On Stephen Colbert, he deftly changes the subject
There’s been a lot of public, celebrity-endorsed antisemitism in the past few weeks, which is painful as hell. And lest you think it’s being overblown by the Jewish establishment, trust me: the Jewish college students I work with are talking about it and they’re feeling it.
I don’t feel compelled to publicly respond to every case: Kanye, then Kyrie Irving, then Dave Chappelle on Saturday Night Live. Especially because everyone else is chiming in, I don’t feel like I have much to add to the conversation.
The first problem isn’t how we respond to antisemitism. It’s antisemitism itself.
But I was watching an extended interview with Jon Stewart on Stephen Colbert last week, and that was a tipping point for me. Perhaps because of the fact that I’ve long admired Jon Stewart, and I have a special affection for his sort of political comedy with a creamy moral center. And because my personal politics often line up with his.
But that’s why I was so troubled by his appearance on The Late Show. I might have expected a vigorous defense from a prominent Jewish celebrity. Instead, he deftly changed the subject.
(He got off a few good lines; he always does. “I wasn’t on the [secret conspiratorial] committee that lost Kanye the Adidas deal. I’m on the committee that does oil prices and bagel flavors.” “Kyrie Irving, they suspended him from playing basketball. If you want to punish him—send him to the Knicks.”)
Stewart spent most of his time decrying the responses to antisemitism; the cancellations and so on. He quotes Dave Chappelle’s monologue, “It shouldn’t be this hard to talk about.” As if the heart of this problem was about free speech or the right to say bigoted things.
Jon Stewart sounds smart and compassionate when he speaks. He quotes Kanye, saying, “Hurt people hurt people,” and that instead of covering up hate you need more conversation. He implores us to consider the Black perspective, with its history of oppression, and suggests that each of these things—Kanye, Kyrie, Chappelle—are howls of pain from people who have been historically oppressed.
I agree with every syllable. So what’s the problem?
The problem is burying the lede. The first problem isn’t how we respond to antisemitism. It’s antisemitism itself.
I agree with everything Stewart said about free speech, the imperative of actually listening to oppressed communities, the ugly futility of cancel culture, etc. Those are important and thoughtful topics for discussion. But the point is that all those things are secondary to the actual story here: Extremely famous people said extremely bigoted things, with the very real possibility of those things leading to violence against an already shaken community. And if he had the integrity to name that pain, he might have had a little more moral authority to make these other points.
The story of Dave Chappelle’s rant on Saturday Night Live isn’t “Will he get cancelled now for saying edgy things?” The real story is: His nasty words exacerbate the pain in a community already on edge.
Do we have to do this again? Does Jon Stewart, or Dave Chappelle, have any sense of the context of the surging wave of antisemitism? Does he realize that Chappelle’s monologue occurred two weeks after synagogues throughout New Jersey were on lockdown because of a “credible threat” of violence against them? Do we have to mention the shorthand of one-word names that we’ve all come to know in the past few years: Pittsburgh, Poway, Monsey, Charlottesville…?
Once again, a prominent progressive thinker has shown that every community’s pain is legitimate—except for the Jewish community’s. Jon Stewart might spend this Thanksgiving reading English comedian David Baddiel’s shocking book Jews Don’t Count, to see firsthand how antisemitism is the progressive community’s dirty secret.
But this is a recurring pattern. A few weeks ago, Brown University’s Hillel building received a handwritten threat of violence. Thank G-d, it didn’t pan out, and after a day or so, a perpetrator was caught (not from the Brown community) and the students’ safety was assured.
Yet these were the first two sentences of the letter that the Jewish community received from the university’s Vice President:
“Our country continues to experience deeply troubling and disturbing levels of division, intolerance, and discrimination.
On Sunday afternoon, staff at Brown RISD Hillel discovered an antisemitic note in a reception area, and this follows reports in recent weeks of other incidents against Jewish, Black, Asian, LGTBQ+ and other underrepresented individuals on campus and in the surrounding community…”
She just “All Lives Matter”ed us!
If we learned anything from Black Lives Matter, it’s this: each community’s pain is uniquely their own. To shovel all forms of discrimination into the same bin is a form of erasure—and it’s its own kind of racism.
And that’s the progressive Achilles heel of Jon Stewart’s interview as well.
Jon Stewart pretty much invented late night comedy that could be topical, progressive, and still funny as hell. If only his Jewishness was a bit more self-aware and informed, I’d be laughing with him this week.