Stephen Fry, our favorite multi-hyphenate Jewish British cultural icon, married his partner, 27-year-old Elliot Spencer, in a civil ceremony on Saturday.

The legendary actor-writer-intellectual-comedian, who is 57, tweeted the news yesterday, along with a picture of the couple signing the marriage register:

Gosh. @ElliottGSpencer and I go into a room as two people, sign a book and leave as one. Amazing. pic.twitter.com/bPDQD5WQoB

— Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) January 17, 2015

The grooms both wore green carnations, in honor of the writer Oscar Wilde, who adopted the trend in the late 19th century (his fans and acolytes soon followed suit). Fry—who bears an uncanny resemblance to Wilde—portrayed the famous gay playwright in the 1997 biopic, Wilde.

Congratulations immediately rolled in from the four corners of the Twitterverse, including House star Hugh Laurie, who tweeted, “Bloody hell it’s happened! @ElliottGSpencer has made an honest man of m’col. Love and happiness to all!!” (Together, the two actors made up the eponymous 1990s comedy powerhouse, Fry & Laurie). Let us add our voices to the chorus: Mazal tov!

(Image: Twitter)

Related: Stephen Fry: Gay, Jewish, and Proud

The post Stephen Fry Marries Partner Elliot Spencer appeared first on Jewcy.

The renowned British actor-comedian-author Stephen Fry has spoken to the UK’s Jewish News of his pride in his gay, Jewish, secular identity.

“I’m as proud of being Jewish as I am as proud of being gay,” he told the newspaper’s new LGBT section on Monday. “And just as I don’t go to shul, I don’t go to gay clubs. The identity can never be taken away from me… for Jews not to celebrate gays within their own community would be a schande, it seems to me, a shame and a disgrace.”

Fry, who rose to fame as one half of the sketch comedy duo Fry and Laurie, was born to a Jewish mother, but raised in a secular environment. For many years he has been one of Britain’s most popular (and controversial) multi-hyphenate intellectuals, and the host of the BBC comedy quiz show QI. In 2006, he appeared in an episode of the genealogy documentary series “Who Do You Think You Are?” in which he traced his the fate of his great-grandparents and extended family from Hungary to Auschwitz. His maternal grandparents emigrated to Britain in 1927, sparing one branch of the family.

When asked by a Twitter follower why he would want to belong to a religion which disapproves of homosexuality, Fry responded thusly:

@JulianStorey @JewishNewsUK Being Jewish is not a matter of religion: I’m a Jew, but don’t follow judaism.

— Stephen Fry (@stephenfry) June 24, 2014

And there you have it: Stephen Fry, proud gay Jew.

Related: In the Story of Queen Esther, Echoes of My Own Coming Out

Image: s_bukley / Shutterstock

The post Stephen Fry: Gay, Jewish, and Proud appeared first on Jewcy.

Living at home sucks. There’s just no getting around it. It’s the little things that get to you. Like when you bring home a six-pack of Weihenstephaner—yeah, it’s imported—and the first thing your dad says is, “German beer, huh? Not something I usually buy.” That’ll teach you for trying to earn his admiration through alcohol.

My Jewish baby-boomer parents were in the habit of bringing up the Holocaust whenever anything from Germany reared its head, effervescent or otherwise. They grew up in the shadow of the Shoah and were leery of all things German as a result. For me though, the moratorium on Teutonic culture had little pragmatic, or even moral, value. It seemed like collective punishment, nothing more.

Wagner & Me, which recently opened in a limited release, gives this thorny issue a more sophisticated treatment, but only slightly. The documentary follows Stephen Fry, a Jewish Wagnerite struggling with his master’s anti-Semitism. The German composer’s reputation for Jew-hating rests primarily on an 1850 essay titled “Judaism in Music.” In it, the composer lambasts Jews for, among other things, their inherent artistic inferiority.

The events of Wagner & Me constitute Stephen Fry’s preparation for his first ever Bayreuth Festival, an annual celebration of Wagner’s operas held in the theater designed for their performance. At the end of the movie Fry must decide whether he should attend in spite of his ancestry. Unfortunately, Fry, best known to American audiences for supporting roles in Bones and V for Vendetta, has more or less made up his mind about Wagner from the start and despite a few moments’ ambivalence, tells us what we ought to think on top of what we ought to know—that Wagner was a world-historical genius whose work we should revere, even if his anti-Semitism gives us pause. In the end, Wagner & Me is more a monument to Wagner’s music than a struggle with his legacy.

