Q&A: A pediatrician who helps trans kids and moonlights playing klezmer

 

 

by Alix Wall March 23, 2020

 

Dr. Ilana Sherer, 38, has a general pediatrics practice in Dublin at the Palo Alto Medical Foundation/Sutter Health with a specialty in caring for gender-nonconforming and transgender youth. She’s also a violinist with Saul Goodman’s Klezmer Band. She lives with her wife and two children in Oakland.

 

J.: You like to say you’re the best klezmer violin-playing pediatrician in the Bay Area. How did that come to happen?

 

Ilana Sherer: Classical violin was a huge part of my life from age 5 through high school. At a Hillel event in college, I sat next to someone in a klezmer band. There was a deep learning curve, but I played through college and then in medical school. I’ve played quite a bit here but it’s more limited now because of my kids. I grew up in a pretty mainstream Jewish community and klezmer helped me see there were other ways to connect to Judaism. Once I entered the klezmer/Yiddish world, I thought about how this is what my grandparents spoke, and how Yiddish culture has these really strong leftist roots.

(…)

There are a lot of Jews working in this field, true?

 

Once, at the center, we were trying to schedule our next meeting and realized that everyone in the room but one person was Jewish. I see it as part of the social justice terrain and my personal responsibility as a queer person and a Jew. These are the kids who need us to support and advocate for them in the way the generation before advocated for me.

https://jweekly.com/2020/03/23/qa-a-pediatrician-who-helps-trans-kids-and-moonlights-playing-klezmer/

George Soros: The money behind the transgender movement

https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/aug/11/george-soros-the-money-behind-the-transgender-move/