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.”
