Thank you, Van. As a Jewish person, I truly appreciate what you've said here and I've always appreciated you. We are in a painful time and you bring light into the darkness.
As someone who is neither Black nor Jewish, but white, I echo your thoughts and thank you for speaking elegantly for most of humanity who is/will fight against bigotry in every form.
I deeply appreciate your allyship, Van, and I was extremely moved by your trip to Auschwitz. Thank you for this ray of hope in these incredibly disturbing times. And for reminding your readers of the historical connection between Blacks and Jews. We’re better together!
Hello - I appreciate all the comments and completely understand everyone's sentiments. However, as a mental health professional, this is a desperate cry for help and attention. When will we see mental illness for what it is? We need to try to stop making sense of this and learn how to assess, intervene and provide care to those who are ill.
I am a psychologist. I have to say that two things can be true at the same time. Yes, he is mentally ill. But he is also a virulent antisemite, racist, and mysoginist. By the way, Hitler was also mentally ill. It doesn't give him a pass to do what he does, say what he does, or to treat women the way he does.
I deeply appreciate this, and you, as always. You're fighting an incredibly important fight here, and it also happens to be quite a brave one.
But i'll add: Ye is so despicable and virulent in his antisemitism that it's almost a self-cancelling parody. The problem with "centering" him (not a criticism of you--thank you for addressing it), is that it offers a certain level of distraction, it allows more insidious and widespread forms of antisemitism--those that mostly hide behind the mask of antizionism--to distance themselves from the hateful caricature that is Ye's version.
If we reduced manifestations of anti-Black rasicm to a white cop murdering George Floyd via knee-on-neck, as opposed to gaining enough understanding of how racism can manifest itself in classrooms, on screens and between book covers, in home-ownership #s, and C-Suite statistics...Well, that lack of understanding would make it pretty easy for most white people to let themselves off the hook. And, I suppose, it's precisely that impulse that's boomeranged us to Trump 2.0...
Yet it is precisely this same kind of ignorance of antisemitism and how it works, that's led to our current schism. Antisemitism, as you know Van, isn't just waving swastikas and praising Hitler. And the antizionist tsunami--which at the VERY least pushes people towards a "socially acceptable" iteration of antisemitism--seems to have swamped huge swaths of politically and culturally-engaged Black culture. From what I've seen--to be clear, I am not intending to tar a vast American peoplehood with one brush, but i'm in activist spaces Insta and X and TikTok, and I work in the mainstream publishing industry, so i'm pretty thoroughly exposed to antizionist "culture"--we Jews are drowning beneath waves of Holocaust inversion, blood libel, scapegoating, double-standards, conspiracy-accusations, and rage about all that power we wield in service of our greed and thirst for violence...
My 17 y.o. kid in NYC lost her entire cohort of Black and mixed-race friends (people with whom she'd been really close), after 10/7. Not on 10/7, itself, for the most-part, but over the following months as the protests grew and spread and "colonized" social media spaces where budding intellectuals and creatives and activists gathered. There were some hold-outs for a few months, but ultimately the pull to join this maximalist, peace-rejecting movement proved too strong for her friends of color to resist. My leftist, Jewish, nonbinary kid has zero Black friends at school anymore. The same thing happened with my 16 y.o. nieces in their Oakland public school--one by one their friends, all BIPOC--started with the antizionism rhetoric (being spewed by a number of teachers, too, it should be added) and peeled off. Within a year, both of my nieces had transferred out into a new school district.
This makes your fight even more essential, Van, and i've been so heartened to see the work that Hillel and UNCF are doing to create cross-cultural dialogue on college campuses. But until we somehow succeed in educating more people not just about Hitler and Auschwitz, but about what everyday antisemitism is, and why it is that antizionism (as opposed to legitimate criticism of Israeli policies, leaders, wartime conduct, and so on) IS antisemitism, we're just going to be left fighting with Shopify to take down Yeezy tee-shirts, while the tsunami continues to grow, and the history of Black-Jewish allyship is swept away in its wake.
Thank you, Van. As a Jewish person, I truly appreciate what you've said here and I've always appreciated you. We are in a painful time and you bring light into the darkness.
As someone who is neither Black nor Jewish, but white, I echo your thoughts and thank you for speaking elegantly for most of humanity who is/will fight against bigotry in every form.
