Kanye said something Antisemitic. We called him out.

Can we move on now?

There are many issues facing the Jewish people and Kanye West is not one of them, at least not one of the big ones. Before you start yelling at us that we need to stand up to powerful people who say hateful, anti-Semitic things, please understand that if anyone gets the defense reaction it's an Orthodox Jewish woman and an Israeli. We are in no way defending the stupid and harmful things that Kanye is saying, but we are trying to keep everything in perspective.

Yes, Ye said terrible things. Aside from his “DeathCon 3 on Jewish people” remark, he also spoke about the Jewish and Zionist media, implied Jewish people are conspiring to get him, and claimed that black people are the real Jews, all in an (excellent) two-and-a-half hour interview with Lex Fridman. He also said that Hollywood killed Bambi’s mother so that we could all turn into orphans of capitalism, and that Planned Parenthood is population control for black people. Simply put, he’s off his rocker.

Being crazy is not an excuse for antisemitic remarks. The immediate Jewish pushback was important, and the support from the general public was reassuring. The rational majority made it clear that generalizing people is harmful, and that these conspiratorial statements are reminiscent of darker days. Public pressure on companies like Adidas to drop their partnership with Kanye was successful, after those decided that association with him is not good for business.

But then, we too seemed to get a little nutty. Ye’s statue was removed from Madame Tussaud in London (yes, we are shocked that place still exists too). There are growing calls for Ye’s music to be removed from Spotify and Apple. Activists are pushing for a total erasure of Kanye from public life. In other words, Jews won’t be safe until we never hear the genius of My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy again.

Removing Ye from the public won’t solve antisemitism. Do we want to be policing whose music is “kosher” or what shoes someone chooses to wear? Do you hate Jews if you play Golddigger on repeat? You don’t need to be a Talmud scholar to answer those questions with an astounding No.

And then there’s the question of the politically convenient bear hug for the Jews, which is always dependant on which side of the aisle did the antisemitism.

It’s hard not to notice that this “I stand with (insert marginalized group)” type of Instagram advocacy is pretty hollow. It’s virtue signaling wrapped in heart and prayer emojis, that only seem to come out when politically convenient. If just one of the celebrities that proudly proclaimed “I love Jews!” on social media this week would acknowledge the weekly attacks on Hasidim in Brooklyn, or speak up against the harassment of pro-Israel students on campus, Dayenu.

What will help is focusing our energy on the real threats, those that the future of our people litteraly depend on. We have no solutions of course, all we can offer is steering the conversation in the direction where it matters the most. The divisions between decular and religious Jews, threats to our one Jewish state, antisemitic assaults on from Paris to Jerusalem, and challenging demographic realities - we are actually threatened around the world by more than just words. Ye’s remarks did not cause any of these, they are just unhelpful side-effects of a fraught culture.

As our Jewish parents would expect - let’s put on our doctors coats and fight the disease instead of the symptoms.