Gregg Drinkwater presents at the Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA
Gregg Drinkwater, PhD student in history, presented a paper titled “AIDS Was Our Earthquake: An American Jewish Community in the Age ofAIDS” at a conference for graduate students and junior scholars hosted in March by the Center for Jewish Studies at UCLA. The conference, “Thinking Beyond the Canon: New Themes and Approaches in Jewish Studies,” featured graduate students and recent PhDs from universities across the country, in conversation with some of the leading Jewish studies faculty in the United States.
Drinkwater’s paper centered on themoment when the American Jewish communitybegan a national conversationon AIDS.In 1985, liberal Jewish leaders began addressing AIDS in public statementsand in resolutions at national conferences. These leaders had to decide if theywould see AIDS as a disease only striking individuals, or as a spiritual,political, and health crisis affecting the entire Jewish community. Would aJewish response to AIDS focus narrowly on compassion and care for thosewith AIDS, or frame AIDS – and by extension, homophobia - broadly as aJewish problem? The paper involved a close reading of two influential sermons, both delivered simultaneously byReform rabbis at two different synagogues in San Francisco on Yom Kippur in 1985. One was delivered by Rabbi Yoel Kahn at Congregation Sha’ar Zahav, the city’s gay and lesbian synagogue,andthe other by Rabbi Robert Kirschner at Congregation Emanu-el, the city’s largest Reform synagogue. Examining these sermons in detail allowed Drinkwater to return to these earlymoments in the Jewish conversation on AIDS. The sermons - both widely circulated and discussed nationally at the time - reflected both the narrowand broad possibilities for a Jewish response, illustrating a turning point whentwo competing visions of how liberal American Jews could respond to AIDSwere on offer.