Our Lady J Says Revealing She’s Converted to Judaism Has Been a Lot ‘Harder Than Coming Out as Trans’

Yona Speidel, the Emmy nominated writer and producer formerly known as Our Lady J, recently experienced grief as a Jew for the first time. Just six weeks after converting to Judaism in March and officially changing her name, Speidel marked her late brother’s Yahrzeit (the anniversary of one’s death) by lighting a candle and reciting a prayer for the dead. She texted the prayer to her family.

“None of them are Jewish or have any desire to convert, but they all said Yahrzeit,” Speidel tells me over Zoom from her New York City apartment. “They all read the texts and they lit the candles. I feel so lucky to have so much support. I could cry because it’s really a wonderful testament to the amazing people that my family are and the people that they’ve become as well.”

Raised in an ultra-religious Amish and Mennonite community in Chambersburg, Penn., Speidel moved to New York City when she was 21. She came out as trans in 2004. A fixture of New York’s downtown art scene, she landed in Los Angeles as a writer on “Transparent,” the groundbreaking Amazon Prime Video series about a an older trans woman (Jeffrey Tambor) and her very Jewish family in Los Angeles.

The “Transparent” writers room inspired Speidel to explore the possibility of converting about 12 years ago. “When I moved to New York as a young queer person at the age of 21 I just thought I loved New York,” she says. “I didn’t realize that so much of what I love about New York was Jewish New York, from the musicals to the food to the attitude of learning and acceptance and progress and social progress. Those are huge elements that were hugely influential to my coming of age. I didn’t realize how much of that was Jewish until I started writing on ‘Transparent.’ Then it became a formal study. So it was a lifetime of kind of casually dating Judaism, I guess.”

Speidel officially converted on March 23. “I’m a little more observant than some reform friends that I know,” she says. “I do Shabbat, I do the holidays. I’m learning Hebrew, biblical Hebrew.”

Speidel says today’s political climate, especially around Middle East issues, has made telling people that she’s now Jewish a little bit more complicated than she expected. “It’s a lot harder than coming out as trans,” she says. “I’ve just had a lot more pushback in my social circles and a lot more silence, a kind of uncomfortable silence where people don’t know what I’m doing. It feels very similar.”

I ask Speidel what she loves about being Jewish. Without missing a beat, she says with a wide smile, “Barbra Streisand.”

“Have you listened to her audio book – all 48 hours?” she asks, referencing Streisand’s 2023 memoir “My Name Is Barbra.” “It makes me so proud to be Jewish. I love her so much.”

Fangirling over Babs aside, Speidel says, “There’s so many different things I love about being Jewish, but humor is way up there on the list, how we deal with adversity, how we sharpen our intellectual skills. We hunker down and we fix problems rather than running away from them. We have solutions that are creative rather than destructive. There’s a reliance on ourselves to get the job done.”

Speidel is not only a writer and producer, but she’s also an actress, a director and a classically trained pianist (she was the first out trans woman to perform at Carnegie Hall). She’s currently co-executive producer and a writer on the upcoming Netflix series, “The Boroughs,” a 1980s-style sci-fi adventure about a group of senior citizens fighting beings from another world. “The Boroughs’ isn’t a Jewish show, but it’s about family,” Speidel says. “Family is a big part of being Jewish.”

The final cuts of the episodes of the series were locked by the time she converted, but “’The Boroughs’ is my first on screen title,’” Speidel says.

She continues, “Our Lady J was used for the credits, but I texted one of the producers and the showrunners as well, and I said, ‘Is there any chance that they could just slip [my new name] in?’ They unlocked the episodes to give me a new name card. Just hearing myself say that, I feel very lucky.”

“The Boroughs” premieres on Netflix on May 21.