Another Very Heimische Zalman Bernstein TGIF (2): The YEEZUS-Trump Anti-Semitism Explosion! (10/21)
David Shasha
YEEZUS, Trump, and the “Jews”: Tikvah Bari Weiss, Bill Maher, Ben Shapiro, and Benjamin Netanyahu Parse Anti-Semitism in the PILPUL Manner
The last time we checked in with our Tikvah Rufo David Project friend, we found her Holy Austin MISHPOCHEH flying to Hungary to kiss the Orban ring:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/_Lp1f4sedJI
And then came YEEZUS!
Prior to the beginning of the Sukkot holiday, I presented the matter in the following SHU post:
https://groups.google.com/g/Davidshasha/c/QC9AvJdUeEU
Since then, we have seen the White Lives Matter whackjob Trump Alt-Right freakout go viral:
https://www.vox.com/culture/23400851/kanye-west-fake-kids-antisemitism
It now includes attacks on George Floyd, repeating lies from Candace Owens:
Buying pro-Fascism Trumpist Alt-Right website Parler:
https://thejewishvoice.com/2022/10/kanye-west-to-buy-conservative-social-media-platform-parler/
And giving out those “White Lives Matter” shirts to the homeless:
https://nypost.com/2022/10/18/kanye-wests-white-lives-matter-shirts-given-to-the-homeless/
Given all the times I have attacked New York Times Corporate Hip-Hop Poptrash Idiocracy shill Jon Caramanica, I wanted to make sure to recommend his excellent summary review of all the mess:
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/19/arts/music/kanye-west-comments.html
The complete article follows this note.
The YEEZUS has certainly gone off the rails if Caramanica is reading the Last Rites.
OY VEY!
What to do with the YEEZUS?
Bari Weiss appears to have an answer:
The White Jewish Supremacists have had it, as anyone who reads the Jewish media knows by now:
Though Bill Maher does some slick Rufo both-sides-ism, attacking Congressional critics of Israel as also being Anti-Semites:
JNS contributor Ian Haworth fully agrees!
https://www.jns.org/opinion/both-the-left-and-the-right-have-turned-on-the-jews/
There are BAD PEOPLE ON BOTH SIDES!
Zombie Trump has happily defended the YEEZUS Anti-Semitism, and added a bit more of his own:
Interestingly, Weiss equivocates with a critical HASBARAH caveat:
While those clips were going viral, Donald Trump offered his own take on American Jews. “No President has done more for Israel than I have,” the former president wrote on his platform, Truth Social. “Somewhat surprisingly, however, our wonderful Evangelicals are far more appreciative of this than the people of the Jewish faith, especially those living in the US. Those living in Israel, though, are a different story—Highest approval rating in the World, could easily be PM! US Jews have to get their act together and appreciate what they have in Israel—Before it is too late!”
Here is the part of the column where I tell you things that are also true.
Kanye West, who now goes by Ye, is a brilliant musician. He is a brilliant musician who is mentally ill.
Also: The Trump White House did a tremendous amount for the cause of Middle East peace.
But those facts do not undermine what is undeniable. Namely, that the wealthiest musician in the world appears to hold deeply conspiratorial views about Jews informed by the antisemite Louis Farrakhan and a hate cult called the Black Hebrew Israelites, whose worldview—black people are chosen by God; Jews are pretenders—is disturbingly prevalent in large parts of American culture. And that the former president is criticizing American Jews for being ungrateful, commanding them to show him proper respect—and issuing a veiled threat if they do not. (His staunchest supporters may insist that Trump’s warning “Before it is too late!” meant “Before it is too late for America” or perhaps “too late for Israel,” the implication being that Biden isn’t as supportive of the Jewish state and so Jews need to support Trump. However you read the opaque missive, the toxic notion of the ungrateful Jew is unambiguous.)
In addition to Farrakhan, she manages to shoehorn in an attack on Berkeley:
Theirs is just one variant of the ancient poison that has been unleashed and now nestles comfortably in so many corners of American life. In Brooklyn, where it’s now dangerous to be visibly Jewish. At U.C. Berkeley, where there are now nine major student groups that have banned any speaker who supports “the apartheid state of Israel”—in other words the vast majority of Jews who do not, in fact, want the Jewish state destroyed. (Under their rules, the current dean of the law school would be barred.) In Los Angeles last week, several billboards were defaced with a sign declaring, “Zionist Jews Control America”—Ye’s dark, twisted fantasy blaring in bold letters.
She makes no mention of her Austin allies going off to Hungary and worship Orban.
But it is crucial to note that Tikvah hero Benjamin Netanyahu is unable or unwilling to throw Trump under the YEEZUS bus:
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/netanyahu-declines-condemn-trump-antisemitic-134446359.html
It is clear that he needs those Trumpscum Israeli voters for his election bid:
https://thejewishvoice.com/2022/10/poll-netanyahu-likud-weakening-closing-gap/
The still not-incarcerated former Israeli PM was not equivocal on Trump’s love for the Jewish people:
Israeli opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu on Tuesday refused to say whether former president Donald Trump’s threat that American Jews should be more appreciative of him “before it’s too late” was antisemitic or opine on whether the twice-impeached ex-president is an antisemite.
