Are We Still Comfortably Numb?

Every morning I drive my kids to school in my beat-up Ford Focus. I put on the classic rock station because someone in this family needs to give them a proper music education. Usually it is Led Zeppelin, Guns N’ Roses, Dire Straits, Queen. Every so often, though, a Pink Floyd song comes on, usually “Comfortably Numb,” and I let it play. I know Roger Waters is a vicious antisemite. And yet there I am, pulling into the drop-off lane at our Jewish day school, windows down, Pink Floyd on the radio. His rancid opinions are his problem. I refuse to let them become mine. That is not a political statement, and it is not a boycott. It is simply how I move through the world.

I thought about that while reading Hen Mazzig’s sharp essay on the Kanye West saga, prompted by the U.K. government’s decision to ban Kanye from entering the country and the subsequent cancellation of his Wireless Festival appearances. Mazzig’s argument is brutal in its simplicity: Kanye’s apologies were never really about teshuva. No serious recognition of harm was being offered. What this latest episode revealed instead was a pattern. Antisemitism, then apology, then platform, then profit, then repeat. Each time he needed his way back in, Jewish leaders were handed a meeting request and asked to treat it as sincere. Mazzig called it a sound check, and the metaphor is exact. In a sound check, the music is not really the point; the point is to see whether the system still works. The Jews were not the point here either. We were the test. Now that we know this, the real question is no longer about Kanye. It is about us.

What is harder to admit is that we should have learned this in December 2023, when Kanye posted an apology in Hebrew just weeks after Oct. 7. The ADL called it a first step. Jewish institutions, still raw from the worst massacre of Jews since the Holocaust, treated the gesture as sincere and let him back into the building. That was not compassion. It was an old Jewish reflex operating at full force precisely when we could least afford it.

Melvin Benn, the Wireless organizer who invited Kanye, published statement after statement casting himself as a man of forgiveness, taking Kanye at his word and asking the public to extend hope and grace. He does not get to do that. Forgiving someone on behalf of a community that is not yours, for hatred that was not directed at you, while your business stands to profit from the performance, is not forgiveness. It is opportunism dressed up as virtue.

More than that, Benn’s argument only works if antisemitism is treated as a general social problem rather than a specific wound inflicted on a specific people. “Never again” carries moral weight precisely because it happened to a particular people in a particular way. That particularity must not be blurred. But neither should antisemitism be treated as if its significance ends with the Jews it targets. Jews get to decide when repentance is real and when forgiveness is warranted, not because we are tribal or vindictive, but because dignity begins with sovereignty over your own wound. When Kanye offered to meet with British Jewish leaders, they understood this instinctively. Cancel first. Then we talk.

Even PM Keir Starmer’s statement after the ban captured the tension without fully resolving it. “This government stands firmly with the Jewish community,” he said, before adding that it would also act to “protect the public and uphold our values.” Both are true, but they are not the same, and the order matters. Antisemitism targets Jews specifically, but it never stops there. It is often the first visible sign of a deeper social sickness. A society that sees it only as a matter of standing with one minority community has not yet fully learned the lesson.

That is what the Wireless episode asks of us, individually as much as communally. The British Jewish community held the line institutionally. What does it mean for each of us to hold it personally? It means recognizing that there is no acceptable context for hatred of Jews. Not “I mean Zionists, not Jews.” Not the familiar maneuver by which obvious antisemitism is repackaged as “criticism of Israel,” as though that alone settles the matter. Not the carefully packaged antisemitism that arrives in political language and asks us to parse it charitably on its own terms. Someone who says something hateful about Jews, or uses antisemitism as a tool, does not get to walk it back with a meeting request or a Hebrew Instagram post. They do not get the benefit of our anxiety to be fair, our discomfort with conflict, or our inherited habit of making ourselves legible and sympathetic to people who have already told us who they are. Internalized sovereignty means something simpler and harder. When someone shows you who they are, believe them. Not because you are angry or tribal, but because you have finally stopped auditioning for the role of the reasonable Jew.

The sound check is over. The British Jewish community held its ground, the government treated antisemitism as a civilizational line rather than a private Jewish grievance, and a festival built around a man who recorded “Heil Hitler” was canceled. None of that should be treated as exceptional. It is the baseline. The real question is whether we are still comfortably numb, whether the next time this happens we will turn to parsing nuance, extending the benefit of the doubt, and auditioning once again for the role of the reasonable Jew. The Wireless episode gave us a glimpse of what it looks like when we do not. The question now is whether we are finally ready to make that the rule rather than the exception.

Rabbi Amitai Fraiman is the Founding Director of the Z3 Project at the Oshman Family JCC in Palo Alto.