Uncertainty #5: Am I Anti-Semitic?

Following his extra Jewy chat with Eli Lake, Adaam faces some backlash — and lays the blame (surprise, surprise) on identity politics.

So the one thing I didn’t expect after our talk with culture critic, journalist, and fellow globe-trotting bagel-sniffer Eli Lake was to be accused of anti-Semitism.

But heck, it’s 2022, and this is clearly the stupidest timeline.

It started, as all intelligible discussions do, with a tweet. Vanessa clipped a brief segment from our latest episode in which Eli brought up the moral question of whether or not we should still support artists who have acted reprehensibly, like Ye, or even committed crimes, like R. Kelly. To briefly butcher the point, while it’s unequivocally clear that society is better off with R. Kelly in jail,¹ in Ye’s case Eli called for a little (trigger alert) nuance. He argued that in cancelling a prodigious and indisputably masterful artist like Ye for the offense of bad speech — speech which, Eli and I agreed, was nothing less than rancid, Old World, textbook anti-Semitism² — we gain a dubious moral victory, while losing an invaluable cultural asset. So who really pays the cost of cancellation, he asked. 

Now, later in our almost 2-hour long conversation, we tunneled further down the rabbit hole of art, morality, and politics as if we were all spry and effervescent turtle-necked college freshmen. We got granular. We got highfalutin. We got (trigger warning #2) nuanced. Eli even used the P word to repudiate my challenges to him as…

*don’t gag!*

… “philosophy.”

But of course, this didn’t make it into the tweet’s 2-minute video, so as far as the world’s concerned, it didn’t exist. So for a few Twitter onlookers, for whom the commitment of listening to an entire discussion is too taxing, the short clip was quite enough to conclude that we were indulging in jolly Jew washing.³ To support Ye’s right to publicly speak his disturbed mind is basically to be right there in the Beer Hall in 1923 with a clear shot of Hitler and do nothing.

Maybe it comes easy to me as a Jew. As I told Eli, giving up on every artist who’s ever professed a taste for some flavor or other of anti-Semitism would leave me quite impoverished, both artistically and intellectually. Detesting Wagner comes easily; I could never get around his interminable pathos. But fuck if I give up on Dostoevsky, Bulgakov, Voltaire, and countless others.

If you’ve never tried it, let me offer you this: it might seem difficult at first, but trust me, it really doesn’t require that much mental overhead to recognize that artists whose work you appreciate are as fallen, rotten, prejudiced, and blind-spotted as the rest of us.

So why does this seem so difficult all of a sudden?

My bet would be that it has something to do with our redoubled infatuation with shallow group identities. 

Maybe it’s the result of having so much of our communication mediated through the social media veil. These platforms provide the illusion of a flat, unified world but really only sharpen our indelible solitude. So we end up clinging to whatever shallow community can give us a sense of deeper association while simultaneously distinguishing us from the faceless masses and their unverified accounts.

Or maybe it’s just  the natural end of Putnam’s warnings about atomization, or the decline of religion, or the changing demographics of the country. Maybe it’s because identity politics is endemic to melting-pot America and simply resurfaces periodically like gonorrhea.

Whatever the explanation, ersatz group identity is the lodestar for most politically active Americans across the board (yes, the right today is just as identitarian as the left; if you doubt it, I suspect you may be stuck in the halcyon days of summer 2015).

Unfortunately, the only way to maintain a sense of belonging to an ersatz identity group is by consistently unearthing sources of offense, something to engender a “we’re all in this together” moment, followed by a hearty, self-righteous mob scene.⁴

Don’t get me wrong: I’m all about communities. I spent an entire episode talking with David French about how, in my mawkish view, the only real way to ease our political pressure cooker is through meaningful connections, strong communities, and deep friendships. But these are about real encounters between real individuals, rather than vague, if occasionally enticing, abstractions.

Within such real communities, surrounded by real friends, I’d be more than happy to debate whether or not Ye’s anti-Semitism is pernicious, while having Runaway playing in the background.

But the idea that we Jews, qua Jews, should lock virtual hands and spam Ye’s remaining sponsors with clever hashtags until they too ditch him is ridiculous to me. Not because his comments weren’t vile. Not because his mental instability somehow exonerates his bigotry (it only makes everything sadder). And certainly not because I secretly approve of his association with Jew-baiting⁵ dirtbags like Nick Fuentes.

But because we have better things to do with our time. We have better ways to make the world less bigoted. And because, I’m sorry, Ye’s music is too good to forgo.

Things Worth Your Time ⏰

🎵 Okorie Johnson really gets it.

🎧 Two worthwhile listens from The Dispatch universe. On Monday, Sarah Isgur and David French got deep and nerdy on a number of legal disputes around free speech. On Tuesday, Jonah Goldberg discussed America’s failure to reinvent its foreign policy with AEI’s Michael Rubin.

What We’re Working On ⏭

Can we do big tech responsibly? Can we stop lying to ourselves about our true motivations? Do banks ruin cities? We’re working on a number of interviews — with a tech ethicist, an evolutionary psychologist, and an architecture critic — which we’re aiming to publish throughout December. If all goes to plan, we might even get to enjoy our holidays.

One Last Certain Thing…

Always dress for the job you want.

why you should have a duck 🦆 @shouldhaveaduck

A duck wears a little hat.

1. Said another way: punishing a great creator for his foul actions comes at a cost to society. Sometimes the social good of meting out just punishment to the villain outweighs all other considerations (as in the case of monstrous criminals like R. Kelly). But sometimes — especially when the offense is bad speech — the cost-benefit calculus becomes less clear cut and deserves consideration.

2. I wrote this piece last night. By today the controversy ballooned further after Ye told Alex Jones that we need to stop buying the Jewish media’s slant on Hitler. Honestly, I found the whole farce part funny, part sad. It was comedic gold as an absurdist piece, but also painful to watch. The only real villains in the whole story are the people, like Jones and many others, who have been trying to either recruit Ye to their political grift or just leech off his fame at the expense of the dude’s mental health. We’ve talked previously on the pod about the sickly celebrity-obsession on the American right. Blogging royalty (and current colleague) Nick Catoggio summed this up beautifully today in his newsletter Boiling Frogs.

Uncertain Things @UncertainPod

"Five for Fighting?" 😂 @EliLake reflects on the "loneliness" of being a Republican, musically speaking. Full ep at bit.ly/3U5xbBf / apple.co/3AOAzJX

3. Several Twitter dwellers implied that we were indulging in anti-Semitism apology, but one accused the “the hosts” of straight up anti-Semitism. I chose not to repost those tweets.

4. And indeed, cancel minded mob scenes are the best way to stop the rise of Nazis, don’t you think? If only they had come up with angry crowds and speech bans back in 1930s Berlin we could have been spared the whole meshugas!

5. Can I reclaim kike?

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