For me, the poise with which the film navigates the Wagner controversy is ultimately its undoing. Fry’s elegant synthesis of Wagnerism and Judaism, his contention that one may hate Wagner’s essay while still loving his music, betrays the fact that we only hear from one side of the debate—the Stephen Fry side. And, insofar as the title of the film is Wagner & Me and not Wagner & The Jews, this seems fair. But if Wagner & Me were really to grapple with the controversy that lies at its heart, the one that (title or not) motivated Fry to make the movie he did, then we would have to reckon with some things the film does not.

What Fry fails to consider is the extent to which Wagner’s hatred of Jews may have sullied his work, and not just its reception. It is one thing to say Wagner was anti-Semitic. It is another to say his operas were. In his book Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination, Marc Weiner argues for the latter, exploring Wagner’s perpetuation of Jewish stereotypes onstage. That the word Jew doesn’t appear in Wagner’s libretti is, as Weiner argues, irrelevant given the clarity of Wagner’s anti-Jewish symbolism for 19th-century audiences.

Another thing Fry doesn’t address, or at least not in any great depth, is the extent to which others may not be able to compartmentalize as well as he does. Fry is never viscerally disgusted by Wagner’s anti-Semitism, even if he is opposed to it conceptually. He can get past the nastiness to the music he fell in love with as a small boy.

This is something I can do as well. I can read Judaism in Music and still shiver when the Tristan chord plays. My parents, on the other hand, cannot—or at least not to the same degree. If they ever visited Bayreuth, or even Germany, they would do so with a heavy heart. This sort of German aversion wasn’t something I understood at first, but when I got to college I got an inkling of what it was about, even if I didn’t agree with where it led.

I read Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals in my junior year and was outraged. These were some of the most inflammatory, vitriolic passages I had ever encountered, and many of them were about the Jews:

All that has been done on earth against “the noble,” “the powerful,” “the masters,” “the rulers,” fades into nothing compared with what the Jews have done against them; the Jews, that priestly people, who in opposing their enemies and conquerors were ultimately satisfied with nothing less than a radical revaluation of their enemies’ values, that is to say, an act of the most spiritual revenge. For this alone was appropriate to a priestly people, the people embodying the most deeply repressed priestly vengefulness. It was the Jews who…dared to invert the aristocratic value equation…and to hang on to this inversion with their teeth, the teeth of the most abysmal hatred (the hatred of impotence), saying “the wretched alone are the good; the poor, impotent, lowly alone are the good; the suffering, deprived, sick, ugly alone are pious, alone are blessed by God.

Fighting words—and they were a central part of Nietzsche’s work, not a peripheral part of his biography. The character of Nietzsche’s love-hate relationship with the Jews is the subject of debate, and much ink has been spilled over Nietzsche’s reasons for berating Semites in one breath and anti-Semites in another. But for me, he was tainted.

My Nietzsche prejudice wasn’t about pragmatism or morals, it was, like my parents’, about rage. Compartmentalization simply didn’t do the trick, or at least, not neatly enough for my reverence to emerge unscathed. Sure he was smart, but what an anti-Semitic bastard!

It was then that I began to understand where people like my parents were coming from. The distaste for postwar German culture wasn’t really about what was productive, or what was fair, it was about an emotional association from which they were not yet free. It was all too raw.

I won’t condone my parents’ aversion to German products, but I can’t bring myself to condemn them for it either. To me, their prejudice was precipitated by unprecedented trauma. It was not calculated to victimize a culture, nor was it pursued with any great conviction.

I haven’t felt the effects of mass slaughter or systemic discrimination, so who am I to judge? If I did judge, it would only be by ignoring the pain that had attracted my parents to their prejudice in the first place.

Sure, I drink Weihenstephaner. But if you were raised by survivors, I can appreciate why you might not.

The post Wagner’s Anti-Semitism and Me: Struggling with an Artist’s Troubling Legacy appeared first on Jewcy.

VIRGO (AUGUST 21-SEPTEMBER 20): An einredenish iz erger vi a krenk: An imaginary illness is worse than a real one.

