to Trump Tower.
We did not get the visas, but we did have 700 people come out and we raised a huge amount of money.
And then the next week, we were having like- we had to organize that.
We had like a debrief.
And we we're like, okay, I guess this is a group now and,
you know, the first week we had like 10 people and then we made sure to post like create really cute Instagram assets like "Next week, meet us here."
And then we have like 40 and then we had hundreds.
And now we have international chapters.
That's amazing. And will you continue to expand that?
Yeah, I really hope so.
And at the time, I didn't like. Right. You said like when you were saying like, now, you know,
what I Weigh is.
At the time I did not know what Voices 4 was.
But now I do.
And it's a group of people that get together simply because they believe that
if they're queer, that means they have an obligation to show up for other queer people.
So whatever Voices 4 group is doing, as long as it's
using their resources to leverage the voices of marginalized queer people.
That's Voices.
I also think, you know, going back to Judaism and really any religion that part of what you celebrate within any given religion is like what an honor it is to be Jewish or to be a Muslim or to be part of this community
to be chosen by this God or this, you know, this source, you know, whatever anyone would like to call it.
I.
I wish that queer people had that sense of not just like a lack of shame, but I love if we could get not only to a lack of shame.
But beyond it, to a point of glory and feeling special for being queer, for being almost like finding it to be like an inner beauty within you.
I totally agree.
Like aren't we so special for being queer?
Do you know what I mean?
That's where I feel like we need to get to. That's another part of, I think the way that you're creating that intersection between Judaism or just religion.
And and queerdom.
I feel I feel very seen.
Thank you.
Absolutely.
And in my book, I
someone asked me, they were like, "what do you want your readers to get out of your book?"
And I said that if you're queer, it means that you are a part of something greater than yourself.
And that you
and that means that you're never alone.
And I talk about like growing up all the time, like
this famous person is Jewish, like, you know, that like this many Jews, like, won the Nobel Peace Prize.
And like sometimes my grandmother would just sit at the table and just like to herself be like
"Jewish people have such brilliant minds," you know, like going to the newspaper by to herself.
And no one ever said anything about being queer.
And so I talk about queer history and queer erasure in the book.
And I see that like in every single
field, every prize, every sport, every career, every delegation,
there is a piece of queer history and that is yours to be proud of.
And grow strength from and
the amount of extraordinary things that queer people have accomplished in the face of such oppression is incredible.
And that I just think being queer is like the coolest thing in the entire world.
Did you always feel this way?
No, not at all.
And I had a really good friend who said
I was like, "are we being too queer?"
And he just snapped his head back.
And he was like, "There's no such thing as being too queer."
And I was just like, okay, like, great.
And so I just
What did too queer mean for you?
Like, we're just being like, sort of flamboyant at like a family gathering.
Okay.
And he was like, "There's no such thing."
And I was like, "Okay, adopting that."
And so I just made a decision at some point that I did not feel like being gay was the best thing that ever happened to me.
But I just started acting as though I did feel that way.
Until it was true.
And then it sort of caught on. You faked it till you made it.
And then that's the same.
And I hated being Jewish.
I hated being Jewish.
Why? Because of society?
So I had two- I hated being Jews for two reasons.
The first is that I had a severe learning disability and I couldn't read. I couldn't learn to read English and was in fourth grade.
And by the time I had learned to read English.
Everyone else was learning how to read Hebrew.
So I'm like 12, 13 years old and I hadn't caught up.
So I'm forced to go into these like, you know, these classes where
I was like put with the younger kids because I couldn't read Hebrew and like,
it was just really holding me back.
And then as I'm trying to read Hebrew, which was such a struggle, because I could barely get it together to read English.
I hit puberty and realized.
And now you wrote a fucking book. Go on
I realized I hit puberty at the same time and I realized that
what was the Jewish world that I was in was not allowing me to be gay, and I was like, well, screw this, I'm not learning how to read Hebrew.
And so I really, really throughout high school and college felt like being gay and Jewish was like pun intended my cross to bear.
Like it was the worst thing that could have happened to me.
And when I went to college, I had a kind of spiritual moment where I was like.
I, Adam Eli Werner, I am no longer Jewish.
I would not wear a kippah.
I did not go to Jewish holidays.
I'd not go to the Hillel like the Jewish Community Center at my school once.
When people asked me if I was Jewish, because, like, obviously I'd be like, no, I'm Greek,
which did not work.
Like I did that for a while and it slowly and slowly changed.
And so sometimes when I talk about being queer and Jewish, I'll have queer Jewish people be like, "I hate being queer and Jewish. And like, I don't want to talk about it."
And I'll be like.
Like absolutely like no problem.
I totally feel that.
If you ever change your mind, like the gays and the Jews aren't going anywhere, so like call us.
I love that.
Oh, I've loved getting to sit down and talk to you.
I Know. This has been incredible.
This has been really fun. The New Queer Conscience comes out?
June 2nd.
June 2nd. Yay!
Thank you so much.
Yeah. Thank you so much for having me.
Adam Eli. What a joy.