Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) hasn’t just gone off the rails, he’s completely shattered them. He has done incomprehensible damage to the Jewish community by utilizing his own Hollywood anecdotes to perpetuate disgusting antisemitic stereotypes. 

People who are not Jewish can’t truly understand how hurtful and damaging his words are. As someone who is Jewish, the stereotypes perpetuated by Ye are scary, especially since he has such a massive following.

Before getting banned from Twitter, Ye had 32.2 million followers. The world population of Jews is dwarfed by that number, at a measly 14.8 million people. Whether Ye is validating neo-nazis like Nick Fuentes or creating a joke culture around the Holocaust, his reach is so wide that he inflicts major damage to the Jewish community.

I understand that it can be hard for those who are not Jewish, or for that matter a minority at all, to comprehend what it feels like when someone perpetuates these types of stereotypes. It’s as if he is invalidating the struggles of a whole ethnicity and religion because of his own personal experiences. He projects blame onto a group of people when they have done nothing wrong, and then people listen to him and go on the internet to justify what he is saying.

The world already has so much hate in it, and now Ye is giving fuel to some of the stereotypes that started the Holocaust. While I don’t think Ye has the power to start another Holocaust, I do believe he may intentionally or unintentionally be the cause of more hate crimes targeting the Jewish people. 

According to PBS.org, 2021 saw a record high for antisemitic incidents in the U.S. There were 2,717 incidents last year—a 34% rise from the year before. The drastic increase in hate crimes is no doubt due to more antisemitic propaganda spreading on social media, which is what makes Ye having such a big platform so threatening to society.

Luckily, Ye was banned from Twitter on Dec. 2. But this still doesn’t stop him from spreading his hateful messages. Days later, he appeared on Alex Jones’ web show InfoWars along with Nick Fuentes. When he openly praised Hitler and the Nazis, it was Jones who was the one to say he was going too far. 

If Jones is the sane person in a situation, the world has flipped upside down.

So what is the solution to this? Well, we need to put Ye under a conservatorship—which is when a person (legally appointed) manages someone’s personal and financial affairs. Someone with the ability to manage Ye’s personal affairs could, first off, require him to take the medication which he openly admits to no longer taking, and they could prevent him from making heinous public statements.

Despite the harm Ye has done to the Jewish community, I believe that it is purely out of ignorance and an unwillingness to educate himself. If you want to learn more about the Holocaust, I suggest you visit ushmm.com. Illinois also has an amazing Holocaust Museum in Skokie which is very powerful.