I am a twentysomething, straight, cis-female expat. How long do I have to wait to ask my German lover, who is übersensitive about the Holocaust, to indulge me in my greatest — and, until now, unrealized — fantasy: Nazi role-play? He is very delicate around me because I am a secular Jew and the descendant of Holocaust survivors. (Even though I’ve instructed him to watch The Believer, starring Ryan Gosling as a Jewish neo-Nazi, to get a better grasp on my relationship with Judaism. To be clear, I am not actually a neo-Nazi — just your garden-variety self-hating Jew.) This persists even though we’ve spoken about my anti-Zionist politics. Evidently he was indoctrinated from a young age with a hyper-apologetic history curriculum. I appreciate that he thinks it was wrong for the SS to slaughter my family, but it’s not like he did it himself. I know it sounds really f***ed up, but I promise this isn’t coming from a place of deep-seated self-loathing. Even if it were, it’s not like we’d be hurting anybody. We’re both in good psychological working condition, and neither of us is an actual bigot. I would try to get to know him better, but we are so different (there’s a big age difference) and I don’t really see our relationship being much more than ze sex.
National Socialist Pretend Party
Savage defers the answer to Mark Oppenheimer who writes about Judaism for Tablet. He says that she should broach the subject with her lover, but then adds some good advice that applies far beyond a sex advice column, even if the letter-writer seems far beyond redemption:
In her letter, she assures us that she is ‘secular,’ ‘anti-Zionist,’ and ‘garden-variety self-hating’ — then jokingly compares herself to the Jewish white supremacist (played by Ryan Gosling in that movie) who in real life killed himself after the New York Times outed him as a Jew. Now, all of us (especially homos and Yids) know something about self-loathing, and I think Jews are entitled to any and all views on Israel, and — again — I am not troubled by her kink. That said, I do think she needs to get to a happier place about her own heritage. Just as it’s not good for black people to be uncomfortable with being black, or for queer people to wish they weren’t queer, it’s not healthy, or attractive, for Jews or Jewesses (we are taking back the term) to have such obvious discomfort with their Jewish heritage.
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Wednesday, April 06, 2016
Elder of Ziyon
From the sex advice column of Dan Savage:
