I know that the first question that comes to mind for readers of this column is, “what did Jordan think about Coachella?”
Have no fear, I am indeed aware of the spat between Green Day and Charlie XCX over the latter’s contention that she should have been the headline act over the former.
The ensuing exchange of petulant childishness between the two artists was refreshing as this is the space that we need pop stars to fill. Such insipid squabbles are fodder for fans to be entertained, debating the meaningless question of who is more famous, and we should be grateful to celebrities for such distractions. We should be even more grateful that it interrupts their political commentary.
I am partial to Charlie XCX in this one because she is the artist that has been the more condemned for failing to be sufficiently biased against Israel, since she came out in support of Kamala Harris during the election.
In contrast, Green Day’s bigoted bona fides were on display at Coachella when they changed the lyrics of one their songs to say “runnin’ away from pain like the kids from Palestine.”
Both acts are rank amateurs though when it comes to being the true headliner of hate. That title belongs to Kneecap, who used Coachella to project expletives about Israel while leading the crowd in a chant of “Free, free Palestine” that could have just as easily been a “Sieg” and “Heil” call and response.
The infection of popular culture with reflexive anti-Semitism amplified by the world’s most vapid people is something we might prefer to ignore, but we pretend that it does not mean anything at our peril.
Our era is not one of isolated, unthinking, anti-Jewish bigotry. There is instead a dangerous convergence of this growing pop culture sentiment with an intellectual drive to legitimize the demonization and marginalizing of the Jewish people.
While Coachella was being co-opted to livestream anti-Semitism to the masses, the International Criminal Court (ICC) was issuing an “invitation to provide submissions” to Hungary, demanding that it account for the reasons why it did not kidnap Benjamin Netanyahu under its specious warrant during the Israeli prime minister’s visit.
In the guise of law and justice, the ICC has crafted itself into the prime mover for creating an intellectual foundation to demonize Israel as genocidal and spread that calumny with such rapidity that it would be astonishing if the target were not the Jewish state.
The use of ersatz law to persecute Jews is not new. The ICC makes its home in The Hague, but its weaponization of law to target the Jewish State would have made Wilhelm Stuckart, the architect of the Nazis’ Nuremburg race laws, jealous.
Taking their cue from the ICC, there are movements afoot around the world to put Israelis on trial for participating in genocide because of their military service.
All of this works to create space into which Jews cannot travel because our oppressors believe they have discovered a new way to reach the old goal of making the world Judenrein.
The combination of popular anti-Semitism at Coachella with the intellectual anti-Semitism of the ICC is both potent and dangerous. Taken together, they represent a harbinger of the demise of the liberal ideal for a just world that we as Jews have advocated for since WW II.
We believed that global institutions would fight for justice and that the free flow of ideas in politics and art would be the antidote to the poison of fascism and totalitarianism.
The UN, the International Criminal Court, universities embracing free thought, and openness to artistic expression had been our hope that the world could move beyond the mythological, medieval bigotry that defined the Nazi era to finally reach a time when we might fulfill the simple dream of living without fear.
Alas, these agents of hope for a liberal world have been co-opted by the dark forces of illiberalism and now masquerade as purveyors of justice while delivering the same threats to our safety that we have always known.
We believe in liberalism. By this I do not mean the faux liberalism of the Democratic party or left-wing politics. I mean real liberalism. The idea that all people are created equal, including us. The idea that all people have the right to self-determination, including us. The idea that all people should be able to sit beneath their vine and their fig tree and no one shall make them afraid, including us.
Our liberalism includes a belief in the value of compromise. Compromises like partition, like withdrawal, like giving up control even over the places that we hold most dear. This liberalism is the foundation of the peaceful world we thought we could bring to life for the betterment of humanity, and ourselves. But, when the compromises are made by and demanded only from us, they are no longer compromises, but self-destruction.
To me, the hope for liberalism faced death at a music festival in the desert where those assembled should have felt the dancing presence of the souls of our beloved dead whose only crime was that they wanted the same freedom as those enjoying Coachella.
Instead, their memory was spat upon with vile epithets rained down from above by Kneecap.
To me, liberalism faced death in the halls of the ICC, where calumny was spun into unjust pseudo-law and weaved into a burgeoning global tapestry to marginalize Jews.
If we are to save the world that we believe will bring us justice, security and peace, we must undo this corruption of the institutions that we thought were at the vanguard of our ideals.
Artists who use their voices to spew hatred cannot be given a platform at venues like Coachella. They must be shouted down by the crowds and removed from the program. Institutions that have betrayed the liberal ideal like the ICC and its parent, the UN, need to be swept away like the League of Nations was.
We must begin again to construct a liberal world before it gets to be too late and we are once again consumed by the perversion of these principles in the service of hate.
