The State of the Black-Jewish Relationship in America: A Roundtable
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I'm Barry Weiss and this is Honestly. I see good things about Hitler also. I love everyone and Jewish people are not going to tell me, you can love us and you can love what we're doing to you with the contracts and you can love what we're pushing with the pornography.

As you may have noticed, Kanye West has been all over the internet lately. Again. Former President Donald Trump is defending himself against a Republican backlash over his recent dinner with two known anti-Semites. He dined at Mar-a-Lago with Trump and the white nationalist Nick Fuentes. Nick Fuentes at Mar-a-Lago last week, along with the rapper Ye, formerly known as Kanye West...

Then he went on Alex Jones' Infowars show with Fuentes and said things like... I'm not trying to be shocking. I like Hitler. And... Just because you don't like one group doesn't mean the other. I love Jewish people, but I also love Nazis. I want to say there's a lot of good Nazis that were just fighting for their country. And for them... Like George Soros. Oh!

He even tweeted a picture of a swastika inside a Jewish star and got suspended from Twitter. Again. I wish it was just that. But there was also Kyrie Irving.

This morning, NBA star Kyrie Irving benched in the wake of tweeting about an anti-Semitic film after he refused to apologize for posting a link to a documentary that denies the Holocaust. Who shared a link to a video that said, among other things, blacks are the real Hebrews and that the Holocaust didn't happen. To which he was met with an eight-day NBA suspension. Or as Dave Chappelle joked afterwards on SNL, Kyrie got in so much trouble, Kyrie got in trouble.

Kanye got in so much trouble that Kyrie Irving got in trouble. Then there was this black Hebrew Israelite march outside of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn when Kyrie Irving returned from his suspension. They've been lying for so long and living this lie of being Jews. They talking about, hey, Kyrie, you got to come and speak to the Jewish Brooklyn leaders. Where are they? Who control the news? The Jewish media, like Kanye West said. Yeah, let's see what color they are. What color are the Jews?

A march that got almost no media coverage. And this is all taking place in the month of November, when Jewish New Yorkers were attacked every 16 hours, and in a country where Jews still suffer the largest total number of hate crimes year after year. What's happened over the past month isn't about one celebrity or one basketball player.

As Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and I talked about recently, these ideas are not new in America, including in Black America. Black Jewish relations in this country have a long and dynamic history with many ups and downs, from the shared struggle during the civil rights movement to the horror of the Crown Heights riots. And through it all, it's hard not to think about the outsized influence of Louis Farrakhan, often dubbed the most popular anti-Semite in America.

So I wanted to put together a roundtable to have a frank and honest conversation about how we got here and how as a society we should respond when public figures spew anti-Semitism. There's no one better to have that kind of discussion with than my guests today. Chloe Valdory, Brett Stevens, Eli Lake, and Camille Foster. Chloe is the founder of the organization The Theory of Enchantment.

Brett is a columnist for the New York Times and editor-in-chief of the journal Sapir. Eli is a journalist who always brings historical context to what's happening today, especially on his podcast, The Re-Education. And Camille is the host of The Fifth Column and an outspoken advocate for moving past racial identity. None of the questions or answers that we're going to talk about today are easy ones. In fact, many of them have been the subject of fierce internal debate here inside our company.

But I wanted to model the kind of discussion that I think is so important in a democracy, one in which we share our perspectives openly and where we disagree in an effort to better understand each other, even when it's a little uncomfortable. We'll be right back. Hey, guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer.

Camille, Chloe, Eli, Brett, thank you all so much for joining me today. Thank you, Barry. Good to be here. Thank you for having me. Thanks for having us. At the risk of sounding like we're in group therapy or some bad camp icebreaker, I want to ask you guys why each of you are here. Like what brings you to this conversation and

Just start by laying our cards on the table and here are mine. I'm not sure if you guys know this, but I am Jewish and I worry a lot about anti-Semitism, not just for the sake of my community, the Jewish community, but for the sake of broader society. And I wrote a book a few years ago in the aftermath of the massacre at my synagogue in Pittsburgh, Tree of Life, which basically made the case that when you start to see anti-Semitism rising in a culture or a country, it's

It is a sign, 100% of the time in history, that that society is dead or at least is dying. And so when I see Kanye West... There's a lot of things that I love about Hitler. A lot of things. One of the greatest artists of our time spreading anti-Semitism unapologetically. When I see him meeting with the former president of the United States...

We learned from Kanye West's Twitter feed that the rapper had dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago and that he was accompanied by white nationalist and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes. West became engulfed in controversy. Along with a Holocaust revisionist and neo-Nazi, when I see Jews getting beaten in the streets of Brooklyn and no one really saying anything about it, or when I see college students hiding their Judaism, I want to call all of it out for the danger that it is.

But, or rather, and I also am someone that doesn't like public shaming. I don't like the bullshit of cancel culture. And so I find myself wondering whether I should celebrate Kyrie Irving's suspension from the Nets. Is it canceling or is it just consequences? And I want to push myself to make sure that I'm not inadvertently embracing tactics that I typically reject just because it's my group right now that's vulnerable.

So those are my stakes. That's why I'm coming to this conversation. And I'm curious to hear from each of you the same. So Eli, maybe let's start with you. Yeah, well, I share your concern that you put out in your great book on anti-Semitism. But one of my concerns right now is thinking about how the American Jewish community, but also in larger kind of America, deals with the threat to Jews from fringe and marginalized places, as opposed to

traditional historical antisemitism, which has come from the center of power. And are we equipped to understanding a response to that? Because in some cases, it can look like killing an ant with a sledgehammer, which is to say...

We got widespread shock and rejection at the outrageous anti-Semitic things that Kanye West has said in the last month, and for that matter, the movie that Kyrie Irving tweeted, or for that matter, any of the fringe and terrible ideas of Nick Fuentes. Nothing changed in terms of what was normalized in our society, but yet there probably are going to be millions of people who might be emboldened or feel that they're more comfortable in their anti-Semitism, and I think it's an important and complicated question to

not just for Jews in America, but also for how we navigate the tension between protecting kind of meaningful boundaries to acceptable discourse, but not giving in to excessive censorship and content moderation that many in the left now are enthusiastic about. So I guess those are my priors in coming to this conversation. Chloe, how about you? Yeah, I think I'm...

interested in where bigotry comes from and how it emerges psychologically. I've done a lot of work in anti-racism spaces. I've done a lot of work fighting against anti-Semitism on this front as well. And I'm curious about how

and why bigotry becomes very popular in a society and what that says about a society and the society's insecurities and how it deals with scarcity. And I'm interested in helping people form responses that are informed by an awareness of that scarcity that could be creating bigotry and perpetuating it and making sure that our responses

in turn, are not perpetuating it, but in fact, creating an environment where bigotry can be transformed and the relationships that we have with each other can be restored. That's really what I'm interested in coming into this conversation.

Brett, you've written two pieces in recent weeks that I think are just directly tie into the conversation we're having here. One in the Times, thank ye very much. And one in Sapir, Jews and cancel culture. And I wonder what your priors are coming to this conversation and whether or not you agree with Eli that none of these incidents we've seen have mainstreamed or normalized anti-Semitism. Yeah.

Well, Barry, as you know, I'm only here because you promised me $100 million deposited to my Swiss bank account so I could use it for nefarious purposes around the world. I'm working on an Adidas sponsorship instead for you. Oh, okay. Thank you. Look, both the Jewish community and the black community will lose a lot about what is most important for themselves if they lose each other. And the possibility of...

Permanent cultural hostility between Black Americans and Jewish Americans is a material loss

to freedom in the United States, and it's a material loss to our mutual conceptions of ourselves as agents of freedom struggles in both the United States and the rest of the world. So I think it's an extraordinarily important conversation to have. I'm also concerned that the Jewish community might make the mistake in response to

Irving and Kanye. The Jewish community might simply try to imitate what I think is a completely mistaken approach to some of these issues when we encounter offense. I'm not, Kyrie Irving's story, I think, concerns me more than the Kanye story, but it's something I'd like to get into in this conversation. We will definitely get there. Camille?

Last but certainly not least, what brings you here other than the fact that I asked? You know, I think I end up being involved in a number of conversations that relate to race and identity and race.

