Gladys Maged and Lorry Sorgman
Gladys Maged and Lorry Sorgman are longtime Jewish feminist and LGBTQ activists whose work helped shape inclusive Jewish life in the United States and internationally.
Gladys Maged was raised in Hoboken, New Jersey, in a working-class family grounded in social justice values. Influenced by the Civil Rights Movement, she attended the 1963 March on Washington as a teenager and came of age politically during the era of Stonewall, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, and the rise of second-wave feminism. In Boston, she became active in early gay and lesbian Jewish organizing, including Congregation Am Tikva. Maged later served in leadership roles within the World Congress of Gay and Lesbian Jewish Organizations, where she worked on international organizing, development, and advocacy, including efforts to secure public recognition for LGBTQ Jews in Israel and to expand inclusion within liberal Jewish institutions.
Lorry Sorgman was born in Boston and raised in an Orthodox Jewish family. A U.S. military veteran who served during the Vietnam era, she later became active in Boston’s emerging gay community. Confronting antisemitism, sexism, and homophobia shaped her political consciousness and leadership. Sorgman was a founding leader and the first president of the World Congress of Gay and Lesbian Jewish Organizations, helping draft its bylaws, establish its international structure, and create a sustainable funding model. She also played a key role in Am Tikva and broader Boston-based LGBTQ Jewish activism, advocating for women’s leadership, economic accessibility, and recognition of lesbian identity within Jewish communal life.
This interview documents the lives and activism of Gladys Maged and Lorry Sorgman, focusing on their Jewish upbringings, emerging political consciousness, and leadership in early gay and lesbian Jewish organizing in the United States and internationally. The narrators describe their childhoods in working-class Jewish communities, formative experiences with antisemitism, gender roles, disability, military service, and the Civil Rights Movement, and the ways these experiences shaped their understanding of oppression and social justice. A substantial portion of the interview centers on the founding and development of Boston-based gay and lesbian Jewish congregations, including Am Tikva, and the creation of the World Congress of Gay and Lesbian Jewish Organizations in the late 1970s. Maged and Sorgman recount debates over naming, women’s leadership, inclusion of bisexual and later transgender identities, bylaw development, funding structures, and international conference planning. They discuss early efforts to secure recognition within mainstream Jewish institutions, including struggles with the Jewish National Fund over public acknowledgment, negotiations with Reform Movement bodies, and advocacy during the AIDS crisis. The interview also addresses changing attitudes within Jewish communities toward LGBTQ participation, the evolution of identity language, and reflections on feminist consciousness-raising.
The views expressed in these interviews are solely those of the speakers and do not reflect the positions of JWA or its affiliates.
