• AIDS Was Our Earthquake:American Jewish Responses to the AIDS Crisis, 1985–92
• Gregg Drinkwater (bio)

On June 5, 1981, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported on an unusual cluster of Pneumocystis Pneumonia among five previously healthy young gay men in Los Angeles. That report is generally understood as the first official documentation of the epidemic that was briefly called "gay cancer" and then "Gay Related Immune-Deficiency" (GRID) before being labelled "Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome" (AIDS) in the summer of 1982. By 1985, 15,000 Americans had been diagnosed with the disease. Nearly 13,000 of them had died.¹ The majority were gay and bisexual men and intravenous (IV) drug users—all populations that were widely stigmatized at the time.

From the beginning of the AIDS crisis in 1981 through 1985, American Jewish leaders were largely silent. We do not see evidence of widespread Jewish communal engagement with AIDS in the United States until September 24, 1985, when two young and charismatic rabbis in San Francisco delivered Yom Kippur sermons on AIDS in their respective Reform synagogues: Congregation Sha'ar Zahav (serving primarily LGBTQ members) and Congregation Emanu-El (with primarily straight members). Both sermons, and the rabbis who delivered them, profoundly shaped liberal American Judaism's responses to AIDS. [End Page 122]

The Sha'ar Zahav sermon, delivered by Yoel Kahn, a 26-year-old gay man newly ordained as a Reform rabbi, suggested a Jewish path forward on HIV/AIDS grounded in the insights of the Gay Liberation Movement and an approach that centered gay and lesbian lives. The Emanu-El sermon, in contrast, delivered by Robert Kirschner, a 34-year-old straight man newly promoted as his congregation's senior rabbi, called upon Jewish compassion in the face of a public health crisis affecting stigmatized populations. Yet both shared common ground. Rather than framing the religious and moral issue at the heart of HIV/AIDS as a need to proscribe sexual behavior coded as dangerous and aberrant, as was common among evangelical, Catholic, and Orthodox Jewish leaders, the rabbis who delivered both of these sermons reflected the emergence of a new moral calculus in which acceptance and tolerance of gay and lesbian people became a Jewish moral litmus test among liberal Jews. The Jewish AIDS initiatives that followed in the wake of the conversations these sermons helped spark were rarely about policing the sexual and intimate behavior of gay and lesbian people. Instead, most of the Jewish AIDS programs that emerged in the US in the late 1980s focused on providing support and social services to people with AIDS (hereafter PWAs) and their families; raising awareness about the risks of AIDS; making AIDS more visible in Jewish communities; and modifying the behaviors of non-gay Jews toward gay and lesbian people.²

In the early years of the AIDS epidemic, conservative American Christian religious leaders, such as Jerry Falwell, had insisted that AIDS was God's punishment for sinful "homosexual" behavior. A 1986 Gallup poll, five years after the AIDS crisis emerged, indicated that 42 percent of Americans agreed with him.³ Such religious bigotry in the early 1980s was one factor that gave political and cultural leaders license to minimize the threat of the disease and to openly mock those suffering from AIDS.⁴ Few Jewish leaders outside the ultra-Orthodox community, however, made claims about AIDS that explicitly invoked God's wrath as the cause of AIDS. One exception was the Modern Orthodox Rabbi Barry Freundel—the same rabbi who was arrested in 2014 for voyeurism at a Washington DC mikvah (ritual bath)—who wrote in a 1986 essay that—although one can cite Jewish proof texts arguing both for and against divine punishment—"[b]y far, the greater evidence indicates that God's retribution plays a role in epidemics such as AIDS." Yet even Freundel quickly dismissed the question as irrelevant to the Jewish obligation to "heal and prevent death wherever possible."⁵ More often, Orthodox Jewish leaders joined conservative Christians in describing AIDS as the consequence of what they saw [End Page 123] as abhorrent or even pathological behavior, although the vast majority still held that regardless of...