Practical, dependable, modest, graceful and extremely reserved, Virgo is characterized by the Virgin Maiden, as well as the bird (like all mutable signs, Virgo is “double-bodied”—adaptable and dualistic). As such, your powers of eloquence, composure, precision and tact are to be lauded. However, you are often overly-critical and can strain yourself with your vigilance and inflexiblity—you work hard so that your calm exterior never betrays your anxious interior, and this disconnect can lead to frayed nerves.

Virgos are ruled by the belly and intestines (Kishka). You operate via gut reaction rather than psychic intuition. You thrive when you are solving problems, creating order out of chaos, and otherwise exercising your brain muscles. Your nervousness, however, when unchecked, can lead to hypochondria and extreme anxiety. Obsessed with hygiene and organization, you often bottle up for feelings—feelings are not, after all, very clean and orderly.

With the New Moon in your sign on September 16 (Rosh Hashanah), and a Full (Blue) Moon in Aries on the 30th (Sukkot), and Yom Kippur in between, you may find particular significance in the tashlich ceremony—how very Virgo to systematically cast off your sins to make a clean slate for the New Year!

Famous Virgo Jews: Peter Falk, Leonard Bernstein, Adam Sandler, Alan Dershowitz, Dr. Drew, Gene Simmons, Dorothy Parker (half-Jewish), Sid Caesar, Pink (half-Jewish), Stephen Fry (half-Jewish), Max Greenfield, Lewis Black, Gwyneth Paltrow (half-Jewish)

LIBRA (SEPTEMBER 21-OCTOBER 20): It’s healthy to question whether you are getting what you want out of life, but dangerous to assume that the path not taken was the right one. Let life unfold naturally—you’ve been warned!

SCORPIO (OCTOBER 21-NOVEMBER 20): 
Your ruling planet Pluto turns direct on September 18, allowing your subconscious to take a break. Stop ignoring your deepest desires and focusing only on getting through the day, and you’ll gain control of your life (and probably prevent some gray hairs).

SAGITTARIUS (NOVEMBER 21-DECEMBER 20): Resentment can build up, preventing you from seeing things for what they are. The New Year will usher in good tidings, allowing you to see with clarity that the decisions you make in life are what shapes it—and you.

CAPRICORN (DECEMBER 21-JANUARY 20): Capricorns are the Vulcans of the Zodiac. It’s not that you don’t have feelings, but you play your cards too close to your chest, guarding yourself against anything impractical. You’ve got so much going on inside of you that it would be a crime not to express yourself! New Year, New You!

AQUARIUS (JANUARY 21-FEBRUARY 20): Pay extra attention this Yom Kippur—your innate indifference can blind you to your own foibles. Once you open up to the possibility that some of this may be your doing, you’ll be more conscious of how to fix it.

PISCES (FEBRUARY 21-MARCH 20): You adorable luftmensh, you! The retrograde triple threat in the slow moving planets makes your psychic abilities so keen that it may be painful. Use this time to sift through these psychic energies, and you’ll begin to reap what you’ve sown throughout the year.

ARIES (MARCH 21-APRIL 20): Rosh Hashanah literally means “the head of the year”—and Aries heads the zodiac in Western astrology. Brandish your shofar and hark the herald! You may be the bold brazen ram, but think about relinquishing some of your control. There’s plenty of time to bemoan a bad fortune once it arrives.

TAURUS (APRIL 21- MAY 20): Surround yourself with people you trust and be direct with what you need from others. They’ll be more willing to help if you know what you want and aren’t afraid to ask for it. True love will come when the time is right. Until it does, remember this: you better work!

GEMINI (MAY 21- JUNE 20): Although Mental Mercury makes you a bit of a macher, you’d better give up on your scheme to harness time. That’s never going to happen. Your versatility and inquisitive nature make you a perfect candidate for embracing the energies of the universe and working with them, not against them.

CANCER (JUNE 21-JULY 20): Sages have said it is unwise to speculate on the unknowable, and for many Cancers this includes other people. You ought to exercise your empathy muscles and cast your sins of dogmatic prejudice into the river of new beginnings—you’ll be surprised by how much others want to include you in their lives.

LEO (JULY 21-AUGUST 20): For this you went to college? Although you may feel you are about to burst from the fear that you’ll never move beyond your current circumstances, it’s time to put up or shut up—tokhis oyfn tish. Big changes this month beseech you to keep your eyes on the prize, you Lucky Leo.

The post Jewcy Horoscopes: Virgo, the Anxious Maiden (August 21-September 20) appeared first on Jewcy.