To recap, for those under a rock: West is one of the best-selling musicians of all time, has been expanding into fashion and, despite being buddies with Donald Trump, made a ridiculous run for president in 2020. On Oct. 3, he donned a “White Lives Matter” T-shirt at a Paris fashion show, on Oct. 7 he was restricted on Instagram for posting a text conversation with Sean “Diddy” Combs that invoked antisemitic tropes, and on Oct. 9 he was locked out of Twitter after saying he planed to “go death con 3 on Jewish people.” (Elon Musk restored his account today.)
Major news outlets were initially mealy-mouthed about this, calling it “alleged” or “purported” or “widely deemed” antisemitism; some were wary of platforming hate from a person known to be mentally ill. Of course, Ye’s personal platforms — more than 31 million Twitter followers — are bigger than most publications, so, you know, the cat was out of the bag.
Ye continued to rant and rave, blaming Jews individually and collectively for all manner of problems, and rejecting the by-now de rigueur invite from a Holocaust museum to visit and repent. Trump rushed to West’s defense as corporations including his record label and agent ran in the other direction. The white supremacist Goyim Defense League hung gross spray-painted banners declaring “Kanye is right about the Jews” over an LA freeway. Reports surfaced that West wanted to name his 2018 album “Hitler.”
Kanye, having been dumped by Adidas, showed up at a Skechers store and then went for a bagel.
Meanwhile in Montclair, New Jersey, on Oct. 17 a woman named Michele Silver went to a school board meeting to talk about what happened to her daughter, an eighth grader at Buzz Aldrin Middle School, where my son graduated in 2021.
Four days before, she said, a boy they’d known since first grade made eye contact with her daughter and put his arm out in a “Heil Hitler” motion. Almost exactly a year ago, she said, a different kid had called her daughter a “Jewish cunt.”
“When is enough enough?” Silver asked. “What else has to happen to my child or anyone else's for Buzz Aldrin and the administration to wake up and realize that antisemitism has been and continues to be a major problem in our schools?”
'No one should be anxious'
You may recall hearing before about antisemitism in Montclair, a town of 40,000 about 13 miles from Manhattan where I’ve lived since 2016. A few years ago, a former NAACP official made offensive remarks about Jews and gentrification, and swastikas were found at the high school — on three separate occasions. During the Israel-Gaza war in May 2021, the Forward reported that Montclair High somehow chose right-wing terrorist Meir Kahane to highlight for Jewish-American Heritage Month.
The superintendent, Jonathan Ponds, ended up apologizing for the Kahane gaffe, which he blamed on lazy Googling by an overworked assistant principal. We heard again from Ponds in January, six days after the hostage-taking at a Texas synagogue, when he sent a communitywide email saying he was thinking “about our Jewish brothers and sisters,” and that “no one should be anxious about going to a place of worship,” though somehow failed to use the word “antisemitism.”
I emailed to thank him, and asked for a meeting to discuss his approach to confronting antisemitism and how it fit into broader efforts to combat hate. He wrote back the next day, saying he’d love to talk to me, and looped in his assistant to schedule a time.
So I sent a note with 11 different options over two weeks, which they ignored for a week, so I re-sent it, and then the assistant said “the next few weeks are jam-packed” and asked that I send questions by email. I wrote back saying I didn’t have a list of questions; I wanted to have a conversation, and asked Dr. Ponds directly if “you indeed want to make the time for this as you initially said” — and then they both ghosted me.
After I posted on Facebook this week about the superintendent’s mystifying statement about antisemitism by a “well-known entertainer and entrepreneur,” I quickly heard from David Cantor, who the school district hired last month as head of communications. I knew Cantor years ago, when he was a spokesperson for New York’s schools and I was education editor of The New York Times. Turns out he also spent 10 years working for the Anti-Defamation League.
'It would have made sense to run it by someone'
I asked Cantor why Ponds put his email out on Tuesday, more than two weeks after West’s antisemitic tirades made international headlines. He said it was because a principal had informed the central office the day before that students were talking about it. I asked if kids “talking about it” meant condemning it or repeating it, and Cantor said he didn’t know. I asked why the statement didn’t name the “entertainer and entrepreneur” and he said “we didn’t want to trigger unfounded alarm or a media spectacle” or have it show up in search results for Kanye and Montclair (huh?). I asked about what happened to Silver’s daughter, and he said it is being investigated.
I asked to speak to Dr. Ponds, and Cantor said the superintendent would be open to it after Nov. 8, because until then he is focused on drumming up votes for a $187.7 million bond issue on the ballot. I mentioned that I’d be more inclined to give the schools more of my tax money if I felt more confident in their leadership.
“If there’s antisemitism in town, it’s got to be called out,” Cantor said. “We have to rely on our principals to bring it to our attention, because we’re not in schools.”
Since the trio of swastikas showed up at Montclair High, the superintendent has had a deal with the rabbis at our four local synagogues: he gives them a heads up about any incident of antisemitism so they can be prepared if a congregant comes to them. My rabbi, Marc Katz, is part of the group, and said their advice has been the same each time: make sure every school complies with New Jersey’s Holocaust education mandate, add some anti-bias training specifically regarding Jews, and, as Katz put it, “use us as a resource.”
Which is why he was surprised, having met with Ponds just last week about the Silver situation, to see his statement only after it was emailed to the community on Tuesday.
"If they were in dialogue with lots of Jewish leaders, which they were, it would have made sense to run it by someone,” Rabbi Katz said. “It was too vague — you want to name hate in a specific way and talk about why it’s problematic. ‘People are talking’ is never the right thing to say, I need to know what’s going on.
“I feel like any statement needs to have three paragraphs: paragraph one, what am I responding to; two, empathy; three, denounce hate,” Katz continued. “They missed paragraph two.”
