Let’s be clear about what happened and what didn’t happen on 22 November at Mar-a-Lago.
A former president of the United States, a self-declared candidate for reelection in 2024, had dinner with Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West, whose antisemitic public statements have grown increasingly extreme, along with Nick Fuentes, who is among the nation’s most vocal Holocaust deniers. One of the rare white supremacists with popular name recognition, Fuentes has suggested that Jews leave the country and that the military be sent into Black neighborhoods. When, at dinner, Fuentes advised Donald Trump to go off-script and ad-lib more often during his campaign speeches, the candidate reportedly told the other guests: “I really like this guy. He gets me.”
That’s what happened. Here’s the part I find staggeringly hard to believe: that Trump had never, as he has claimed, heard of Nick Fuentes; that his staff knew only that Ye was bringing some friends to dinner, and no one had the faintest idea who they were. The reason it seems to me unlikely is that Trump’s staff is presumably paid to make sure that nothing like this ever happens – that no hostile journalists, prominent socialists or political rivals show up to share an intimate meal with the boss. We can assume that Trump’s employees are familiar with the internet, and that one or two mouse-clicks would have red-flagged the mystery dinner guest.
Trump must have spent every waking moment of the last month on the golf course if he hadn’t heard that his friend Ye threatened to go “death con 3” on Jewish people. Wouldn’t most hosts (or those with a conscience) have found an excuse to cancel dinner? (“Sorry, Ye, something’s come up…”) That is, unless the host’s idea of a friend and ideal guest is a celebrity who flatters him when he’s not making nasty racist threats.
Antisemitic incidents and hate speech have grown more common in recent years. Fuentes, Ye and company have returned to a playbook dating from long before the Nazis – tropes that portray Jews as conspirators, as “globalists” driven by greed, plotting control of the world – to which they’ve added the more modern slur that Jews run the media and the entertainment industry. “The Jewish community,” said Ye, “especially in the music industry, they’ll take us and milk us till we die”. On Thursday, while on Alex Jones’s Infowars show, West proceeded to praise Hitler.
Fifteen years ago, at a cocktail party in Rome, an American woman told me and two friends that her son couldn’t get a job in Hollywood because Jews controlled the entertainment industry. She was serious. All these years later, I can still remember our shock at what she’d said, and at the fact that we’d said nothing in response.
In his 12 November monologue on Saturday Night Live, Dave Chappelle began with a few wink-wink remarks about Ye and “the Jews”. Then he said: “I’ve been to Hollywood and – no one get mad at me – I’m just telling you … it’s a lot of Jews. Like, a lot.” He joked about the “show business rules of perception … If they’re black, then it’s a gang. If they’re Italian, it’s a mob. If they’re Jewish, it’s a coincidence, and you should never speak about it.”
We know what was supposed to be funny: the familiar trope, the undying zombie of Jewish media control. It’s not all that surprising. But what was surprising was how readily the studio audience laughed.
Laughing at an antisemitic joke in a TV studio, or anywhere, is pretty much the definition of normalization. And normalization is the Petri dish in which the virus of racial and religious hatred grows, which it inevitably does. One of the bleaker lessons of history is how regularly the hatred of the other spills out of the culture medium and erupts into mass violence.
Obviously, the gap between Chappelle’s monologue and the Nuremberg laws is a huge one. But it’s been bridged before. In a 1934 issue of Julius Streicher’s pro-Nazi propaganda tabloid, Der Stürmer, based in Nuremberg, there’s a “humorous” cartoon of six Jews (fat, well-dressed, gigantic bulbous noses) riding on an airplane emblazoned with a Jewish star, searching the landscape, with telescopes, for a corner of the earth where no one reads Der Stürmer.
One way to resist antisemitism – and resist its normalization – is by being clear about what is happening. Some of Trump’s Jewish supporters might approve of his stance on Israel but wonder if, in the future, they want to be expelled from an all-Christian judenfrei American theocracy and forced to emigrate to Tel Aviv. We need to overcome the impulse to go along with the group or to be polite and let things slide instead of telling the woman in Rome not to blame Jews for her son’s unemployment problems.
Let’s be clear about one more thing: if a politician refuses to condemn Donald Trump for hanging out with Ye and Fuentes, if a public figure mealy-mouths that “no one should have dinner with an antisemite” without naming Donald Trump, there are only two explanations.
One: they themselves are antisemitic.
Or two: they have no conscience, no sense of right and wrong, no decency. The only thing that drives them is the fear of losing supporters and of risking the goodwill of a candidate whom someday they might need to ask for help.
Francine Prose is a former president of Pen American Center and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
