Last month, Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, was all over the internet with his conspiratorial, antisemitic tirades. Most recently, he went on Alex Jones’s InfoWars show with White Nationalist Nick Fuentes and said things like, “I love Nazis” and “I see good things about Hitler.”
I wish it was just that.
Also last month, Kyrie Irving shared a link to a video that claimed that Black people are the real Jews and that the Holocaust didn’t happen—to which he was met with an eight-game NBA suspension. (As Dave Chappelle joked afterward on SNL: “Kanye got in so much trouble that Kyrie Irving got in trouble.”)
There was also the Black Hebrew Israelite march outside of Barclays Center in Brooklyn—a march that got almost no media coverage.
All of this took place in November, in which Jewish New Yorkers were attacked every 16 hours in a country in which, according to the FBI, Jews suffer the largest number of hate crimes.
But what’s happened over the last month isn’t about one celebrity or basketball player. As Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and I talked about recently, the antisemitic ideas we’ve seen in the news lately are not new in America. Including among Black Americans.
On the latest episode of Honestly, we put together a roundtable to discuss the history and state of of Black-Jewish relations in America with guests Chloe Valdary, Bret Stephens, Eli Lake and Kmele Foster.
We’ve hosted a lot of incredible guests on the podcast. But this frank, searching conservation is one of my favorites.
Listen here:
Great discussion. Very complex topic. I believe the answer is very simple. Anti Semitism is on the rise because of the increased presence of Critical Race Theory (CRT) in our society. Early on during this phenomenon I read a book about this topic that was even handed and not biased for or against. It simply presented the arguments on both sides and I landed on my own conclusion. Which is that CRT increase racism.
Writing as a first generation child of Hungarian Jews who went through every awful experience y’all have ever seen in any holocaust movie or book…
It is untenable for the New York Times, the Washington post, various major media TV outlets, and huge swaths of higher education to fearlessly and consistently attack “whiteness” with no repercussion… while at the same time shutting down bank accounts, levying fines, and generally ruining the careers of people who attack “Jewishness.”
I don’t think race exists in any meaningful sense, but even if you think it does, you cannot have this insane double standard. Either all race based generalizations/insults are off the table, including every NYT essay on whiteness, or nothing is. Allowing nonstop attacks on white people while cancelling those who attack Jews just feeds -big time - into antisemitic stereotypes of Jews controlling everything. It’s not that difficult folks!