My concerns and my interests are usually the same. My fundamental interest is in promoting the dignity of humans in general, like writ large. And I think that the seat of that dignity is found in our individual persons. And I think that there are two things. I mean, I want to

echo Eli's sentiment. I'm a little bit concerned about what seems in some cases a lack of proportion and a lack of nuance where there just ought to be more curiosity. If something is important, then it's worth understanding whether or not we've got kind of a false positive or there's some confusion here. But beyond that, I'm also very interested in the ways that race and identity can kind of confound our ability to understand complicated, difficult things.

And in this particular case, it seems to me that the fundamental complaint with

with someone like Kanye West, for example, isn't broadly that what he said is anti-Semitic. The specific concern here is that he is taking particular instances and extrapolating from that to attribute motives and beliefs to entire classes of people. And there is a curious incongruity in the way that we end up talking about these things, where we start to talk collectively and generally about Blacks and collectively and generally about Jews.

And I think we have to recognize the degree to which our commitment to race and even these kinds of notions of kind of ethnic solidarity and ethnic kind of collective belief is

can make it harder for us to have sophisticated conversations. And it seems to me that the fundamental error that Kanye made is one that a lot of us practice on a regular basis in other contexts. We just don't seem to acknowledge it's the same error to talk about black people collectively or white people collectively. I want us to regard all of it with a degree of skepticism in precisely the same way it sets off some alarm bells when we talk about Jewish people collectively.

Okay, so we've touched on Kanye, we've touched on Kyrie, all of these things I want to get to. First, I want to go back in time.

I want to start by digging in a little bit to the history between the black community, insofar as you can speak about a black community, to your point, Camille, and the American Jewish community. And let's start with the ways in which these two groups have historically been allies in their shared fight against oppression, exclusion, and injustice. Eli, I wondered if we could start with you.

Sure. I mean, I think it's important to maybe start in terms of modern sense on the lynching of Leo Frank, who was a Jewish manager of a pencil factory in Atlanta, Georgia, who was unjustly tried and convicted of the murder and rape of a 13-year-old girl named Mary Fagan. And it's important for the black and Jewish community question here because the person who was responsible for that horrific crime was a black janitor

who was working in this factory, whose false testimony in court was the first time a black man's testimony had ever been used in at least the Georgia jurisprudential system to convict anyone, let alone, of course, a white Jewish man. And it's important that this case, because eventually this is the sort of founding, the beginning of the Anti-Defamation League, which is the American organization that is the guardian against anti-Semitism in this country,

And they kind of become who they are during this trial. And their advocacy, with the help of the New York Times at the time, which has been published by a Jewish family now for more than a century, manages to persuade the governor of Georgia to stay the execution of Leo Frank. And then he is

abducted from his prison and lynched by a crowd that would have many of whom would become the founding members of what historians now call the New Ku Klux Klan a few weeks later. But these were people who were prominent legislatures in Georgia, part of the Bureau of Prisons. They were very much part of the establishment there.

So it's a terrible injustice. It's kind of a terrible story. But what it shows is that it's not always the case that the interests of the black community in this country are aligned with the interests of the American Jewish community. It's often the case, but it's not always the case. And I think it kind of gives this context to what we would see later is much of the leaders of the institutional American Jewish community were great allies of the civil rights struggle.

But it's like anything else. History is complicated. And there's this famous James Baldwin essay, which is kind of anti-Semitic, where he talks about the experience of living in Harlem where there are Jewish landlords, but the Jews no longer live there. So it's all pretty complicated. So there is, I think, a very good story to tell about African Americans understand as they struggle for civil rights in this country, they see the story of the Jewish people as a kind of

They identify with it. They see it as part of their struggle. They adopt much of the iconography and so forth. But at the same time, there's the kind of reality of Jews in America being one of many immigrants groups who are seeking their own success. And sometimes it is seen, I think, wrongly that that success is at the expense of African-Americans who have migrated to the big cities. So it's a complicated story.

For many Jews that I know who grew up in the 50s and 60s, I think about my own grandparents, okay? Their identity as Jews was inextricably linked to their identity as supporters of the civil rights movement. As we were preparing for this conversation, my producer mentioned that her great-grandfather, who was a Jewish tailor in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, was sort of famously or infamously, depending on who you were, known for being the only tailor in town to let black men try on and buy clothing in his store.

Of course, there's the iconic image of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel marching on Selma with Martin Luther King Jr. There's the two Jewish civil rights activists, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, abducted and murdered in 64 in Mississippi for trying to register black Americans to vote. Let's talk about why Jews were drawn to the fight for civil rights. Well, the core of the identity of the Jewish people takes the form of the story about a freedom struggle.

and of Moses and the flight of the Israelites from oppression and slavery in Egypt. And so there is no version of Judaism that doesn't take the fight against tyranny and injustice and the struggle for freedom and put it at the center of its sense of itself.

So it's not at all surprising that Jews were among the founders of the NAACP, that Jewish lawyers were instrumental in the legal fight against discrimination, that those Jewish tailors like your relatives behaved the way they did, because it's difficult to think of Judaism as Jewish.

separable from those fundamental values. And it's why so many of the great Negro spirituals of the 19th century invoke the name of Moses and letting my people go.

This is hugely important, not just to our self-conception of Jews or as Jews, but also to the way in which we view our American-ness and why our own sense of American-ness, I think, is tied to the black struggle for freedom and for civil liberties, which is a notion of the United States as

as a refuge and a promise to the oppressed, both from outside and from within, and as a place that seeks perpetually a more perfect union, which is constantly being challenged by the instincts and habits of discrimination, which also obviously run deep in American life. So no American Jew, with some dishonorable exceptions,

can think of his own faith traditions or his own historical experiences and not feel a profound sense of affinity with the struggles of Black America to be free and to be equal.

Chloe, as someone who has sort of always had one foot in and one foot out of two worlds, right? The worlds of black America and the world of Jewish America. I'm curious how you think about the integral relationship between these two worlds,

during the period we're talking about, the civil rights movement from the other side, right? You've noted and written about the fact that many of the leaders of that movement, people like Rosa Parks, Coretta Scott King, obviously MLK, Bayard Rustin, Count Basie, were staunch Zionists.

So Jews, as Brett is saying, were drawn to the fight for civil rights because of the Jewish imperative to stand against pharaohs of any kind, to stand for freedom from oppression, for hating slavery and injustice. Were those black leaders drawn to defending the Jewish people and the Jewish cause for freedom for the same reason?

Yes, many of them were, and this was especially the case during protests that erupted within the Jewish community against Soviet mistreatment of its Jews and Soviet dehumanization of Jews resulting in sort of association of Zionism with racism. I mean, many of the civil rights movement leaders that you mentioned came out staunchly against that and came out against the persecution of Soviet Jewry. And so there was this

There was this reciprocal sense of mutuality that really permeated certainly a lot of Dr. King's philosophy in the sense that he believed that everything was interconnected. And so, of course, even as our Jewish brothers and sisters march for us, we will march for them.

And at the same time, you also had opposing sentiments coming out of the Black community that were opposed to the civil rights movement, opposed to the style and philosophy of the Dr. Kings and the Bayard Rustins of the world, who said and believed that other ways of being were

would bring about power, would bring about liberation. And of course, you saw this in the Nation of Islam. You still see it in the Nation of Islam today with Louis Farrakhan, then Malcolm X. You see this within Black Hebrew Israelite movements, which come from a different strain. And it would be...

a mistake to try to caricaturize any group of people in any direction, meaning to idealize a group of people as only angels is equally as dehumanizing in a way as seeing them as only demons. We have to be able to see the complexity that exists within our fellow man, which also exists within ourself. Okay, so speaking to that complexity, there were also

uncomfortable, uneasy, tense relationships sort of bubbling under the surface or even boiling over for decades, right? And I think here about the

unequal relationship between black artists and Jewish music agents starting in the 1930s or you think about Hollywood and of course the anti-Semitic myth is Jews controlling both of those industries is a myth and untrue but it is true that Jews are very overrepresented in those industries as management and that

Blacks are very overrepresented in those industries as talent, right? So that's one area of a tremendous tension. The other is what we have mentioned before, the relationship between Jewish landlords and black tenants. MLK famously explained this tension when he was working in Chicago during the rent strikes, and he said this. It was unfortunately true that in most instances, the persons we had to conduct these strikes against were Jewish landlords.

We were paying $94 for four rundown shabby rooms and discovered that whites were paying only $78 a month. And then perhaps in the most infamous expression of this tension, in 1969, James Baldwin writes a piece in the New York Times titled this, Negroes are anti-Semitic because they are anti-white. And it's a remarkable piece in which he opens with this. When we were growing up in Harlem, our demoralizing series of landlords were Jewish and we hated them.

