Stars and Triangles: The Jewish architecture of queer liberation and its dismantling

On 28 February 2026, hours before Sydney’s Mardi Gras parade, organisers barred the anti-Zionist group Pride in Protest from marching, citing its social-media attacks on Dayenu, Sydney’s Jewish LGBTQ+ group, as a breach of parade terms.

In 2000, on Dayenu’s first Mardi Gras float beneath a glowing Star of David, founder Dawn Cohen told the crowd: ”We bet our lives on you and we won that bet.” Twenty-five years on, the bet looks less certain.

Dayenu, founded in 1999, has marched every year since 2000. In 2024, after Pride in Protest declared Jewish Mardi Gras participants ”proud of genocide and the mass murder of children,” Dayenu marched anyway; a volunteer was hospitalised with an asthma attack when pro-Palestine protesters set off flares on the route.

This year, after the 14 December 2025 Bondi terror attack and a violent pro-Palestine protest at President Herzog’s Sydney visit, Dayenu briefly withdrew from the parade – then marched after talks with police.

The Sydney decision is part of a global pattern intensified since 7 October 2023 – most striking against the history of who built this movement.

There is a principle at the centre of queer liberation: identity should never be the price of belonging. The people who built the movement that lives by it were, at every foundational moment, disproportionately Jewish.

On 6 May 1933, three months after Hitler took power, Nazi student activists stormed a villa in Berlin and seized its library. Four days later, SA men joined them to burn the collection on the Opernplatz. The images became some of the most reproduced photographs of the Reich’s early cultural destruction. Most people who have seen them do not know what was burning.