Jon Danforth-Appell was walking his dog in his Los Angeles neighborhood one Thursday in October when the weight of the past few weeks pressed down upon him.
For Jewish people with his politically leftward leanings, recent antisemitic remarks by Kanye West and subsequently emboldened white nationalists had bubbled up frustration with mainstream Jewish organizations — groups that drove fundraising dollars in the wake of incidents targeting Los Angeles Jews.
But the negative portrayals of Jewish people throughout the ages — a “shapeless form,” Danforth-Appell described, in which Jews are conceived of as both poor and rich, powerful and needy, communist and capitalist, not so much a people as representations of something oppressive and invincible — left him feeling bleak.
“It’s really upsetting, and it’s scary, and we’re in the shadow of the Holocaust, where survivors are still alive,” Danforth-Appell, who sits on the board of his local LA Jewish community center, said.
American Jews, he said, live in an age where their nationality is reflected as “American” and not “Jewish,” as his grandfather’s paperwork read. “And at the same time, synagogues could be shot up; the JCC I was a part of growing up was tagged with swastikas. Kanye can say the most demented s*** in an interview, and Tucker Carlson will just edit out the Jewish parts.”
Danforth-Appell was referring to unaired footage obtained by Vice from a recent interview between the rapper and right-wing television host.
It’s a time of heightened alert for Los Angeles’s Jewish population – like in many Jewish communities across the country – and reactions are mixed. While some are calling to strengthen coalitions, others are demanding that non-Jewish allies go all-in on support and denounce other allegedly anti-Jewish views. It’s also a question of philosophy: is antisemitism lurking as part of the natural order, or is it a tool deployed to sow discord?
“Ultimately, what it comes down to is fear,” Danforth-Appell said, adding that while white nationalists try to provoke, he’s trying to be realistic. “I think of antisemitism, things like racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, misogyny — it’s all deeply connected to antisemitism. It all just has different functions.”
It’s been less than a month since Ye, the artist formerly known as Kanye West, sparked an antisemitic brushfire that consumed his personal and professional life.
On Oct. 5, shortly after attending his Paris Fashion Week event in a White Lives Matter shirt, Ye suggested that rapper-turned-media-mogul Sean “Puffy” Combs was being controlled by Jewish people — the first in a wave of statements, which included a promise to go “death con 3 on JEWISH PEOPLE,” as well as complaints that Jewish people conspired to have him diagnosed with mental illness. Ye was reportedly diagnosed with bipolar disorder, a mental illness which "causes unusual shifts in mood, energy, activity levels, concentration, and the ability to carry out day-to-day tasks," according to the National Institutes of Health.
Soon after, during a podcast interview on Oct. 18, Ye said: "I can say antisemitic things, and Adidas can’t drop me. Now what?” Ye’s major brand partnerships with Ye dissolved in short order, including that wildly profitable deal with athletics manufacturer Adidas, which Forbes estimates accounts for about $1.5 billion of his net worth.
But his comments appeared to embolden a wave of antisemitic hatred in Los Angeles, specifically around pockets of Jewish neighborhoods.
The weekend of Oct. 23, a group of white nationalists took to an overpass above the 405 Freeway in Los Angeles, hanging banners reading “Kanye is right about the Jews” and performing Nazi salutes. That same weekend, fliers with antisemitic propaganda were found on lawns, doorsteps and cars of Jewish people in Beverly Hills and Los Angeles’ Westwood neighborhood.
The fliers were part of an ongoing trend — twice last winter, and again in April, similar fliers popped up on doorsteps and lawns in LA’s Westside Jewish neighborhoods. Each flyer, placed in plastic sandwich bags and weighed down with rocks or sand, included similar antisemitic tropes baselessly linking the Jewish people to the COVID-19 pandemic, control of the media and government and other false claims.
The flyers have been found in states from coast to coast.
'A responsibility to speak out'
According to LA Holocaust Museum CEO Beth Kean, Holocaust survivors whom she knows — and who regularly speak in museum events — find this all very familiar. They hear the hate and the stereotypes, and they can’t help but flash back to the 1930s.
“There are so few Jews around the world," Kean said, noting that while "less than one percent of the world’s population is Jewish," there are a disproportionate amount of antisemitic hate crimes. A report from California State University San Bernardino released in August 2022, found that anti-Jewish hate crimes in Los Angeles rose by 82% between 2020 and 2021.
