Anti-Semitism in the World

I suppose I probably shouldn’t admit this, but I hadn’t ever heard of Kyrie Irving until last week when he suddenly became famous even to people who don’t follow basketball by encouraging his 17.5 million Instagram and 4.5 million Twitter followers to take seriously a movie called Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America that, among other things, promotes the theory that Black people were the original Hebrews, that Jews worship Satan, and that the Holocaust didn’t actually happen. This was not well received by the Nets, Irving’s NBA team, which suspended him for five games to punish him for his bigotry. That didn’t strike me as such a serious punishment, but it was apparently enough to prompt an apology in which Irving acknowledged that the movie he was promoting “contained some false anti-Semitic statements, narrative, and language that were untrue and offensive to the Jewish Race/Religion” and in which he accepted “full accountability and responsibility for his actions.” On the other hand, the movie itself is now a bestseller on amazon.com. (Click here for details.)

Still, the Irving story has at least a kind of a good ending: a bad statement followed by contrition, apology, and an public acceptance of responsibility. But coming on the heels of a similar incident regarding Kanye West, whom I actually had heard of, the security that I’ve always felt as an American Jewish person suddenly felt just slightly compromised. (Kanye West, now called Ye, has embraced many different loony-tunes theories about the world, including some promoting the notion that Black people are the “real” Jews and the old canard about, and I quote, the “Jewish underground media mafia” that enslaves Black performers. He’s also occasionally spoken positively about Adolph Hitler.) Because of his remarks, his various commercial relationships with huge companies like Adidas, Vogue, and the Gap have been terminated. (An article in Forbes reported that these losses have reduced his personal wealth to a mere $400 million. That poor man!) West—Ye—is a complex, troubled personality, but his reach too is immense: he has 18.1 million followers on Instagram, 31.4 million on Twitter, 1.3 million on TikTok, 8.69 million subscribers to his YouTube channel, and 345,000 followers on Facebook. So to wave him away as a disturbed person with crazy ideas is seriously to underestimate the damage such a person can do. Oh, and he also threatened personally to go “death con 3 on Jewish people,” presumably a way of saying he is preparing actually to start murdering Jews. (Click here to read a deft deconstruction of the phrase “death con 3” by Philissa Cramer and Ron Kampeas that was published last week on the Times of Israel website.)

Suddenly, the topic feels almost ubiquitous. Two different Broadway shows, Tom Stoppard’s play Leopoldstadt, and Alfred Uhry and Jason Robert Brown’s musical, Parade, are both formally and forcefully about anti-Semitism and the violence it breeds. (Leopoldstadt is basically a Shoah story set in Vienna; Parade is about the 1915 lynching of Leo Frank in Marietta, Georgia, a suburb of Atlanta.)  The fourth anniversary of the Pittsburgh massacre last week inspired even more public rumination about the topic, as did also a whole series of on-line stories about the resurgence of anti-Semitism here and abroad, of which the essay on the Algemeiner website published this week entitled, “London Jews Facing Spree of Anti-Semitic Attacks,” was just one among many. (Click here to read it.) As a sign of just how much press coverage these various incidents have generated, former President Obama chose to address the topic head-on in a campaign sweep through Pennsylvania last weekend on behalf of Josh Shapiro (who will now become that state’s governor) and John Fetterman (who also won and will now become one of Pennsylvania’s senators).

For actual Jewish people, the challenge is always to find the precise line between underreacting and overreacting. This is not as easy as it sounds. That there are people who harbor deep-seated bigoted opinions about Jewish people will come as a surprise to no one who lives in the world and least of all to actual Jewish people. Nor have we come to expect the world to isolate or, to use my least favorite word, “cancel” people who express anti-Semitic opinions out loud. (Alice Walker, author of The Color Purple, has openly expressed overtly anti-Semitic opinions for years and has, as far as I can see, suffered no consequences at all. For more on the topic, click here. Nor have they stopped teaching T.S. Eliot’s poetry in American high schools. Or Ezra Pound’s.) As a result, we have learned to tolerate a level of public abuse that other minorities would never accept. But even that principled stoicism is difficult to evaluate: are we merely accepting things as they are and making a conscious choice not to whine about it or are we more accurately mimicking the Jews of Weimar Germany who too felt virtuous ignoring the rising tide of anti-Semitism in their country until that very tide overwhelmed them utterly and beyond tragically? In my heart, I have to say I don’t know which is the right approach: at different moments, I seem to embrace one or the other…but never with the whole heart I wish I could bring to my decision in either direction. I’m basically always of two minds, always at least slightly conflicted, never completely certain in which direction the golden path forward actually lies. Welcome to my Jewish-American world!

There’s also good news. Not only former President Obama, but countless others have spoken out in the last few weeks against anti-Semitism—and that list includes movie stars, famous musicians, politicians, athletes, and Christian theologians. So that’s heartening. But the elimination—the principled anathematization—of anti-Semitism is going to require a lot more than expressions of the encouraging sentiments by celebrities. To free our nation from anti-Jewish prejudice will require something else entirely, something along the lines of the paradigm shift the Civil Rights movement brought about in the middle of the last century with respect to Black people. Society does grow forward, after all. But it does so in fits and starts by altering the way people see the world and think about the world one by one. Looking away from slurs or, worse, attempting to re-interpret them as humorous jabs surely meant to amuse rather than seriously to insult is not at all helpful. Being afraid to ruffle feathers when a public personality says something negative about Jews, also not. Strengthening our American Jewish community from within by raising the level of culture, education, and familiarity with the classics of Jewish literature and the giants of Jewish thought, on the other hand, would be a very useful set of steps forward, one that would make it clear that Jewishness exists today, as always, as a bulwark of culture and civilization against the tides of incivility, barbarism, prejudice, ignorance, and discrimination that seem constantly to threaten to engulf the world. But this cannot solely be an in-house operation. If anti-Semitism is to become as wholly unacceptable in the American square as anti-Black racism now is, the shift I have in mind is going to have to originate, at least to a great extent, in the non-Jewish world.

There is no real point to any attempt to stifle honest debate in the public square. If someone of stature claims in public (falsely but convincingly) that Jews dominated the slave trade that brought African slaves to America, that person has to be forced publicly either to produce proof of that allegation or to apologize for spreading lies about Jews. If someone with scores of millions of social media followers spreads the perfidious lie that the Holocaust didn’t actually occur, the correct response is not to deny that person his or her right to speak in public, but to force that person to demonstrate the truth of those allegations in a convincing way…or else to admit to having spread falsehoods to millions of willing listeners and then accept the consequences of having spread that lie. There was a time when it was considered entirely normal for people to speak disparagingly in public about all sorts of minority groups, mostly definitely including people of color, gay people, and even (although not precisely a minority) women. Those days are long past us. But expressing anti-Semitic opinions is not an act of professional or reputational suicide in America the way expressing racist views has long since become.

Or is it? Have we finally arrived the point at which even important celebrities are being called up for vulgar, anti-Semitic comments made intentionally and malevolently? The whole brouhaha in the course of these last weeks about Kyrie Irving and Kanye West is encouraging in the extreme in that regard. The challenge is specifically not to allow the momentum to die down as we yet again become “used” to slander. What the future will bring, who can say? But we can make a serious effort to create a society in which anti-Semitic tropes never pass for humor, in which unproven calumnies cannot simply be bandied about and then retracted under pressure, and in which anti-Jewish invective is treated as seriously as hate speech. The Kanye West and Kyrie Irving incidents are encouraging! But where we go from here, of course, remains to be seen.