Only Jewish Elvis Can Save Us Now
Put on your yarmulke, it's time for E4P's Hanukkah!!!
As of sundown last night, it’s officially Hanukkah! To celebrate, I FaceTimed my mom from my Covid isolation for about two minutes to watch her light a single candle.
Faulty immune system aside, Hanukkah is genuinely one of my favorite times of the year. But, like with all good things here at Emily For President, comes the inevitable miserable ✨context✨. With today being the first full day of Hanukkah, it’s only fitting that we talk about the rise of antisemitism in the US and with that, unfortunately, Kanye “Ye” West, racism, and conspiracy theories.
Just this past Saturday, a high school in Bethesda, Maryland was vandalized with antisemitic rhetoric in a county represented by a Jewish congressman where the population is estimated to be about 10% Jewish—worse still, it’s already the third antisemitic attack in the past week. It’s unsettling for everyone who is not a neo-Nazi to clock the uptick in blatant antisemitism but as someone who practices only the traditions of Judaism, I wanted to talk with someone more in touch with their Jewish identity. This week, Zoe Eisenstein returns to talk about all of this and more (such as who is her Hanukkah Hero).
Zoe Eisenstein is a secular Jewish girlina who doesn’t really like latkes that much and lives in Brooklyn, New York. A media planner by day and an Ina Garten-wannabe by night, Zoe loves sparkling water, kissing her dog on the top of the head, and carefully organizing her perfume collection. In the spirit of the season, Zoe’s favorite Christmas movie is The Holiday with Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Cameron Diaz, and Jack Black. If you haven’t seen it you should definitely go light a wintery scented candle and watch it.
Happy Hanukkah, Mike Pence (Derogatory)
Growing up, my parents let my siblings and me decide if we wanted to practice any religion. Our extended family is a mix of Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant, but my parents were never particularly religious and didn’t feel any of us needed to practice something that didn’t resonate spiritually. After hearing what it took for our friends to go through CCD or to prepare for their bar and bat mitzvahs, though, all three of us decided religion just seemed like too much work (while, of course, travel sports required truly no time commitment at all).
As such, religion to me is kind of a funny thing. My family and I have all developed our own belief systems—for me, that was wholeheartedly believing that Oprah was God for a number of years when I was younger because, based on what I had been told about both Oprah and God, they seemed to share the same values and practices1—and our own relationships with the various shapes organized religion takes in the world.
While I wouldn’t change this, it has inclined me personally to spend a lot of time thinking about how religion exists in others’ lives, with Judaism being a particular focus as it seems, in turn, both very progressive and very restrictive, depending on who you ask and about which part of the faith.
With that said, I wanted to launch right in by asking Zoe:
Emily: What is your relationship like with Judaism?
Zoe: Quite complicated. I am not and never have been a particularly religious person, and organized religion tends to repel me. Like many secular Jews, my parents
forced me to go tosent me to Hebrew school to learn about Jewish history and theology and let me come to a decision about my religiosity on my own. Although neither of them are religious, I think they wanted to give their children the opportunity to learn about Judaism as a religion because of our family history.My parents are both Jewish on both sides, as were all of my grandparents and so on. Both my mother’s recent ancestors and my father’s recent ancestors faced severe discrimination for their Jewish identities. Through Hebrew school, I realized that the religious elements of Judaism aren’t necessarily for me: it’s a lot about rules, and I can’t help but question the validity of rules that seem silly to me, like being forbidden to wear leather on Yom Kippur. It’s not that I need to wear leather on that particular day to make a point but like, I just do not understand how forgoing Doc Martens for a day signifies my commitment to atoning for my sins.
My identification with Judaism does not come from a religious place but rather a cultural one that is most aligned with the Ashkenazi experience. I love Jewish comedy, I love kvetching and kvelling, I love matzoh ball soup, I love knowing that I come from survivors, and I love knowing that my severe anxiety is the intergenerational thread that connects me to my ancestors.
If you’re wondering why antisemitism has felt more prevalent in the news lately, it’s because it has been more prevalent in the world lately: according to the Anti-Defamation League, 2021 saw a 34% rise in antisemitic incidents from the previous year. As the CEO of the ADL explained, “Antisemitic acts were going down in the United States for almost 15 years, and then, in 2016, they started to move up. And we're now at the point where we have nearly triple the number of incidents today that we did in 2015” (X).
I asked Zoe:
Emily: Why has antisemitism felt more prevalent in the last few years?
