Who’s more dangerous to the safety of Jewish people, Kanye West or Jenna Ortega?
Easy, right? Kanye is an open Jew hater. He creates tweets that are both incomprehensible and threateningly anti-Semitic, spews Black Hebrew Israelite and Nation of Islam propaganda, and declares his love for Hitler and the Nazis. He even appeared to cause discomfort for even Alex Jones, the guy who attacked the survivors of the Sandy Hook shooting. Ortega, who plays Wednesday Addams in the current Netflix series, is, according to those who work with her, genuinely nice. While West uses his social media for self-aggrandizement, unhinged rants, declarations that he is a god, and, most troublingly, Jew hatred, Ortega uses hers to promote her work and humanitarian causes. She seems to genuinely want to help others.
And therein lies the problem.
The anti-Semitism of the well-intentioned but uninformed
West understands antisemitism perfectly well. He hates Jews. Whatever else is going on in his addled mind, that much is clear. Jenna Ortega presumably sincerely believes that antisemitism is evil, no less so than sexism, homophobia, hatred of Muslims, or other forms of racism and xenophobia. The idea that she promotes anti-Jewish causes would likely make her shudder. The problem is that, like millions of other well meaning Americans, she has no real understanding of antisemitism, and therefore is unlikely to recognize it in at least some of its forms. And, also like millions of other Americans, she likely doesn’t do much investigation into a cause before she posts it to social media. (The number of celebrities who at least in part handle their own social media is astounding.)
Earlier this year, someone forwarded a link to a group chat, horrified that “the girl from Scream” (the Netflix series hadn’t yet been released) would post something like it. (My friend, a Russian-speaking Israeli Jew, used far more vividly descriptive and colorful language which I avoid repeating here.) The link was to a Jenna Ortega Tweet that read simply “Decolonize Palestine,” with an embedded link to a website bearing the same moniker.
Decolonize Palestine. https://t.co/MlI5Gpr2QN
— Jenna Ortega (@jennaortega) March 6, 2022
Decolonize? Was this a clumsy attempt at supporting a two-state solution? I clicked the link.
And I was horrified.