The "Antisemitism Notebook" is a weekly email newsletter from the Forward. Sign up here to receive the full newsletter in your inbox each Thursday.
How many of you remember when one of the NBA’s most famous players shared a documentary that claimed Jews had deceived the world into believing they were God’s chosen people, including by fabricating the Holocaust?
Kyrie Irving's promotion of "Hebrews to Negroes" coincided with antisemitic outbursts by Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, and resulted in a brief outcry.
Irving was suspended, donated to the Anti-Defamation League, made more inflammatory comments, saw his donation get rejected, eventually apologized, returned to the court, and then months later deleted the social media post containing his apology after being traded from the Brooklyn Nets to the Dallas Mavericks.
Now, he’s leading the Mavericks on a playoff run, and concerns about his alleged antisemitism have all but disappeared.
“It doesn’t come up unless Kyrie Irving does something good,” explained my colleague Louis Keene, who covered the original controversy. When that happens, Irving’s young fans will bemoan the past efforts to cancel him.
Louis just published a piece about his conversations with Jewish Mavericks fans who, regardless of their personal feelings about him, are rooting for Irving to succeed. “I’ve forgotten about the antisemitism,” said Ben Calmenson, a 28-year-old who grimaced when Irving wore a keffiyeh to a recent press conference but quickly excused it.
I still cringe when I watch Irving win, as he’s been doing throughout the playoffs and did again against the Minnesota Timberwolves Wednesday night. But I’m not saying he should have been kicked out of the league for sharing a film that concludes Jews are to blame for Black suffering. He mostly seems like a weird guy who doesn’t believe in vaccines and isn’t sure whether the earth is flat or round.
“There are a lot of young fans who see Kyrie Irving as an iconoclastic figure whose vulnerability to conspiracy theories is just part of that,” Louis explained to me. “He’s very charitable — even by the standards of professional athletes — and he’s very outspoken on social issues, so they just see him as a genuinely and deeply good person who is a little bit unusual.”
The Kyrie Irving saga highlights how selective the organized Jewish world can be in calling out antisemitism. The American Jewish Committee and other leading groups quickly ended a campaign to convince Amazon, which still sells the antisemitic film on its Prime Video service, to remove the movie after Andy Jassy, the company’s chief executive, refused.
Currently, the concern is about left-wing students on elite college campuses. But if Irving had been playing basketball thirty years ago, when Jewish groups were focused on so-called “Black antisemitism” as a threat to American Jews, reporters might not have so quickly stopped asking him about "Hebrews to Negroes," and his social media post referring to Israelis as “murderous oppressors” might have received more attention.
Additionally, Irving is playing for a basketball team that Mark Cuban, described by Louis as a “Jewish community legend,” is in the process of selling to Miriam Adelson, wife of the late Jewish casino mogul and philanthropist Sheldon Adelson.
And Irving is a celebrity. Jewish leaders have a fair amount of sway on campus and even in Congress, but it’s really, really hard to sanction superstars for what fundamentally amounts to intemperate comments. “They recognized their power is kind of limited,” Louis said.
0 Comments:
Post a Comment