Zoe: When any big social movement comes to the forefront, a massive backlash is never far behind. There has been a convergence of social justice issues over the past ten or so years, probably partially due to the rise of the internet and increasing globalization.
While a lot of social movements in history have been mostly disconnected due to white supremacy’s success in dividing marginalized groups (ex. the tensions between the Civil Rights Movement and the Women’s Liberartion Movement in the mid-20th century), nowadays, a lot of people who start off caring about one particular social justice issue have easier access to resources that outline how all of these -isms are connected.
I think this is really scary to white supremacists who feel insecure about their position in society. I also think that people who want to dominate others assume that everyone else does, too, and a lot of these people believe that Jewish people want “revenge” for centuries of oppression. That’s where these insane fears of a “white genocide” come in, and that’s how the “always blame the Jews” and “international conspiracy” of it all get started. And that’s also where you see that even though many Jewish people are white, it doesn’t really matter, because white supremacy does not view us as “real” white people, but just as sneaky impostors seeking domination over the “global system,” whatever that is.
For example, the Tree of Life synagogue shooter thought that Jews were running a conspiracy to bring Muslim and South and Central American immigrants into the country. This is a person who wasn’t just antisemitic, but was a full-fledged white supremacist that subscribed to the “Jewish globalist” conspiracy theory.
One thing bigots don’t get enough credit for is having really vivid and creative imaginations. With absolutely no facts to prove them right (and often, in fact, exclusively facts that prove them wrong), they craft these elaborate stories about caravans of drug dealing criminals crossing the border between the US and Mexico, drag queens who read to children are actually a part of a Satanic lizard cabal, and Jewish people controlling every facet of life somehow.
In all honesty, this would all be so funny if people didn’t take these asinine stories as fact and use them as justification to harm the marginalized people who, in all of these fairytales, inexplicably have this outsized power in a kind of backward, delusional David and Goliath battle.
The root of all discrimination and violence perpetrated as a result of discrimination is a lack of understanding, whether that is an intentional misunderstanding or simply ignorance. In the case of antisemitism, these misunderstandings stem from your garden variety of conspiracy theories long believed to be true. As Zoe mentioned, the Tree of Life synagogue shooter subscribed to an antisemitic conspiracy theory that, like all antisemitic conspiracy theories, hinges on the notion that Jews are subversives determined to bring down every society they “infiltrate.” (Sound familiar?)
To understand why this belief is at the root of pretty much every antisemitic story, I asked Zoe:
Emily: Can you contextualize the most popular antisemitic conspiracy theories? Where have they come from and what implications do they carry today?
Zoe: A lot of antisemitic conspiracy theories that we see today are actually the same ones that have existed for thousands of years with small tweaks for the purpose of modernization. They have to keep their antisemitism in style!
All of these theories come back to power, hatred, fear, and alienation. What makes antisemitic conspiracy theories so hard to combat is that many come from a place of historical truth, but the facts are twisted by antisemites to somehow prove that Jews are plotting world domination and planning to punish white Europeans for the centuries upon centuries of violence they directed toward us.
For example, the idea that Jews control the international banking system comes from the history of banking in Medieval Europe. Capitalism was not the dominant economic system in Europe at this time—it was feudalism. Europe was deeply Christian religiously, and many European Christians genuinely believed that the Jews killed Jesus. Jews were barred from owning land in European kingdoms and could not take jobs working on farms, because kings and princes did not want Jews mixing with their people in professional or recreational settings.
But European Jews were nomadic peoples with no homeland of their own and needed to find ways to survive literally and economically. Pushed to the fringes of the economic system, Jews took riskier jobs as tavern keepers or, notably, as money lenders who risked unpaid debts and expulsion by angry mobs.
The pattern followed as such: if European principalities lacked capital, they invited Jewish money lenders into the court to lend money and stimulate economic activity. When local economies improved, princes and kings would pay Jewish money lenders back. If the local economy didn’t improve and the principality couldn’t afford to repay their debt, princes and kings would stir up antisemitism among their populations and the Jews would be expelled without ever being paid back. There was much more risk in banking back then, as it was not the relatively safe and lucrative profession it is today, and Jewish money lenders often went unpaid.