And Baldwin goes on to write, "The most ironical thing about Negro anti-Semitism is that the Negro is really condemning the Jew for having become an American white man, for having become, in effect, a Christian. The Jew profits from his status in America and he must expect Negroes to distrust him for it. The Jew does not realize that the credential he offers, the fact that he has been despised and slaughtered, does not increase the Negro's understanding, it increases the Negro's rage."

Camille, I read this, I've read it many, many times, and I find it very disturbing. But I also think the story that Jewish families like mine like to tell ourselves is the story of Heschel and King. But I wonder if the story that Baldwin is expressing here is more accurate, is the story that he is laying out here. The idea that, you know, basically black Americans are suspicious at best of Jewish Americans because essentially they perceive Jewish Americans as being white people, but

Is that more accurate to the story that at least many Black Americans tell themselves about the Jewish community? Yeah, I too read this essay a couple of times, and I'll tell you that my relationship with it is quite a bit more complicated. I mean, there's a lot of interesting points at which Baldwin is talking about the sense of contempt and loathing and even a deficit of self-esteem there.

But he asks this question over and over again, somewhat rhetorically. I don't know if they're Jewish. Are they in fact Jewish?

which is to suggest almost that there is this dynamic of black people being suspicious in different contexts and being mistreated in different contexts and Jewishness not really being essential to that relationship. So I'm not quite sure what Baldwin is actually getting at throughout that piece, although he does kind of end in a place that suggests that

that there is this kind of ultimate hope to treat and regard people as individuals and to have some respect for

for time and place and circumstance. The dynamic that he describes, and that has been alluded to a few times, where a number of black people had these Jewish landlords, well, sure, that could obviously create some odd dynamics where people are making these generalizations about one another, and it's worth being aware of that. And similarly, as you mentioned a moment ago, Barry, the dynamic in the recording industry, where there are a number of Jewish agents or Jewish...

managers. And in the NBA, even, I just talked to a friend who is a journalist who covers the NBA, mentioned that more than half of the ownership in the NBA are Jewish people. These are kind of unusual levels of over-representation in these different spaces. And unfortunately, because we haven't found or at least developed a sophisticated habit of thinking about

what it means when we find over-representation, we tend to make some rather sloppy category errors and start to generalize from specific instances to talk about entire communities and entire groups. And I think that can have very damaging consequences. And I think a lot of that is what we're seeing right now. I just want to read one more line from the Baldwin essay and maybe...

tease out this difference that we're seeing in it. This is Baldwin. He here is standing for Jews. He is singled out by Negroes, not because he acts differently from other white men, but because he doesn't. His major distinction is given him by that history of Christendom, which has so successfully victimized both Negroes and Jews. And he is playing in Harlem the role assigned to him by Christians long ago. He is doing their dirty work. How is there any other way to read that other than as being

I don't know what other word to use, deeply anti-Semitic. Well, no, I think it's correct that there is a strain of anti-Semitic belief that is rooted in precisely this relationship, that dynamic that he's describing there. What I'm suggesting, though, is that the essay broadly does seem to bring in these other themes, this suggestion that there is this kind of underlying suspicion that exists about

Where, you know, if you're calling the police, this is another portion of the essay, you're calling the police, you hope they send a white person because if they send a black police officer, he's going to be even more likely to brutalize you. Is that anti-blackness in the same way that a comment that is derogatory about Jewish people in this essay is regarded as anti-Semitic? I think it's complicated.

and it's nuanced and it's worth grappling with what the prescription is if we understand what the problem is. If we know that the problem is generalizing from these specific instances to everyone, then what does that suggest about how we ought to think differently and how we ought to discuss these issues differently? I think that might be kind of an interesting place to root ourselves when we're evaluating what this article actually means. Yeah, there's another irony, which is that

The reason that the stereotype of the Jewish Shylock or the moneylender exists is because Jews were not allowed to own land and property in Europe. So he is kind of saying that Jews have achieved a level of whiteness because in America, Jews are allowed to own land and property and charge rent. So you could say one of the equalities or one of the things that makes America more just than the old world is one of the reasons why Baldwin is complaining that Jews are

loathed by the black community. I mean, the problem is it's such a generalization too. Jews had known every tenement that blacks were in Harlem. I mean, it's kind of a ridiculous idea. Like, why would that be specifically about Jews and so forth? But, you know, I mean, we afforded a great literary genius like Baldwin lots of latitude to write about these sorts of things, but I don't think it really stands up to much scrutiny. Hmm.

Let's talk a little bit about the Nation of Islam, which I feel like in my mind disappeared for a while and now has sort of come roaring back. And it's certainly having a very powerful moment right now in the culture. So it's founded in 1930 in Detroit. And then the philosophy sort of spreads like wildfire in the 50s and 60s, especially when Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali joined around that time.

You have this organization building mosques in urban areas, rehabilitating incarcerated men, and providing a kind of alternative vision of themselves with a message of restoring black self-esteem, black dignity that's making it catch on. But central to the movement's tenets is a sort of relentless demonization of the Jews. The satanic Jews! The satanic Jews!

They control everything and mostly everybody. You are not the chosen of God, you are the chosen of Satan. I'm talking about the wicked ones in the Jewish community that run America, run the government, run the world, own the banks, own the means of communication. They are my enemies.

Chloe, you've written that the, quote, psychological attraction of that anti-Semitism, the reason the Nation of Islam has had such success in attracting both converts and admirers, derives at least partly from a sense of competition for chosenness. What did you mean by that? Yes, there's a historically beleaguered community that saw a man, Elijah Muhammad, promoting a vision of

in which that community was, instead of being ridiculed and reviled for its skin color, would be deemed as actually chosen for its skin color.

And so there's a sense of chosenness that is a powerful, potent stream within Nation of Islam ideology. And this is really par for the course when you have a community that is deeply impacted by scarcity, both psychologically and material, as we know the black community was. And it's also, I should specify, specifically men.

These are men who have been historically deeply wounded in a racist society that are looking for a powerful masculine symbol that they found within people like Elijah Muhammad and Malcolm X and many others who were preaching a doctrine that

in many ways, actually, rhymes, is not the same, but rhymes with something like what a Jordan Peterson might tell men, right, today. So there's this potent call to make your bed, right, and defend your woman and protect yourself. That was the clarion call that was coming out of the nation of Islam historically. And of course, if you have a wounded, beleaguered community,

That is going to be a very attractive call. The problem with that call is that it comes with this hatred, this deep sense of hatred against Jews, against white people in general. And that hatred is

has buried itself within Nation of Islam philosophy. And, you know, the question becomes, is it possible to, and I do believe it is, is it possible to be sustained, to empower yourself, to stand up for yourself without making that dependent upon tearing the other down, without making that dependent upon being in competition with

Another group of people who have a sensibility around chosenness. And this is specifically why Jews, I believe, is specifically why Jews are attacked. Because when the Nation of Islam says, no, no, because you are black, you are chosen. It also concludes that any other group of people that are claiming to be chosen are a threat necessarily to that nation.

to that ideology, to that philosophy. And so the penetration with which the attack comes has to be of a certain potency because it's a direct threat to that idea. Right. But they're also cultivating a sort of group dignity based in race. And it's, I think perhaps because of that, because of this kind of unearned nature of the pride that they're talking about, this esteem that's kind of built into my epidermis, it's

weak. It's vulnerable. It's uniquely vulnerable to these counterclaims. No, no, no. We're the chosen people. We're the chosen people. It'd be very different if they were cultivating a sense of you're not a black king, but you yourself have this inborn dignity. There's nothing competitive about that. That is non-rival. So that is a really important point.

Before we get to what's happening today, I want to just spend one moment, if we could, on I think what many American Jews and African Americans regard as just the lowest point in the relationship between our two communities. And that takes me to 1991.

It did not take long for this crowd to grow in size Monday night and with it an apparent anger. Let's not get busy one night. This is a long fight. Activist Reverend Al Sharpton and Alton Maddox had come in from outside the Crown Heights community following an accident where a seven-year-old boy was killed and his cousin critically injured after being run down by this car driven by a Hasidic man.

Also in Crown Heights Monday night, as violence was breaking out... If the Zenith is the...

collaboration that happened in the civil rights movement and the things that I was referencing before, those iconic photographs and relationships, I would say that the flip side, right, for people who want to focus on the dark and negative side of the story, that moment happens in Brooklyn in 1991 with the Crown Heights riots. What I remember is that a Black child was killed in a car accident on account of a

Orthodox Jewish driver, which resulted in what amounted to a three-day series of riots bordering on a pogrom. The violence started at dusk. Dozens of demonstrators vented their anger with bottles and rocks that kept police and residents running and ducking.

