How are Jews supposed to feel about Ilhan Omar?
Two Jewish comedians discuss intention, context, outrage culture, Israel, and when it’s okay to pass judgement
Matt Ruby here. I posted this to Facebook…
Matt: Politician does brownface: “He must resign!”
Shiksa does jewface: “Give her an Emmy!”
Comedian says Asian slur: “Fire him!”
Congresswoman says Jews are “all about the Benjamins”: “She’s being bullied!”
Israel violates human rights: “Boycott them!”
Palestinian Authority bans LGBTQ groups and Hamas declares homosexuality punishable by death: “Well, it’s tricky. Different cultures have different values…”
Phew, outrage culture sure is complicated!
Andrew Tavin responded….
Andrew: I don’t really have the time or inclination to get bogged down on how valid I think each of those contrasts or examples are, but Ilhan Omar absolutely did not say “Jews” are all about the Benjamins.
Ilhan Omar has not singled out “Jews” in a negative way even once, to my knowledge. This is a constantly repeated fiction to the point that supposedly legitimate news outlets have claimed she has made negative statements about “Jews.”
Matt: I know what she said & went for economy of words…but the hypnotized/dual loyalty/Benjamins pattern of comments from her is notable:
“The Ilhan Omar anti-Semitism controversy, explained.”
Andrew: I am aware of all of this. I’ve followed the issue very closely.
Like I said, I don’t really have the time or inclination to get into it right now, but I think the economy of words here is promoting a falsehood that many people actually believe, that is that she has explicitly made negative comments about Jews.
I’m sure we’d disagree on the issue beyond that point, but I just wanted to clarify what I think is a significant and meaningful discrepancy between your summary and reality.
Anyway, I said all I want to say on it here for now. Hope you are well!
At this point, I asked Andrew if we could continue the conversation via email instead of on Facebook. He agreed.
Matt: “I think the economy of words here is promoting a falsehood that many people actually believe, that is that she has explicitly made negative comments about Jews.”
You’re right, she didn’t say Jews were all about the Benjamins, she said support for Israel in the US Congress was “all about the Benjamins.” And she didn’t say Jews have dual loyalty, she said, “I want to talk about the political influence in this country that says it is okay to push for allegiance to a foreign country.” And she didn’t say Jews have hypnotized people, she said, “Israel has hypnotized the world, may Allah awaken the people and help them see the evil doings of Israel.” Accuracy matters and I understand why you felt the need to point this out.
I guess my question is, as a Jew, how much better should I feel about these statements than if she had actually said Jews hypnotize people or have dual loyalty or are all about the Benjamins? As this Vox piece states: “When Omar talks about Israel, she has a bad habit of saying things that feed into anti-Semitic stereotypes.”
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think your defense of her seems to be this: “She’s not talking about all Jews, she’s just talking about Israel and people who support Israel.” I don’t think it’s completely analogous but imagine if someone defended Shane Gillis this way: “He’s not talking about all Chinese people, he’s just talking about people who live in Chinatown.” I doubt that would convince anyone criticizing Gillis to change their mind, ya know? You can see how Jews are at least wary of Omar’s comments, right?
However, I also think it’s a good idea to zoom out and look at the role of intention and context. This is where I get confused by a certain segment of outrage culture. When it comes to Omar, this segment argues we must look at the context of her remarks. We must examine her intention. We are told not to leap to the worst conclusions about her. We must look at her in good faith.
Yet these same people who preach tolerance for Omar assumed the worst about Gillis. The context (improvising during a comedy podcast) did not matter. His intentions (to get a laugh) did not matter. The fact that, in the clip that went viral, he’s saying the slur while “in character” does not matter. We are told to leap to the worst conclusions about him. We must look at him in bad faith.
To be clear, I don’t defend the podcast segments I’ve heard as successful comedy. They’re hacky and unfunny. But I also know that bad comedy is part of the path to making good comedy. As you know, this can be a messy process. As Patrice O’Neal said, “Funny jokes and unfunny jokes come out of the same birth, you don’t know if anything is gonna be funny, you should attempt to be able to make anything funny.” My take is Gillis said some dumb shit in a sophomoric and failed attempt to be crude and edgy. But at the end of the day, he was a comic doing a podcast trying to get a laugh. I think that matters.
Is Ilhan Omar a virulent anti-semite? Probably not. Is Shane Gillis an alt-right clown espousing white supremacy? Probably not. So why do we rush to support her while we condemn him? It feels like this segment of outrage culture is willing to bend over backwards to give the benefit of the doubt to a Muslim woman in a headscarf while they can’t wait to condemn a white dude who looks like a frat bro. I can’t help but wonder how much of the reaction here is based solely on their respective appearances. It just all feels very tribal.
As for my take on Omar, I’m leery about her pattern of statements but also willing to give her another shot. I think she’s learning as she goes. Andrew Yang said this about Gillis: “We would benefit from being more forgiving rather than punitive. We are all human.” I agree with him. Compassion, empathy, and forgiveness are vanishing concepts in our society and I’d love to see more of them from both sides.
