The swipeListener is being deprecated. Instead, there are events dispatched by jqUi [swipe,swipeLeft,swipeRight,swipeUp,swipeDown] that you can bind. The listeners you have for ontouchstart/ontouchend could be killing the event from propegating up though (are they custom listeners?)
$.ui.ready(function(){
$(document).bind("swipeLeft",function(){
$.ui.toggleSideMenu(false);
});
$(document).bind("swipeRight",function(){
$.ui.toggleSideMenu(true);
});
}