The area's latest flare-up followed a fatal accident last night that left seven-year-old Gavin... In the Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn, heavily Jewish neighborhood, instigated, not instigated, but certainly cheered and abetted by Al Sharpton, now the respectable Al Sharpton. And...

Was it the low point? Yeah, probably the low point in Black-Jewish relations. Their medical attention

was not the same medical attention that the Jewish gentleman got. You understand what I'm saying? They helped him before they helped the children. And the children were the victims, not him. Ascetic residents, meanwhile, were angered by what they said was the revenge killing later of a Jewish man. What was an accident which other people used as an excuse to murder one member of our community,

Two hours later, whatever the truth, historic animosity between ethnic groups in Crown Heights appears to have overcome a day of diplomacy among community leaders. Following the Crown Heights riots, the historian Henry Louis Gates, Skip Gates, writes the following in The New York Times.

Many American Jews are puzzled by the recrudescence of black antisemitism in view of the historic alliance between the two groups. The brutal truth has escaped them that the new antisemitism arises not in spite of the black Jewish alliance, but because of that alliance.

For precisely such trans-ethnic, trans-racial cooperation, epitomized by the historic partnership between blacks and Jews, is what poses the greatest threat to the isolationist movement. In short, for the tacticians of the new anti-Semitism, the original sin of American Jews was not their involvement, truly inordinate, truly disproportionate, not in slavery, but in the front ranks of the civil rights struggle. I would just like to add a thought to that.

which goes to my suspicion of the word allyship and the dangers that allyship poses. It's a word that has a lot of currency on college and high school campuses and suggests that what one group expects of another is a shared set of political or ideological commitments.

Allyship seems to be a road to ruin when it comes to sustaining long-term positive relationships between real groups, because what allyship commands is political commitment, whereas what really should be taking place between groups is friendship.

actual understanding of people whose skin tone differs from you, but who are otherwise human beings in the same way that you are with the same set of hopes, fears, weaknesses, and so on. I don't think

Look, the Jewish community, the segment of the Jewish community that rose overwhelmingly, as Skip Gates points out, to champion civil rights, I think they did it from excellent motives. But there's always a quality of self-regard when you are acting out of these purely ethical

motives that is bound to arouse suspicion. Aristotle observed somewhere in, I think, the Nicomachean Ethics that beneficiaries don't always appreciate the work of their, at least their self-declared benefactors. So the missing aspect of the Black Jewish alliance in the civil rights era, and actually right up until the present, has been

The fact that it never moved beyond allyship to actual sustained friendships on a kind of, in the kind of way that would have prevented, I think, the recrudescence, to use that word again, of anti-Semitism 25 years after the events in Selma and elsewhere. Yes, the Lord said, go down, Moses, Moses.

After the break, how we should think about the consequences Kanye and Kyrie should face. Stay with us. Let my people go. Let my people go.

All of this kind of leads us up to recent events where we have, as the wonderful John McCorder recently put it, black celebrities who sound a lot like Henry Ford, right? We're hearing the ideas, like the worst of Farrakhan's ideas and other similar extremists coming out of the mouths of musicians like Ye, who said, among many other things, Jewish people have owned the black voice. Right.

And I think for many Jews, hearing this has been shocking. But I wonder if we should really be shocked, actually. Eli, I wondered if you could help illuminate for us why you think there's an explosion in these kind of expressions right now and where it's coming from. Well, I'm wondering if it's an explosion or if it's just, you know, Kanye West has decided, you know, that he's going to

have another very public meltdown. Because, I mean, you know, a lesser-known rapper, very good rapper, Jay Electronica, he's been pretty much out there with some of this Louis Farrakhan nonsense for a long time. People noticed it. Everybody moved on. And I think it's because Kanye West is this towering cultural figure who is now making a run to be a political leader.

that we are talking about and we're hearing about it again, because he's continuing to double and triple and quadruple down. And I don't even, I can't, I try to follow it from the original tweets, you know, to his argument with P Diddy to, and it, it, it gets crazier and crazier and it becomes almost impossible to distinguish between whether Kanye is talking about his critique of society and the economy or

in an antisemitic way or is he just talking about his personal life and he's blaming Jews for his various ordeals? Both are kinds of antisemitism, but I can't, he flits back and forth. It's not, I mean, so. Okay. So maybe explosion is the wrong word. Although, you know, I want to get in a little bit later to sort of the connection between the types of things Kanye has been saying and then the actual physical attacks that have been happening around the country kind of in his name. Yeah.

But Brett has written kind of just with such moral authority on the idea that Trump dismantled the moral guardrails that kept bigotry down. And I think, Brett, you wrote that in the aftermath of the attack on Pittsburgh. And I can't think of a more poignant example of that than the fact that last week—

Kanye West gets on a plane, goes to Mar-a-Lago, has dinner with the former president, and brings along with him Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who we really don't want to quote here, but it's too vile and disgusting to even talk about. And Trump then goes out and says, I didn't know who Nick Fuentes was, but he certainly knew who Kanye West was and chose to have dinner with him anyway. So I see that as...

Something that sort of would have been unthinkable five years ago. Am I being hysterical to say that? Nope. How did we get there? So this has been really long in coming. And the table for this banquet was laid a while ago. I mean, it was laid when Trump made it clear that

in 2016 that he would vent ethnic bigotries. I always think of him saying that he couldn't get a fair trial from a judge who happened to be of Mexican heritage and Paul Ryan calling it a textbook definition of a racist comment and then endorsing him anyway.

I think it was laid when Trump started to, even before his campaign, became clear that Trump was a conspiracy theorist of the first order, most notorious of them being birtherism, and people not finding that disqualifying for his run for office. Conspiracy theories almost inevitably lead to the ultimate conspiracy theory, which is that the Jews did it.

It was laid when it became okay among conservatives and Republicans to use the word globalist, which is a dog whistle for the word Jew, as a term of opprobrium. It was laid when Fox News decided it was okay to have Tucker Carlson as their star anchor championing replacement theory. It was laid with the immigrant bashing theory.

that became the signature of the Trumpian movement. So all of this has a long pedigree. And, you know, Barry, you know me very well. It's not like I am shy about criticizing the anti-Semitism of the left. I do that frequently and loudly.

But we have to take a look at just what has happened over the last 10 years of the nation's relationship with Trump to see how naturally the Kanye Fuentes dinner flowed from everything that had come before.

Certainly when I hear you talk about, to take one example, Trump's remarks about not being able to get a fair ruling from a Mexican-American judge. I'm also reminded of Sonia Sotomayor suggesting that there is this kind of jurisprudential approach that is informed by her Latinowness. And

I'm wondering if we shouldn't pay more attention to the fact that there are affirmative ways that we traffic in these kind of identitarian essentialist sentiments

And I think that the fact that we are all steeped in this milieu of looking for disparities along racial lines, about talking about one another as though we're members of communities, I think there is a far more direct line from that to a lot of the strangeness that we've seen people talking about, the bizarre kind of awkward comments in some cases and otherwise shared.

sometimes outright odious comments from people. I think that is more persuasive to me than the notion that Trump himself is kind of responsible for pulling down all of the guardrails, or at least...

we have to evaluate these two things alongside one another. We tolerate a great deal of race essentialism and we never really talk about it. We don't disabuse ourselves of these notions. We talk about systemic racism, about white supremacy, almost religiously at this point. There is a large swath of the American population that believes what is in effect a conspiracy theory that the country itself exists and is fundamentally being

based on white privilege. To the extent that kind of thing exists, why wouldn't it make sense to naturally talk about the Jewish community's responsibilities because of Jewish over-representation in the music industry? Can I just say something briefly? Because I think what Camille is saying is so important and incisive. One of the ways in which Trump was odious to me

was that he, whether cleverly or through some kind of reptilian instinct, seized everything the left had been saying for decades and then turned it to the purposes of the far right. So...

if the left talked about identity politics, Trump would say, well, how about white identity politics? If the left said that the Constitution of the United States was nothing better than just a document for the perpetuation of slavery, a document to perpetuate the power, well, then what's the harm of trashing and dismissing the Constitution if the left said that American politics

was based on a series of convenient lies. Well, Trump said, okay, so I'm going to take that and run with it. So there is a confluence here that I think Camille has spotted, I think quite precisely, in which what Trump represents to a large extent isn't the extension of

of the kind of conservatism I grew up with, but it's like a funhouse mirror version of so many of the tropes of the progressive left as it developed from Derrida and Foucault all the way to the present.

