This paper is based on an ethnographic study of Russian-speaking queer immigrants in Israel and, in particular, on their organising against homophobia. The paper follows the queer immigrants' claims that the homophobic attacks they experience are similar to anti-Semitism and the persecution of Jews by the Nazis. Engaging with Freud's notion of the double as uncanny, I trace the relations of doubleness and substitution between two figures: the humiliated homosexual and the persecuted Jew. What does it mean, I ask, that injuries of homophobia are compared to injuries of anti-Semitism? What does it mean that Jewish immigrants in Israel claim that they are persecuted 'just like the Jews'? Throughout the paper I explore questions of migration and sexuality, as well as issues of Israeli nationalism and the currency of victimhood in claims for national belonging.
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