However, the same way that bakers (like my Jewish ancestors) passed their bakeries and trades down from generation to generation, Jews who banked did too. So their later ancestors were well situated to succeed when capitalism became the world’s dominant economic model. But banking was never about world domination for Jews—it was about simply surviving economically in a world where they were barred from most conventional trades.2
The “Jews Control Hollywood” conspiracy theory is really much more simple. The WASP-y upper classes of America during the Gilded Age thought of film as a tacky fad for the lower classes as it only cost a few cents to see a film. The wealthy would go to the theater or opera if they wanted to be entertained. Jews who had been involved in vaudeville saw an opportunity for economic advancement in the film industry. Although Jews did not face legal discrimination as severe as Black Americans or Asian Americans did, they had to navigate either strict quotas or outright exclusion from elite institutions such as Ivy League universities, and had to build their own networks and industries to succeed.
As a people with a legacy of storytelling and literacy, it makes total sense that we’d succeed as storytellers in film. In the same way that Dutch and English families with centuries of legacy in New York, Connecticut, and Massachusetts passed their trades and privilege down through their family trees, Jews passed down their professional networks and expertise in Hollywood.
And even though we are certainly represented in the entertainment industry, most current heads of major studios and production companies aren’t even Jewish.
Emily: What do you personally have to say to people who believe that Jews control Hollywood and the media?
Zoe: If Jews control Hollywood then why will no one give me a job on a TV show or movie? Checkmate, antisemites.
But just as Frankenstein’s monster is nothing without Frankenstein himself, every antisemitic conspiracy theory needs maladapted people with anger issues who should probably have their internet connections and phone plans severed.
And Are the Men Defending Kanye’s Musical Genius in the Face of Everything Else He’s Done in the Room With Us?
By now, I’m sure we’ve all heard Kanye “Ye” West’s recent antisemitic comments so I won’t waste our time rehashing them in detail here. What I will say is that I’m not going to cushion what he’s said recently with the defense that he is going through a mental health crisis. Plenty of celebrities have gone through mental health crises—plenty of average people go through mental health crises—without talking violently about anyone. Conflating Ye’s mental health with his racism, misogyny, and antisemitism does nothing for anyone.
With that said, I first asked Zoe:
Emily: American antisemitism is equally rooted in the paradoxical beliefs that Jews are both inherently other and conniving enough to have integrated into American society in such a way that they secretly control it. What are your thoughts on this?
Zoe: I think America now is a lot like some 19th-20th century European countries where Jews flourished and became partially integrated with the societies they lived in.
When capitalism became the dominant economic system, some Jews had the skills necessary to succeed due to the legacy of the banking trade, elevating the social stature and relative power of those few Jews. Many Jews then and now felt a false sense of security that all came crashing down when they were brutally reminded via the Dreyfus Affair, the Pogroms, and the Holocaust that we are—and under white supremacy always will be—an other.
When there is an economic downturn or some sort of social unrest that threatens the powers that be, the powerful sometimes have to sacrifice a few of their own. The Jews have always been the scapegoat for the powerful when their power is threatened. If your own power is endangered but you can deflect to someone who has some power but is seen as an other, whose social status is already more tenuous and thus can be scapegoated relatively easily (as proven by history over and over again), you are going to choose self-preservation.
Jews with money are on the fringes of power, but will always be seen as outsiders. Thus, the legacy of conspiracy theories about Jews plotting world domination + some Jews that have money = the perfect scapegoat when push comes to shove.
My mom always says, “when all else fails, they’ll blame the Jews,” and she’s always right.
Emily: What are your thoughts on Ye/Kanye West's recent antisemitic comments? Why do you think he still has a platform to make such remarks?
Zoe: Kareem Abdul Jabbar wrote some really great commentary on Kyrie Irving in his own Substack newsletter, but I think that his criticism applies to Kanye as well (and not that literally Kareem Abdul-Jabbar needs my promotion, but his Substack is fabulous, by the way):
Honestly, there’s little hope that he will change because he’s insulated by fame and money and surrounded by yes-people. There is no motivation to learn how to distinguish propaganda from facts. All that’s left is for the world to decide how it should respond to him (X).
At a certain point, if a person kind of sucks enough, I think their class and social status can supersede any sort of solidarity they have with marginalized people, regardless of whether or not they are also part of a marginalized group. I mean, hello—the Kushners!!!
To share a religious/ethnic background with people who lived in tenements and ghettos (I’m not sure if the Kushners actually did, but other American and European Jews definitely did) and then go on to become slumlords who align themselves with far-right political figures that have huge antisemitic followings is pretty awful. But unbelievable wealth and a following from people who will do anything to be around that kind of wealth is a fantastic buffer from criticism or challenges to your beliefs.
