Regular readers might have noticed that I have added the Star of David to my rainbow logo next to this journal’s masthead. I thought I might write a few words about this.
The idea is that these two symbols will say something about me and this online journal. The rainbow flag is, of course, the international symbol of the contemporary gay community. In the past, gay people used a variety of symbols, the best-known being the pink triangle that Hitler’s Nazi regime forced gay men to wear on their clothing. The pink triangle is stilled used in some contexts, but most gay organizations opted for the rainbow flag in the late 1990s. I think it happened because gay people were collectively sick and tired of identifying with a symbol so closely associated with homophobic oppression.
The rainbow flag is old and have been used by many people and movements over the years. One example is the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, a small province in the far east of Russia where Stalin allowed for Jews to settle and speak Yiddish. The province’s flag consists of seven narrow horizontal coloured stripes (see picture).
Although the Menorah is a far older symbol of Judaism, the Star of David is the most famous symbol nowadays. The six-point star became a Jewish symbol because Sephardic rabbis found a description of King David’s coat of arms in the Koran and decided to adopt it.
A rainbow-coloured Star of David is part of the logo of the Israel Movement for Progressive Judaism alongside a number of Jewish gay-rights groups.
The late Rabbi Louis Jacobs has written an informative article about the rainbow in Jewish symbolism. “The rainbow reminds Jews of God’s glory and faithfulness to the covenant,” he writes and references two sections in the Talmud where the rainbow is given a special symbolic value. “The rainbow has thus become in Jewish thought the symbol of both God’s glory as manifest in the universe and God’s faithfulness to His covenant to mankind and to the people of Israel,” Jacobs writes.
I added the Star of David to my journal’s logo because my Jewishness and issues related to Judaism, Israel, and the Jewish people are becoming increasingly more important to me. Issues related to gay rights and queer culture have been important to me since I came out in the early 1990s. Therefore, I felt it appropriate to have a logo that signalled my two most important identities and two of the most common subjects discussed in my journal. When I began blogging about seven years ago, my focus of interest was libertarian politics. A subtitle in the masthead defined my blog as a “libertarian journal”. The fight for liberty is still very important to me, but nowadays I don’t identify as strongly with a political ideology as I did a few years ago. I’m still a libertarian, though.
