I am so Fucking Tired of All This Anti-Semitism
On a dispiritingly regular basis, I think to myself, “Man, people REALLY hate Jews.”
Not a lot of y’all know this, but I actually AM Jewish so I take all of this anti-Semitism personally.
I always have. As a Jewish child one of the very first things that I learned about my faith and my religion was that a lot of people really fucking hated Jews.
I was probably five or six when I first learned about the Holocaust. It was at that age that I first discovered that children my age were being rounded up and killed en masse because of who they were.
That was 1981 or 1982. At that point the Holocaust had only ended thirty-six or thirty-seven years earlier. To put that into perspective thirty-seven years ago Back to the Future was the big box-office smash. Ronald Reagan was in his second term.
Thirty-seven years is not a lot of time yet that’s all that stood between the end of the Holocaust and me finding out about the Holocaust as a child.
To say that finding out about the Holocaust made an indelible impression on me would be a colossal understatement. It forever changed the way that I saw the world, myself and Judaism.
The Holocaust wasn’t ancient history. It was recent history. It’s not the distant past. It’s yesterday.
At Passover every year we reflect on the fact that in every generation people have tried to destroy the Jews. That’s canon. It’s not opinion. It is a historical fact that Jews live with every day of their lives.
We can never forget the Holocaust and we can never forget the ugliness and pervasiveness of anti-Semitism. I am writing this because over the past few days, Kanye West, an artist I once considered my favorite rapper and producer and someone I felt an intense spiritual and emotional connection with, has completed his transformation into a hateful right wing troll by going all in on anti-Semitism.
When Diddy, who is the voice of reason here despite professionally being known by such monikers as Diddy, P-Diddy and Puff Daddy, implored Kanye to maybe knock it off with the “White Lives Matter” shit Kanye replied, “Ima use you as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me.”
West was so proud of himself for saying that if a way too patient and understanding peer challenges him it must be because he’s being controlled by Jews that he posted the exchange on Instagram.
Later Kanye tweeted that he was sleepy, but that when he was more alert he was going to go “death con 3 on the JEWISH PEOPLE.”
I can’t say I was surprised by Kanye’s tweets. He’s convinced himself that anti-Semitism and anti-black racism and self-hatred are not all toxic, destructive forms of bigotry but rather profound truths that people in power are trying to suppress.
He’s convinced himself that being a free thinker and a free soul means being able to say whatever you want without consequences. In that conspiratorial mindset he sees consequences as a form of censorship, suppression and thought control.
On a personal level, I am sad because I remember how much Kanye used to mean to me. I remember falling in love with The College Dropout. I remember defending Kanye for a solid decade on the grounds that he was a genius and that the rules are different for geniuses.
There are rules that should exist for everyone. These are rules like “Don’t be racist”, “Don’t be anti-Semitic” and “Don’t psychologically terrorize the mother of your children because you refuse to treat your mental illness.”
These are all rules that Kanye is flagrantly defying. He’s in the biggest tantrum of his career. He’s BEGGING to be punished so that he can play the victim card and yell from the mountaintops that he’s being oppressed for telling inconvenient truths and not for being a racist, anti-Semitic, abusive piece of shit.
I’m fucking heartbroken. This is just sad. It’s sad on every level. This anti-Semitism is exhausting and dispiriting. And it’s never going to stop and it’s never going to end. I have to live with that. We all do.
But we do not have to accept Kanye’s words and actions. Actions have consequences. Kanye’s extreme actions should have extreme consequences and if people still want to be in business with Kanye after all that he’s said about the Jewish people then those consequences should extend to the corporations so interested in making money and appearing hip that they’re willing to implicitly cosign a billionaire bragging about going “death con 3 on the JEWISH PEOPLE.”
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