Pride Has a New Rule: Be the Right Kind of Jew—or Be Erased

Pride is where we celebrate being fully, unapologetically, and fiercely ourselves.

For me, that sometimes even means stepping out in six-inch heels and full glam as The Empress Mizrahi—not necessarily a drag persona I put on, but an extension of myself. It’s pure self-expression. It’s joy. But whether I’m in drag or not, I am who I am: a gay Iranian Jew, the child of immigrants, someone who carries generations of Middle Eastern Jewish history in my bones, my blood, and my voice.

So imagine what it feels like to be told—explicitly or not—that I don’t belong. That my intersectional identity is too inconvenient for the so-called champions of intersectionality. That if I want to show up in LGBTQ spaces, I need to shed a part of myself—my Jewishness.

Let me be clear: I refuse.

The antisemitism in these spaces didn’t begin a few months ago. I’ve watched it fester for years, slowly growing more brazen. Since October 7, it has erupted. Jewish LGBTQ people have been harassed, uninvited, erased, and met with suspicion at community events, including Pride. Groups have been dropped from parades. The Star of David is being labeled “too political.” Jewish drag artists are being told to tone it down—or not show up at all.

And just this month, two people were gunned down outside the Capital Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. after attending a reception focused on peace and humanitarian aid. The attack took place just steps from an exhibit celebrating LGBTQ Jewish life. If that’s not a wake-up call, I don’t know what is.

In Los Angeles—a city my family fled to after the revolution in Iran in search of freedom—I’ve watched Jewish LGBTQ people hesitate to participate in the very events we helped build. This is the city where I marched just a few years ago in full drag, proudly waving a rainbow flag with a Star of David on it. And now I’m being told that holding a rainbow flag with a Star of David on it—my flag—makes others feel unsafe?

What happened to “everyone is welcome”?

Today’s social justice warriors fetishize and tokenize all things Middle Eastern—so long as it’s the right kind of Middle Eastern. Arab. Muslim. Anti-Zionist. But Jewish culture originates in the Middle East, too. And nothing is more inconvenient to the antisemitic, anti-Zionist worldview than a Jew whose ancestors never left the region. My existence as a gay Middle Eastern Jew doesn’t fit the narrative they’ve constructed—as white Europeans—so it gets erased.

I carry the stories of the Jewish people—not only from Iran, where my family’s diaspora experience took root, but from across our global journey. I hold close the histories of Jews from Aleppo, Baghdad, Yemen, Afghanistan, and across the Middle East and North Africa.

At JIMENA, the organization I work for that represents Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, we uplift these stories every day—because they are too often ignored or forgotten.

But I also hold the stories of diasporas from Ethiopia, Europe, and all across the world, including the trauma of the Holocaust. Their history is mine, just as mine is theirs. Despite 2,000 years of dispersion, we are one people. Our survival is collective. Our connection is ancestral. And that unity runs deeper than skin tone, accent, or geography. In a time of gatekeeping and selective solidarity, I’m here to say: all Jews are valid. Being Jewish isn’t about optics—it’s about shared responsibility, shared destiny, and the sacred act of showing up for one another.

And yet now I’m being told that unless I denounce Israel—or hide my Jewish identity—I don’t belong. That my Jewishness is only acceptable if I align with a movement that is decisively anti-Jewish, that calls for the destruction of my people and our ancestral homeland. Do they not see how cruel that is? How vile? To demand that I disavow a core part of who I am just to be accepted? And here’s the irony: the very ideology they’re defending hates LGBTQ+ people even more than it hates Jews. This isn’t justice—it’s shallow, performative, and dangerously unserious. It’s ideological subversion personified: queer people cheering for a movement that quite literally wants them dead.

That is not justice. That is not allyship. And it is certainly not queer liberation.

This Pride season, I’m working with A Wider Bridge to ensure that Jewish LGBTQ people—Ashkenazi, Sephardi, Mizrahi, Israeli, diasporic, religious, secular, and everything in between—can show up fully and without fear. That means working with Pride organizers to create real inclusivity. It means making sure our symbols aren’t treated like threats. It means ensuring that slogans shouted from stages don’t erase our identity or humanity.

And it means calling out antisemitism—even when it’s cloaked in activist language.

To my fellow LGBTQ Jews—don’t shrink. Don’t dilute the truth of who we are. We are not too complicated. We are not “off-brand.” We helped build this movement. It’s ours as much as anybody’s.

And to those organizing Pride events: reach out to your Jewish LGBTQ communities. Include us. Protect us. Make space not just for slogans—but for stories. Messy, layered, intersectional stories like mine.

This year, I’ll be out. I might be in a wig, heels, and full glam—or I might not. But either way, I’ll be proudly wearing my Star of David.

Just as I once planted my feet firmly on the ground, ten toes down, and declared with my full chest: I am part of the Jewish community. I am part of the Iranian community. I’m not going anywhere. I am part of you, whether you like it or not. I’m doing the same now in the LGBTQ community—the very community that once taught me how to be bold, how to be defiant, how to be unapologetically myself.

The irony isn’t lost on me. But neither is my pride.

Nouriel is a non-binary digital activist who advocates for LGBTQ+ rights and equality in the Iranian and Jewish communities.