Kanye West, Whoopie Goldberg and the Growing Anti-Jewish Movement in Black America

Americans and people worldwide are calling for Adidas to end its working relationship with Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, in response to the numerous offensive and antisemitic remarks the rapper has made in recent weeks. West has faced some consequences for his comments: Both Twitter and Instagram have restricted his accounts (now he says he plans to purchase far-right-friendly social media site Parler), and Balenciaga fashion house is reportedly cutting ties with him. Prominent Hollywood agency CAA, which has represented Kanye West since 2016, ended its relationship with him this month. Additionally, more than 150,000 people have signed a petition urging Adidas to cut ties with Kanye West. (Note: A day after the petition was launched, Adidis seems to have ended their relationship with West.)

What Did Kanye West Say?

Beginning in early October of 2022, Kanye West went on a spree of public appearances and interviews in which he spouted anti-semitic rhetoric.

• On Oct. 7, West was restricted on Instagram for violating the app’s policies after he posts a screenshot of a text conversation he had with Sean “Diddy” Combs in which he said he was going to use Combs “as an example to show the Jewish people that told you to call me that no one can threaten or influence me” — which the American Jewish Committee said invoked “tropes like greed and control” about Jewish people.

• On Oct. 9, West claimed on Twitter that he is going to go “death con 3 on Jewish people,” an apparent misspelling of “defcon,” and says it was not anti-semitic for him to say so because “black people are actually Jew also”. His account was locked by the social media platform.

• On Oct. 11, Vice leaked footage from West’s interview with Tucker Carlson that was edited out of the broadcast, including him saying the term “Jew” refers to the “the 12 lost tribes of Judah … who the people known as the race Black really are” — a belief which the Anti-Defamation League says stems from the Black Hebrew Israelite movement. West also falsely said Planned Parenthood was founded to “control the Jew population.”

• On Oct. 17, in an interview with Chris Cuomo, West talked about the “Jewish underground media mafia” and says his “death con 3” remarks referred to when “Black musicians signed to Jewish record labels and those Jewish record labels take ownership,” a form of “modern day slavery”. The ADL says his remarks use “age-old anti-Semitic myths about Jewish greed and power and control of the entertainment industry.”

• On Oct. 19, On Piers Morgan Uncensored, after saying he did not regret his anti-Jewish remarks, West apologized to “the people that I hurt with the ‘death con’” comment and to “the families of the people that had nothing to do with the trauma that I have been through.”

Earlier this year, Whoopie Goldberg got into hot water for her comments on the Holocaust, in which she proclaimed that the Holocaust “was about man’s inhumanity to man” and “not about race.” When one of her co-hosts challenged that assertion, saying the Holocaust was driven by white supremacy, Ms. Goldberg said, “But these are two white groups of people.” Ms. Goldberg is clearly either a Holocaust revisionist of the worst kind, or simply historically ignorant: The Final Solution was the official Nazi plan to murder Jews in Europe.

Whoopie Goldberg was off of her show for one week, but her apology was not sincere, and the incident was largely forgotten.


Growing Antisemitism in America’s Black Communities

To those who have been monitoring antisemitism in the U.S. for more than a single year period, it is not particularly surprising that Jews are under attack from prominent figures in the African American community. We have documented before how Jews were under attack in New York City between 2018 and 2019, and how prominent black intellectuals — ranging from Alice Walker and LaMont Hill to Cornell West and Leonard Jeffries — have been influential in reenforcing negative stereotypes about Jews in the black community.

Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan — who is influential in some circles in the United States — has a long, well-documented history of diatribes about the "white devils" and Jewish "bloodsuckers" who purportedly decimate America's black community from coast to coast. He has referred to Judaism as a "gutter religion," and to Adolf Hitler as "a wickedly great man."

Kanye West’s verbal and social media attack seems to stem from the Black Hebrew Israelite (BHI) brand of anti-Jewish extremism. The Black Hebrew Israelites are a sect within the African American community believe that they are the true Israelites and that the Twelve Tribes of Israel are all people of color. This is a significant departure from the mainstream understanding of the Twelve Tribes of Israel as a reference to Jacob’s twelve sons — each representing a different genealogical thread of the Jewish population. Instead, the Black Hebrew Israelite sect and its supporters do not accept that American or Israeli Jews are members of the Twelve Tribes.

According to the BHI, white people and white Jews are commonly referred to as “Edomites” or descendants of “Esau” and biblical enemies of Jacob (Israel). They are described as hairy and ugly, and some teachings say that Edomites will become slaves in heaven. As such, the U.S. Black Hebrew Israelites in the African American community believe that Jews are agents of Satan, false worshipers of God, and liars. They also believe that Blacks are racially superior and the only true “chosen people.”