Do you think I’m missing something here? I’m also curious to know if you think the other contrasts mentioned in the original Facebook post are noteworthy? Do you think there’s a double standard in how people can treat Jews in our society compared to other minority groups?
Andrew: Hey Matt, thanks for emailing me, and I’m glad to have this discussion in a way that I think is much more conducive to well… actual good faith reasoned discussion than Facebook tends to allow.
I’m not sure that responding to the points you’ve made in order as you made them is the best possible way to organize all of my thoughts on these matters, but it would be the quickest way, and given that it’s still not going to be all that quick, it’s the option I’m going to opt for.
So to answer the first question, I would have felt much, much worse if she had made these statements about Jews! Had she made those statements about Jews, I would certainly say they would be without a doubt anti-semitic. As it stands, I do not think her wording was ideal to say the least, and I think it would be fair to say that she should have chosen her words more carefully (I’ve always wondered if the original “Benjamins” tweet was meant to be a pun off Netanyahu, which would be kind of clever, but still too flippant).
Your characterization of my defense is sort of right, but I think her words are narrower than that. I think she is talking specifically about AIPAC and other lobbying groups and the Israeli government. Even just saying she is criticizing people who “support” Israel feels very wide. After all, not everyone who would claim to support Israel believes you should not be allowed to criticize the Israeli government, which is what Greenwald’s original tweet was referring to. There are Jewish organizations that support the existence of Israel while criticizing the actions of the Israel government and the treatment of Palestinians. Do Omar’s (again, admittedly poorly chosen) words apply to these organizations as well?
Most of the hardest core Israel supporters in America, and specifically in congress, are evangelical Christians. I think the idea that those who offer unquestioning support of the Israeli government and “Jews” are one and the same is an idea that only only benefits anti-semites and the Israeli government.
My high school taught the David Project, a program designed to “give students the tools they need to defend Israel on campus.” One of the tools we were taught to use (and one I see quite commonly) is the following formulation:
1) Acknowledge that you can criticize Israel without being anti-Semitic
2) Ask why the person in question is criticizing Israel instead of another country
3) Conclude that it is because they are anti-Semitic
You could see this in Bari Weiss’s recent appearance on Bill Maher, where she asks why Omar criticizes Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians but doesn’t criticize China’s treatment of the Uighur Muslims. Of course, people online were quick to point out that Omar has criticized the Chinese government on this very point multiple times, including on the floor of Congress, but there is not an amount of criticism of the Chinese government from Omar that would “buy” her the right to criticize Israel. Weiss only cares about the Uighur oppression to the degree she can use it to deflect from Israel.
While I agree that Omar should be more careful in her word choice, there really is, I think, an attempt to use any criticism of Israel as evidence of anti-Semitism. Imagine, for a moment, you called the Saudi Arabian government (another country Omar criticizes often) “barbaric.” I do not think there would be any real backlash even though “barbaric” is a word often used by Islamophobes to describe Muslims in their entirety.
This is why, when it comes to criticism of Israel, I personally think it is best not to assume anti-Semitism unless it it is blatant. Does someone disagree with a criticism? Then explain why it is wrong, rather than deflecting. For example, Omar is wrong to say that Israeli policy in the US is primarily the result of AIPAC. It is a factor, but it is not the largest factor.
OK! So that is a not at all brief explanation of my objection to your characterization of Omar’s remarks. Utimately it seems we more or less agree that Omar is probably not anti-Semitic but could choose her words more carefully.
So, moving on to the larger issue. I think you have two main points you’re interrogating:
1) Does our culture (and particularly, those left of center) judge speech too harshly, and is it too willing to attach consequences to that judgment?
2) Regardless of whether point 1 is accurate, does that paradigm exclude Jews when asking for greater respect to be given when talking about marginalized groups?
Point 2 is a quicker one to address (although you can see what “quicker” means to me). First of all, I don’t think the comparison between Omar’s words and Gillis’s really works for me. You acknowledged that it’s not analogous, and I hope my explanation would further illuminate why I don’t think the comparison works, but I can talk more on that specific point of why it fails, for me, if you’d like.
Also, to be clear, Omar got an immense amount of backlash for her words, and not just from the GOP. Many Democrats rushed to condemn her. I could be wrong, but I think Omar got more criticism from Democratic lawmakers than Gillis did (as you point out, he was defended by a top 5 Democratic candidate). Now, of course congresspeople would feel more obligated to comment on a coworker than on a comedian, but I reject the notion that “outrage culture” is exclusively a feature of the left. I think it exists across the political spectrum.
I’ll assume you agree (if not, I can expand on the point in another email) and that the reason you are interrogating what you see as an issue of “Jewish oppression blindspot” on the left is because you consider yourself somewhere left of center and are Jewish. As you know, I am also Jewish and consider myself on the left side of the spectrum (probably left-er) so I imagine we’re coming from a somewhat similar place.