“When someone like Kanye, a powerful person, a huge celebrity with huge influence, starts speaking out against Jews and spewing lies … his comments are perpetuating dangerous stereotypes.”
Ye’s rhetoric, Kean said, sticks in the heads of his followers and fans, and those stereotypes and conspiracy theories can lead to persecution and violence. His words matter — they have consequences, and that kind of unfettered rhetoric can lead to calamity.
“We know, from evidence, that the Holocaust started with words,” she said. Holocaust survivors are first-hand evidence that Jewish people were persecuted for their faith and their history as a people. They wear that evidence on their skin, with prison camp serial numbers tattooed onto them, and in their souls, after witnessing their loved ones being marched into gas chambers.
Which is why the museum reached out to Ye, inviting him to come to the museum and speak with a survivor — to learn about the Shoah from those who suffered, first-hand.
In an interview, Ye seemingly referred to the invitation – and rejected it.
"We are still in the Holocaust," he said. "A Jewish friend of mine said, ‘Go visit the Holocaust Museum,’ and my response was, let’s visit our Holocaust Museum: Planned Parenthood," before going on to espouse false conspiracy theories about abortion.
It was reported soon after that the Holocaust Museum was itself the target of hate speech following Ye’s statement.
Kean said that she’s “trying to figure out how to be positive” in the midst of what Jewish people are facing. The museum is currently working to double its footprint within its home base of LA’s Pan-Pacific Park, and building a series of ambitious tech-heavy programs, including augmented reality and interactive holograms, to ensure Holocaust survivors’ words live past their deaths.
When asked how best Los Angeles can move forward, she called back to history, from Jewish Freedom Riders during the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s to the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020.
“Jewish people are the first to show up when another group is marginalized…so Jews shouldn’t be the only ones speaking out when they’re being targeted,” Kean said, stressing the importance of leaders from Black, Asian and Hispanic coalitions in calling out for Jewish friends and neighbors.
“We can’t rest. Any time someone with power like Kanye speaks out, we have a responsibility to speak out and call someone like that out,” Kean said.
'We're not accepting scraps'
Scottish-born Ben Freeman was a young man when he felt overt antisemitism — though he prefers to call it “Jew-hatred,” noting that the term “antisemitism” was coined and popularized by German agitators who sought to make Jewish hatred seem more rational and reasoned. His experiences at university, he claimed, amounted to “four years of abuse from my peers and my professors.”
In recent years, Freeman has authored a pair of books, “Jewish Pride,” and “Reclaiming Our Story,” both about the notion of advocating for the Jewish people to rebuild a strong cultural identity. The idea is to push back against what he sees as the Western cultural default: antipathy against Jewish people.
“Growing up in a post-Holocaust world, in some ways people are experiencing this for the frist time,” Freeman said. Antisemitism had been on the fringes of society, never quite going away, often bubbling under the surface — and Ye’s recent rants have contributed to renormalization of Jewish hatred, he claims.
Freeman recently spoke at the LA Holocaust Museum as part of a tour supporting his recent book release, seated in a gallery telling stories of Jewish liberation in the twilight of World War II. That night, Freeman made clear to the audience that his appearance choices, from the kippah (otherwise known as a yarmulke) atop his head to the magen (or Star of David) he wears around his neck are beacons of his Jewish pride.
“There is a vulnerability to being visibly Jewish in the world…I’m vulnerable in certain circumstances, because I’m marking myself as a Jew,” Freeman said. “The tragedy is, Jew hatred is not counted. Jews are not counted. Our experience isn’t felt to be relevant.”
And yet, to Freeman, celebrities and private people who have spoken out against Ye’s antisemitism don’t necessarily count as allies. Freeman believes that celebrities who have spoken out against antisemitic speech, but have taken stances against Israeli policy decisions, are hypocrites holding Israel, and the Jewish people, to an unfair double-standard.
“It’s easy to call Kanye out, because what he said was quite outrageous, and it’s easy to call out when a child carves a swastika into a school desk,” Freeman said. “It’s less easy when people are demonizing Jews in Israel.”
