On the very day that Jews around the world had to witness three Israeli hostages liberated from the Holocaust of Hamas tunnels emaciated beyond recognition, Kanye West, in an absurdly boastful way, asserts his self-identification as a Nazi and professes his love for Hitler. He then harkens back to when the Jews were slaves in Egypt claiming that one should “make your Jews work for you but watch them as close as you can whip the Jews.”
At what point did the world decide that the worst genocide in Jewish history was fair game to become a spectacle for a global audience? From the hellscape of the Hamas staged hostage humiliation parades to Kanye’s captive 21M followers who gave his antisemitic vitriol proud likes, Jewish suffering has once again become an accepted, if not condoned reality in the year 2025. From the tacit compliance of the Red Cross to the silence of global world leaders as the hostages are liberated in varying degrees of atrophied physical condition, the world has yet again come to accept Jewish suffering as a sign of the times unworthy of protest let alone outrage.
We may never know what series of life’s disappointments have led Kanye to sell T-shirts embossed with swastikas on his website and to flood his social media with the worst of antisemitic tropes. Yet what we do know is that his hate-filled diatribes won’t derail the Black-Jewish alliance that has been forged in this country over decades of solidarity and evidenced in the documentary film “You Will Not Replace Us” by USC filmmakers Josh Greene and Luke Harris. Nor will his rants undercut the vital connection between the Jewish people and their ancestral homeland despite his calls to return us to slavery.
We may never know what led Kanye to sell swastika T-shirts on his website and flood his social media with antisemitic tropes. Yet what we do know is that this won’t derail the Black-Jewish alliance that has been forged in this country over decades of solidarity.
Ironically, the most fervent of Holocaust deniers and antisemites in the academy only serve to strengthen the Jewish identity of the people they seek to marginalize. History has not been kind to empires that have subjected the Jewish people to violence and antisemitism. From the Greeks to the Nazis, no empire predicated on the eradication of the Jewish people has survived no matter how strong their militaries were and how dogmatically their leaders ruled. We are experiencing a very painful collective moment as a people where Holocaust imagery and reference are rendered a mockery. Absent any major consequence, this climate will only get worse.
Unfortunately, antisemitism has been a harsh reality of Jewish life for generations. Yet unlike pre-Holocaust Europe, the existence of the State of Israel today assures us that despite the many challenges we face as a nation, we will always have a home—a haven against the hate that we continue to experience across the world.
Antisemitism is not a winning strategy—Kanye should ask Mel Gibson how well it worked out for him. It is my hope that Kanye will have his come to “Yeezus” moment where he is able to reflect on the pain points in his life for which he is so erroneously scapegoating the Jews. Perhaps he should dust off his photo album from his trip to Jerusalem in 2015 with his then-wife Kim Kardashian and remember that Israel is the only country in the Middle East that guarantees civil liberties to all of its citizens. Or perhaps he will recall that Israel is the only country in the Middle East where members of the LGBTQ+ community can live in freedom without persecution or even death.
Or perhaps at some point he may even muster the intellectual integrity to visit the Holocaust Museum of Los Angeles where he would receive an education on the dangers of hate speech and the direct link between calls for genocide and the death camps.
In either case, one might suggest that his album from his trip to Israel would make for more tasteful conversation than his photos from this year’s Grammy awards. Until then, we are keenly reminded of why Israel has two memorial days—Yom Hazikaron, where we commemorate our fallen soldiers to remind us of the cost of having a Jewish state and Yom Hashoah, or Holocaust Remembrance Day, to remind us of the cost of not having a Jewish state at all.
Lisa Ansell is the Associate Director of the USC Casden Institute and Lecturer of Hebrew Language at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion Los Angeles.
