We Are Not Your Cosplay: A Jewish Nerd’s May the Fourth Rant

Scrolling Instagram today, I came across the above picture. It is a storefront window in Long Beach, California. A poster. The word DEFEAT across the top. The word EMPIRE across the bottom. In the middle, a Death Star — Lucas’s iconic spherical superweapon — patterned half American flag, half Israeli flag, with a small Star of David stamped onto it in case you somehow missed the editorial position. Right next to it, sharing the window: a poster for an upcoming event called “Queer Resistance: An Intergenerational Dialogue.” The storefront has committed to the bit.

Today is May 4. Star Wars Day. May the Fourth Be With You, the day the rest of the internet greets each other in stormtrooper voice and posts Death Star memes. This poster, evidently, is what the Long Beach window committee thinks counts as fan content.

I would like, on behalf of the Jewish nerd community, to register a complaint.

A Note from the Fandom

This piece will not be a deep dive into the structure of antisemitism. I have written those. They are one tab over. This piece is a rant.

I am, by lifelong inclination, a sci-fi and fantasy nerd. I have read Harry Potter more times than is healthy. I can name, in order, all seven Horcruxes. The extended editions of The Lord of the Rings are a holiday tradition. Star Wars — the original trilogy, the prequels, the new stuff, The Mandalorian — is not background entertainment for me. It is genre I have lived in.

So I am not coming at this from outside the tent. I am coming at it as someone who has spent a real number of hours of her one short life inside Tatooine, Middle-earth, Westeros, Hogwarts, Pandora, and Arrakis.

And I have to tell you: it is exhausting to watch every single one of those properties get dragged, by force, into the gravitational field of one specific contemporary conflict.

Mordor is Israel. The Na’vi are Palestinians. The Capitol is Tel Aviv. The Fremen are the resistance. The Empire — well, here we are again.

It is not enough, apparently, for the activist class to talk about Israeli policy in Israeli policy’s own genre, with the actual nouns of the actual region. Every imaginative space ever built has to be conscripted. Tolkien did not write about you. Lucas did not write about you. Even James Cameron — who has spent twenty years telling anyone with a microphone that Avatar is about colonialism — did not write about you. He wrote about colonialism. You assigned yourselves the lead role.

The stories were about other things. They were big enough to mean a lot of things at once. The fan culture used to know that. It does not anymore. A particular subset of the fan culture — very online, very politically certain — has decided every fantasy text is actually one text, and that one text is The Conflict, and any reading that does not foreground The Conflict is reactionary, complicit, or stupid.

I cannot describe to you how tired the average Jewish nerd is.

Quick Aside, Because I Cannot Help Myself

Before I get to the actual point of this rant, one fact about Star Wars the owner of this Long Beach establishment may want to look up before next May 4.

George Lucas designed the Galactic Empire on Nazi Germany. Openly. The officer uniforms are Wehrmacht. The Stormtrooper helmets are stylized Stahlhelm. The Imperial mass rallies in A New Hope are direct visual quotes from Leni Riefenstahl’s Triumph of the Will. The word Stormtrooper itself is borrowed wholesale from Sturmtruppen, the German shock-troop designation Hitler’s brownshirts adopted as their own brand. Lucas has been on the record about all of it for fifty years.

So when you map the only Jewish state on earth onto the most explicitly Nazi-coded fictional regime in modern entertainment, what you are doing — at the level of pure semiotics, before any argument is made — is taking the Nazi-aesthetic villain and assigning it to the Jews.

Just so we’re clear what we’re looking at when we look at the poster.

Ok. That was not the rant. The rant is below.

We Are Already the Rebellion (You’re Just Late)

The thing that should embarrass anyone who has ever read a Haggadah is that Jews are the rebellion.

The entire Jewish historical narrative is the original anti-imperial story. Passover: escape from Egyptian imperial slavery. Hanukkah: armed Jewish revolt against the Seleucid Greek empire, fought by guerrilla resisters against forced cultural assimilation by an occupying superpower, celebrated every December by lighting a candle for each night their improbable victory held the line. Purim: a foiled genocide by the Persian empire.

Pick a Jewish holiday at random. Statistically, it commemorates Jewish resistance to an actual empire.

The Maccabees were literally the rebel alliance. The Hasmonean revolt is the original Star Wars. We do not need your costume. We have our own costume. Ours is older than the brand.

Stop Stealing Our Joy

Which brings me, finally, to the point.

To the Jewish nerds reading this: do not let them have this one.

Star Wars is not a vehicle for working out the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. It is a vehicle for working out how cool spaceships look in dogfights. It is a story about found family, about the temptation of power, about what fathers owe their children, about whether evil is genetic or chosen. It is also — and this is the part that should be obvious — not about us. Not about Jews. Not about Israel. Not about a Brooklyn sophomore’s two semesters of intro to settler-colonial studies.

Some shows are not about us. Star Wars is one of them. The Lord of the Rings is one of them. Dune is one of them. They were not written for you, Long Beach window committee, to use as a billboard for your foreign-policy preferences. They were not written for the rest of us to surrender. They are, frankly, ours too — we paid for the tickets, we bought the books, we waited in line at midnight openings, we own the merch, we have opinions. We have been participants in this culture for as long as it has been a culture.

The fact that a particular sliver of the fan base cannot enjoy a single major fantasy property without immediately asking but what does this say about Zionism? is not, I want to suggest, the fault of the fantasy property. It is a personal problem. The problem is them. They are obsessed with us. We did not invite them. We do not owe them an answer.

So this is my plea, on May 4, to my fellow Jewish nerds: refuse the conscription. Watch Star Wars this weekend. Wear the Jedi robe. Buy the Lego Death Star. Argue about the prequels. Reclaim the genre. Reclaim the joy.

We are allowed to like things that are not currently doing political work for us. We are allowed to enjoy a Saturday afternoon. We are allowed to be fans, not just symbols.

This show, fundamentally, is not about us. Let’s stop letting it be.

May the Fourth

Today is May 4.

To the people in the storefront window: we are not your Empire. We never have been. We are the people you are LARPing as. The Maccabees took the Temple back from the Greeks and they did not become Greek. They became Jewish, again, in their own land, on their own terms.

You can put us on a Death Star. We will know who you actually are. We have seen this movie before — and we have, frankly, also seen the actual movie, which we like quite a bit and would now like to enjoy in peace.

May the Fourth be with you.

Just not like that.