CUNY Graduate Center

Helping LGBTQ+ Jews Find Support in Orthodox and Hasidic Communities

In this episode of The Thought Project, host Tanya Domi speaks with Mordechai Levovitz, M.S.W., a Ph.D. student in the Social Welfare program at the CUNY Graduate Center, about being queer and Jewish, and about the search for safety, support, and acceptance within Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish communities. Levovitz founded and served as executive director of JQY, Jewish Queer Youth, a nonprofit organization that provides crisis, communal, and clinical support for LGBTQ+ and queer teens growing up in Orthodox and Hasidic Jewish families. He discusses how LGBTQ+ Jews, including transgender, nonbinary, and gender-expansive people, often face isolation when coming out, especially when family, religious law, and community expectations appear to leave little room for a queer life. His work grows out of his personal experience and years of helping queer Jews find support, language, safety, and community. He entered the Social Welfare Ph.D. program to deepen that work through research, advocacy, and policymaking, with a focus on the needs of LGBTQ+ people in religious communities. The conversation also explores how Judaism contains a more expansive history of gender than many people realize, including rabbinic discussions of seven or eight gender categories. For Levovitz, that history matters. So does the ability to change one’s name, an act that can affirm identity, dignity, and the right to be fully seen.

How Immigration Policy Affects New Yorkers, and What Comes Next

Professor Robert C. Smith of the CUNY Graduate Center and Baruch College and Manuel Castro, the former New York City commissioner of immigrant affairs and a Baruch graduate, join The Thought Project for a timely conversation about immigration policy at a moment of deep uncertainty. Smith draws on decades of research on Mexican migration, legal status, and intergenerational mobility, as well as his legal advocacy on DACA and birthright citizenship, to explain how current policy choices are reshaping the lives of immigrant families. Castro brings the perspective of a former undocumented immigrant, longtime advocate, and city official who has worked at the center of New York’s response to immigrant communities. Together, he and Smith argue that today’s crisis did not emerge overnight: Comprehensive immigration reform has remained out of reach for years, leaving millions vulnerable to shifting enforcement priorities and legal uncertainty. They discuss asylum, mixed-status families, the limits of local protections, and why expanding access to citizenship and legal status remains essential. The episode connects scholarship, public service, and lived experience in a clear call for reform grounded in both policy and human consequences.

Can Biodegradable Fashion Outlast Fast Fashion?

From mushroom leather to algae-based garments, Elizabeth Wissinger, a professor of Liberal Studies at the CUNY Graduate Center and of social sciences at Borough of Manhattan Community College, explores whether bio-based materials can offer a real alternative to synthetic fabrics, fast fashion, and clothing waste. On this episode of The Thought Project, she discusses the rise of bio-couture, the environmental problems driving interest in biodegradable textiles, and the ethical questions raised by using living organisms in design. She also examines the challenges these materials still face, including durability, scalability, and the possibility that, if they are made for short-term use and quickly discarded, they could reproduce the same wear-once, throwaway logic that defines fast fashion.

How Dirty Power Clouds New York’s Climate Future

As Earth Day approaches, Ashley Dawson returns to The Thought Project for a sobering conversation about climate politics at a moment of global instability. Dawson, a distinguished professor of English at the CUNY Graduate Center and the College of Staten Island, is a member of Public Power New York, a movement for a just, publicly controlled energy transition in New York. He was also the 2025 Climate Justice Fellow at the arts organization Culture Push, where he worked on a series of photographs and short films about the struggle to abolish polluting power plants, and he is currently a resident at the Center for Architecture Lab in New York City, where he is co-curating an exhibit on the infrastructure of energy transition in the city. In conversation with host Tanya Domi, Dawson examines renewed fossil fuel dependence, weakened environmental enforcement, and the battles over climate policy in New York and California, while also pointing to public power, offshore wind, and community-led solar as part of a more just and resilient future.

When Immigration Enforcement Operates Outside the Usual Rules

What does it mean when immigration enforcement begins to look and feel like policing, but operates under a different set of rules? On this episode of The Thought Project, host Tanya Domi speaks with criminal justice scholar and lawyer Candace McCoy, a professor emerita at the CUNY Graduate Center and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, about ICE’s expanding role in carrying out U.S. immigration policy. McCoy argues that ICE officers are not police in the traditional sense: Their mission is not to protect human life or investigate crimes, but to enforce administrative immigration law. That distinction, she says, has major consequences for how the agency operates, from the use of masks and militarized gear to detention practices, federal-state conflicts, and broad legal protections for officers acting within the scope of their authority. The conversation also explores the limits of court intervention, the friction between federal enforcement and state power, and the deeper questions ICE raises about accountability, democratic governance, and the rule of law.