Is Sexy Nazi Role Playing OK — as Long as You’re a Proud Jew?

Image by Nikki Casey

By Josefin Dolsten April 12, 2016

There’s nothing wrong with introducing Nazi role play in the bedroom, journalist Mark Oppenheimer wrote in an advice column — but he scolded the letter writer for being a self-hating Jew.

Famous sex writer Dan Savage called on Oppenheimer, who is Jewish, to answer the unusual question on his blog “Savage Love.”

The letter writer, a Jewish woman in her 20s, found herself in quite a pickle with her German lover.

She wanted to ask him to fulfill her Nazi role play fantasy, but was scared he would be offended.

“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?” the woman “He is very delicate around me because I am a secular Jew and the descendant of Holocaust survivors.”

Mark Oppenheimer Image by YouTube Screenshot

Oppenheimer, who writes about religion for the New York Times, advised the woman not to hold back in speaking to her lover about her fantasy, “First off, I think that Die Fraulein should make her kinky proposal ASAP,” he wrote.

“Given the ‘hyperapologetic’ curriculum that her Teutonic stud has absorbed, he is probably going to freak out … On the other hand, if he’s open and kink-positive, he’ll probably be down for whatever,” Oppenheimer continued.

Oppenheimer did object to the way the lady described her Jewish identity.

“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 [the Believer]) who in real life killed himself after the New York Times outed him as a Jew,” Oppenheimer wrote.

“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,” he continued.

The letter writer should try to be more comfortable with her Jewish identity, Oppenheimer wrote, because her “obvious discomfort” is “not healthy, or attractive.”

Savage added that he had consulted a German friend on the issue who said he would not fulfill such a fantasy “in six million years,” referring to the number of Jews who were murdered in the Holocaust.

The letter writer is not the first to incorporate Nazis into her sexual fantasies.

Stalag fiction was a genre of erotica, popular in Israel in the 1950s and early 1960s, that depicted often violent sexual encounters in concentration camps, generally between imprisoned Allied soldiers and female SS guards.

The genre was banned by the government following the trial and hanging of Nazi leader Adolf Eichmann in 1962.

The Night Porter, a 1974 Italian cult-hit film, also depicted a sadomasochistic relationship between a Holocaust survivor and an SS officer.

Holocaust surviror Boris Lurie, who passed away in 2008, also juxtaposed sexual images with those depicting Nazi horrors in his art.

Lurie’s most controversial work, “Railroad Collage,” shows a bare-bottomed pinup girl pasted on top of a photograph of corpses stacked on a flatcar.

Josefin Dolsten is a New York-based writer who has reported for the Forward, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, The Times of Israel and other Jewish publications. She currently works as an account director at Fenton Communications, supporting organizations that work to advance racial justice, LGBTQ+ equality, reproductive rights and more. Dolsten earned her B.A. in government from Cornell University and her M.A. in comparative religion and Jewish studies from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. We’re in the middle of our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we have a very ambitious goal of $127,000 by April 21.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism you rely on. Make a Passover gift today!

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO