To party until we cannot discern good from evil

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I leave breadcrumb trails for myself everywhere. To lead myself back. Bottom page corners turned up, phone notes with a half-life of sense of about four minutes. As Purim nears, I find myself trying to track a trail back to something I read or heard last year. Something about Amalek, maybe? Something that made sense of this raucous festival of Megillat Esther (the Book of Esther) – a story of revelries but peppered with persecution and an arc of violent retribution that has been abhorrently used towards justification of revenge after 7 October. I’m looking for this trail, to lead myself forwards, I suppose. 

After skimming a near-library of Purim analysis – from cultural critique to Talmud – my exasperation convinced me I had found what I was looking for when a friend sent me this article about how hamentaschen are actually vulvas, and derive from pre-monotheistic Jewish worship of Ishtar, the Babylonian goddess of sex, war, justice and fertility. Sadly, I awoke from my feminist fever dream of poppy seed cookies, disillusioned once more. The trail having run fully cold – I resolved to turn to observation first. How do we observe Purim? We party. 

Radical, queer, and smoked salmon flavoured

One club night offering to fulfill the obligation to party in the name of Megillat Esther is Buttmitzvah. Now approaching a decade of club nights, having first launched via an of-its-time Facebook “event”, Buttmitzvah attracts celebrities and international travel to their nights in London. The concept is a play on the coming-of-age bar/bat/bnei mitzvah ceremony for Jewish teens, inspired by their tendency to extravagance and, perhaps, campness. Buttmitzvah employs drag, music acts, DJs, sponsored pickles and more to create, in their own words, a “shlongtastically fabulous take on the ancient ritual into adulthood.” The franchise fast-expanded with a party to mark all the major Jewish festivals (minus Yom Kippur!). This year’s Purim party is selling itself, for a hefty ticket price of £25, as yet another iconic “smoked salmon flavoured simcha”.

Indeed, Haaretz agrees that Buttmitzvah is London’s “most radical Jewish queer experience”. And Tom Daley always goes. This in particular ridicules me – the superlatives, not Tom Daley. Every time a new buttmitzvah party comes around, I just can’t shake this feeling of resentment and twisty ick. And it seems I’m not alone. Adjacent to my attempt to remember the drash I read last year, I ask around to try to work out why Buttmitzvah has me so pissed off. 

What-washing? 

Rubbing up against white muscle gays dressed half in kink gear, half as pickles whilst a diligent mix of klezmer and mizrahi music plays may feel radical to many. Especially, maybe, for the swathes of allies (to queers and to Jews) that attend Buttmitzvah — and for those rightly refreshed by the chance to dance to ancestral music in a queer space. 

I get it. I, too, once made a move in the smoking area of Pickle Factory (back when Buttmitzvah was held there) with Ian McKellen over my shoulder and a sense that there was something special about a night that was queer and Jewish and London (read: diaspora) and that I was amidst it. This kiss is a life story I would readily stop retelling if the person I made out with that night weren’t now my life partner. Buttmitzvah was bashert, for me, I guess. 

But as time has passed and the parties grown, it’s certainly not where I want to observe Purim’s obligation and it feels important to intervene in this supposition that it’s “radical”. The Jewish Chronicle loves it, Australia loves it, Time Out loves it, the Daily Mail loves it, the BBC loves it (perhaps unsurprisingly given head of BBC comedy founded the party). So why, when I asked around about this party, was my discomfort compounded? 

A couple of people recalled some hoo-ha on the Instagram stories of the party organisers after 7 October. I remember it too. Perhaps purposefully there is no trace of anything being said and thus this rests here simply as anecdotal collective discomfort related to a political stance; firmly a memorialised hoo-ha, as opposed to any sort of journalistic claim. 

But it has become more and more difficult to ignore the smell of pink-washing. I entrusted my nagging suspicion to a small few. Someone rightfully challenged me: pink-washing what? the occupation, genocide? How? When it is so distinctly diasporic, so without the trace of a political stance, so apolitical, so non-denominational – and I conceded for a moment. Indeed, I self-checked the self-same dynamic I have been pummeled by over the last years: that to demand diaspora Jews answer for the Israeli state is to replicate the associative work of Zionism itself. 

But something still sticks here. And I begin to put my finger on what. 

All parties, political. 

It comes back to that Haaretz headline. And the proud coverage in the Jewish Chronicle and the BBC. It uses Buttmitzvah, this one series of club nights, popularised by the same white gay cisgender men as of much pink-washing’s party-based ammunition, to say: look over here, in London they are all liberal and Jewish and queer. It’s very popular to be Jewish and gay! To be gay and to be Jewish is absolutely fantastic. And absolutely ok here! All absolutely liberally brilliant here!

