Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiog)

Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman—Joy Ladin. In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self. With unsparing honesty and surprising humor, Ladin wrestles with both the practical problems of gender transition and the larger moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions that arise. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain of her experience living as the “wrong” gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love. We eavesdrop on her lifelong conversations with the God whom she sees both as the source of her agony and as her hope for transcending it. We look over her shoulder as she learns to walk and talk as a woman after forty-plus years of walking and talking as a man. We stare with her into the mirror as she asks herself how the new self she is creating will ever become real. Ladin’s poignant memoir takes us from the death of living as the man she knew she wasn’t, to the shattering of family and career that accompanied her transition, to the new self, relationships, and love she finds when she opens the door of life. 2012 Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award for Biography, Autobiography, or Memoir“Wrenching—and liberating. . . .[it] opens up new ways of looking at gender and the place of LGBT Jews in community.”—Greater Phoenix Jewish News “Given her high-profile academic position, Ladin’s transition was a major news story in Israel and even internationally. But behind the public story was a private struggle and learning experience, and Ladin pulls no punches in telling that story. She offers a peek into how daunting it was to learn, with little support from others, how to dress as a middle-aged woman, to mu on make-up, to walk and talk like a female. She provides a front-row seat for observing how one person confronted a seemingly impossible situation and how she triumphed, however shakingly, over the many adversities, both societal and psychological, that stood in the way.”—The Gay and Lesbian Review Worldwide

LGBTQ+ Books

Ladin, Joy

Biographies & Memoirs

University of Wisconsin Press

National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Memoir Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman—Joy Ladin. In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self. With unsparing honesty and surprising humor, Ladin wrestles with both the practical problems of gender transition and the larger moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions that arise. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain she experienced living as the “wrong” gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love. We eavesdrop on her lifelong conversations with the God whom she sees both as the source of her agony and as her hope for transcending it. We look over her shoulder as she learns to walk and talk as a woman after forty-plus years of walking and talking as a man. We stare with her into the mirror as she asks herself how the new self she is creating will ever become real. Ladin’s poignant memoir takes us from the death of living as the man she knew she wasn’t, to the shattering of family and career that accompanied her transition, to the new self, relationships, and love she finds when she opens the door of life.

Reference

A collection of three chapbooks in one volume by three different authors. This is book two in the series. The books delve into the mysteries of the ordinary, the evolution of absence, beauty, love, and things past. One book, Answers to the Name 'Lucky', opens the reader up to exploring the themes of existence and vanishing, nothingness and purposefulness. A second book, Maximum Speed through Zero, takes the reader into vignettes of familiar historical figures like Julia Childs, Susan B. Anthony, Frida, Frank Lloyd Wright, Frederick Douglas but also Donald Trump. The third book, Torch, delves into the beautiful moments about absence and love, loss and hope.

Delphi Series Vol. 2: Answers to the Name "Lucky", Maximum Speed through Zero, & Torch

Literature & Fiction

Cotter, Tasha

Litt, Jennifer

Poetry

Blue Lyra Press

This compassionate, constructive volume by renowned author Joy Ladin collects eleven essays written between 2008, on the cusp of what Time called America's "transgender tipping point," and 2021, as anti-trans laws began metastasizing around America. Dr. Ladin, the first openly transgender employee of an Orthodox Jewish institution (Yeshiva University), a nationally known speaker on transgender identities and issues, and founding figure in trans poetry and trans theology, has lived through and contributed to gender's bitterly debated and still unfolding transformation. Drawing on her experiences as a trans parent, spouse, teacher, and author, she writes honestly and insightfully about gender, exploring its intersections with feminisms, psychotherapy, divinity, ontology, and even the poems of Emily Dickinson. Written for any curious reader, these essays teach us about who we are, who we can be, and what it means to be human.

Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender,

Essays & Correspondence

Persea

It begins with "haiku suites," an invented form through which her mother's dementia and the poet's growing disability are glimpsed by the light of a blossoming world. The lyric narratives that follow portray a widening family circle that also includes estranged children, God, targeted trans women, and Trump-era America. The book concludes with "Autobiography of My Whiteness," a reckoning with Ladin's belated awareness of her place in America's racial hierarchy. Written with an open heart and a formal grace, Family&nbsp;is the latest important work of poetry from a Lambda Literary Award finalist and National Jewish Book Award winner.

Family: Poems

Layered and heartrending and transcendent, this is Ladin’s best book yet. The speaker’s nearly omnipresent fear—and acceptance—of the possibility of impending death are offset by her eagerness to speak, her expressions of love, and the poems’ persistent music. And whether considering “the snake of time,” the curving of eternity, or “plain old forever,” these poems are chock-full of the myriad nouns of the world—which is to say the concrete feel and fabric of living: “I want to swallow the ocean of more, yes more.” —Ellen Doré Watson, author of Dogged Hearts and pray me stay eager A Sapphic glance at the Pleiades; a Heraclitean thought on I-95; a siddur-derived “ritual for comforting someone afflicted by a nightmare”; a Woody Allenesque “death, shmeth”—these moments among many others blend into the improbably triumphant harmony of Joy Ladin’s new collection. Woeful and ecstatic, earthy and ardent, Fireworks in the Graveyard enacts its title. —Rachel Hadas, poet, critic, and author of Questions in the Vestibule Today, “The world/grew wider, warmer, more dangerous,/more densely cross-referenced/with emptiness.” Poet Joy Ladin again gets the temper of a complicated world—inner/outer—down on the page: “life may be all there is.” Still, “. . . that tree over there [is] spinning light into sugar.” Her poems rescue us from history as we read. —Hilda Raz, author of All Odd and Splendid The Zen admonition ‘to live as if you were already dead’ is suffused in every one of these watchful poems. Start anywhere. Or turn to “Balance,” a masterful crystallization of what happens when meditation and lyric poetry become indistinguishable from one another. —Timothy Liu, author of Kingdom Come: A Fantasia