I think about the phrase equity a lot, which has sort of come to replace equality. And if equity, not as the definition that you'd find in Merriam-Webster, but the way that it's sort of used broadly right now, which is not equity as equality of opportunity, but equity as equality of outcome between groups, when that becomes the measure of fairness, as it seems to me it is in basically almost all

the sense-making institutions of American life, doesn't that naturally lead to a kind of flirtation at best with anti-Semitism? Because if Jews are overrepresented, doesn't that mean that something is amiss, that there's some kind of sinister plot or maybe a kind of discrimination against another group and these people are taking the place of anti-Semitism?

another group that's underrepresented. That's a really good point. Can I just weigh in really quick on the dinner? Oh, of course. At Mar-a-Lago. Please. Listen, I'm... They probably had dry steak and ketchup. Right. Anyway, so a few points. You're absolutely right that Nick Fuentes is a deplorable and despicable human being. And everything I've been trying to follow, like what they're saying about the, you know, when the, in this weird war of words and

you know, once again, Milo Yiannopoulos has, you know, found another 15 minutes of fame and they're out there just, you know, they've gone way over the line. It's clearly in so many, but on the other hand, I'm trying to imagine sometimes I do this. I have an exercise. What if I time travel, went back in time and had a conversation with Nathan Bedford Forrest. And I said, listen, in 2022, uh,

The biggest white supremacist in America is going to be a Hispanic guy named Nick Fuentes who was just hired by a black rapper to help with his presidential campaign. Just so you know, that's where white supremacism is going to end up. There is something of an element of this whole

you know, episode is performance art. It feels a little bit like Andy Kaufman going on David Letterman wearing his, you know, phony wrestling championship belt, you know, when he used to, you know, challenge women in deep South to, you know, these battles and so forth. It's like, this is, looks like theater a little bit to me because it is, it's,

such a clown show. And it does seem like here we have the, you know, reality star president who, who succeeded in entertaining and also riling up his supporters meeting with,

professional entertainer and other various entertainment political kind of grifters and they're fighting for the same you know slice of attention and I'm sorry I think it's disturbing I'm worried about the effect it would have in normalizing horrible toxic ideas which have been terrible for the Jewish people of course but at the same time I'm like I'm not like worried that the Third Reich is just around the corner it's just too pathetic and kind of like unintentionally funny okay so

Let me challenge you on that. Okay. And this sort of speaks to the relationship between words and violence because I reject the idea in general that words are violence, which is the sort of like one of the talking points of much of the progressive left these days. And yet, you know, what conclusion am I to draw from the following things?

A few weeks ago, a banner hangs in LA over the freeway declaring Kanye was right over the 405 with people giving Nazi salutes. On Halloween, on the side of a townhouse in an Atlanta neighborhood, there's graffiti spray-painted, Jews kill blacks. On a stop sign around the corner, Jews enslave black lives. Last week, headstones at a Jewish cemetery in Chicago were vandalized with swastikas and the phrase, Kanye was right. So...

What is the connection between, you know, ha ha ha, Kanye having dinner with Trump, it's an Andy Kaufman sketch, and the fact that it's seeming to lead to actual attacks on, if not Jews directly, although I'm sure we could find some instances to talk about in Brooklyn over the past few weeks, but at least on Jewish bases? Listen, yeah, I mean, we're a huge country, we contain multiple, and there's always going to be these fringe haters, right?

I'm not trying to be Pollyannish about it because I worry, but I think that the concern here is not that Trump having dinner with Fuentes, Yiannopoulos, and Kanye is going to make it more acceptable to believe these anti-Semitic lies. Rather, the system in place for keeping in the margins...

all kinds of bigotries, has been somewhat discredited by the gatekeepers for the last decade that have tried to tell me any number of things are examples of racism and antisemitism, which are not. So I'm saying that they're kind of taking advantage of a weakness that's already there. So I think what you're saying, Eli, and I agree with this, is that the gatekeepers who basically said to...

acknowledge that there are differences between men and women is essentially bigotry. You know, that why should we pay attention to those gatekeepers? Why should we respect them when the boundaries they're drawing of acceptable speech are so very narrow that they keep even reality-based observations as unsayable? Yes. And I'm saying if you want to know where

people we're demagogues and bad people can fill that void it starts with that starts with the abuse of the gatekeeper powers whether it's the content moderators ever just fired by Elon Musk from Twitter or whether it's like you know college professors who kind of get out and say no Mitt Romney is one of the most racist presidential candidates we've ever had it's it's all of this combined is like a lot of people said okay I mean these people have clearly lost their mind I guess anything goes

And this is, I see as a consequence of that, as opposed to, listen, also granting, I think what Brett said, which is correct, which is that,

Donald Trump kind of figured out how to turn all of this on its head and apply the same logic to the right. But Donald Trump also, I think, Eli, Donald Trump was a reaction to that frustration. He was the ultimate middle finger, the ultimate sort of troll, the ultimate like FU to those gatekeepers that a lot of people in the country were pissed off about. Yeah. And I would just add one more thing. There is a constituency of people who like just live in,

to be enraged on behalf of a minority and to be defensive to the point where, not to make this too personal, but over the weekend I was on Twitter making a completely separate point about how ineffective the resistance was. And there were Jews calling me a Nazi, which is kind of crazy. But where is this coming from? It's just like there's people who just love to be righteously criticized

And this feeds that too. And it's all now, I feel like we're on the Tower of Babel at this point. But I guess I wonder if from all of you, just like quick round robin, there are a lot of Jews I know who are expressing real fear, for example, about visibly being identifiable as Jewish walking in certain cities in America right now.

They are making changes to their behavior that are normal for Jews living in a city like Paris, but have not typically been normal for Jews in Los Angeles, Chicago, or New York. Are they taking the...

Few examples of Kanye, Kyrie, who we'll get to, and others, and extrapolating too much? Or is there fear based in an actual change that for many feels like it has happened in the culture in the past few years? There are aspects of this that feel a lot like the Black Lives Matter, the concern about the spike in Asian hate crimes cases.

There is a very real sense in which what is changed primarily is that we are talking about this in a particular sort of way now. And the kind of opportunism that Eli was describing a moment ago, that...

Plenty of people who might have been bigots already and are taking the opportunity to do something. Some people who are trolling. We remember the wave of phony bomb threats that recently was targeted at historically black colleges and universities. And it turns out there's a kid who's behind it. There was a similar one when Donald Trump was first elected to office. And it was a young Israeli boy who had who had.

used a software program to make thousands of these phone calls across the country. And at the time we were inundated with stories about this spike and hate crimes. And, and,

It seems as though that might not have been precisely what was described, but the impact in the culture is there all the same. The spike in fear, the elevated concern. And I think differentiating between real and imagined harms, to quote Baldwin, is something that is actually terribly important. And there's a sense in which one does kind of surrender and

and just give up on trying to do this because even to suggest something like that is derided and regarded as suspect and might open you up, even if you're a Jewish person, to being regarded as some sort of anti-Semite or a collaborator. So to commit exactly the form of behavior you've just decried. And Camille, I suspect you're right. I hope you're right. A hundred years ago in 1922, the most powerful man in Germany was Walter Rattenauer, who's Jewish.

The most important philosopher in Germany was Edmund Heserl, who was Jewish. And the German winner for the Nobel Prize in Medicine, Otto von Meyerhof, was Jewish. It was a zenith, culturally, politically, artistically, economically and socially speaking, for the Jewish community of Germany. And the sad reality of Jewish history

is that the eclipse happens when the sun is at its highest point. It's darkness at noon. So I don't want to overstate things. The United States today is not Germany in 1922. But at the risk of being crude, the shit can go south really fast. And I don't want to let

consciousness of that fact escaped the discussion. Brett, I agree with you, and we have to always be vigilant about it. However, we shouldn't forget that there was a deliberate cultural war that was waged by the Nazis to infiltrate various institutions, to create new German national songs that denigrated the Jews, to try to basically poison the minds of Germans. That was not something that just

happened overnight. There was a lot of deliberation and planning that went into it to horrific and horrendous result. But I'm just saying that it wasn't like we were doing great. Yeah, but what worries me, and I'll just try to be brief, what worries me is that conspiracy thinking has gone mainstream in a way that

never works for the benefit of anyone but doesn't work for the benefit of Jews because people who believe anything about anything about a stolen election in 2020 or about Barack Obama being born in Kenya will ultimately believe the worst about Jews and that stolen election myth is not dissimilar to the stab in the back myth which animated far-right militant German thinking in the 20s and

Add to that war, economic dislocation and inflation, not the kind of inflation we're seeing today that we saw in Germany 100 years ago. And it's a potent mix. So I just want to maybe it's that deeply Jewish and fatalistic side to me that's injecting this note in an otherwise cheerful conversation. But I wouldn't want to not say that.

