Gay and Orthodox Jewish: is there a problem?
BY MIKE BOONE, THE GAZETTE
FEBRUARY 22, 2010
Here’s one for psychologists to ponder: How many gay men are the sons of ritual slaughterers?
David Brody’s father was a shoichet, a butcher who rendered animals kosher by killing them in the manner specified by Jewish dietary laws.
Brody has never killed anything, although he may have taken liberties with an idiom or two. Born in London and educated at Edinburgh University, where he studied French, Brody, 69, is a translator.
He has also become a novelist. Mourning and Celebration is Brody’s imaginative account of what life might have been like for a gay, Orthodox Jewish boy raised in the shtetl, the eastern European village of Brody’s ancestors.
Fiddler on the Roof Meets the Boys in the Band.
Brody will speak tomorrow evening at the Shaar Hashomayim synagogue in Westmount. His topic is Growing Up Jewish, Orthodox and Gay.
"My credentials are quite good," Brody says. "My father was the principal of a Hebrew and Jewish studies school. He was also, when I was very young, a shoichet and a part-time cantor."