Kanye’s most loyal fans and inner circle didn’t blink an eye when he was supporting white supremacy, insulting Black women, and putting a Black writer who was brave enough to criticize his “White Lives Matter” shirts on blast, subsequently earning her death threats and challenges to her safety. As a literal billionaire who has enjoyed the privilege and security of fame for years, he didn’t think twice about the fact that his words endangered this woman’s life. He wields massive power. If those actions didn’t get him canceled, I don’t think anything will.
Not to mention that antisemitism rarely earns public figures much more than a slap on the wrist, so Kanye has been the exception so far regarding the damage done to his career. Mel Gibson acted in seven projects this year alone, and designer John Galliano heads a major fashion house (previously Dior and now Maison Margiela).
I couldn’t help thinking about how so much of Ye’s power, like that of other problematic men in this day and age, is wielded on social media and the internet at large. On the day when the January 6th Committee has recommended criminal charges be brought against former president Donald Trump for inciting the violent mob via his Twitter account, at a moment in time when teachers are expressing concerns over the changes they’re seeing in their male students as Andrew Tate’s presence continues to grow, as Elon Musk’s supporters are as desperately fervent as ever despite him truly having the Most Divorced Man Breakdown in real-time, it is no wonder forms of discrimination like antisemitism are so normalized: hate, like Alex Jones’ shitty InfoWars store, has become another commodity to influence followers to subscribe to.3
The internet is a tool for great progress and great violence, and the problem now is that the violent people are the ones who have learned how to use it best.
I asked Zoe:
Emily: Is the internet more of a resource to fight antisemitism or a space where hatred can flourish?
Zoe: I think the internet has been a great development for antisemites. For Jews? Not so much.
In my opinion, we Jews haven’t really utilized the internet as an organizing space, while antisemitic forums have been a fabulous place for antisemites to coagulate, trade and elevate conspiracy theories, and re-popularize the Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a counterfactual, conspiracy-riddled antisemitic text written in imperial Russia in 1903 with “evidence” that Jews were plotting world domination pulled from satire magazines, fictional plays, and antisemitic political cartoons.
I would actually argue that the internet makes antisemitism more difficult to fight. First, there is the lack of face-to-face interaction: these antisemites literally do not have to see Jewish people as humans when they are just staring at a screen and inhaling garbage without actually hearing from or seeing real Jewish people in front of them. Once antisemites have gotten to a point where they have stopped acknowledging Jews as members of the human species, Jews face the lose-lose situation of combating internet antisemitism.
If you attempt to report antisemitic activity to site moderators and successfully get it removed, then you just confirm antisemites’ belief that Jews control all media and are trying to silence “the truth,” possibly emboldening them further. But if you do nothing when you see antisemitism online, then you’re just allowing these people to continue spreading their garbage far and wide without any challenge to their beliefs whatsoever. That’s what makes antisemitism such a difficult form of discrimination to fight: you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t.
In my opinion, the only solution is real education that invalidates these peoples’ beliefs beyond repair, and I think historically situating popular antisemitic conspiracy theories is a huge step in the right direction. I didn’t know a single thing about the history of antisemitic conspiracies until listening to an episode of the Binchtopia podcast in which a historian discusses one of my previous answers in much more detail.
Thinking about all of this together, it’s not surprising that the Venn diagram of discrimination frequently overlaps with racism and antisemitism. We have two recent examples—the Tree of Life synagogue shooting and the Buffalo supermarket shooting—in which the motivation for violence was a combination of racism and antisemitism.
What’s interesting (said, of course, with a sense of tragic irony) is how combating these two forms of discrimination is regularly seen as two separate—and competing— battles when it is, in many ways, the same fight. The history of the relationship between Black and Jewish Americans is a wide-spanning and complex one and therefore something that, you guessed it, is too big for us to cover entirely here today, but Zoe did a great job of summing up the central tension when I asked:
Emily: What roles do you think race and white supremacy play in American Judaism?
Zoe: Racism and white supremacy are a lot like viruses—there are different variants of the same disease. One complicating factor in this equation is the fact that the American version of white supremacy and racism is very different from the racisms and white supremacies that exist in other places.
American racism is very situated in the history of slavery, Jim Crow, eugenics, and appearance-related differences between races, but while European-rooted antisemitism has elements of that (see: every Nazi propaganda cartoon with a “hook-nosed Jew”), it is more rooted in this fear of a culturally-different impostor who they believe killed Jesus and wants to destroy all of Christendom and drink the blood of blonde Christian children.
