Students who gathered in Pigott Hall last night for the screening of the 2004 documentary “Out of the Closet and into the Streets of Tel Aviv” saw a side of Israel rarely portrayed by the U.S. media.

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The Stanford Israel Alliance, Jewish Students Associations, LGBT CRC, etc co-hosted the screening of the documentary #gallery http://daily.stanford.edu/image/full/6794
John Shen

The Stanford Israel Alliance, Jewish Students Associations, LGBT CRC, etc co-hosted the screening of the documentary "Out of the closet and into the streets of Tel Aviv" last night.

The film, produced by Blue Star PR in collaboration with Israel’s two largest Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual and Transgender (LGBT) organizations — the Agudah and Jerusalem Open House — featured members of the gay community in Tel Aviv discussing Israel’s unique tolerance of homosexuality, especially in the military.

“Tel Aviv is like the gay city to be in all the Middle East — it’s an amazing place,” remarked one Israeli man interviewed in the documentary.

The film reported that Jerusalem Open House, one of the grassroots organizations that sponsored the film, also helps Palestinian homosexuals estranged by their own community to embrace their sexuality.

Mishan Araujo ‘07, president of the Stanford Israel Alliance (SIA), collaborated with members of the Jewish Student Association, LGBT-Community Academic Support and Advising, Stanford Jewish Queers and StandWithUs to show the film.

“I originally heard of the documentary from the Israel Center in San Francisco, a group that serves Israelis in the Bay Area and works closely with the Stanford Israel Alliance,” she said. “I thought now would be a great time to organize the event, since Israel just legalized gay marriage and the first gay couple was recently married there.”

Araujo expressed concern that Stanford students are bombarded with a singularly negative impression of Israel, especially with the Israeli/Palestinian conflict receiving considerable attention on campus recently.

“When students think about Israel they think about war, controversy and the desert, when there are so many positive things going on in Israel,” she said. “LGBT rights is just one of these things.”

Dan Zeehandelaar ‘07, co-president of Stanford Jewish Queers, agreed to work with SIA partially as a reaction to the recent publicity given to the Israel/Palestine conflict on campus, but also because his group had a specific interest in the issue at hand.

“In addition to having a community for Jewish queers, we want to have a space for a dialogue about people who share those identities,” he said.

The Stanford Jewish Queers plan to further the dialogue addressed by the documentary by inviting Avner Even-Zohar, the openly gay former Captain of the Israeli Defense Forces, to campus in hopes that he will discuss the contrasting positions of Israel and the United States on gays in the military.

“The fact that Israel allows openly gay people to serve in the military,” Araujo said, “is an interesting discussion that could inspire us to see that in the [U.S.] military, LGBT rights could work.”