I have no desire to write this party out of existence. The aim of cancelling or boycotting Buttmitzvah gives the campy night far too much attention and is, to be extremely clear, not my intention, or useful. Hilariously, as I write, I fear my own social cancellation – for ranting and calling it journalism, for in-fighting, for bashing a space that is life-changing for many, that may well be a life-saving haven (and I suppose it did change my life). Why can I not just sit down, and mind my own business? 

But it is my business: to insist it is not “radical” queerness, and to question what saying so acts to obscure; what saying so is being used for. What a collective Jewish queerness is being used for.

Everything is not ok. And it is so important to continue partying in the face of that. But we cannot party apolitically. Queerness is not apolitical, Judaism must not be apolitical and we cannot do Purim apolitically. When we party and decline to say anything of the million devastating shitshows: the retraction of PIP in the UK forcing the most vulnerable into inevitable poverty; the relentless contestation of trans rights and deaths at the hands of policy makers and “academics”; a genocide, ongoing, in our names – it depoliticises us. To say nothing, at best, refuses that all liberations are entwined with ours and, at worst, allows our relative freedom to wash over the prescient and fatal violence persisting in our name and against our siblings. 

Is not London’s most radical Jewish queer experience happening inside hearts and chests when queer Jews are willing to upheave and rethink their liberations’ interdependence with all freedoms? 

I think of collecting anecdotes of real people sharing their most radical Jewish experience. Lighting the shabbes candles surrounded by family of all kinds. Marching in solidarity with Palestine after a Zionist upbringing. Saying the blessing for putting on tallit and feeling “l'hit-atef”, to envelop, to enwrap oneself, as holy instruction, reverberate through a bound chest. But I drop the idea, not wanting to add fuel to the fire, and return to thinking about how I want to party this Purim. 

Purim is really gay… (and anarchist). 

D. Katz reminds me of the detail of Purim’s obligation: to spend the night so drunk that you cannot tell the difference between “blessed” Mordechai and “cursed” Haman – the good and evil characters forming the backbone of Megillat Esther and its pantomimic annual retelling. 

When everything is not ok – when there is goodness but there is huge evil – Purim says inebriate yourself  (the precise translation is “mellow” yourself) until you cannot distinguish from where that good and that evil came. Tipsy meditations on slippery boundaries and disappearing distinctions are facilitated by the tradition of donning fancy dress.

On this the queers are well accustomed and Buttmitvzah is, probably, pretty right-on. In balls/the ballroom scene and descendent drag culture, the competition category “realness” awards points for believable-ness, for “passing”. In the space of the ball passing is not so as to assimilate – as it partially is in the surrounding world, where to “pass” is to be safe(r), to survive. Rather, this “realness” in the balls is temporarily not about regulated conformity but about subversion. To pass, here, is not to reify gender but to debase it. To perform across binarised categories is to remember that they exist to punish, not to free us. And they are stupid. 

Purim, on reflection, is an early exemplification of playing with passing and non-conformity for me. As a kid, I walked into cheder (Hebrew school) dressed as Dennis the Menace in a jumper my Irish Catholic grandma had diligently knitted me to honour the Jewish festival. And it’s not just the (as of yet un-self-identified) trans kid who was doing costume for gender play. I, as Dennis, was doing the same act of performance, of gendered enhancement as every girl dressed as Queen Esther; dressing-up to try out existences temporarily, so we can embody and inhabit other roles, all kinds of desires. 

What we learn from queerness and from masquerading is that lines are not clear cut and therefore cannot be stood upon. When we masquerade on Purim and fulfill our obligation to be so drunk, so slippy, that we cannot tell the difference between the goodness and evil within us all, it is because there is no difference. If it persists, evil is mine as much as it is yours. We are all responsible until it is completely gone. The binary distinction between good and evil does not serve to free us, just to separate us from the truth and from each other and from true justice. 

Drinking to remember

I am not saying don’t go to Buttmitzvah. I am saying party with your whole heart. With your whole treacherous body. I am saying party until you cannot tell the difference between you and the next body, between a notion of us and them. I am saying you must queer and masquerade, play all roles on this night, enact such anarchy in the face of nation-state-bent-everything. Seek to “mellow”, indeed to humble yourself – until you can no longer sustain the conviction that you are a good person. Face the evil that is within you as within us all. Realise: all people were made equal and rupturable. In doing so take on collective responsibility. And then, and only then, let us call ourselves a radical, queer, Jewish thing. 

Waking up the morning after such a Purim, remembering what it felt like to have stepped into collective responsibility, we come to know that saying “not in our name” is no longer enough. All of it is in our name, despite our wishes, until it ends. Buttmitzvah may be “the perfect antidote to shame”: for joyful safety, partying together, being queer, Jewish and proud about it is an antidote indeed. So too an antidote to shame is action. Lest you ever forget that, make yourself a breadcrumb trail back to this drash.