Mackle-less

Brian Haggerty has a thing about the Jews. He’s the rapper known as Macklemore, who is busy earning his stripes as an anti-Zionist. Regrettably, he has a legion of admirers who reflexively side with Israel’s critics with harsh critiques of Israel’s behavior in Gaza and everywhere else it is currently at war. That means, at the least, all of southern Lebanon and Arab villages in the occupied West Bank. Public opinion has shifted radically. Jews need to accommodate themselves to the new reality that Israel is now a pariah state and is not likely to recover from its reputational damage.

Regrettably, its supporters have done it no favors. Robert Kraft, the Jewish oligarch who forced Ed Sheeran to jettison Macklemore, is entitled to his ferocious hostility toward the performer. Kraft is a very public Zionist and he reacted to the Sheeran tour as an intolerable insult. Despite the warm relationship between them, he demanded that Sheeran cut his ties to Macklemore or forego the privilege of performing publicly. That’s what oligarchs do when offended. They pick up their stadiums and go home to Massachusetts.

What he did not reckon with was the very strong possibility that he would turn Macklemore into a political and artistic martyr, and position Sheeran as a tool of the Jews. You might have predicted this a mile away, as the case of a “cure” being worse than the disease. This was not so much a public relations campaign as the ham-handed effort of a clumsy rich guy who could not perceive a likely result. Yes, of course, he had a right to act, but in an era of professional image management and influence, you’re not supposed to be blind to outcomes.

More interesting, perhaps, is Macklemore himself. At first, I was taken with his earnest effort to distinguish between Jews and the Israeli government. Before he was cancelled by Kraft and Co., he stood on the field at an enormous arena and underscored his love for his “Jewish brothers and sisters.” All he wanted was justice for Palestinians.

But then I discovered that he has been around this block. About ten years ago, Macklemore got on stage to perform, wearing a big old honking prosthetic nose and a hairpiece that made him look more than vaguely Hassidic. It was a set piece of stereotyping and anti-Semitic mockery that traded in the typical images of Jew-hatred.

That, for me, is the clincher in this case, the moment he became Mackle-less, for sure. When you criticize the government of the State of Israel, you are arguably within the bounds of legitimate discourse. Just take a look at the pages of Ha’aretz, Israel’s class-act paper of record. On any given day it engages in take-no-prisoners criticism.

But it never uses the tropes of anti-Semitism. When you add those to Macklemore’s anti-Zionist politics, you end up with someone who has crossed the line. If nothing else, Macklemore is the test of where one thing ends and the next thing begins. That next thing is no longer permissible.

And one more thing before we’re done. When Macklemore was finished with his hooknose minstrel show, he apologized for his error of taste and judgment. At that point he was forgiven by Abraham Foxman, dean of American-Jewish defenders—who pronounced Macklemore’s atonement sincere and genuine.

We simply must stop granting absolution, pretending that we know the hearts of those who hurt us. Modesty and circumspection would be the far better course. Foxman’s pronouncements were part of a theater of self-promotion, and he was undoubtedly used by Macklemore as a detergent. Please God, never let me make the same mistake.

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No robots were involved in the writing of this article.