Fry-Up
By Gilad Atzmon
In my latest book The Wandering Who, I explore the ideological, spiritual and political continuum between Jewish identity politics and gay theory. Yesterday, Stephen Fry, a British gay Jewish playwright and celebrity, provided us with an opportunity to review the tight political and spiritual affinity between Jewish identity politics and the LGBT call.
In An Open Letter to PM David Cameron and the International Olympic Committee, Fry equated Putin’s anti gay policy with Hitler’s Jewish hatred. Fry’s argument deserves some attention.
Hitler, says Fry “banned Jews from academic tenure or public office, he made sure that the police turned a blind eye to any beatings, thefts or humiliations afflicted on them, he burned and banned books written by them. He claimed they ‘polluted’ the purity and tradition of what it was to be German…”
According to Fry, “Putin is eerily repeating this insane crime, only this time against LGBT Russians. Beatings, murders and humiliations are ignored by the police. Any defence or sane discussion of homosexuality is against the law.“
Historical analogies are dangerous territory, especially when the necessary and even elementary scholarship is lacking. Needless to say that I oppose any form of abuse of human right against Jews, LGBTs, Palestinians or anyone else. However, I also oppose the emerging lame culture of sound bites and empty slogans in which Fry is, unfortunately, a leading exponent.
Fry, for the obvious reasons, avoids the most necessary question - what is it that led to the dreadful treatment of Jews in the 3rd Reich? Far from being surprising, he also avoids a similar question when it comes to Putin’s antagonism towards LGBT. And in fact, if we really want to fight oppression, these are the most crucial questions to ask and tackle. I would argue that the difference between holocaust scholarship and proper history is that holocaust studies are mainly concerned with the study of the suffering (itself) while history attempts to grasp the events that brought the suffering into existence.
The Jews who want to prevent Jewish future suffering must look closely into the repeated circumstances that made Jewish history into a chain of Shoas. They should read Bernard Lazare’s ‘Anti-Semitism, It's History and Causes’ instead of reading Anne Frank or the Jewish Chronicle. Similarly, gay theoreticians should examine critically what is it exactly that the Russians oppose in the LGBT discourse. Is it possible that the Putin regards LGBT as a form of crude Western intervention? Maybe Stephen Fry should answer this question before he is lobbying again for an international boycott.
