UPDATED: Kanye West and Donald Trump are antisemites
I am sharing this free post that I originally published on October 18 because this clearly demonstrates that Kanye West’s antisemitism is impactful and inspiring. He is an apostle of hatred. Kanye West remains endorsed by the GAP and Adidas, despite his antisemitism. Ye has 31 million followers. This was the scene yesterday in Los Angeles — 77 years after the liberation of Auschwitz.
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Steve
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That memory is both fleeting and enduring is a unique aspect of the human condition. This is a story of a searing memory from a cold Polish day in 2005.
The buses left Krakow and rolled forward in a vast motorcade towards Oświęcim. The Nobel laureate and human rights giant looked out the same window I did as we rolled deeper into the Polish countryside. We talked a bit towards the beginning of the journey that got quieter as we drew closer to our destination. I am unable to describe the heaviness that set in as we drew close.
I was looking for a house. It was the home of the most prolific murderer in human history, Rudolf Höss. He personally supervised the murder of two million human beings. The house was on the corner of the camp and had high walls and a garden. Mrs. Höss called her villa “paradise.” Her husband’s work was close at hand, just beyond the edge of paradise. He was commandant of Auschwitz. I had come there to bear witness as part of an American delegation led by Dick Cheney, the Vice President of the United States, and included his daughter Liz.
Elie Wiesel had returned to a hell from which he had somehow survived. He shared an incandescent gift and moral sensibility to bear witness to history’s greatest premeditated crime: the murder of Europe’s Jews by Nazi Germany and its fascist collaborators.
Wiesel was Hungarian. He was shipped like an animal to Auschwitz by Hungarian fascists and Nazis. Those fascists are broadly admired by Viktor Orban and his fellow travelers like Matt Schlapp, the CPAC leader and American fascist. That is what must be talked about in 2022 America.
Auschwitz and the killing camp Birkenau were at the core of a vast Nazi slave labor and execution archipelago that will never be eclipsed by any comparable act of evil because of its premeditation and precision. It was the culmination of thousands of years of hate and conspiracy theories melding together with an extremist political ideology rooted in a deep fanaticism of hatred. That hatred was not abstract. It was organized and focused against a specific group of human beings above all others. It was directed against Jews.
The Shoah was the murder of the Jews at an industrial scale. In America, we call it the Holocaust.
Here is a depiction of the murder of Professor Aaron Jastro in an Auschwitz gas chamber from the 1980s-era ABC miniseries “War and Remembrance,” based on the novel by Herman Wouk:
The Aaron Jastro character is a naturalized American citizen and a Jew who had converted to Christianity. Wouk’s fictional masterpiece follows him through the 1930s as he sloughs off the growing dangers and rising Jew hatred around him. This scene shows the end of Professor Jastro’s life and his body being desecrated into smoke and ash.
When General Dwight David Eisenhower, the Supreme Allied Commander, Allied Expeditionary Forces, stepped into a concentration camp, he had the wisdom to understand immediately that, one day, people would live who would seek to minimize the magnitude of the crime. It is why he ordered the liberation be documented on film (if you click on “Watch on YouTube,” you will be able to see it):
The murder of the Jews in the Holocaust led to the formation of a simple frame around the event based on two words: Never Again.
Let us examine three statements about these events and the people who were murdered and vaporized in ovens. Those people, again, are the Jews.
The first statement is “The US and the Holocaust,” a documentary film made by Ken Burns, a national treasure and the greatest documentary filmmaker who has ever lived. The recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom has added to his voluminous contributions towards the documenting of US history with yet another vital contribution — this time about the United States’ role in the events peripherally and directly connected to humanity’s greatest act of organized evil, the Holocaust.
How many young Americans will see it? Perhaps more importantly, how many Americans will watch it and grasp its lessons?
