Forty years of anti-Semitism didn’t prepare me for Kanye West

This is the way minorities have felt for generations. Don’t make a fuss. It’ll only lead to backlash and further prejudice. Just be unimpeachable.

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There are notable exceptions, of course. On Sunday, comedian Sacha Baron Cohen revived his retired alter-ego, Borat, the vulgar and oblivious Kazakh TV journalist, and roasted West and Donald Trump. “It not fair,” he said at the Kennedy Center Honours, an annual event in Washington DC that pays tribute to American artists. “Kazakhstan is number one Jew-crushing nation … Your Kanye, he tried to move to Kazakhstan and even changed his name to Kazakhstanye West. But we said: ‘No, he too anti-Semitic, even for us.’” (Baron Cohen, who delivered his roast in front of President Joe Biden, Vice-President Kamala Harris, Julia Roberts and Patti LaBelle, among others, is Jewish.)

Comedian Sarah Silverman and Jessica Seinfeld, the cookbook author and wife of comedian Jerry Seinfeld, have also spoken out on social media.

Now I can’t stay silent anymore. Regardless of what stereotypes people might now throw my way. Because Ye’s statements – including his since-deleted statement on Twitter in October that the Jews had “toyed with me” and he would be “going death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE” – have felt more threatening than any others I’ve ever heard before.

It’s not that he’s famous. The famous have been there, and done that. (To see the tip of the iceberg, Google: Christian Dior designer John Galliano and his rant towards a “f—ing ugly Jewish bitch” in 2011, or Mel Gibson ranting that “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world” in 2006.)

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It’s Ye’s reach: 18.5 million followers on Instagram alone. Some of his many followers have already picked up his message and run with it. “Kanye was right about the Jews,” read a digital sign on the exterior of a football stadium in Florida, in October. Another anti-Semitic group hung a banner with the same message over a busy Los Angeles freeway the same month. ”Honk if you know,” read an additional banner next to it, in front of a group of people raising their arms in a Nazi salute.

For the first time in my life, I feel uncomfortably close to the childhood my late father used to tell me about in Toronto in the 1950s, when signs near the main beach still read: “No Dogs Or Jews Allowed.” I used to hear this story and think it was an archaic fact; horrible, but fascinating and distant. Like, say, the Salem witch trials. It wouldn’t happen again.

But now, with Ye’s comments and as hate speech grows on Twitter in the wake of Elon Musk’s ownership of the company, I’m not nearly so confident. I worry about the world my three children are growing up in. Yes, I live in Sydney now. But evidence has emerged of a recent rise in anti-Semitism in schools in our eastern suburbs.

Words matter. We saw that with Donald Trump encouraging attacks on the Capitol Building in January last year.

We know hate speech is often the precursor to violence. Whether that’s in Cambodia in the 1970s where the Khmer Rouge murdered up to three million people, during the Holocaust, where six million Jews were murdered, or in the US four years ago, when a man who asserted “I just want to kill Jews” murdered 11 people at a synagogue. Or in New Zealand, where 51 Muslims were murdered in two mosque attacks in 2019, or here, where Indigenous Australians continue to die in increasing numbers in custody and suffer the devastating mental and physical fall-out from prejudice.

In my experience, many Australians have a hard time discussing racism. They just don’t want to do it. (While I’ve shied away from discussing anti-Semitism, I’ve more successfully spoken out against the discrimination of other groups.) But it’s more crucial than ever that we do.

So, please learn from my mistakes, and speak out when you hear someone – anyone – being discriminated against. Join me in trying to become more like the thriving sub-Reddit community, with 721,000 members from various religions and cultural backgrounds, which has turned its one-time Kanye West fan club into a Holocaust awareness forum. We just might change the world, one interaction at a time.

Samantha Selinger-Morris is a lifestyle writer for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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