Well, here we go again. In a matter of days, a big pile of antisemitic horseshit from Kanye West and another, sadly, from someone I used to have absolutely boundless admiration for.
The Offenses
Kanye West’s belch of antisemitism got a lot of attention, as well it should. Anybody who tells you “I actually can’t be Anti Semitic” is a horse’s ass. Now unaired footage has leaked from an interview with everyone’s favorite journalist Tucker Carlson, and it’s as awful as you imagine. But more on that below.
The second blast came from Roger Waters, former genius, and a pair of interviews backing up his latest tour. This got less attention, because Roger Waters is by now far past his expiration date. Waters once meant a lot to me, but it seems like he hasn’t had a new thought in the thirty years, and lately he’s decomposed into a bowl of rancid radical chic mush.
Out of respect for what he was (but no longer is), I’ve just cut several paragraphs of snark.
Anyway, recently, backing up his tour, Waters gave a couple of interviews: Rolling Stone and Joe Rogan. And it turns out the worst thing you can do to a guy like Roger Waters is let him talk.
Prof. Deborah Lipstadt, long a hero of mine and our State Department’s Special Envoy Against Antisemitism, called Waters out on Twitter, where Waters has been trending off and on for a couple days.
But Waters is only mischaracterizing what Jews do.
Kanye is doing the same, but on top of that he’s mischaracterizing what Jews are.
In his interview with Carlson, Ye said that Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger, a “known eugenics,” as he put it, created Planned Parenthood with the KKK “to control the Jew population.”
“When I say Jew, I mean the 12 lost tribes of Judah, the blood of Christ, who the people known as the race Black really are,” Ye added. “This is who our people are. The blood of Christ. This, as a Christian, is my belief.”
Ah, folks. Never start a sentence with “When I say Jew, I mean...” It never works out.
What the Jews Are
Well, then, what are the Jews?
That’s not a trick question, and pretty much everyone knows the answer: Jewish people are the contemporary descendants of the Israelites. The clue’s in the name: the word “Jew” comes from “Judea,” historical homeland of the Jewish people. The Jews were sent into exile when Roman colonial imperialists, as in empire as in emperor acting in an act of colonial imperialism, demolished the Jewish state. But instead of fading away, wiped from history the same way Romans wiped Judea from the official map, the Jewish people survived, maintaining their cultural identity in the face of outstanding odds, and then got their homeland back. About half the world’s Jews now live in Israel, back where it all started.
What the Jews Aren’t, I
The west has a tradition of religious pluralism which, while flawed, is still wa-a-ay better than its attitude toward racial pluralism. It’s only natural that some Jews would try to combat antisemitism by trying to separate the racial history of the Jewish people away from its religion, saying only the latter counts.
That’s also known as “trying to reason with bigots.” The Jewish people are an ethnicity highly correlated with a religion. They’re not a group defined by adherence to a religion the way Christians profess to be. Every now and then I hear a whizbang say “why should the Jewish religion have its own state?” as if (a) the Jewish people were defined by religion alone and (b) there’s no Vatican.
What the Jews Aren’t, II
Unfortunately, “de-emphasizing” the role of history in defining the Jewish people often comes in the form of denying whole chunks of it altogether. The master class here comes from a guy in the UK named Arthur Koestler, who in the mid-1970s wrote a book asserting that today’s Jews weren’t in fact descended from the Israelites and there was a presto-change-o swap with a long-lost kingdom nestled between the Black Sea and the Caspian and … well, it deserves a diary of its own, because it’s a great example of cranks cranking about Jewish identity. Turns out I already wrote that diary, quite a while ago.
The key word is: Khazars. Koestler’s wild guess — however noble his intentions — was blown out of the water by genetic studies of DNA. But cranks will be cranks, and if you want a one-word test about whether someone’s a crank about Jews, see what they say about Khazars. I know of no better single-word touchstone for antisemitism: cranks and haters and neo-Nazis on one side, everyone else on the other.
The various Christian Identity groups ran with this, because it lets them love the biblical Israelites while hating on today’s Jews. And it’s also found ground in the Black Hebrew Israelites movements.
What the Jews Aren’t, III
Here’s what else they aren’t: Kanye West.
But there are Black movements quite sure that they are the true Israelites and “the real Jews.” If this is what Kanye West is playing with, well, this is the community he’s playing to. (Or else — and this seems more likely — he’s simply very wrong but wanted attention and there was no Taylor Swift nearby to bully.)
That Kanye West wraps it up in the pig-ignorant argument that “antisemitism” means something different than everyone says it does — I’ve said this before: don’t play faux naif with the word “antisemitism," because (a) it doesn’t work and (b) makes you look like either a moron, a racist, or both.
Sure, there are Black Jews. But that’s not what Kanye’s saying. He’s saying all Blacks are Jews. And he’s saying it in the classical formula of antisemites everywhere: “I can’t be antisemitic because...” It’s a mens rea admission, knowing ahead of time people were going to call out his tweet as antisemitic and trying unsuccessfully to preempt the possibility.
Why Change the Definition?
Why do some people work so hard to change the definition? There are a few reasons, none of them good.
- Because you want to usurp Jewish history for yourself, Christian Identity/BHI style, calling yourself the real Jews. This is a raise-yourself-up argument.
- Because you want to delegitimize the Jews by calling all them “fake Jews.” This is the difference between saying “Jews are liars” and “the Jews are a lie.” It’s a knock-them-down argument.
- Because you want to atomize Jewish communities by denying their historical connections to each other. It’s a pull-them-apart argument.
- Because you want to delegitimize Jewish historical claims about Israel, thereby delegitimizing Israel’s very existence. It’s an antisemitic “anti-Zionist” argument.