• 艾滋病是我们的地震：美国犹太人对艾滋病危机的反应，1985-92年
• 格雷格饮用水（生物）

1981年6月5日，疾病控制与预防中心（CDC）报告说，洛杉矶有五名以前健康的年轻男同性恋者中有异常的肺孢子虫肺炎。该报告通常被认为是该流行病的第一份正式文献，在1982年夏季被冠以“后天免疫缺陷综合症”（AIDS）的标签，之后简称为“同性恋相关的免疫缺陷”（GRID）。到1985年，已有15,000名美国人被诊断出患有这种疾病。其中有近13,000人死亡。¹多数是男同性恋者和双性恋者以及静脉内（IV）吸毒者-当时所有被污名化的人群。

从1981年的艾滋病危机到1985年，美国犹太领导人基本上保持沉默。直到1985年9月24日，美国才出现犹太人在艾滋病中广泛参与的证据，当时，旧金山的两名年轻且具有超凡魅力的拉比在各自的改革会堂中发表了有关艾滋病的赎罪日布道：主要是LGBTQ成员）和会众Emanu-El（主要是直属成员）。讲道和提供这些讲道的拉比，深刻地塑造了自由的美国犹太教对艾滋病的反应。[第122页]

由新任命为改革拉比的26岁男同性恋者Yoel Kahn提供的Sha'ar Zahav讲道提出了犹太人在HIV / AIDS方面的前进之路，其基础是Gay Liberation Movement（同性恋解放运动）的见解和以这种方式为中心的方法同性恋生活。相比之下，由34岁的异性恋者罗伯特·科斯纳（Robert Kirschner）提供的Emanu-El讲道相反，面对会受到污名化的民众的公共卫生危机，他呼吁犹太人同情。然而，两者有共同点。与其将传播艾滋病毒/艾滋病核心问题的宗教和道德问题归结为是对习俗，天主教徒和东正教犹太领导人普遍禁止的被编码为危险和异常的性行为的要求，提供这两个讲道的拉比反映了一种新的道德演算的出现，在这种演算中，男女同性恋者的接受和宽容成为自由派犹太人中犹太人的道德试金石。在这些布道帮助引发的谈话之后，随之而来的犹太人艾滋病倡议很少涉及维持同性恋者的性行为和亲密行为。取而代之的是，1980年代末在美国出现的大多数犹太人艾滋病计划都集中在为艾滋病患者（以下简称PWA）及其家人提供支持和社会服务。提高对艾滋病风险的认识；使艾滋病在犹太社区中更加明显；并修改非同性恋犹太人对同性恋者的行为。^2个

在艾滋病流行的早期，保守的美国基督教宗教领袖，例如杰里·法尔威尔（Jerry Falwell），一直坚持认为艾滋病是上帝对有罪的“同性恋”行为的惩罚。艾滋病危机爆发五年后的1986年盖洛普民意测验表明，有42％的美国人同意他的观点。³在1980年代初期，这种宗教偏执是使政治和文化领袖获得许可以最大程度地减少疾病威胁并公开嘲笑艾滋病患者的因素之一。⁴然而，极东正教社区之外的少数犹太领导人宣称对艾滋病的明确宣称是将上帝的愤怒作为艾滋病的根源。一个例外是现代东正教犹太教教士巴里·弗伦德尔（Barry Freundel），也是同一位拉比，他于2014年在华盛顿特区因偷窥而被捕mikvah（仪式浴）在1986年的一篇文章中写道，尽管有人可以引用支持和反对神圣刑罚的犹太证据文本，” [b]到目前为止，更大的证据表明，上帝的报应在诸如艾滋病。” 然而，甚至弗洛伊德尔（Freundel）都迅速否认了这个问题，因为它与犹太人“尽一切可能治愈和防止死亡”的义务无关。⁵更经常地，东正教犹太领导人与保守派基督徒一起将艾滋病描述为他们认为[End Page 123]是令人讨厌甚至是病理行为的结果，尽管绝大多数人仍然认为，无论...