Sir Stephen Fry and his Jewish heritage
If, like me, you are a devotee of British television, you well know Sir Stephen Fry. The former host of the wonderful comedy panel show QI, he is what the British would call a "national treasure," having starred or featured in such classic television series as A Bit of Fry and Laurie and Blackadder.
Channel 4 in the UK, one of the terrestrial broadcast networks, has a tradition of offering an "alternative Christmas message" to, not so much counter, as to give a different take that the one given by the King or Queen of the day. This was Sir Stephen's message in 2024.
It is a truism of our "feel-good" times to just "be who you are". Self-actualization is the highest calling. Care not a farthing for what others think of you.
Of course, when you're Jewish, that's not as simple as it seems. Ever since the 7 October Pogrom, everyone almost immediately forgot that Jews were, in fact, the victims that day, the Hamas terror group having broken a cease-fire with Israel. No, immediately the Western left dismissed the murders, the rapes, and the kidnappings, seeking to blame those perfidious Jews. Israeli Jews were barely human, and accorded no sympathy for twelve hundred dead, children bashed in like something out of medieval horror show, women raped, killed, and then paraded through the streets of Gaza City. Living as a Jew has again become fraught with peril, with attacks on Jews escalating since 2023.
But Stephen Fry came and claimed his Jewish heritage. That is an act of supreme bravery, especially in the arts, when you have despicable creatures like a musician named Bob Vylan chanting from the stage "Death to the IDF" and "From the River to the Sea, Palestine will be free." As he says in his message, people consider him "quintessentially English"; and for him, that includes being who he is, which means being a Jew.
The West is awash again in not only a fascist moment, but a far left one. And both revolve around "the Eternal Jew." The Jewish community is again the focus of discontent for all that is going wrong in the world. Jews are the source of all chaos, of all cultural pollution. They are the immortal Other, not allowed to have their own home, not allowed to call the countries in which they live "home," always allowed to exist on sufferance. "Never again" was a cruel lie, told by the West to itself to absolve itself of two millennia of Jew hatred which led to the crematoria.
I cannot commend Sir Stephen highly enough. There are two billion Muslims who form the majority of forty-nine nations. There are fifteen million Jews with one state. Ask yourself who is the oppressed population. I wish no ill on our Muslim brothers and sisters; but the fact is that they have treated Palestinians as cannon fodder for their desire to destroy Israel and Jews more broadly. Someone like Stephen Fry claiming his Jewish heritage is the kind of bravery in the face of calumny which Jews have had to show for thousands of years. And despite what the antisemites say, they're not going anywhere.
Postscript
As a bonus, here is the film he made of his love for the German composer Richard Wagner, who was a virulent antisemite. He addresses the contradiction of his love for Wagner's music despite his hatred of Jews as he, himself, is Jewish.