Fireworks in the Graveyard

Headmistress Press

Psalms

These psalms grow out of a decades-long fascination with the biblical psalms, particularly the Davidic psalms, which portray the tempestuous, sometimes awful intimacy of the Divine-human relationship. In the lightning-shot Psalm-space where Divine meets human, time shatters, splits, leaps like a river, and so does the soul of the speaker, now hunting God, now hunted, now languishing in despair, now reclining in quiet triumph against the pillars of Heavens. These contemporary psalms attempt to create a corollary to that biblical psalm space, a space narrowed to a single room in which God and the speaker have no choice but to face and struggle toward one another through the whirlwind of pain and love.

Wipf and Stock

The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective (HBI Series on Jewish Women)

Review\n“This heartfelt, difficult work will introduce Jews and other readers of the Torah to fresh, sensitive approaches with room for broader human dignity.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) ― Publishers Weekley, starred review\n"Taken together, these chapters provide groundbreaking and vitally important readings of the Torah that have transformative potential for transgender and queer people as well as all others." ― Journal of the American Academy of Religion\n“For me, the best Torah and the better life come from a wrestle and a dance between a superbly sensitive human being in the right-now, and the ancient text. Ladin has done this in her transparent exploration of how her own Trans life, through joy and pain, has brought her new insights into Torah and into life that open both of them more fully. I found myself dancing in mind and heart and spirit as I read. Hallelu-Yah!” -- Rabbi Arthur Waskow, director of The Shalom Center and author of Godwrestling―Round 2\n2020 Over the Rainbow Non-Fiction Longlist ― Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgender Round Table of the American Library Association\n"I thanked Ladin after her reading, telling her that her work was an inspiration for my own journey into scripture as a gender nonconforming person. She told me that the only way to read Torah is in community, with other voices to guide and challenge you on your reading, each contributing a layer of interpretation to the text. This was days before the reckoning with COVID-19 transformed New York, seemingly overnight, into a city of isolates; now many of us are experiencing the “being alone with God” that Joy Ladin described in her childhood....I felt, if not a sense of community, one of solidarity—a common wayfinding in search of various shores. We’re all looking to get to the other side of something right now. Narratives of transition and transformation remind us that, even in the face of unfathomable bewilderment, we are capable of learning who we truly are." -- Jude Wetherell ― Believe Out Loud\n"The Soul of the Stranger is a daring book. Ladin dares to speak as a transgender person, unapologetically, and assert that transgender people have a place in Judaism, whatever people may say and think....The Soul of the Stranger does not teach that lesson only to transgender Jews. Ladin is an example to everyone who fears living openly as themselves will cost them a place in their community. Whatever identities you hold, we all have something to learn from Ladin about living openly, boldly, and loving God while we do it." ― The Common Reader\nReading some of the best-known Torah stories through the lens of transgender experience, Joy Ladin explores fundamental questions about how religious texts, traditions, and the understanding of God can be enriched by transgender perspectives, and how the Torah and trans lives can illuminate one another. Drawing on her own experience and lifelong reading practice, Ladin shows how the Torah, a collection of ancient texts that assume human beings are either male or female, speaks both to practical transgender concerns, such as marginalization, and to the challenges of living without a body or social role that renders one intelligible to others―challenges that can help us understand a God who defies all human categories. These creative, evocative readings transform our understanding of the Torah’s portrayals of God, humanity, and relationships between them.

History & Criticism

Brandeis University Press

Reading some of the best-known Torah stories through the lens of transgender experience, Joy Ladin explores fundamental questions about how religious texts, traditions, and the understanding of God can be enriched by transgender perspectives, and how the Torah and trans lives can illuminate one another. Drawing on her own experience and lifelong reading practice, Ladin shows how the Torah, a collection of ancient texts that assume human beings are either male or female, speaks both to practical transgender concerns, such as marginalization, and to the challenges of living without a body or social role that renders one intelligible to others―challenges that can help us understand a God who defies all human categories. These creative, evocative readings transform our understanding of the Torah’s portrayals of God, humanity, and relationships between them.

Resource Publications

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ladin, Joy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Ladin, Joy

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Ladin, Joy. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiog)

Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey between Genders (Living Out: Gay and Lesbian Autobiog)

Delphi Series Vol. 2: Answers to the Name "Lucky", Maximum Speed through Zero, & Torch

Once Out of Nature: Selected Essays on the Transformation of Gender,

Family: Poems

Fireworks in the Graveyard

Psalms

The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective (HBI Series on Jewish Women)

The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective (HBI Series on Jewish Women)

Psalms