As a Jewish fan, do I cancel Kanye and Kyrie Irving?

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 07/11/2022 (1275 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As a Jewish teenager in the year 2011, two things I cared about were the National Basketball Association and Kanye West’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.

I loved the NBA because I loved to watch the game at its highest level, with the most skilled players in the world. I loved Kanye’s 2010 masterpiece because it expanded my understanding of what hip-hop was and could be. My entire childhood had been spent misunderstanding what the genre was, completely under the influence of racist depictions of rappers in television and film. The way rap was portrayed made it seem not an artform, but a threat. I knew that wasn’t true, and started to listen more intently when I got my first iPod.

When I turned 13, it was 2008, meaning my Bar Mitzvah year coincided with West’s heyday as a radio superstar. “When he first started out, he was huge,” says Barry Kay, a local entertainment figure who’s DJed Jewish events for 23 years.

And then Fantasy came out. At camp in the summer of 2011, we listened nonstop. That year, Kyrie Irving was drafted by the Cleveland Cavaliers. Irving was an electrifying prospect, with an Iversonian crossover and an immaculate ability to float by defenders as he drove through the lane.

I am both white and Jewish, which is not at all to say that Jewish people can’t be good at basketball or rapping, but is to say that this particular white Jewish man is not too talented at either. But I do love both.

When West started making anti-Semitic comments a few weeks ago, I contacted a Jewish high school teammate of mine who is better at both basketball and rapping than I am.

Now based in L.A., Jeremy Hecht is the head of video at HipHopDX, a hip-hop review and culture site.

“Kanye has been for me one of the five most influential people in my life, music or not,” says Hecht, whose dad bought him West’s Late Registration in junior high.

So Hecht was thrown when West began sharing anti-Semitic thoughts during an interview last month. He knew West had a penchant for saying questionable things, but this was the first time it was about Jewish people.

“Especially as an interviewer (Hecht has interviewed artists like Ice Cube and Wiz Khalifa) I was shocked that there was no pushback.”

West tweeted about going “Deathcon” on Jewish people, and spoke about a Jewish-controlled media, a trope that has been a dominant strain of anti-Semitic propaganda as long as publishers have existed.

A few days after the interview, a group of people held banners saying “Kanye is right about the Jews” above a freeway in Los Angeles. Even if those people held those views beforehand, West’s public embrace of the ideology may have played a role in emboldening them to share them.

In the past decade, West had already hedged into far-right rhetoric: he has said that slavery was a choice, and wore a Make America Great Again hat; this is not the first time he has enraged a segment of his fanbase or society.

West has meanwhile made several incredible albums and a few clunkers, while struggling with mental health openly; those struggles cannot be discounted, but critics have pointed out millions of people with less influence than West who deal with mental health challenges do not turn to racist, anti-Semitic tropes.

Kay, whose father was a Holocaust survivor, says some anti-Semites don’t necessarily understand the immense harm in what they’re saying. Hecht says he would not want to silence West, and sees him as a visionary creative, but wishes his idol would realize why what he’s saying is hurting people.

“I don’t want to shut up and dribble Kanye,” Hecht says. “The responsibility that comes with being that influential is when you say things you have to have accountability for its impact. You have to be able to admit when you’re wrong.”

That’s been difficult for Irving, who has become the NBA’s leading skeptic: he’s asserted that the earth is flat; missed dozens of games due to his anti-vax stance; and promoted unscientific research, stoking misinformation.

A few weeks after Kanye’s latest spiral began, Irving, who plays for the Brooklyn Nets, tweeted a link promoting an anti-Semitic film.

The NBA and Jewish people have long been connected. In the first game in league history — on Nov. 1, 1946, between the New York Knickerbockers and the Toronto Huskies — the two leading scorers for the Knicks were Leo Gottlieb and Ossie Schectman, and the Knicks also featured Hank Rosenstein, Ralph Kaplowitz, and Sonny Hertzberg. The league’s commissioner was Maurice Podoloff. In 1984, David Stern became commissioner. In 2014, his longtime deputy, Adam Silver, replaced him.

Silver’s tenure began with the league in crisis, as former Los Angeles Clippers owner Donald Sterling — who is also Jewish — made racist remarks about Black people. Silver was praised for his quickly issued lifetime suspension of Sterling, which triggered his sale of the franchise.

Eight years later, Silver is dealing with another image crisis for the league.

“Kyrie Irving made a reckless decision to post a link to a film containing deeply offensive anti-Semitic material,” Silver said. “While we appreciate the fact that he agreed to work with the Brooklyn Nets and the Anti-Defamation League to combat anti-semitism and other forms of discrimination, I am disappointed that he has not offered an unqualified apology and more specifically denounced the vile and harmful content contained in the film he chose to publicize.

“I will be meeting with Kyrie in person in the next week to discuss the situation,” Silver concluded.

What is a white Jewish man who loves Kanye West and Kyrie Irving to do? Kay, for one, has never been a huge fan of West, but says that if he got a request to play one of his songs at a Jewish event now, he “wouldn’t even think about it.” “But if a corporation hires me to play their party and tells me to play his song … that’s an interesting question. I’m not sure what I would do.”

That moral dilemma is where longtime listeners find ourselves.

As a white Jewish man in Canada in the 21st century, I have enjoyed tremendous privilege as compared to Jewish people throughout history. I was not subjected to a quota barring me from university. I am able to rent or own property. I can practice Judaism without fear of violence, although, local synagogues frequently hire security guards to protect congregants, especially after the Tree of Life Synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh. In my personal life, I have never suffered for my religion or my cultural expression. This is not true for all Jewish people, here or abroad, but it is for me.

But people who have historically been subjected to hate understand that all it takes is a little bit of hatred to change perspective – a truism that goes in both ways. Go check out the writer Roald Dahl’s Wikipedia page, which details his views on Jewish people. I am now forced to confront the same questions about Kanye West as I did about Willy Wonka: do I boycott my favourite film because its author didn’t like my people, or do I remember that Gene Wilder’s real name was Jerome Silberman?

Wilder wasn’t religious, but according to his obituary, upheld the golden rule – treat your neighbours as you would like to be treated.

I want to still love Kanye West and I want to still love Kyrie Irving .

But it’s hard to love your neighbours when they wish you didn’t exist.

ben.waldman@winnipegfreepress.com

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