If I was in America right now, I would be scared.
Hell, I know things have gotten bad when I find myself wholeheartedly agreeing with everything written in a Bret Stevens column.
In the past month, multiple key figures across politics and entertainment have made, and refused to apologize for, heinous antisemitic statements. Namely, rapper/producer Ye (Kanye West), NBA player Kyrie Irving, a number of Republican nominees for office, and the former president himself.
Those who have spoken to me about my anxieties regarding the fascist rhetoric in America over the past few years will have already heard me say that it was all but inevitable that the far-right would openly and shamelessly begin attacking the Jewish community sooner rather than later. I’ve written about the mainstreaming of antisemitism across the US before, and have “joked” that my moving to the United Kingdom was in part motivated by a need to seek refuge from what appeared to be a coming storm.
Still, once reality starts to actually sink in that that is what is happening, it’s hard not to be caught off guard.
In a sense, I have always struggled with my Jewish identity. I do not believe in God nor organized religion; in fact, I would categorize my general feelings toward religion as disdainful, particularly as it has increasingly become a force for regressive political and social change.
But I am Jewish. I am ethnically and culturally a member of the American Jewish community.
I grew up in a predominantly Jewish neighborhood. In my 13th year I attended dozens of Bar and Bat Mitzvahs and had one myself. I enjoyed celebrating all major Jewish holidays by gathering with close family and friends. I grew up in close proximity to numerous Holocaust survivors, and I volunteered for four years in fundraising for the US Holocaust Memorial Museum. I went to an undergraduate university that had a significant Jewish population and joined a Jewish fraternity.
Before coming to England, I had always been surrounded by Jews in great numbers. They are home to me.
Despite this, for most of my adult life I’ve been told my predominant identifying traits are that I am white, male, and privileged. These are all accurate identifiers, of course, but they have caused a dissonance in my perception of self and how others perceive me, especially as the sense of normality I once felt in being Jewish has eroded over time.
I am both minoritized, attacked, and clearly and increasingly unwelcomed by many in American society because of my ethnicity, and I am also considered “white” and assumed “successful” by other measures. For example, when filling out job applications there is never a section under race/ethnicity to denote I am Jewish (just “White, European”), nor should there be. Despite being common targets for detestation, American Jews have “made it”, so to speak. This has paradoxically created tremendous prosperity for our community as well as a blindspot by which it is difficult to convince the ignorant of our historical and continued victimization.
On Thursday, the FBI warned of “broad threats” to synagogues across the state of New Jersey. Attacks against Jews have been rising significantly in recent years, with antisemitic incidents hitting an all-time high in 2021. In an era of normalized political violence, antisemitic hostility is only likely to continue rapidly increasing.
To men like Ye and Mr. Irving, who apparently subscribe to the baseless idea that they are true Israelites and that Jews are impersonating their heritage, I am something they wish and believe themselves to be: “God’s chosen people”. Such conspiratorial rhetoric, spread by Black supremacist leaders like Louis Farrakhan, is deeply antisemitic by denying us our past, our struggles, and our identity.
What is so upsetting about the aforementioned men is not just their antisemitism (and refusal to unequivocally apologize for it), but that it has been accepted and defended by far too many individuals, or has otherwise been met with cowardly silence by their peers.
Not a single current NBA player has spoken out against Mr. Irving in the week since he posted about, promoted, and continually defended an antisemitic documentary on social media. Not one.
The closest any player has come to calling out Mr. Irving is Robin Lopez, who retweeted a link to basketball great and civil rights activist Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Substack post which itself excoriated Mr. Irving. Other former players, now commentators, such as Charles Barkley, Reggie Miller, and Shaquille O’Neil, have not minced words, but overall the league’s response has been a travesty.
What the silence leads me to conclude is that either such individuals quietly share Mr. Irving’s antisemitic views (a litany of athletes have proven this to be the case in recent times, including DeSean Jackson and KJ Wright, among others) or are otherwise hypocritical in their lack of requited allyship for the Jewish community.
Following the murder of George Floyd in the summer of 2020, I felt it was my duty, like many others—Jewish, or otherwise—to act as an ally to the Black community. The clarity with which injustice was and is continuing to be delivered to Black Americans was as upsetting to me as my own apparent ignorance of the depth of the issue. Despite being a social policy student and despite growing up with an education that regularly highlighted racial oppression (something shared historically by Jews), I knew there was still much I had to personally learn and reckon with regarding the Black experience in America.
