Nazis Spark Fear, Loathing, And Lust Among Israelis

I wrote a post a couple of months back on the small Nazi skinhead culture that has sprung up in Israel. Persons from the former Soviet Union are allowed to immigrate to Israel if they can prove they have as little as one-eight Jewish ancestry. This means that there is a group of young persons in the country who have no real connection to Judaism and Jewish culture, and who sometimes harbor anti-Semitic beliefs. The first major skinhead bust in Israel took place this week. Eight young persons were arrested and charges with vandalizing synagogues with Nazi graffiti as well as attacking orthodox Jews on the street. If all of this seems a little weird, take a look at this article I came across detailing the now-dormant genre of Nazi porn that was once popular in the Jewish state. It seems that in the 1960’s, pornography was very difficult to obtain in that country. To satisfy the demand for erotic material, some Hebrew-language publishing houses in Israel began to churn out paperbacks that allegedly described the horror of the death camps. In fact, these fictionalized accounts dwelt of sadistic tortures melded out to male prisoners by female SS officers. The books usually concluded with the male prisoners breaking lose then raping and killing their former tormentors. (These books might well have been the inspiration for the vile Nazi exploitation film genre of the 1970’s). The idea of a Jewish Israeli man being sexually aroused by thoughts of Nazi torture would of course be both ethically and politically bizarre. This just goes to show that sometimes, sexuality trumps politics.