Even more depressingly, how many Americans will watch with interest what Ken Burns meticulously documents versus what millions of young people will absorb like Bounty paper towels from a mentally ill musician with 31 million followers on social media? How many decades of bearing witness and remembrance were wiped out in a nanosecond as Kanye West mainstreamed Jew hatred on a foundation of centuries’ old conspiracies?
And this past weekend, American Jews were directly threatened by Donald Trump, the disgraced 45th President of the United States. Here is Trump’s statement:
What prompted him to write it? What is his demand of the Jews? What is it exactly that Trump claims is owed him by an entire race of people? What precisely does Donald Trump believe his claim is on the loyalty of the Jewish people? Should we not know? It seems important.
It is important because all of history’s slurs against the Jews are deeply rooted in the concept of treachery. Specifically, Jewish treachery. For Hitler, it was Jewish treachery that defeated Imperial Germany, not Allied power. How long until Trump takes the next step and directly connects Jewish treachery to his delusions about a stolen election that was in fact the most reviewed and cleanest in American history?
It is important to understand that insanity, lies and delusions cannot be ranked like NFL teams in the standings. They stand equally, if differently, against one another in a sick hall of mirrors that is strangling American liberty in broad daylight.
Kanye West’s delusions and slurs are delusions and slurs.
Donald Trump’s delusions and slurs are delusions and slurs.
Herschel Walker’s delusions about being a cop are delusions about being a cop.
Jew hatred isn’t a delusion. It is real. It is real even if it is spun from maliced delusions of sick and evil people and their groups whether their names be Trump, West, Ye, Eichmann, Höss, Hitler, Lindbergh, Henry Ford, David Duke, Proud Boys, SA, SS, Klan, or the Christian Nationalist fervor of Doug Mastriano.
Tolerance is the only thing that has ever kept Jews safe, and that is why they are facing growing danger across America. Donald Trump stepped off an escalator and announced his presidential campaign with a broad denunciation of specific groups of people aimed at dehumanizing them. Seven years have passed. Fascist movements cannot help themselves. In the end, antisemitism falls from fascist movements like rain drops from the clouds.
When Elie Wiesel and a generation of survivors tried to teach us the meaning of what happened it was built around something profound that was articulated memorably by Martin Niemöller, who said:
We must NEVER FORGET.
I can’t believe this is where we are in America. The country that beat back the fascists during WWII. How have we allowed so many Americans forget? I watched the Ken Burns documentary and did my best to encourage others to do so as well. But people don’t seem to understand that short memory and selective amnesia is what gets us right where we are.
As we get closer to the midterm elections the knot in my stomach gets bigger. I’m afraid for us. Afraid that we have allowed social media and the delusional people you speak of Steve to take hold. I’m afraid that we are too distracted by the superficial and the trivial to be interested enough to even care enough to vote and best back this wave of hatred. I pray that this important election proves me wrong.
God help us.
Steve, for I’ve been the Senior Rabbi of a Reform synagogue in Austin, Texas for 31 years. I never thought I’d be discussing contemporary, violent, American anti-semitism with my high school students, particularly because Austin is known as “a bright blue dot in the middle of a very red state.“ But then, on Halloween night almost exactly a year ago, after a series of antisemitic demonstrations and vandalism incidents (some perpetrated by an out-of-state group, some homegrown) an 18 year old arsonist, a college freshman, drove onto our campus with a 5 gallon can of flammable liquid, and set our synagogue sanctuary on fire. The FBI found white supremacist and anti-Semitic literature in his home. He is now facing federal arson and hate crime charges. Because of a passerby who saw the flames and called 911, as well as a quick response by firefighters and law-enforcement, our sanctuary building still stands. But the smoke and fire damage will take years to repair. Many people of goodwill have reached out in the aftermath of this attack, including people who made and continue to make monetary donations to help with the repairs, as well as a local episcopal church that gave us a place to pray on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But I cannot help but lay a good portion of this at the feet of our 45th president, who gave up the bigots and extremists political and sociological cover for hate speech and hate crimes. I pray that we make wise choices at the ballot box next month!