Forty years of anti-Semitism didn’t prepare me for Kanye West

I’d always been scared to respond to anti-Semitism. That was before Kanye West, now known as Ye, became something of a one-man Ku Klux Klan, metaphorically planting lit-up wooden crosses on Jewish lawns. This past week has been horrible.

Last Friday the rapper was suspended from Twitter for tweeting an image of a swastika blended with a Star of David. This was only hours after Ye praised Adolf Hitler, said he loved Nazis, and denied the Holocaust in an interview with right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones. (“I like Hitler …,” said Ye, wearing a black mask, before adding, “and he didn’t kill 6 million Jews”.)

Kanye West, now known as Ye, appears masked and behind a copy of the Bible on Infowars. Credit: Screenshot/Infowars

Then, on Monday, Ye repeated claims he’d previously made that the Jews are, more broadly, a threat. Not only do we “control” the majority of the media, the banks, real estate and shopping centres, but we’ve colluded to “give America porn” to “dumb us down”, he said in an interview with Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes on his alt-right video platform, Censored.TV. The rapper, identified by McInnes as Ye, again appeared in a black mask.

“You can’t say, you can’t force your pain on everyone else,” Ye continued. “Jewish people, forgive Hitler today.”

Now, like most Jewish people I know, I’ve fielded my fair share of anti-Semitic remarks over the past three or four decades. “Aren’t Jews supposed to have horns?” a new friend at university in Canada asked me one day. He was joking, he said. He’d never met a Jewish person before. This is what he’d been told about us.

Unmasked: the rapper formerly known as Kanye West.Credit: AP

I threw him a benign grimace, like you would to a small child caught eating glue. It wasn’t his fault he didn’t know better. Now he’d met me – a hornless, human, Jewish woman – I thought hopefully he wouldn’t say it again. I responded much the same, a couple of years later, when a 20-something man my friends and I met in a train station in Prague asked us about the local market. “Can you Jew them down?” he said, innocently. As in: Can you haggle for a cheaper price?

It was only while writing a fashion column for this newspaper, 17 years ago, that I felt my first sting of shame for remaining silent. “My daughter tried to get into the industry,” said the 70-something, white-haired man sitting next to me at a fancy event in Sydney promoting the diamond industry. But, he explained, it was run by Jews. She just couldn’t break in.

“You know what they’re like,” he said, not knowing I was Jewish. I looked to the side and murmured, noncommittally. Don’t be a coward, I thought. Say something. But I stayed silent. Keep it professional. I was worried that if I spoke up, I’d damage my professional reputation. By letting the personal get in the way of the professional.

This is the way minorities have felt for generations. Don’t make a fuss. It’ll only lead to backlash and further prejudice. Just be unimpeachable.

There are notable exceptions, of course. On Sunday, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen revived his retired alter-ego, Borat, the vulgar and oblivious Kazakh TV journalist, and roasted West and Donald Trump. “It not fair,” he said at the Kennedy Centre Honours, an annual event in Washington DC that pays tribute to American artists. “Kazakhstan is number one Jew-crushing nation … Your Kanye, he tried to move to Kazakhstan and even changed his name to Kazakhstanye West. But we said: ‘No, he too anti-Semitic, even for us.’” (Baron Cohen, who delivered his roast in front of President Joe Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris, Julia Roberts and Patti LaBelle, among others, is Jewish.)

Comedian Sarah Silverman and Jessica Seinfeld, the cookbook author and wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, have also spoken out on social media.

Now I can’t stay silent any more. Regardless of what stereotypes people might now throw my way. Because Ye’s statements – including his since-deleted statement on Twitter in October that the Jews had “toyed with me” and he would be “going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” – have felt more threatening than any others I’ve ever heard before.

It’s not that he’s famous. The famous have been there, and done that. (To see the tip of the iceberg, Google: Christian Dior designer John Galliano and his rant towards a “f---ing ugly Jewish bitch” in 2011, or Mel Gibson ranting that “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” in 2006.)

It’s Ye’s reach: 18.5 million followers on Instagram alone. Some of his many followers have already picked up his message and run with it. “Kanye was right about the Jews,” read a digital sign on the exterior of a football stadium in Florida, in October. Another anti-Semitic group hung a banner with the same message over a busy Los Angeles freeway the same month. “Honk if you know,” read an additional banner next to it, in front of a group of people raising their arms in a Nazi salute.

For the first time in my life, I feel uncomfortably close to the childhood my late father used to tell me about in Toronto in the 1950s, when signs near the main beach still read: “No Dogs Or Jews Allowed.” I used to hear this story and think it was an archaic fact; horrible, but fascinating and distant. Like, say, the Salem witch trials. It wouldn’t happen again.

But now, with Ye’s comments and as hate speech grows on Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s ownership of the company, I’m not nearly so confident. I worry about the world my three children are growing up in. Yes, I live in Sydney now. But evidence has emerged of a recent rise in anti-Semitism in schools in our eastern suburbs.

Words matter. We saw that with Donald Trump encouraging attacks on the Capitol Building in January last year.

We know hate speech is often the precursor to violence. Whether that’s in Cambodia in the 1970s where the Khmer Rouge murdered up to 3 million people, during the Holocaust, where six million Jews were murdered, or in the US four years ago, when a man who asserted “I just want to kill Jews” murdered 11 people at a synagogue. Or in New Zealand, where 51 Muslims were murdered in two mosque attacks in 2019; or here, where Indigenous Australians continue to die in increasing numbers in custody and suffer the devastating mental and physical fallout from prejudice.

The Reddit backlash against Kanye West. Credit: Reddit

In my experience, many Australians have a hard time discussing racism. They just don’t want to do it. (While I’ve shied away from discussing anti-Semitism, I’ve more successfully spoken out against the discrimination of other groups.) But it’s more crucial than ever that we do.

So, please learn from my mistakes, and speak out when you hear someone – anyone – being discriminated against. Join me in trying to become more like the thriving sub-Reddit community, with 721,000 members from various religions and cultural backgrounds, which has turned its one-time Kanye West fan club into a Holocaust awareness forum. We just might change the world, one interaction at a time.

Samantha Selinger-Morris is a lifestyle writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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