Just a very plain question. Like, do you feel now differently about the place of Jews in America and the fate of Jews in America than you did five years ago? Oh, for sure. For sure. Look, I've been giving speeches at synagogues for 20 years. And it was only in the last 10 years that I noticed that whenever I gave a speech, there was a striking amount of police protection.

It's just a weird thing to just, you know this, Barry, as well, go into a synagogue. This was not the case when you were bat mitzvah at Tree of Life. Now it's ubiquitous. So every synagogue, it's a major line item of their budget. Every synagogue, every JCC, every Jewish preschool. I mean, I was in Pittsburgh last weekend at another synagogue, Beth Shalom, and there were

several armed guards at synagogue. And that is a normal part of Jewish life that I'm not sure a lot of people appreciate. You know, you don't go to church or you don't go to a mosque. There's not an armed guard there. Yeah, sorry, Brett, go on. Well, and you also didn't have a former president of the United States peddling an outrageous conspiracy theory and dining in company with

The man who is now the most notorious anti-Semite. I'm not talking about Nick Fuentes. I'm talking about Kanye. The most notorious anti-Semite in the United States. Now, I tend to think Donald Trump is finished politically. I even wrote a column to that effect. And obviously, I hope I'm right, because if I'm wrong, it will be hung around my neck from now until the end of time. But the fact is that he remains a serious candidate for office now.

That is a stunning fact. And I remember how in the 2016 campaign, it was one outrage after another that was supposedly the end of his political career. He wound up as president. Let's see how this one plays out. So I want to just affirm that anti-Semitism is the classic conspiracy theory, and you're absolutely right. We have to be worried about that. But I would say we've gone about it all wrong. What a conspiracy theory tells us is two things about people who believe it. One is that they

they're powerless. They believe that they're looking for some way to explain events that, for them, they can't understand and they can't explain. And conspiracy theories are a very tempting, kind of easy way to try to explain things that are hard to understand and accept. The other thing, though, is it often reflects the discrediting of the sources of authority. And what we've seen, especially in the last three years, is whether it's public health, whether it's

the FBI. I mean, you can go through the list of institutions that are supposed to be trusted and at once were trusted that squandered their trust, not because they were attacked by Donald Trump or by Breitbart or by, you know, social media, but because they, they told us things that were not true, that they knew were not true. And so if we want to address the rise in conspiracy theory thinking, uh,

We have to reform some of those institutions and account for them, and then also look at why so many Americans are feeling perilous. Having lived in the Arab world, conspiracy theories is very common in the Arab world because most people who live in the Arab world don't have much control over their daily lives. So that's, I think, the way to kind of get it. Instead, what we've done, until Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, we've said...

These are the following kinds of conspiracy theories that we must either throttle or remove from social media so people aren't exposed to it. And I think that's just the wrong way to go about it.

So Eli, you're saying in a world in which people were told by all of the gatekeepers, you know, Hunter Biden's laptop isn't real, or if you believe in the lab leak, you're a racist xenophobe. In that world, people are going to say, hold on, if that conspiracy theory turned out to be right, maybe there are other conspiracy theories that I should entertain. Well, yes, and I'm not defending it, but I'm saying that if you don't address the other side of it, which is exactly like the mainstream theory

which are supposed to give us information that's true, have conned us, then, you know, that's why we have more conspiracy theory thinking. Okay, let's talk about consequences of some of the incidents we've been talking about, right?

In the aftermath of Kanye's sort of rolling anti-Semitic tirade, he lost his billionaire status. Adidas dropped him. Gap and Balenciaga pulled out of deals with him. Until very recently, until Elon Musk took over Twitter, he was kicked off of Twitter and other social media. Fair?

Unfair, an example of cancel culture, or absolutely justifiable? I think there's a really important sense in which Kanye has brought this upon himself and his doubling down in the kind of lack of sophistication in general has contributed tremendously to just how bad an outcome this has been for him.

And I'm not sure that anyone could actually speak sense to him, so to speak, on these matters. But it also seems to me that there's a lot of what Kanye says that seems more confused than hateful.

Yeah.

I can't weigh in on that in a professional capacity, but I can say that it certainly seems as though he is behaving in a way that is not conducive to his well-being. And...

I want to be thoughtful and proportionate in responding to something like that. And I don't necessarily want to see someone completely decimated as a result, but it does seem that he is on this kind of destructive path. And I don't know that there's anything to sort of celebrate, so to speak, in the particularly...

awful way this scandal has impacted him. Camille, it sounds like you feel bad for Kanye West. Oh, I do. I mean, listen, I, like many people, am a fan of Kanye's music, but there's a very real sense in which this is just kind of a human tragedy. Like, this is, it's awful to see someone going through so much of this publicly. He often seems confused and befuddled in these conversations. He's persistently on the defensive. And

Again, as I said, the things that he's saying, you know, there are often described as aggressively anti-Semitic. And it is certainly true that they are consistent with particular tropes. But it's also true that they're just confused. He's constantly confusing.

trying to get people to address the obvious hypocrisy in talking about all sorts of groups in these generalized ways and not being able to do that here. And he says over and over again that he doesn't get it. He doesn't get why this is not okay. A lot of bigoted people are confused. They're generally confused. And like Camille, I'm not in any position to

Say whether he's mentally ill or not, I think it's irrelevant. You know, I'm no fan of cancel culture. I've been targeted by cancel culture a number of times in my career. I think treating Kanye as a victim of cancel culture misunderstands what cancel culture is all about.

And a real and important distinction between the absolutely legitimate corporate and institutional interests of businesses like Adidas to safeguard and husband their reputations and their brand from a clearly outrageous, troubled, call him what you will, spokesperson or artistic person.

collaborator and the cancel culture that you and I, Barry, know so well, where the attacks are almost invariably in bad faith, when there is no possibility for repentance or conversation, where it's a first strike and you're out kind of approach to

infractions of rules that are constantly evolving, constantly changing, constantly being defined in order to entrap people in sins which would not have been considered sins six months earlier or at least six months

six years earlier. That's the kind of cancel culture to which I objected, which has done so much profound damage to so many effectively either innocent people or people for whom there are mitigating circumstances. Kanye, as Kamal mentioned,

points out, keeps doubling down. It's not like mentally ill or not. The shame factor has not in any sense kicked in. The contrition factor has not kicked in. So to say Kanye is a victim of cancel culture, I think is a misstatement and also risks

diminishing what the real harm that cancel culture involves, which is almost invariably the assault on people who, if given the opportunity, would do anything they could to at least try to explain themselves, to have a good faith conversation, to meet someone halfway. That's not what is occurring here. That being said, just very briefly, Camille used a word that I think is so important in

Our general bias, our inclination in many of these cases should always be towards conversation, not cancellation. Should always be to say with Kyrie or people you sense just don't know what they're talking about, really, to say, okay,