There is no question that anti-Black racism is a far more dominant form of white supremacy in the United States than antisemitism is. Although white American Jews have faced significant barriers to success in the United States, I do not think our struggles in America can compare to the violence and constant threat of violence that Black people encounter here.
Whereas a Black person cannot hide their marginalized identity—leaving them constantly vulnerable to the American brand of white supremacy—Jews are seen as sneaky impostors who are always white and always want to hide their Jewish identity by assimilating and “tricking” unsuspecting, European-rooted white people in order to achieve world domination. This form of white supremacy is how we ended up victims of genocide: Europeans feared that Jews were assimilating too much and acquiring too much power, and wanted us to know that we are not part of the in-group even if we are physically indistinguishable.
I can understand how American people may not see antisemitism as a form of white supremacy since the kind of racism that they have seen in America uniquely targets Black and Brown people. If a Black person and a white, secular Jewish person walk into a convenience store, the Black person is going to be the one who is racially profiled. I do, however, think it is important not to view these forms of white supremacy as mutually exclusive. To do so would invalidate the identities and experiences of Black and Brown Jews, whether they are Ashkenazi, Mizrahi, Beta-Israel, or Sephardic.
But that’s the huge problem with white supremacy at large, pitting marginalized groups against one another and positioning these forms of hatred as wholly distinct: not only does it inhibit solidarity, it leaves no place for people whose identities cross these boundaries.
To emphasize Zoe’s point, I feel compelled to add a video from someone person who has become a part of the Kanye Multiverse:
Tiktok failed to load.Enable 3rd party cookies or use another browser
In the comment section of this post, one user writes, “She explained xenophobia.” Another writes, “The fact that this seemingly ridiculous conversation is totally true is actually terrifying…” And a third user, inadvertently hitting the nail on the head, asks, “Why in the United States are they so OBSESSED with the race of the people?”
By casting everyone into ethnic or racial groups, it is then easier to pit any identity that deviates from the white supremacist hegemony against another, keeping the fighting away from the minuscule elite at the top. The goal, which has succeeded for so long in America, is to drive everyone to become so preoccupied with our most privileged identity in the hopes of reaching the pinnacle of the social hierarchy that we often act against our own self-interest.
That is why the United States is so OBSESSED with the race of the people: if we weren’t, we would clearly see how all of white supremacy is nothing more than a bigot’s backward, delusional David and Goliath fairytale and we would wonder why we spent so much time fighting one another instead.
As a Wise Man Once Said, “Put on Your Yarmulke. It’s Time For Hanukkah.”
There’s no real positive ending here today—save for remembering Zoe’s conclusion that the best way to negate antisemitism is to take the history the hateful conspiracy theories are rooted in and flip the narratives on their heads. While it’s great that President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland said this week that hate (and antisemitism in particular) has “no safe harbor in America,” that’s not really true. Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (of Jewish Space Laser fame) handily won her re-election this year, Kanye’s Twitter account was restored by whatever Elon Musk is to the platform now, and again, there have already been at least three reported antisemitic acts in the past week.
If we’ve learned nothing from all of this (see: the general E4P archive), it’s that in America, hate has a safe harbor, a safe house, a safe college education, a safe elected office, a safe shot with a safe gun, and a safe forum on the internet. But as bleak as this all is, I never want to end on a pessimistic note, especially today since it is the last E4P installment of the year.
I never set out to fix the world’s problems with this little newsletter—I just wanted any excuse to be aggressively nosy and talk about history in a way that makes 1.5 people laugh each week. So with that in mind, I asked Zoe:
Emily: Who is your Hanukkah Hero? Mine are the Haim sisters.
Zoe: Jewish Elvis but also Sarah Michelle Gellar.
Thank you a billion to Zoe for all of her gorgina insightful answers which stemmed from a call that accidentally ran for an hour and a half!!!
Thank you to all of YOU for a fantastic year of E4P!!! Have a great two weeks off from my voice, and I’ll see you in January!
I was also a practicing Buddhist for a year in high school but that’s another story for another time.
“Also sorry that the words baking and banking are so similar phonetically—I am talking about two different jobs here.”
I know I could make a dig about Team Pick-Me’s Karen Captain Marjorie Taylor Greene and her blatant antisemitism, but unpacking all of that could be its own E4P.