And so I did. I read books like Ta-Nehesi Coates’ Between the World and Me and Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow. I donated to the NAACP, ACLU, and Black Lives Matter (though I later found out the donations were being siphoned) to support the ongoing protest movement. I had difficult, honest conversations with friends and family over ongoing racial disparities in America. I was not and am not perfect, but I made an effort to grow, as did much of the country and world. I applauded key leaders in the NBA, the entertainment industry, politics, and beyond that led me and others on a path to greater understanding and (hopefully, but regrettably not yet) significant policy change, and I still do. I worked and will continue to work to listen to and amplify their voices within my personal capacity.
But it is demoralizing to not see those universal values of allyship carried over in support of the Jewish community when we are clearly in need.
Where is the quick, strong, full-throated condemnation of antisemitism in America? Where are our allies? I have watched as white supremacist neo-Nazis have chanted “Jews will not replace us”. I have watched congressional candidates routinely make antisemitic remarks. I have watched as Marjorie Taylor-Greene has accused Jews of lighting forests on fire with a space laser. I have watched practically the entire Republican Party parrot conspiratorial, antisemitic lies about George Soros running the world. I’ve watched a prominent far-right pundit invoke blood libel.
Have they been shunned from our society for their statements? Attacked and cast off the (metaphorical) bridge like the Illinois Nazis in Blues Brothers? No. They continue to find platforms from which to spew their apparently popular ignorant, racist, vile speech, including by the likes of “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk, who appears intent on solving the world’s inflation problem by lighting $44bn on fire.
My girlfriend, a French-British national who has seldom spent time in the States, was appalled recently when I told her my childhood best friend’s mom, when she was in college in the 1980s, had her head checked by her roommate for devil horns.
It’s easy to forget, perhaps because of Jewish people’s outsized presence in major coastal media centers, that most Americans have probably never interacted with a Jew before. Most don’t know what “Mazel Tov” means, or that our religion is the bedrock for their own. They have no personal experience with us to inform them against the hateful, conspiracy theory-ridden rhetoric that they are being increasingly exposed to.
As in the aftermath of George Floyd, there appears to be a need for further education, understanding, and support, this time for the Jewish community. People should feel it is their duty to visit their nearest Holocaust museum, to read books like Elie Wiesel’s Night, to watch Schindler’s List, to have difficult conversations about antisemitism in America and the need for allyship. Hopefully, and unlike with the heinous murder of Floyd, members of our community do not need to be killed for such a reckoning to occur.
Otherwise, ignorance—which is currently breeding hate and violence unlike anything seen this century—presents a clear, existential danger to Jews in America, particularly when antisemitic rhetoric is promoted, amplified, and defended by major public figures. If even just 1% of Ye’s 31.8 million Twitter followers saw and agreed with his desire to “go death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE”, that would still amount to 318,000 new antisemites around the world.
Thankfully, Mr. Irving has been (belatedly) suspended. Ye, on the other hand, has already been unmuzzled.
It is frustrating to even have to write this piece of criticism regarding figures that are part of a community that I hold in high esteem and that naturally share social and political values with Jews. During the Civil Rights era, Jews were statistically one of the most actively involved non-Black groups in supporting the Movement.
I am confident that Ye and Mr. Irving’s beliefs are not echoed by the majority of Black Americans. So much of the problem on the political left is that we end up infighting instead of banding together. Because the real threat to Jewish people—and to all who care about civil liberties and personal safety—is of course not from the Black community at large, but those on the far-right that are openly advocating for violent terrorism, voter suppression, and antisemitism.
Is anyone surprised that Paul Pelosi’s attacker, who intended to kidnap and kneecap the Speaker of the House, was also a known antisemite? Of course not.
It is tiresome to watch as horrific, historical cycles continue unbroken. Jews have been villified for centuries by the same old weaponized lies and bullshit. But the American experiment—an experiment in which the Jewish people have been welcomed and allowed to contribute and even thrive alongside those of countless different backgrounds—still fails to be a lost cause.
To my friends in the Jewish community: if you have any sense of self-preservation, you will not vote for a single Republican in next week’s midterm election, or ever again until they wipe from their party fascist, antisemitic rhetoric.
To all the rest who purport to care about the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness for every American, I ask you to loudly recognize and support our community as it comes under attack, and use your vote to do so.
There will otherwise come a time some day when they will come for you, and we will not be able to return the favor.