Let's have a chat. Let's just sit down at the table of food and drink and talk it over before we suspend you for eight games, try to shame you, force you into some kind of- Shakedown. Shakedown. Basically a shakedown and then say that you've been cured of your mental defects. That seems like

terrible process that we should avoid. Yeah, I mean, I think right now in the culture, there's a kind of grouping together of Kanye, Kyrie, Kanye, Kyrie, but they're really different examples, right? Kyrie Irving shared on Twitter a link to a movie called Hebrews to Negroes Wake Up Black America. It's a

horrible film laden with anti-Semitic tropes, including Jews own the slave trade and the Holocaust never happened or exaggerated. And as Brett just explained, Kyrie initially refused to back down from his post, tried to claim, I can't be anti-Semitic if I know where I come from, nodding to this idea that blacks are the real Hebrews or the real Jews. And then he

not to go into all the details, but there was this kind of debacle. He was suspended from the team for eight games. He was forced to apologize publicly. It was kind of humiliating. The ADL accepted a half a million dollar gift only to give it back. That's the shakedown that sort of Brett was referencing. It struck many of us in the Jewish community as a kind of latter day Al Sharpton move that was really, really cringeworthy. That

to me seems like a much more clean cut example of the kind of cancel culture that I think all of us in this conversation are repelled by. And I guess if we could go back in time, what should the response, Chloe, to Kyrie sharing that link have been? If you're the owner of the Nets or if you're running the Anti-Defamation League, either of those personas, what should the right

to him sharing that link? Again, let's remind people, this is someone who also believes that the earth is flat. What should the right response to him have been? I think that a more appropriate response would have been

having private conversations, inviting Kyrie to have private conversations with the head of the team, with the head of the ADL. I think that the former CEO of the ADL did such things in the past with folks who would say anti-Semitic or prejudicial things. I think that the problem with the

performance nature of the society in which we live in is that we are incentivized to perform every aspect of our lives, including challenging anti-Semitism. And so perhaps it may have been the case that the ADL got caught up in that sort of

sensibility, right? In its rush to cancel. If canceling is popular and it gets you a lot of attention and we are in an attention economy, right? Then you're more likely to

do things that I think end up being harmful in the long run and also end up perpetuating the very notions that Kyrie had in his mind or Kanye had in his mind about the Jewish community being all powerful and being able to stop things. And Camille, I hear what you're saying about Kanye being punished or, you know, I don't think he was canceled. I think it's actually impossible to cancel Kanye, but it's certainly being leaping consequences or reaping consequences for his actions. I think with Kanye, though,

shaming won't work. If the goal is to actually get us into a space where we're having conversations with each other, but also when we have offended each other, we're able to realize how we've offended each other and why we've offended each other and how that has brought in so much pain towards each other. If that's the goal that we want to get to,

And I don't think shaming will work. And so the question, I think, for us is how can we actually meet Kanye and others, people like that, who clearly have a platform, who clearly have influence, and who are also clearly suffering on some level? Can we do both?

And it seems to me that there has been a total absence of that in the conversation. Our society has not been primed for that. We have not been conditioned. We have not learned how to actually do that. And if we could get to a place where we're able to respond to the Kanye's of the world in that way, I think there's a greater chance that we'll get that outcome that we're seeking.

Just to say very briefly, there's a sense in which cancel culture is often talked about as though it's a particular act. And I've always felt a bit awkward about using the phrase. In general, I feel as though we exist in this kind of censorious climate where we're interested in purging ourselves of the bad actors, the people with the wrong sentiments. And it

it is precisely the kind of dynamic that Chloe was describing. I think it is entirely possible to kind of believe that Kanye West, for example, is wrong and that he's done wrong things and that it's appropriate for there to be some sort of consequence for that. And that, that there, that shouldn't be something that we're kind of shocked by or outraged by, but it's also the case that a lot of the articles that were published around the time that this was happening was the,

These people have broken ranks with him. These people have not. They have yet to say anything publicly. It's been two weeks and they haven't yet publicly said anything. They haven't revoked his contracts and agreements. Um,

That is a very different kind of cultural disposition. Like that is the milieu that we actually exist in as if we're kind of waiting for the consequences. And in some circles, like urging on the kind of machinery that goes about

you and in some instances kind of deleting you from polite society. When I share the aspiration that Chloe was just talking about, I wish that we had more of a

of a culture that was interested in reconciliation. Again, to the extent we're interested in confronting antisemitism in a meaningful way and bigotry more broadly, it seems to me that excommunication is one approach, but if you actually want to do this in a durable way, if you actually wanna make an impact, taking advantage of opportunities

to really meaningfully and productively engage with one of the most influential cultural figures of not the last like 10 years, like the last several decades, like it's kind of important. The last two decades anyways, is really important. I think that's a missed opportunity here and something worth keeping in mind. Like when I'm watching him sort of

disassemble himself on all of these podcasts looking like increasingly disheveled and out of sorts and broken. Like it, it's a bit heartbreaking for me as a fan, but it's also like, I keep thinking about like what might've been like, what might've happened if Barry Weiss had been in conversation with him and it was like intimate and personal, like maybe there was no hope of that, but I can't help but wish that it would have been the way that things had proceeded. I just say there is a precedent for this.

In 1984, after Jesse Jackson made his infamous Hymie Town remarks and affiliated with Louis Farrakhan, Abe Foxman, away from the cameras... Abe Foxman, the head of the ADL at the time. At the time, you know, spent weeks and months in private conversations with Jesse Jackson and turned his heart. And Jesse Jackson, I have many criticisms of, but he went from somebody who was tripling down on anti-Semitism when he was...

caught in a hot mic by a Washington Post reporter when he, I guess he thought it was off the record and, you know, wouldn't apologize for a bit. You know, to this day, when Jesse Jackson is talking about, you know, his ideas of, you know, social justice and so forth, he mentions the Holocaust. He has, you know, visited Auschwitz. You know, through that kind of engagement, you can turn hearts and turn a foe of the Jewish people to a friend. And I think that that it's possible. I would hope it is something that I would endorse the idea that Barry Weiss and Veit

Kanye West to like a lesbian Sabbath in Los Angeles I think that might do a world of good um

Not for the podcast. Everything's off the record. We're just having a conversation. Just a little sapphic shabbos, you know what I mean? Okay, a few last questions, then I'll let you guys go. Speaking of someone who either, depending on who you are, depending on your perspective, has been canceled, people have tried to cancel, and now has decided to weigh in on the latest cancellations, let's talk about one of the great comedians of our time, Dave Chappelle. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you very much for being here. But before I start tonight, I just wanted to read a brief statement that I prepared. I denounce anti-Semitism in all its forms. And I stand with my friends in the Jewish community. And that, Kanye, is how you buy yourself some time. Dave Chappelle, the...

Saturday night after the midterm elections hosts SNL. Well, I have Jewish friends, so I'm not freaked out by your culture. I know a little bit about it just from hanging around. I'd be like, yo, let's go out at school tomorrow. They'd be like, we can't go out. It's Shanana tomorrow. I'd be like, what? What is Shanana? I had so many questions. Why do some of your people dress like Run-D.M.C.?

And the entire monologue is all about everything we've been talking about during this conversation. Early in my career, I learned that there are two words in the English language that you should never say together in sequence. And those words are the and Jews. I've never heard someone do good after they said that. Made jokes like, I've been to Hollywood, it's a lot of Jews.

You know what I mean? You might go out to Hollywood and your mind might start connecting some kind of lines and you could maybe adopt the delusion that the Jews run show business. It's not a crazy thing to think, but it's a crazy thing to say out loud in a climate like this. Talked about, you know, the rules of perception. If they're black, then it's a gang problem.

If they're Italian, it's a mob, but if they're Jewish, it's a coincidence and he should never speak about it. I was laughing pretty much the entire time until we get to this moment.

And Chappelle, his brilliance is that he often has this kind of mic drop, truth bomb moment where he says a thing or makes an observation about the world or about the culture, about politics that he's been thinking, that everyone else is thinking, and that only he is fearless and brave enough to say out loud. And this was meant to be sort of that moment, that beat in the monologue. And he says this.

And the NBA told me you should apologize, and he was slow to apologize. And then the list of demands... He talks about Kyrie Irving's suspension, and he says, this is where I draw the line. This is where, you know, I draw the line. I know the Jewish people have been through terrible things all over the world, but you can't blame that on black Americans. You just can't. You know what I mean? But you can't blame that on black Americans. You just can't. And it took me aback because I think of Chappelle as a brilliant truth teller,

And I just didn't see the truth in that statement. There is nothing in my experience that suggests that there is a sort of secret blaming by the Jewish community of black Americans. And for me, every note until then had basically been pitch perfect. And that note, that moment that was supposed to be the kind of Zenith truth moment seemed perfect.

totally false. Now, there was a big debate that ensued, of course. Some people said that Chappelle's jokes normalized anti-Semitism. And Eli, you wrote this great column where you talked about giving Chappelle what you called a shtetl pass and made the argument that basically we need to give artists and especially comedians wide latitude in terms of what they're able to say. So I

What did each of you think about his monologue in brief? And what did it reveal about where we are? And did you have the same reaction to that moment as I did, if we could just each briefly weigh in? Well, I thought it was hilarious. I thought he was funny. Look, if Lorne Michaels had said, can you take a look at the monologue before he gives it, I would have tweaked that. I think his meaning was, when you think of the great

calamities to have befallen the Jewish people, whether it's the Holocaust, the expulsion from Spain, Torquemada, and so on, black people are implicated in none of those. That's how I heard that line. There is no column I have ever written that doesn't contain a line. I

might have written a little better. There's no monologue that's ever been delivered that couldn't have landed just an ounce more perfectly. This is a guy who had the courage to talk about an electric subject and whose real purpose was not to talk about black Jewish relations, wasn't to talk about antisemitism,

or the Jews, the Jews or Jews individually. It was to talk about the importance of being able to speak and even speak and blunder. It shouldn't be this scary to talk about anything. It's making my job incredibly difficult. To be honest with you, I'm getting sick.

