opinion
Kanye in Context: Which Came
First, the Hatred or the Target?
BY RABBI AARON MILLER
I 16
NOVEMBER 3, 2022 | JEWISHEXPONENT.COM
An antisemitic freeway demonstration in Los Angeles in support of Kanye West
Like fi re, antisemitism is only dangerous when it is
allowed to spread.
At the risk of sounding too much like Jerry
Seinfeld’s Uncle Leo, the spread of antisemi-
tism depends on a host of conspirators. While
Republicans are right to call out antisemitism on
college campuses or under the guise of inter-
sectionality, they have been slow to reject Ye’s
“bold” ideas on Jewish world domination. While
Democrats are right to sound the alarm on right-
wing antisemitic violence or shameless dog-whis-
tling, they are doing precious little to address
anti-Israel purity tests that its Jewish activists
increasingly must pass. If antisemitism remains a
cudgel that the right and left use only to wallop
each other, then today’s hatred has more than
enough room to spread. And unchecked, this
madness will consume us all.
Jews are the fi rst victims of antisemitism, but his-
tory has shown that Jews are never the last. Millions
of people starved to death while Russian elites ped-
dled “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” Societies
collapsed and nations fell with the Nazis’ rise to
power. Jews suff ered gravely and disproportion-
ately during these upheavals, but as the expression
goes, crazy does not know where to stop. Jews are
a nation’s canary in the coal mine. The same forces
that hurt Jewish people will eventually come for
everyone. They always have. No exceptions.
As we witness our democracy fraying and civil-
ity reaching ever new lows, the time has come for
people who are not Jewish to be just as worried
about antisemitism as Jews have been. I used to
think that the Holocaust fi nally taught the world a
lesson in acceptance 2,000 years in the making. I
naively hoped that future generations would see
once and for all where the hatred fueling antisemi-
tism inevitably leads. This week has shown, again,
how easily people forget. Though antisemitism
hurts Jews fi rst, its spread only exacerbates the
crises that cause it. We are in crisis now. It will take
everyone committed to reconciliation and under-
standing to fi ght for a future where these things
are far from guaranteed.
Jews have been fi ghting hatred for millennia
against the strongest forces the world has ever
known. But altogether, we comprise only 0.2% of
humanity. Now is the time for allies who are not
Jewish to join the struggle and raise their voices
with ours. Together, and only together, can we
stop antisemitism’s spread. We can make sure this
chapter of madness has fi nally reached its end.
And then, together, we will be able to write a new
story, one in which God’s children can come back
together once again. JE
Rabbi Aaron Miller is associate rabbi of Washington
Hebrew Congregation in Washington, D.C.
StopAntisemitism.com/Twitter n the early years of my rabbinate, antisemitism
rarely crossed my mind. I saw how antisemitism
was rising in Europe, and I knew how pervasive it
had become in the Middle East. But somehow, I
held the illusion that the spread of antisemitism was
contained to a specifi c time (the past), certain places
(not here) and fringe people (whose names I have
never heard). Antisemitism had not disappeared, but
it felt like a distant siren shrieking so far away that I
could hardly hear its blare.
Now, as these past days have shown, antisem-
itism is spreading like wildfi re, and the alarms are
sounding everywhere. Antisemitism has rightly
been called “the world’s oldest hatred.” On its
surface, antisemitism is a hatred against Jews,
but underneath, antisemitism emerges from a per-
son’s need to hate someone and, conveniently,
yet again, landing on the Jew. For antisemites,
hatred comes fi rst, and for thousands of years,
Jews have been their fi rst targets.
This has been a terrifyingly familiar week for the
Jewish people. When Kanye West posts about
Jewish bankers or Jewish media moguls or Jewish
blood libel, for all his creative genius, his antisem-
itism is actually quite stale. When the United
Nations publishes yet another report singling out
the State of Israel for crimes against humanity, as it
recently did, we know we have been here before.
When a former president tweets, yet again, about
Jewish dual loyalty, he is not saying anything that
Jewish people have not heard countless times
before. Jewish space lasers? That’s a new one,
but for anyone who has studied or experienced
antisemitism, this week’s fl are up is surprisingly old.
Today’s antisemitic outbursts do not reveal any-
thing about Jews, but they speak volumes to our
times. I should not even have to say it, but there is
no Jewish conspiracy. There is no cabal. There are
no secret meetings. We are not parasites, or ter-
mites or cancers spreading across the globe. The
world has not and will never be saved by long-suf-
fering international superstars or politicians who
believe they are the only ones courageous enough
to stand up against the Jewish strawman of their
imaginations. The fi rst revelation of antisemitism is
the madness of the antisemite.
Antisemitism’s other great revelation is a soci-
ety so dysfunctional that Jew-hatred spreads. The
world is full of dangerous people. We Jews know
this better than most. But this week, we have seen
how a broken political system, or a soulless corpo-
ration, can bring their ravings to the mainstream.
opinion
Tom Stoppard Reveals His
Jewish Self in ‘Leopoldstadt’
BY THANE ROSENBAUM
T here is no small amount of irony in Tom
Stoppard’s latest play, “Leopoldstadt,”
dazzling audiences on Broadway at the same
time as America’s streets are convulsing with
antisemitic mayhem.
After all, Stoppard, one of the world’s finest
dramatists, has for the entirety of his career been
a closeted Jew. And not just any Jew, but one of
the fortunate ones who, as a small boy, actually
survived the Holocaust.
Stoppard was born in Czechoslovakia as Tomáš
Sträussler. His family managed to escape the
encircling Nazis, although his father was eventually
killed. His mother would marry a British, non-Jew-
ish military officer in India, who brought his new
family to England. That’s when Tomáš became Tom
and adopted his stepfather’s surname.