The “Jewface” one is an interesting example, and there is a certain complexity. We have sort of accepted, right or wrong, that people can play within a certain range of their ethnicity. For example, no one of any prominence, to my knowledge, objects to Randall Park, born to two Korean parents, playing a Taiwanese character on Fresh off the Boat.
Or when Randall Park plays the Chinese-American Governor Danny Chung on Veep.
Or the Chinese-American FBI agent Jimmy Woo in Ant-Man.
Jews have, historically and currently, been pretty well represented in Hollywood. We’ve gotten to play a wide-range of roles, both Jewish and otherwise, whereas John Wayne played Genghis Khan, and now all Asian roles are played by Randall Park (not that he doesn’t deserve it, he’s talented and very charming).
When discussing how Apu is voiced by a white (Jewish) person, I’ve seen people point out that Hershel “Krusty the Clown” Krustofsky is voiced by a goy, so how is that different? To which I just have to say… C’mon. The Simpsons writers room and staff was/is pretty Jew-heavy relative to the population at large, whereas there were no Indian writers or cast members able to give their input.
“So how many Indians do you need before it’s OK to do whatever you want?”
It’s not really an exact science! There will be things people are cool with and things people aren’t, but perhaps we can agree that it’s not as simple as “you should only play and write about your own race” vs “there should be no standards when it comes to who plays who and what they write about them.”
Which gets to the question of Shane Gillis and the larger question of how people respond to things and to what degree. I understand and am sympathetic to the idea that, as a culture, we move too quickly to pass judgment, rather than taking time to examine the full context around statements that spark outrage. But I think there is a contingent that does not want to have these conversations at all.
They want to say that everything is alright (except of course for things they do not like or which annoy them, in which case the person saying them should just shut up).
Personally, I do not believe in hate speech laws. I do not think someone should face criminal consequences of any kind for anything they say, outside of extremely narrowly defined threats or harassment. In fact, I think that without universal healthcare, shelter, and food, we can not have free speech at all. Gillis will almost certainly have a much bigger career boost off of this controversy than he would playing “Frat Guy #3” in a commercial parody before being quietly cut midseason. The Wal-Mart employee fired for tweeting the same slur (or even just a criticism of the company) is screwed.
The first time I saw Shane Gillis was his Comedy Central Stand Up clip. I thought it was fine. Not my favorite comedian, but funny.
When I saw he was cast on SNL, I had the same thought I had when Brooks Wheelan was cast. Namely “huh, feels potentially cool for me that they cast a stand up who doesn’t do impressions to my knowledge, but what is he actually gonna do as a cast member?” In the case of Wheelan, the answer was “not much.” He is also a funny stand up comedian, but a show like SNL that relies so much on characters and celebrity impressions didn’t really seem like the best fit.
When I saw the podcast clip, I felt immediately tired on a visceral level, because I knew what would happen next. I was pretty much right. There were two camps. One which demanded his immediate firing and removal and one which claimed any attempt to interrogate what he said is a crime against free speech.
There were many opinions in between (you have expressed one here) but they were a lot less loud. Gillis offered a sort of half-hearted apology, which I think was certainly the right move career-wise as his public firing will probably lead to many more opportunities than Wheelan got off of not being immediately fired from SNL. I think it was also the more genuine move, because I doubt he feels sorry, and to his credit, from what I’ve heard, he doesn’t seem particularly upset or to be playing the victim.
I think the podcast clips were pretty bad. It doesn’t feel like an attempt at making jokes to me, to be honest. There are tons of podcasts where comedians just have more or less straightforward discussions and to call the entirety of these podcasts “comedy” seems misleading. Is all of the Joe Rogan Experience “comedy?” Or is a lot of it people expressing their actual opinions?
I haven’t listened to Matt and Shane’s Secret Podcast, so I do not want to pass judgment for sure. But I get the sense that they are actually annoyed by at least some Chinese people and do not think that is a bad opinion to express or one they should feel bad about. That Matt excuses it by essentially saying “well look, they’d be racist to us” seems to back up that assertion.
Nearly every justification I’ve seen for the segment of the podcast could apply to Michael Richard’s infamous Laugh Factory set. I’m curious where you come down on that. I’ve brought the comparison up to people, and they tend to say something along the lines of “well, that was in hate.”
But how are we supposed to know when something is actually in hate, or whether someone is trying something out that just doesn’t work? Richards was on a comedy stage, trying to deal with hecklers in a way he thought would be funny. It was pretty universally agreed not to be. Most people agreed that Owen Benjamin has crossed a line. But not everyone! There will always be someone to laugh at racist material, no matter how racist it is. Because there are people who find racism inherently funny. Many of those people are racist.
So how can we know where the line is? And the answer is that there is no “one line.” It is a conversation, and I am suspicious of those who seem to be trying to shut down that conversation. Gillis will be fine. His career trajectory is probably better than Richard’s, even if he’ll never get Seinfeld millions (none of us will).
I think, generally, people all over the political spectrum like hearing words they agree with and dislike hearing words they disagree with. I think the number of people who think no one should ever face consequences for anything they say is very small, so it is important to be able to have the conversation over what words should lead to what (non-criminal) consequences.