Mr Netanyahu – who has twice served as Israel’s prime minister, is currently facing corruption charges but could be returned to that post once more if his coalition of right-wing and religious fundamentalist parties garners a majority in the 1 November Israeli elections – was pressed on Mr Trump’s latest antisemitic comments while promoting his memoir on MSNBC’s Morning Joe.
Asked what he made of Mr Trump’s claim that Jews in the US should be more appreciative of what he has done for Israel — an invocation of dual loyalty tropes that most observers have condemned as classic antisemitism — Mr Netanyahu invoked Mr Trump’s Jewish son-in-law and his daughter, a convert to Judaism.
“Well, you know, he has a Jewish son-in-law and his daughter converted to judaism, his grandchildren are raised as Jews,” he said.
Mr Netanyahu added that in his estimation, Mr Trump’s antisemitic comment “reflects his frustration” for not getting “credit for the things he did”.
Questioned further on whether the ex-president should be more careful with his rhetoric, the Israeli leader again refused to opine on whether Mr Trump’s use of antisemitic tropes carried any risk for American Jews.
“Look, he’s been a great supporter of Israel. He has many Jewish supporters and he also has many opponents,” he said.
And Ruthie Blum agrees!
Morton Klein agrees even more!
Fortunately, there are exceptions to that rule. The Zionist Organization of America (ZOA), for example, announced on Friday that it will be awarding Trump its Theodor Herzl Medallion. The honor will be bestowed on the “best friend Israel ever had in the White House” during the organization’s gala on Nov. 13 in New York City.
Will Bari Weiss be attending the ZOA event?
Inquiring minds want to know.
Arguably the most fulsome support for Trump’s Anti-Semitic comments comes from Top Dog “Real Jew” Ben Shapiro:
Shapiro, fresh from his triumphant Tikvah Fund Fascist trip to Israel with Jordan Peterson, wants us to know that Trump is essentially correct about American Jews!
So, Donald Trump saying, I don't understand why more American Jews don't care about how pro-Israel. I was, this, too, puzzles me except for the fact that there are so many American Jews who aren't observant in any way and don't care about Judaism in any way. And just because your name ends in Green or Stein or Blatt or Gold does not actually mean that you practice Judaism in any way or take Judaism seriously in any way. That's the answer to Trump's question. However, the notion that Jews should not be pro-Israel is bizarre to me. Of course, if you care about Judaism you should be pro-Israel. I'm not going to be shy about that. Zionism is deeply rooted in biblical belief.
Shapiro is saying that those who do not agree with Trump are not “Real Jews.”
There does seem to be some commonality with Weiss’ caveats.
So, is there a crack in Trumpscum Tikvahworld?
Only time, and the YEEZUS, will tell.
David Shasha
Kanye West Is Running Out of Platforms
By: Jon Caramanica
We may not yet have hit the nadir of the current debacle of Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, but Monday night’s interview with Chris Cuomo certainly felt like some kind of bottom.
In the back of an S.U.V. heading to a meeting with the chief executive of the conservative social media app Parler, Ye jousted with Cuomo for 20 minutes, largely rehashing the provocations he’s been harping on for the last two weeks: his anger with Jewish executives; his desire to think freely, independent of the expected Black celebrity narrative; and his belief that all Black people are Jews, and therefore he cannot be deemed antisemitic.
During one of a few fraught exchanges in which Cuomo pushed back on bigoted statements, Ye replied testily, “Are you gonna give me a platform? Are you gonna give me a platform?”
Throughout his career, Ye has gobbled up platforms — sometimes others’, sometimes ones he has built himself. The very act of consuming public oxygen has been a centerpiece of his art for two decades. And even though in recent years Ye has, time and again, expressed sentiments that have been uninformed, ill-phrased and profoundly concerning, he has routinely found ways — whether through the success of his business ventures, or by strategic disappearance and recalibration — to paper over the disturbances. He remains a tendentious superstar, but a superstar nonetheless.
But in this moment, following two straight weeks of offensive chatter — “I’m going death con 3 on Jewish people”; “the guy’s knee wasn’t even on his neck like that” (on George Floyd); “I prefer my kids knew Hanukkah than Kwanzaa. At least it will come with some financial engineering”; “Bernard Arnault killed my best friend” (on Virgil Abloh); and more — it’s challenging to imagine a future for Ye in which he bounces back as crisply as he has in the past. Alienating people, even loyalists who hope he’ll return to old form, has always been part of Ye’s cost of doing business, but now it is threatening to become his core achievement.
Call it what you will — a heel turn, a villain arc, a worrisome descent into reactionary politics, a manifestation of what Ye has described as mental illness, a gruesome side effect of extreme wealth, an embrace of true hate. What it does not appear to be is a performance. Instead, it is a new, brutal and detrimental iteration of the sense of grievance that has been Ye’s essential animator since even before he signed a record deal and released his debut album, “The College Dropout,” in 2004.
It is one thing, however, to lash out from feeling excluded — a music industry that isn’t quite ready to accept your gifts, a fashion industry that isn’t sure how to handle an interloper with vision and a sense of entitlement. But Ye is a mogul now, an entrepreneur in the clothing and sneaker business who wields levers of power, influence and authority.