Freeman says that he’s not being combative by questioning how celebrities will proceed with their support, and insistent that Jewish people should not just accept “easy” callouts. “We’re not accepting scraps, we’re not going to be grateful to people who never talk about the Jewish experience,” Freeman said. “We deserve better and we should demand it.”
A community alliance
Rabbi Aryeh Cohen, a professor of rabbinical studies at American Jewish University, at first didn’t see a point to Ye’s anti-Jewish statements.
“I dismissed it. It was terrible and awful, but I thought it would die out,” Cohen told Spectrum News. He’s long been of the mind that antisemitism is often used as a means to an end — one that, in recent years, has been used by politicians seeking to divide the public. “But Pastor Cue, he said that we have to say something about this.”
Cohen, as a leader within the Jewish justice organization Bend the Arc, works closely with Pastor Stephen “Cue” Jn-Marie in the Black-Jewish Justice Alliance, a program of Clergy and Laity United for Economic Justice, or CLUE.
The BJJA last week issued a statement of solidarity, condemning Ye’s anti-Jewish remarks.
“The scriptures declare that to whom much is given much is required. Therefore, given that Kanye West has such a large platform and can influence so many people, he must be held accountable for emboldening White Supremacy,” the statement read.
The statement came amid a moment of growing tension among the Black and Jewish communities. Around Oct. 27, in now-deleted social media posts, NBA star Kyrie Irving shared links to a film full of antisemitic tropes reportedly aligned with extremist sects of the Black Hebrew Israelite movement. Members of the movement generally believe that they are the true descendants of the ancient Israelites; the movement is unrelated to the mainstream Jewish community, including Black Jewish people and other Jews of color.
The BJJA's statement is a call for unity in a moment when online discourse — in part driven by Ye's extremist Black Hebrew-styled assertion in a recent podcast interview that he's "Jew, not Jewish" — is pitting Black people against Jewish people.
“In the context of capitalism and colonialism, there’s always going to be a struggle to survive for different groups of people,” Jn-Marie told Spectrum News.
“But these tensions are not there because Black folks and Jewish folks hate each other. If that were the case, Goodman and Schwerner and Chaney wouldn’t have been murdered for riding with Black folks,” he said, referring to James Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, three men who were killed in 1964 while working to register voters among Black Mississippians; Chaney was Black, Goodman and Schwerner were Jewish.
“There’s a tension, but there’s also an understanding, because Jewish people have been oppressed themselves. There’s always a relationship, and the BJJA is built on that.” Jn-Marie said.
Finding unity and solidarity, Cohen said, is the key to moving forward. “I think that is ultimately the answer to hatred of all kinds: Communities standing together with one another.”
The jumping-off point to an online spectacle
The thing about Ye’s antisemitic rhetoric, Jon Danforth-Appell said, is that he’s become a man no longer worth taking seriously.
“But to see [white nationalists] take up space and use it as a jumping-off point…that was really upsetting and scary to see the [demonstration] on the 405. It brings home that Kanye, the person, is a goof, but Kanye the billionaire with a platform getting primetime interview spots on Tucker Carlson, that person is incredibly dangerous,” he said.
A common thought offered by many of the sources spoken to for this article is that antisemitic behavior and Jewish hatred is a tool of a larger societal machine — of racism and white nationalism, borne from fear of a diverse, heterogeneous nation.
Robert Bowers, the suspect in the deadly Tree of Life Synagogue mass shooting in Pittsburgh that took place little more than four years ago, used his far-right social media accounts to spread white nationalist conspiracy theories of diversity-driven “white genocide.” The 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., was marked by marchers waving Nazi symbols, shouting Nazi-friendly slogans like “Blood and Soil” and “Jews will not replace us!”
“The [white nationalist] stuff is scary as something much larger and much scarier, this kind of public-facing expression of stuff that’s always been there but has been in the shadows,” Danforth-Appell said.
What Ye ultimately did was create an online spectacle — one that white nationalists will be dining out on for as long as possible. That's why their fliers, and the banners dropped over LA's 405 freeway, included URLs and QR codes to sites with videos so hate-filled and antisemitic that they can't live on other platforms, like YouTube. That's why the photos and videos of those anti-semites spread as quickly as they did: It was all part of their show.
“[The white nationalists] knew that all they had to do was get to one bridge, and that’d be more powerful than going on 10,” Danforth-Appell said.