Stoppard mastered the language of his new
country and wrote widely and wittily about
weighty themes in a career that landed him on the
short list of England’s theatrical royalty. He would
eventually be knighted. Not bad for someone
whose childhood was darkened by the monstrous
events that resulted in the murder of two-thirds of
European Jewry.
“Leopoldstadt” is a fictional account of what
happened to Stoppard’s entire Jewish family.
Most were killed in death camps.
After a long and distinguished career writ-
ing award-winning plays and screenplays, none
of which revealed any tribal connection to the
ancient Hebrews, Stoppard arrived at a point
where he would train his considerable dramatic
gifts on exploring the buried story that, psycho-
logically, might have shaped him most. All that
British schooling and literary fame had left some-
thing very precious unsaid and undone.
And it arrives at a propitious moment on America’s
finest stage. “Leopoldstadt” should be required
viewing for Kanye West, Kyrie Irving and the woke
mobs who had never heard of Kristallnacht and
who believe that Jews, throughout the ages, have
led charmed, white-privileged lives. Their igno-
rance, or plain antisemitism, is astounding. Jews
involved in the slave trade? When did they have
time for that, folded in between the expulsions,
Inquisitions, pogroms and genocide?
With this new wave of antisemitism becoming so
fashionably mainstream and unapologetically vis-
ible, far too many have forgotten that Jews were
always first among equals in deserving the spe-
cial protection of minority status. “Leopoldstadt”
“Leopoldstadt” is both a
metaphor and object
lesson for Jews.
is an astonishing tutorial on how deceptive per-
ceived privilege can be.
The play unfolds over half a century. The Jewish
family at the center of the story plunges from
lavishly wealthy, cultured, cosmopolitan Jews to
a decimated family tree stump. All that’s left are
three scattered cousins and fractured memories.
Stoppard sets the play in Vienna so as to allow the
adults in the opening scene to boast of how much
influence Jews have had on Austrian culture, and
how successfully Jews have assimilated and have
been embraced by Austrian society. Indeed, the cur-
tain opens to a massive Christmas tree that upstages
the large cast of Jewish parents and children.
Twice characters say: “We Jews worship cul-
ture.” They see it as an inoculant. Obviously, they
have never heard of today’s cancel culture.
Another thematic reason for Austria as set piece
is that a fellow Austrian Jew Theodor Herzl had
just written a book about how the Jews of Europe
should leave and start their own country. What
a laughable idea, they think. Another Jew from
Vienna, Dr. Sigmund Freud, is introducing a new
field of medicine — one of the mind — once more
demonstrating to the world the intellectual agility
of the Jewish people. What would Austrian soci-
ety do without its Jews? Apparently, the mayor of
Vienna is a major Jew-hater, but, honestly, what
does that have to do with them?
Later in the play, one of those same characters
confesses, “All that culture did not save us from
barbarism.” “Leopoldstadt” is both a metaphor and object
lesson for Jews who deceive themselves into
believing that once they graduate from the lowly
streets of ghettos, they will be forever welcome in
high society.
For the poignant reminder of this mispercep-
tion, Stoppard should be congratulated yet again.
After all, he is not alone among Jewish-British
playwrights who Anglicized their names and stra-
tegically left any trace of their secret identities out
of their dramas. Toward the end of “Leopoldstadt,”
the character who represents Stoppard himself as
a young writer remarks on his Jewishness as noth-
ing more than “an ironic fact.”
There are many such writers in England. British
stages have hosted scores of plays by Jewish
dramatists who never came close to making
such an admission: Harold Pinter (in the first draft
of “The Homecoming,” the family was Jewish),
Peter Shaffer, Alfred Sutro, Arnold Wesker,
Ronald Harwood (“Taking Sides,” an exception),
Peter Barnes and Patrick Marber (who directed
“Leopoldstadt,” and has written one Jewish play,
titled, “Howard Katz”). Together they comprise a
canon of Jew-less storytelling.
The British are known for having a stiff upper lip.
British Jews, apparently, go one step farther: keep-
ing their entire mouths shut. Perhaps it’s because
Jews were officially expelled from England in the
13th century, which left a legacy of provisional resi-
dency — gentle manners always expected, Queen
and country first, bags always packed, just in case.
It was the rare British Jew for whom Jewishness
was part of the mystique. Victorian Prime Minister
Benjamin Disraeli converted to Christianity.
Mendoza the Jew, who boxed in the late 18th
century, was perhaps the first professional ath-
lete to market his name — and nickname. Harold
Abrahams, the world’s fastest man during the
1924 Olympic Games, despite his Cambridge ped-
igree, never outran the prejudice that drove him.
Until now, in what may become his last play,
Stoppard never dwelled on his past. The scope of
his loss and degree of Jewish ties took decades
to materialize as art. All along the tragedy of his
parents and many uncles, aunts and cousins was
rich with dramatic possibility and catharsis. Even
England could not contain such emotion.
And it has arrived at the right time — for
Stoppard, and for Jews living in a world eerily
reminiscent of those foreboding days when actual
Leopoldstadts provided no shelter from dark
clouds and hard rain.
Despite his longtime association with
Shakespeare (his first play was a retelling of
“Hamlet”; his screenplay for “Shakespeare in
Love” received an Oscar), Stoppard’s backstory,
and the dissolution of his family, proved to be the
real thing. JE
Thane Rosenbaum is a novelist, essayist, law
professor and distinguished university professor
at Touro University, where he directs the Forum
on Life, Culture & Society. He is the legal analyst
for CBS News Radio. His most recent book is titled
“Saving Free Speech … From Itself.” This article
was first published by the Jewish Journal.
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