And yet still he lashes out, resulting in the most troubling stretch in his career since the series of events that led to his hospitalization in 2016.
The domino effect began early this month, when Ye and the Black right-wing commentator Candace Owens appeared at Paris Fashion Week wearing T-shirts that read “White Lives Matter.” What he may have been presenting as an offhand gimmick quickly became emblematic — when Ye is questioned or attacked, often he doubles down. (Just a couple of days ago, his associates were giving out the shirts to homeless people in Los Angeles.)
The discourse quickly became unruly, spreading across social media — in one example, Ye began posting texts between him and the Supreme creative director Tremaine Emory, who had formerly worked for him. The exchange was callous and stern, a tug of war between righteous indignation and indignant self-righteousness.
By now, battle lines had been drawn. Ye took refuge in an interview with the Fox News host Tucker Carlson, in which Ye suggested that the “White Lives Matter” shirt was “funny,” and that the Clintons had been attempting to control him through his ex-wife, Kim Kardashian. Later, Motherboard posted unaired leaks from the interview, including one in which Ye posited that “fake children” were planted in his house to improperly influence his children. On Twitter, he lodged a litany of complaints about Jewish people.
Over the weekend, he returned to Drink Champs, the rowdy and usually uproarious podcast hosted by the rapper N.O.R.E., only to re-emphasize his hateful stereotyping. However, egging Ye on, or giving him the space to ramble unchecked, is beginning to have consequences — for others, at least. On Monday, N.O.R.E. apologized for not rejecting Ye’s hate speech in real time, and the episode was removed from the internet.
Later that night, Ye videoconferenced in to Chris Cuomo’s program on NewsNation from the back seat of a vehicle, with no light. The content of the conversation toggled between coherent and worrisome, and the staging felt haphazard and desperate. He was largely unable to meet the camera with a firm gaze. He appeared like a man being conveyed to nowhere.
Perhaps crucially, it gave the image of a man truly untethered — from other people, from loving counsel, from shared social ethics.
“The common understanding,” he told Cuomo, “more oftentimes than not nowadays, is not the truth.”
And yes, sometimes that is the case. But the antisemitic sentiment that Ye has been espousing is gross, and also gross in its casualness — familiar, tiresome tropes that serve only to incite hatred. (On Wednesday, in an interview with Piers Morgan, Ye appeared to apologize for some of his comments. “Hurt people hurt people, and I was hurt,” he said, in a short clip released in advance of the interview’s airing.)
If this run of interviews and social media bursts feels familiar, it’s because there is a certain cyclicity to how Ye has navigated his public life. Early in his career, his loudest complaints were often followed by his most ambitious achievements. But in recent years, the balance between volume of grievance and level of achievement has become destabilized. This recent time period feels like a callback to 2016, when Ye cut his Saint Pablo tour short and was briefly hospitalized; not long after, he publicly embraced Donald Trump and questioned whether slavery was a choice.
In that era, like the current moment, Ye would not, or could not, turn off the faucet. Sometimes it seems that he wants words to mean something other than they do. He has burned through several cycles of trying out ideas in real time only to recalibrate when he found — intentionally, or more likely not — the outer bounds of acceptable discourse. But there is no apparent fail-safe in place now.
Which leaves the responsibility to others. So far, there have been a handful of efforts to hold him to account. After Ye’s tweets, Elon Musk — soon to be the owner of Twitter — tweeted, “Talked to ye today & expressed my concerns about his recent tweet, which I think he took to heart.” The influential radio D.J. Funk Flex called out rappers and industry executives over their silence, suggesting they still hoped to work with Ye down the line. A few celebrities have expressed their exasperation; others, like Diddy, have attempted to intervene directly, only to have Ye target them publicly.
And yet people still tune in, perhaps out of schadenfreude, but also perhaps because Ye is drawing upon a cultural bank account so vast and deep and long-running that he is difficult to disentangle from our modern understanding of celebrity. For years and years, he has stepped out over the line, then crafted work — music, fashion or otherwise — that appeared to justify, or at least partially excuse, his baser impulses. Whether that dynamic can continue is the remaining question. It is also worth considering at what point outrage morphs into concern — if Ye needs help, who would be in a position to provide it to him, and from whom would he accept it?
The media outlets giving him airtime in this moment are riding the border of responsibility and irresponsibility. He has already been suspended from Twitter and Instagram for his incendiary behavior. He has terminated his partnership with Gap. His Adidas partnership is “under review.” Soon, he may have no mainstream partner platforms of any kind to speak of.
Which may explain why he reached an agreement in principle to purchase Parler, the faltering right-wing social media app. (The parent company of Parler is owned by Owens’s husband. Perhaps Ye is, among other things, a recurring victim, witting or otherwise, of right-wing grift.)
For decades now, Ye has been building new worlds and waiting for people to populate them. But even if he does make Parler his megaphone, it’s unclear whether he will simply end up doing anything beyond shouting into the void. Speech may be free, but attention is not.
From The New York Times, October 19, 2022