Now saying “Eat”, musician and designer Kanye West found himself in front of the cameras outside of what appeared to be a workplace strip, just weeks after promising to go to “death con 3 On JEWISH PEOPLE” on Twitter. Los Angeles – One of the places without parking, which is very typical of TMZ style videos. A group of reporters asked him about the multi-platform antisemitic hate he had traded recently, and the fallout from his subsequent rejection by corporate partners like Adidas and Balenciaga. In response, he pulled out his phone and, with increasing zeal, read the listing on a website of Jewish executives of media and entertainment companies, and finally picked up his phone as if he were visually proving who supposedly controlled everything.
None of this part of the video was particularly widely shared, even with the intent to denounce it. After all, Ye had been saying things like this for weeks. What eventually circulated was the part at the end of the video where Ye returned from talking about the MAGA hat to talking about mental health treatment, which he now regrets. “The thing about the red hat that got me to the point of exhaustion,” he says, pointing like an old man teaching from his porch, “which I’m not talking about – what race, which people – the doctor and which hospital, what media he went to – we know I can’t say. But then He folds his arms and, after a very short pause, clarifies what he wasn’t allowed to say in case anyone thought of it: “He was a Jewish doctor.”
Jewish Twitter went a little crazy for this. A brief synopsis of Ye’s long, gruesome nonsense has been shared many times, mostly not out of anger, not because he has embraced the oldest kind of conspiratorial antisemitism, but because he has no regrets for inspiring an ongoing variety show. -hate up front, but in the words of one Jewish political staff member who retweeted the clip, because something about his presentation felt very “classic Jewish”. It was unintentional, but in terms of comedy timing, it could well have passed the rally at Grossinger’s during the heyday of the borscht generation. Joan Rivers couldn’t have done better.
Antisemitism in America
Antisemitism is one of the oldest forms of prejudice, and its followers say it is now on the rise across the country.
- Dangerous Times :With examples of hate speech on social media and increased reported incidents, this decline has become increasingly worrying for American Jews.
- Kanye West : The rapper and designer, now known as Ye, has recently been widely condemned for antisemitic comments. The fallout in the industries was swift.
- Kyrie Irving : The Nets lifted the suspension of the basketball player who offered “deep apologies” for sharing a link to an antisemitic movie. His behavior terrified and frightened many of his Jewish admirers.
It is not for me to tell my people not to laugh at a time like this; Since when haven’t we turned our haters into humor? But something about the stickiness of this clip, especially in Jewish circles, broke my heart because it was talking about a group looking for something, anything, to use as a raft or security blanket. Here was the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” type of hatred that had swept through the midst of mainstream popular culture, coming from a prominent figure so dominating the media and whose actions were impossible to ignore. There were people here, emboldened, entering through the eaves, hanging a “Kanye is right about the Jews” banner from the Los Angeles overpass. NBA player Kyrie Irving was standing by at a press conference where he posted a link to a movie denying that the Holocaust happened, among other wildly anti-Semitic ideas. Here is Donald Trump, questioning the loyalty of American Jews and sending the message that “US Jews need to act together”. And so on “SNL,” Dave Chappelle begins his monologue by reading Ye’s apology for “wasting time” and goes on to talk about how “two words in English you should never say together in sequence” are. : ‘The’ and ‘Jews.’”
Antisemitism felt that there was a trend moving, with surprising speed, from something verbal to something that glided haphazardly around the culture. Taking refuge in an unwelcome comedy moment that made Ye look more stupid than dangerous was an understandable balm. But the laughter still sounded to me like the sickening chuckle of being cornered with nowhere else to go.
For years, American Jews have been slow to respond to indigenous antisemitism. The reasons are multifaceted and labyrinthine. Some left-leaning Jews are reluctant to center any persecuted situation on the grounds that other questions (anti-Black racism, issues around Zionism) weigh more heavily. Some Right-leaning Jews are unwilling to form an alliance with the Christian Right and its support for Israel (even if, for example, it includes characters like Marjorie Taylor Greene who once claimed that the wildfires in California may have been started by someone else). space laser attached to the Rothschilds). There are also dual reasons. Creating consequences for the anti-Semite, who said that the Jews had all the power, told him, “See? I told you so.” There’s also the Holocaust, which can make almost any threat seem trivial compared to its central dread. For young Jews in particular, invoking anti-Semitism felt like an outdated habit of an uncle at the Passover table and fearing the worst every time a swastika was sprayed on a random wall. It was easy to appease ourselves by telling ourselves that we are living in an easy golden age, because we are living in it compared to many other eras of pogroms, deportations and mass murders.
Earlier this month, I spoke with some rabbis and anti-Semitism experts. Some have said that anti-Semitism could be seen as an “indicator” that for many people things are about to get worse – the canary in the coal mine for growing hatred and division. Hearing that, I remembered the scholar and writer Dara Horn, who described these full descriptors as a form of Jewish self-denial, as if we were saying that the really bad thing about antisemitism could mean hate crimes for Jews. others.
This year, however, it is felt that younger generations of Jews are starting to grapple with all these forces that have softened their reactions. Maybe it’s because hate hits them where they live – in cultural feeds, playlists, favorite brands, phones. After the 2017 Charlottesville marches, when various white supremacists chanting “Jews will not replace us” received only mild reprimand from the president, it felt like a political turning point had been reached: At the height of politics, it was no longer a given. You must appear horrified by the hatred towards the Jewish people. Now, seeing as unencrypted anti-Semitism pop up often in mundane pop culture settings—places like basketball news conferences and Hollywood interviews—another deep cut emerges. We once had a media ecosystem where blatant antisemitism could end a career or at least force a celebrity to stay out of sight for a while. (Mel Gibson and designer John Galliano are back.) Today, however, this could be the start of a new phase of exposure, a conversation that will involve both condemnation and affirmation. In the discourse window, we have people clearing their cabinets of Yeezy kicks, but we also have NBC backing an “SNL” monologue playing fast and loose with the idea of sneaky Jewish control.
So yeah, Ye’s pause with his arms folded, the split-second turn, is fun to watch. But it’s also where Jews in America currently live: on the rift between the world where it’s forbidden to say hateful things (“We know I can’t say that”) and the world where people just go on and say it. he (“was a Jewish doctor”). I don’t think most of us know what to do about it – how to fix it, how to make it better and not worse. Finding the hateful humor doesn’t help much after all.
Source photo: Saul Loeb/Agence France-Presse via Getty Images.