Back in October, when Kanye West, the rapper who now calls himself Ye, began broadcasting his Nazi-grade antisemitism, swearing he’d go “death con 3 on the Jews”, there was a rush to put his remarks “in context”. Ye was mentally ill, wrote one prominent Jewish columnist, and Jews ought not to take seriously his unfortunate ranting about Hitler’s failure to finish the job; rather, they ought to pity him. Prominent non-Jews rushed to his defence too.Ye’s good friend, the conservative star Candace Owens, also stuck by her pal. In a recent conversation with the excellent Winston Marshall, host of the Marshall Matters podcast, it was shocking to hear the brainy Owens getting hung up on how Ye had meant to go “Def con 3” not “death con 3”, as he tweeted, on Jews, as if this made it alright.
Last week, Ye tweeted a swastika interlocked with a Star of David. This went too far even for Elon Musk, who banned him from the platform on grounds of incitement to violence.
It’s hard to believe that this is all happening in the country of my childhood — a place where light antisemitism sometimes marred small Waspy towns like the one I grew up in, or circulated within certain communities, but didn’t dominate the ether. On the contrary.
Entertainment in my childhood was an upbeat mix of the non-Jewish — The Wonder Years, Full House, Saved By the Bell — and the Jewish, largely in the form of Seinfeld and Woody Allen. I never winced when Jewish characters appeared in otherwise non-Jewish domains, like Ross, Monica and Rachel in Friends, because it was always done with affection and humour.
Crucially, there was a sense, an awareness, that Jews were an indispensable addition to American showbiz — and America was lucky to have them. The idea that celebrities, from comedy to music and sport (the NBA’s Kyrie Irving recently promoted a terrifying book called Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America) might weekly spew some new Goebbels-grade sentiment would have seemed dystopian.
But that dystopia has been building steam for quite some time, given an extra push by the Black Lives Matter movement in which, as well as fair anger about anti-black racism in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, a troubling and virulent strand of Jew-bashing emerged. This has been visible in people from Antifa, who looted Jewish businesses in the first flush of post-George Floyd protests, to those sympathetic to Nation of Islam’s rabid antisemite-in-chief Louis Farrakhan. Indeed, the most troubling aspect of Ye’s obsession with genocidal thinking about Jews is its long-running, percolating quality. In the 1990s, the virtues of Adolf Hitler was not something one had the impression that America’s favourite entertainers devoted their time to broadcasting.
There may be other factors contributing to this discourse other than an uptick in in raw antisemitism. Since my childhood, the internet has swamped everything and this has of course changed and sped up the pathways of ideas good and bad. But internet dynamics are not an excuse for saying, as Ye did last week on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s show: “I love Nazis… I see good things about Hitler”. These are the kinds of statements that only trip off celebrity tongues through at least some degree of cultural collusion.
Ye lost billions when Adidas and other brands dropped him. But according to CNN, the rapper has been praising the Nazi chief to staff for years. The thinking, and the belief in the righteousness of Jewish genocide, appears deeply held. Which sharpens the sense of disgust in Trump’s little Mar-a-Lago dinner party in late November with none other than Ye and Nick Fuentes, a white supremacist and Holocaust denier.
The America of my childhood was not a place where Jews had to brace themselves for constant invocations of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, where Jewish excellence in entertainment triggered public mockery laced with canards about Jewish control, as in Dave Chappelle’s monologue. And, on the left, it was not a place where being pro-Israel was seen to be a position of “white supremacy” — a crime, in the new American progressive universe, deemed far worse than antisemitism.
Of Kanye’s swastika post, it was telling that the super-woke Washington Post offered a brief reference to the six million killed in the Holocaust, and then spent the rest of the piece on Hitler’s anti-black racism — as if this is the real problem with Adolf. The distortions and apologetics for it begin to seem endless, a hydra of too many heads to fight off. It is with a gloomy heart that I look over the pond and think how the America I once admired and defended has disappeared, its exuberant, creative Seinfeld-loving pizazz replaced with a growing taste for anti-Jewish violence, literal and metaphorical.
