The State of the Black-Jewish Relationship in America

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:

May 19, 2021

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