Don't do a crowd like this. And, you know, comedy is an art form that requires people to walk up to the very edge of the cliff, lean very far over and somehow not fall down. And it also requires an audience that in some ways is participating in good faith with that high wire. Now I'm mixing my metaphors, but high wire act of,

in which a great comic talent is engaged. So I thought Chappelle was brilliant. And, you know, if he had asked me, I would have tweaked the line. But I think... Although apparently in the rehearsal, he did an entirely different monologue and it was a shock to everyone on the show. Well...

Well, you know, the guy is a genius. He, to me, is the true comedic genius of the last 15 or 20 years. I agree. He did something that I thought was courageous and bold. And yeah, OK, so I didn't agree with every bit of it, but I found myself laughing. And more than that, I found myself admiring the gutsiness of

of what he chose to do. So, you know, 10 years from now, maybe he's going to revisit it. I have no doubt that when Chappelle speaks, he's operating in good faith. And that's ultimately what matters to me. Oh, I also loved it. I was laughing the entire time. I will just add, though, that I think that this allyship-like posture, as opposed to a friendship-like posture, actually results in

even greater outrage from Jews when seeing anti-Semitism come from the black community. And I think there might have been a little bit of that recognition or awareness in what Chappelle was saying when he said that line. Mm-hmm.

Camille, Eli? Yeah, I mean, I also thought it was quite funny. I mean, I share a lot of those sentiments. Barry, I mean, maybe I'll direct the question at you. You specifically mentioned the moment where he, the joke he made about like a group of blacks being a gang and, you know, a group of Jewish people, like we're not supposed to talk about it. Is there a responsible way to talk about the unusual degree to which

Jewish people are overrepresented in positions of authority in certain industries. Yeah, I think Eli did some of that in this conversation. It's like, you know,

You have to ask yourself, like, well, wait, hold on. Why are Jews overrepresented in Hollywood? Oh, maybe it's because of the fact that they were shut out of all of these other industries. And here was an attempt for them to sort of make it their own way and have control over one of the few industries that they were not shut out of. So I think that there's a way to talk about it very openly that is grounded sort of in historical reality. Well, I think the distinction...

if I may say, you know, curious little fact, Mormons are overrepresented at the CIA.

Now, turns out... Because they don't drink. Well, because they don't drink, but also because mission work exposes them to foreign languages, and foreign languages are a very good skill to have if you're working in intelligence. Last I checked, no one says like, oh, yeah, Mormons totally control the intelligence agencies of the United States. The question isn't whether a population or a demographic is overrepresented in a given industry. The question is whether they are using that knowledge

representation or over-representation, if the word over-representation actually means anything, for some sort of self-dealing and nefarious purpose. If Jews were over-represented in Hollywood studios and only gave jobs to other Jews and only made movies called Exodus and

you know, those, those, those, right? Then you'd say, okay, there's something amiss here, right? But it's not the question of over-representation. It's the question of how do you use the, the, the power that you happen to have individually? And are you, or are you not using it in concert with other Jews for the purposes of some kind of ethnic play? And the answer, I think quite obviously is not.

Chloe, you recently wrote that the greatest American moonshot of the past 100 years wasn't JFK's idea of a man landing on the moon. It was Dr. King's idea of fundamentally transforming national consciousness across lines of color. The current moment calls on us to do this work again, beginning by repairing the wounded but necessary friendship between blacks and Jews.

So I'd love to hear from each of you in brief as a last question. How do we do that other than me hosting Kanye for a lesbian Shabbat dinner here in Los Angeles? Well, I think that we have to learn how to get in right relationship with our full complexity and, um,

That means working on ourselves and making sure that we are not easily susceptible to conspiratorial mindsets, making sure that we understand that the project of integration, that term has a lot of cultural cachet for obvious reasons, but the project of integration isn't just a societal project. It is also an individual and a communal project in the sense that we have to recognize as human beings that we contain both

both the potential for good and evil, and we should not caricature ourselves or any other group

of people by seeing them. And as I said earlier, it's either all good or all bad. This requires an adoption of a new way of seeing and a new way of being. And it is a very difficult thing to do, right? It's very difficult for the people in the civil rights movement to respond to white supremacists by saying, actually, I love you and you're my brother. And even though I'm going to protest what you're doing, I'm not, I'm going to do so nonviolently. And I'm going to do so while recognizing that you too are actually suffering.

It's very difficult to do that and it requires a practice, an actual habit in order to be able to do that. And I think the present moment, which is, as we've already established, rife with conspiratorial ways of thinking is

It is incumbent upon us to take upon that practice so that we can bring into fruition the beloved community. And it's not something that simply falls from the heavens. It's something that we have to work on and bring into fruition. And I think we have to take that up as individuals and as a society as a whole. Eli? Well, I mean, I feel more comfortable saying this about our own people, the Jews. I don't want to, you know, but my view is that like, I would like to see a sort of new friendship between blacks and Jews, right?

based around the idea that we refuse to be only understood as victims of various kinds of oppression and that we are so much more than just, you know, various peoples who have been, you know, oppressed and excluded throughout history. And I mean, I'm more close to it from the Jewish perspective, but I would hate to see the Gen Z Jews today only understand their Jewishness as this kind of badge of victimhood and that we are

that we should celebrate our resilience. And that I think that that's a great thing that African-Americans should celebrate. This incredible resilience that we're still here and thriving and that so many of us are thriving. And that instead of having this like constant focus on, you know, all of the ways in which our communities are threatened and so forth. And I'm not saying that we shouldn't, of course we have to be alert to that. I agree. But is that there's so much more to it because what I worry about is that, you know, there's a kind of,

organized effort right now on the left to try to say that, you know, we want to be your protector, Jewish people and black people. We're going to call out all of the kind of systemic oppression that is against you. And we're going to be part of this coalition with, you know, all these other groups and so forth and saying, no, I mean, we're much more than that. And that let's all try to live together. And so maybe that's my, that's an idea. And I'm sure, you know, you can probably find flaw with it, but that's kind of where I'm at at this point.

Camille, Foster, anything kumbaya-ish? Or maybe you want to say we just need to reject these identities entirely, if I know you. Well, I mean, I'd say that that's actually definitely part of it.

Like, there's something wonderful about having an exemplar with respect to these kinds of conversations like King that we can point to who kind of bravely confronted particular pernicious ideas that were in the culture. But I also think that it's imperative that we are kind of setting new bars for ourselves, right?

And in a very real sense, there's a sense in which King kind of came up to a particular point. And we can go beyond that point and say that, you know, it's not that I want black girls and white girls to play together. I want there to be a broad recognition that this notion of blackness and whiteness is kind of preposterous. And I don't want Jews and blacks to have better relationships with one another. I want us all to see every individual we encounter in their full humanity.

with a deep appreciation for the fact that that kind of rich complexity that Chloe was alluding to is ever present. It is always there. We don't actually forge relationships in the sort of way that we often talk about.

And the opportunity is there for us to transcend the taxonomy of identity that we've enthroned here in the United States, where we talk about people in these essentialist ways, because it has ideological implications. It is confusing. It undermines our ability to kind of productively engage with one another and is a source for all manner of consternation. So I think until we take up that project,

We may kind of find ourselves treading water on issues like this for a very long time. Brett, last word. Oh, God, all of that was so eloquent and well stated. I think we should just hang out more. Totally. I mean that in the most...

Mundane and profound sense. We should just hang out more without reference to philosophy, politics, sociology, anti-Semitism, racism, intersectionality. We should just eat and drink and just be normal human beings in company with one another. Amen, brother. Amen. Brett Stevens, Camille Foster, Eli Lake.

Chloe Valdory, just such a pleasure talking to all of you. I really appreciate you making the time. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. My thanks to Brett, Camille, Chloe, and Eli for joining me today. Please share this conversation with people in your community and engage in a debate of your own. It is a good thing to talk to people that you disagree with and that you respect. We really need it.

And to support Honestly, subscribe to no longer Common Sense, but The Free Press at our shiny new website, thefp.com. We'll see you next time.