In This Day and Age?!: a Community at the Crossroads of Religion and Homosexuality

Dr. Isaac Namdar is a successful doctor in private practice in a major metropolitan area. He recently married his long-term same-sex partner in a very intimate ceremony. They later had a dinner party to celebrate their union with family and friends. Dr. Namdar comes from a Sephardic background, and is part of a tightly-knit community of first generation immigrants. Since the general position of his community on homosexuality mirrors the Biblical prohibition, Dr. Namdar chose to keep his sexuality and his wedding private from his ancestral community. Two months after the wedding party, a fellow community member found their wedding photos online and proceeded to forward the link to everyone else. Within a day, a thousand new hits were registered to the website, and the news of the first same-sex wedding of a community member spread like wildfire. While the leaders and the Rabbis of the community took steps to excommunicate Dr. Namdar solely on the basis of his sexuality, a great debate ensued on the rights of homosexuals within the community and the society at large. In this book, Dr. Namdar provides us with just enough insight into the customs of his community for the reader to appreciate the implications of his story. He then chronicled his experiences through a series of communications in the form of emails, phone call, and Discussion Board entries to give the reader a first hand account of the extreme events surrounding his outing. Many people believe that gay rights are the most important outstanding civil rights issue of our generation. Through this book, the author attempts to highlight the range of attitudes that exist in contemporary society regarding this issue. What makes this book unique is that the arguments are not written by a single protagonist with his own biases. Rather, the range of opinions are expressed by many different people in their own original language.