Dear Bey and Jay,
I hope you’ll forgive the informality. ’Tis the blessed season of the 20th anniversary B’Day re-release, and when you’ve spent most of your life listening to you two, as my friends and I have, you feel a certain familiarity. Can you imagine being on a dance team in the late ’90s and early 2000s and not blasting “Jumpin’, Jumpin’” or “Survivor” on repeat? Jay, in college, we were warming up to “Lucifer,” performing to “Bring ’Em Out” and, for a twist, the beautiful “My 1st Song.” Of course, in the car with the windows down we were rapping “Izzo” even earlier. Bey, watching the evolution has been a wonder and I teared up the first time I heard “16 Carriages,” not just because it’s stunning but because it was so fun and so rare to hear something that unexpected. B’Day will always be my favorite Beyoncé album. There is no limit to the amount of times I will request “Get Me Bodied” in my life, whether at a club or at a bat mitzvah. And I will drop it low at both.
It is also the season of the third commemoration of October 7. The hostages have come home. Or died in captivity under terrorists. Antisemitism, violent and otherwise, has ballooned in such alarming fashion the world over that, for a child of the 90s in America, it defies comprehension. Recently, “Clique” popped up at random in my playlist. At first, I thought only that I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about this song for so long. Sometimes it takes a minute to wake up into the twilight-zone world of 2026. Like the first morning of a trip, in the waking moments with your eyes closed, when your dreams still shimmer and you think yourself at home. After a second, I remembered I don’t listen to Kanye West anymore—not after his tweets, not after his anti-Semitic rants, not after the song on the 2025 album that I find difficult even to name. Then I thought, I don’t think Bey and Jay have made any kind of attempt to distance themselves from this hateful person who was once their friend and close collaborator. And I really wish they would.
One of the lessons of history is that catastrophes happen by increments. If you are looking around scared of the signs you’re seeing, something is already happening. In an earlier draft of this essay, the entirety of my disbelief was directed toward the fact that a critically acclaimed global superstar had released a song, among others equally horrifying, called “Heil Hitler.” But today, just hours ago, I heard that Kanye West this past weekend, broke his own record and played the largest hip-hop concert in U.S. history. 83,000-plus fans. Yes, he apologized earlier this year. He also apologized in 2023—two years before he started selling swastika t-shirts and recording the most vilely antisemitic record I can conceive of.
He’s ill; we know this. He is maybe, in some degree, like Ezra Pound: brilliant, innovative, sick, hateful. But don’t you understand? He is dangerous, as is anyone using a powerful platform for a hateful cause. Certain people listen. After “Heil Hitler,” after the banner hung across an L.A. freeway in direct response to his even earlier comments, where were your voices? I wish to goodness I could stick with my first draft which conceded that the limelight was no longer his. Jay, by the time you take the Super Bowl stage in February 2027, will you have demanded better behavior from your peers? Will you have shared your disgust with any person who makes any such statement? Will you have left well enough alone your own problematic lyrics in “The Story of O.J.”? In his January apology, West said he had “lost touch with reality” due to his bipolar disorder. I don’t doubt this. Let me make something very clear: anyone who holds antisemitic beliefs has lost touch with reality. Anyone who participates in a belief about any entire group of people, disregarding the reality of individual humanity, has somewhere lost the thread. I believe the thread is retrievable, but only if you extinguish the hatred expeditiously in favor of open discourse. Now. Yesterday. Mr. and Mrs. Carter, in 2026, you have one thing (hopefully that’s all) in common with your old friend: we want you on the stage. You hold a great deal of power. I am asking you to use it.
When you grow up Jewish, you start to become accustomed to the feeling of discovering the next anti-Semitic person you had once loved. Poets, authors, singers, politicians. Each time it hurts. Sometimes, it pierces. (T. S. Eliot, looking at you. Roald Dahl. Hardly able to look at you. I used to read Matilda on repeat, flipping back to the first page immediately after finishing the last. I wish I hadn’t remembered this example.)
The question for me has always been how it is even possible that people with such virtuosic gifts to sing of the beauty in human existence could simultaneously be stupid enough to engage in group hatred. A base form of stupidity. A secondary (and clearly naïve) question follows: how could they not figure that their prejudices would hurt their Jewish fans? Are they not aware that they have young viewers of all backgrounds who read themselves right into their universal characters and think “thank you for this human story”?
As I listened to the first two verses of “Clique,” I could not help but think of how much both of you, Jay and Bey, have meant at every stage of my life. Once, as my mom drove me to the hospital with an unnerving bout of colitis and asked what she should put on the radio, the answer was “anything from 4.” When my little sister and her friends (aged 10) had to choreograph a dance for the annual pool party, the song choice of course was “No, No, No.” When I finish writing this, I’ll play “Cuff It.” Feel-better music. What holds us together is always so much stronger than what divides us. The lie has always been the reverse.
As I listened to B’Day, the original, on nonstop in 2007 during my semester on a kibbutz in central Israel, with volunteer friends from almost every continent, I would not have believed you had you told me what was coming. It’s 2026, and things don’t make sense more often than they do. It’s 2026, and as we wait for the Act III album, as though the world were normal, we cannot grant the clearest of centrally grounded realities. In the third year after October 7’s devastation, it should not be difficult to say that our hearts bleed for the innocent of Gaza, as for the innocent of October 7. It should also not be difficult to acknowledge that rabid anti-Zionism is correlated to rising anti-Semitism. And 83,000+ fans just went to West’s concert. I got an email last week about swastikas at my former high school. I could go on. None of this was imaginable two decades ago. If we do not understand by now that anything can happen—unless we prevent it—we understand nothing. When Act III is released, when Super Bowl LXI rolls around, it is impossible to say what the world will look like. We are doing our best to ignore what it looks like now. I can only say—through my disbelief, which requires portioning into ever more absurd circumstances—I hope by then that you have woken up and reminded people what matters.
Like millions of people, I’ll be forever grateful for what you’ve given me. Truly my life would not be the same without your talent. It would be missing an entire pattern of joy without your music. It is 2026 and I, like so many, am often walking around with a broken heart. But where there is dance, music, connection, there is joy: a joy that fights heartbreak. Use your voices, the soundtrack to my life, on behalf of every fan, and against every hatred. Group hatred of any kind is reprehensible. Don’t you think it is ridiculous that we still need to remind people of this? Let’s see if we can learn anything from history. If we can be better. Use our platforms for better.
Thank you for decades’ worth of making life better,
—Jordi
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