Amichai Lau-Lavie is a rabbi, an Israeli-American, a father, gay, and... a drag queen. At just 13, on the day of his bar mitzvah, he realized his identity was incompatible with the "Orthodox bubble" in which he had grown up. "I was chanting my Torah story, and the text that I'm chanting is from the book of Leviticus, and it is the text that says that [as a homosexual] I am an abomination and I should be put to death. And I remember thinking: 'What do I do with this?'" The life he has built since then – one of successive acts of emancipations and activism, and shaped by questions of Judaism, Zionism and rising tensions in Trump-era America – has been his answer to that existential question.

Born in Israel 56 years ago, then known as Ami Lau, he grew up in Bnei Brak, just east of Tel Aviv, in an Orthodox family said to trace its lineage back 38 generations of rabbis. His father, a Holocaust survivor born in Poland in 1926, settled in Israel in 1945 (he died in 2014). His British mother arrived a few years later. The family was religious, observant, Zionist and conservative, and the fate of the four sons seemed destined to follow the traditional path of the men before them. But Lau-Lavie describes himself as "a multitude." "I have many identities within," he said. His last name combines his father's (Lau, meaning "lion" in Polish) with a family name adopted upon arriving in Israel (Lavie, which also means "lion" in Hebrew). At 16, he lengthened his original first name, Ami, to become Amichai: "I thought it sounded more serious."

You have 71.53% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.