I’m half-Jewish (father’s side, not religious, wore a yarmulke once at Passover and hated it, free Palestine) and this article is completely fascinating to me. Like…if you guys love acting Jewish so much…why not convert to Judaism? I saw that one guy did, and then he became a prominent Jewish leader in Germany! Odd echoes here too of euro-amerikans maintaining with only anecdotal evidence that they have indigenous ancestry, even as they themselves have no connection at all to any existing Native American tribes. There is also something postmodern going on here, just a complete contempt for reality, a very strong “we had to destroy Judaism in order to save it” kind of vibe.

Then there are the literal costume Jews. I have twice witnessed large groups of Germans wearing kippot. Once at a rally against antisemitism and once marching with a large police escort down Sonnenallee, the hub of Arab life in Berlin, chanting pro-Israel slogans. To hold a sign that said “Stop Genocide” or “From the River to the Sea” on that same street today would invite certain arrest and potentially criminal prosecution. The police violently suppressed demonstrations and even basic symbols of Palestinian identity on Sonnenallee in the weeks following October 7; I had to extricate a friend, a prominent (Jewish) journalist, from one such demonstration after he was pepper-sprayed for filming the brutal arrest of a man whose crime was to hold a Palestinian flag.

One German Jewish historian, Barbara Steiner, has written a book about the phenomenon and history of Germans converting to Judaism. She finds, perhaps unsurprisingly, that the primary motivations for most converts are manifestations of guilt in one guise or another.

I can see this maybe happening in the USA with white folks trying to join Native American tribes out of guilt…and then just making the Native American tribes white.

Germanness as such has no aspirational, positive content.

Has anyone in history ever actually liked Germany, aside from the fucking Nazis, who only liked a certain side of Germany, let us say? Even the ancient Romans fucking hated the Germans. Nietzsche himself, the Karl Marx of Nazism, despised Germany. I guess Wagner liked it—but, again, only a certain side of Germany?

When the pandemic started I was actually super into Babylon Berlin. A reactionary acquaintance recommended I watch a show called Generation War, which is a German show about the experiences of a bunch of fucking Nazis. I shit you not, it starts with a literal token Jewish friend saying “shalom” to his grownup Nazi friends from school who are wearing Nazi uniforms as he says this and mere hours from being shipped out to commit mass murder in Eastern Europe. That’s as far as I got in that show. It was apparently a huge hit. Thankfully I’ve been able to avoid the guy who recommended it to me for years.