The ADL gives some examples of the active Black Hebrew Israelite sects in the U.S. At this site, we provide quotes from prominent African Americans about Jews. Notably:

"The traumatic experience of Ilhan Omar is more personal than the experience of children of Holocaust survivors."
— James Clyburn, U.S. Representative, South Carolina (2019)

"If there’s one thing Jewish people have showed us, it’s they have the power."
— Charlamagne tha God, aka Lenard McKelvey (The Breakfast Club radio show, summer 2020)

“You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America?"
— Jay-Z, aka Shawn Carter; lyrics from 2017 song "The Story of O.J."

History of Anti-semitism

Anti-Semitism has had a long history among African Americans. In the 1920s, for instance, the 'buy-black' campaign of the black-nationalist leader Marcus Garvey was explicitly targeted against Jews, and Garvey later spoke admiringly of Adolf Hitler.

In February 1948 the black writer James Baldwin acknowledged how widespread anti-Semitism was in his community, writing: "Georgia has the Negro and Harlem has the Jew." Baldwin later succumbed to such views himself when he wrote that while Christians made up America's true power structure, the Jew "is doing their dirty work." He went on to denigrate Jewish financial support of civil rights organizations as mere "conscience money."

Malcolm X, too, was a vociferous anti-Semite both publicly and privately. According to author Murray Friedman, when Malcolm met with representatives of the Ku Klux Klan to solicit their support for his project of black separatism, he "assured them" that "it was Jews who were behind the integration movement."

The prominent role that Jews played in the American civil rights movement did little to diminish black anti-Semitism. When the movement first began to gain traction in the late 1950s and early 60s, the front-line troops in the Montgomery bus boycott and then in the lunch-counter sit-ins were all blacks; but among the whites who soon rallied to the cause, a disproportionately large share were Jews. The Freedom Riders rode in integrated detachments, and two-thirds of the whites, were Jews.

A few years later, in 1964, came the "Mississippi Summer," a black-voter-registration project conceived and organized by a Jew, Allard Lowenstein. According to Friedman, Jews made up from one-third to one-half of the white volunteers who took part. Of the three volunteers who lost their lives in the project, two — Michael Schwerner and Andrew Goodman — were Jewish.

In his book Blacks and Jews, Paul Berman reports that Jews contributed one-half to three-quarters of the financial support received by civil rights groups in the 1960s. The organizational support they provided was equally pronounced. All over the United States, Jewish organizations assigned staffers to work on civil rights initiatives. In those days, writes Berman, "it was almost as if to be Jewish and liberal were, by definition, to fly a flag for black America."

Then, just as the struggle for civil rights achieved its cardinal victories with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, many of its black activists began to turn away from their original goals, taking up instead the cause of “Black Power.” The driving motive of Black Power was the venting of rage over racial humiliation, a rage that the earlier civil rights movement had insisted on subordinating to the strategy of nonviolence and sublimating in the rhetoric of Christian love.

This rage manifested itself within the civil rights movement's own organizations, where the presence of whites in leading positions — and indeed at all levels — was now regarded as an intolerable affront. CORE and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which had been on the cutting edge of the fight for integration, suddenly became racially exclusive.

With whites in the movement redefined as oppressors and opportunists, and with so many of the whites being Jews, some of the new hostility was bound to assume an anti-Jewish tone. In 1968, during a New York City school strike, leaflets were distributed by blacks attacking Jewish teachers as "Middle East murderers of colored people."

More Recent History

In more recent decades, a number of leading black activists — some immensely popular and influential — have become vocal exponents of anti-Semitism. Stoking the fires of racial grievance and victimology, they aim to imbue fellow blacks with contempt for, and envy of, Jews. Some of these anti-Semites serve as Imams or ministers at major mosques across the country. Others work as chaplains in America's prison system. Others have established themselves as leaders of the contemporary civil rights movement.

According to a poll from the Pew Research Center during the 2014 Hamas attack on Israel, "While 47 percent of whites see Hamas as the instigator and 14 percent blame Israelis, 35 percent of Hispanics side with the Palestinian group Hamas on this issue, versus 20 percent with Israel. And blacks were split on the question, with 27 percent faulting the Israelis and 25 percent faulting the Palestinians." Similarly, "Hispanics and Blacks were less sympathetic to Israeli policy, with 35 and 36 percent saying the nation had overreacted, while only 22 percent of whites shared this view."

The left-wing Anti-Defamation League (ADL) even noted, "For many years, anti-Semitic views among African-Americans have remained consistently higher than the general population. In 2013, 20 percent of African-Americans expressed strongly anti-Semitic views, an encouraging decrease of nine percentage points from the previous survey in 2011."

Conclusion

The Black community in the United States should unite with the Jewish community. Some pro-Israel African American organizations — like the Institute for Black Solidarity with Israel and Jews, African Americans and Israel: Supporting One Another — do exist. However, there are few voices in the African American community’s leadership who have condemned Kanye West, Whoopie Goldberg, or the others. The silence is deafening.

Jews come in all shapes and colors. The Jewish community has done a lot for African Americans — from creating schools that help raise poor southern blacks out of poverty to being at the forefront of the Civil Rights movement. Yet what has the Jewish community received in return?

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