The Stiffening Spines of American Jews

Macklemore, an anti-Israel rapper who once wore a fake hooked nose on stage while dressed like an anti-Semitic Jewish caricature, was dropped as the opening act for Ed Sheeran’s tour. The important part of the story, however, is what came after that. First, a brief recap of the drama. Macklemore has enthusiastically jumped on the “Palestine means relevance” bandwagon and sought to rebrand his public persona accordingly. Even before Israel’s incursion into Gaza in response to the Hamas invasion and slaughter of innocents, Macklemore accused Israel of “genocide.” He repeated the Big Lie at every opportunity. Then he wrote a song in which he proclaimed Israel’s existence as an injustice that needs to be corrected. Were Macklemore’s dream to come true, millions of Jews would be murdered and the rest banished from their homes. Many Jews did not find this charming, but Macklemore’s core audience ate it up. Then recently, he was asked to be the opening act for Ed Sheeran, who plays a very different kind of music from Macklemore and doesn’t share Macklemore’s genocidal feelings toward Jews. Opening for the artist that the fans actually come to see can be tricky; it’s important that openers avoid making the shows all about themselves. For Macklemore, that would’ve meant maybe dropping the Hamas propaganda. Macklemore didn’t want to adjust. So for a couple of shows, he let the Jews have it. This put Sheeran in a difficult position. An upcoming show on the tour, however, was scheduled to take place at a venue owned by Robert Kraft, the New England Patriots owner who has directed a fair amount of his philanthropy toward combating anti-Semitism. Kraft didn’t want Macklemore using his venue to incite against Jews, so he told Sheeran to get a new opener. One more detail: The artist Pink, who is Jewish, reposted a social-media post criticizing Macklemore for turning Sheeran’s shows into anti-Zionist war-porn spectacles. Pink took some heat for this online. After Sheeran decolonized his tour and liberated his fans from Macklemore’s occupation, Macklemore responded exactly as expected: He and his fans and his defenders pretended he was being fired for simply supporting Palestinian rights. It is at this point that Jewish advocates usually recede into the background and let the anti-Semites spin the incident as one in which they just said some nice “pro-Palestinian” stuff and then the oversensitive Jews came along and ruined everybody’s fun. But this time the Jewish figures involved didn’t recede. They didn’t let themselves get smeared as “anti-Palestinian,” because they are not. They had specific objections to what Macklemore had said and done, and they were happy to explain those objections in detail. “This decision is not about diminishing the suffering of innocent Palestinians or denying anyone the right to advocate on their behalf. Their pain and loss are real,” Kraft said. “But that advocacy should not come at the expense of the Jewish community.” He then said something that is obviously true but to which Macklemore and his wider movement don’t subscribe: “Standing with the Palestinian people and standing against Hamas, antisemitism and hate should not be mutually exclusive.” I suspect that, somewhere deep in their hearts, Macklemore and his fans understand this. Otherwise they wouldn’t obscure what Macklemore actually says and does behind self-pitying platitudes. They would just own it. For her part, Pink knocked Macklemore for trying to dictate what Jews think: “he stood in front of a stadium full of music-loving families, with violent images from a war on the screens, dedicated a song to the movement of his choice, and then took the mic to tell all of the Jews in the stadium that it wasn’t about them. You don’t get to decide that for us.” Pink also added this: “Protecting innocent life comes first, everywhere, and nobody should ever celebrate the death of a child. Anybody’s child. I’ve spent a decade as a UNICEF ambassador for kids who didn’t choose the country or the war they were born into, and I have grieved every one of them, on both sides of that fence. I didn’t do it from behind a screen; I went to those children and held them. I’m not going to litigate a complex war in an Instagram caption, and I’m not going to recite anybody’s slogan to earn back a follower.” Which is why I hope American Jews continue following this story after the headline-making part of it. Because there’s an important lesson here: You don’t have to let self-pitying anti-Semites lie about you. The Mideast discourse desperately needs more truth and more spine, and neither are going to come from the Macklemores of the world.