Thank you for giving us back some hope, a feeling that us in short supply these days!
I deeply appreciate your allyship, Van, and I was extremely moved by your trip to Auschwitz. Thank you for this ray of hope in these incredibly disturbing times. And for reminding your readers of the historical connection between Blacks and Jews. We’re better together!
YES! Love and light to you, Van. 💕✨
Amen and thank you!
Thank you, Van. You are a mensch, visionary, and change-maker. May we all have the strength that you do to speak the truth and find the light!
Amen. Thank you for continuing to be a steadfast and loyal ally!
Hello - I appreciate all the comments and completely understand everyone's sentiments. However, as a mental health professional, this is a desperate cry for help and attention. When will we see mental illness for what it is? We need to try to stop making sense of this and learn how to assess, intervene and provide care to those who are ill.
I am a psychologist. I have to say that two things can be true at the same time. Yes, he is mentally ill. But he is also a virulent antisemite, racist, and mysoginist. By the way, Hitler was also mentally ill. It doesn't give him a pass to do what he does, say what he does, or to treat women the way he does.
Thank you for reminding me that beautiful stuff is still happening, Van. I needed it this week.
Thank you, Van. You always speak truth with eloquence and make me feel better for having listened to you.
I deeply appreciate this, and you, as always. You're fighting an incredibly important fight here, and it also happens to be quite a brave one.
But i'll add: Ye is so despicable and virulent in his antisemitism that it's almost a self-cancelling parody. The problem with "centering" him (not a criticism of you--thank you for addressing it), is that it offers a certain level of distraction, it allows more insidious and widespread forms of antisemitism--those that mostly hide behind the mask of antizionism--to distance themselves from the hateful caricature that is Ye's version.
If we reduced manifestations of anti-Black rasicm to a white cop murdering George Floyd via knee-on-neck, as opposed to gaining enough understanding of how racism can manifest itself in classrooms, on screens and between book covers, in home-ownership #s, and C-Suite statistics...Well, that lack of understanding would make it pretty easy for most white people to let themselves off the hook. And, I suppose, it's precisely that impulse that's boomeranged us to Trump 2.0...
Yet it is precisely this same kind of ignorance of antisemitism and how it works, that's led to our current schism. Antisemitism, as you know Van, isn't just waving swastikas and praising Hitler. And the antizionist tsunami--which at the VERY least pushes people towards a "socially acceptable" iteration of antisemitism--seems to have swamped huge swaths of politically and culturally-engaged Black culture. From what I've seen--to be clear, I am not intending to tar a vast American peoplehood with one brush, but i'm in activist spaces Insta and X and TikTok, and I work in the mainstream publishing industry, so i'm pretty thoroughly exposed to antizionist "culture"--we Jews are drowning beneath waves of Holocaust inversion, blood libel, scapegoating, double-standards, conspiracy-accusations, and rage about all that power we wield in service of our greed and thirst for violence...
My 17 y.o. kid in NYC lost her entire cohort of Black and mixed-race friends (people with whom she'd been really close), after 10/7. Not on 10/7, itself, for the most-part, but over the following months as the protests grew and spread and "colonized" social media spaces where budding intellectuals and creatives and activists gathered. There were some hold-outs for a few months, but ultimately the pull to join this maximalist, peace-rejecting movement proved too strong for her friends of color to resist. My leftist, Jewish, nonbinary kid has zero Black friends at school anymore. The same thing happened with my 16 y.o. nieces in their Oakland public school--one by one their friends, all BIPOC--started with the antizionism rhetoric (being spewed by a number of teachers, too, it should be added) and peeled off. Within a year, both of my nieces had transferred out into a new school district.
This makes your fight even more essential, Van, and i've been so heartened to see the work that Hillel and UNCF are doing to create cross-cultural dialogue on college campuses. But until we somehow succeed in educating more people not just about Hitler and Auschwitz, but about what everyday antisemitism is, and why it is that antizionism (as opposed to legitimate criticism of Israeli policies, leaders, wartime conduct, and so on) IS antisemitism, we're just going to be left fighting with Shopify to take down Yeezy tee-shirts, while the tsunami continues to grow, and the history of Black-Jewish allyship is swept away in its wake.
THANK YOU!
I love Snoop