Rebecca Alpert and Katherine Franke

Katherine Franke is a professor at Columbia Law School, where she also directs the Center for Gender and Sexuality Law. In addition to her scholarly writing on sexual harassment, gender equality, sexual rights, and racial history, she writes regularly for a more popular audience in the Gender and Sexuality Law Blog. Rabbi Rebecca Alpert is an associate professor of religion and women's studies at Temple University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. She was ordained as a rabbi at the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College in 1976 and served as dean of students there for ten years.

Analysis of Israel/Palestine

Boycotting Equality Forum’s Israeli Sponsorship

By Rebecca Alpert and Katherine Franke | May 10, 2012

Palestinian gays and lesbians have urged the gay community in the United States to become more aware of how we have become an unwitting partner in Israel’s efforts to improve its much-criticized human rights record—especially with respect to the Palestinians. Through a policy that some have called “pinkwashing,” Israel has self-consciously sought to rebrand itself as less religious, less militaristic and less hostile, and in so doing wants to deflect attention from the International Court of Justice and UN Human Rights Council’s findings that many of Israel’s policies with respect to the Palestinians violate international law.