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 but I was disappointed with Bari and Bret’s response to the question on whether there is an appropriate response to So called Jewish over representation in Hollywood and other fields. The typical answer of Jews being banned from land ownership and other professions is a true but very elementary answer. The use of the word “over representation” is problematic in and of itself, as if Jews have something to explain or apologize for achieving success in certain fields and making quite astounding contributions to the betterment of their chosen professions and for that matter humanity. I think the better question is what is it about Judaism or Jewish thought, traditions, history and culture that have allowed the Jewish people to survive and at times thrive in exile over the millennia in a world that was usually hostile to its communities. Interestingly, the Dalai Lama and Mark Twain have asked the same question?
Kanye nor Kyrie should ever be penalized for exercising their right to be stupid.