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Wiley's anti-Semitism - and the blunt painful debate around it - has hurt me in a way I find hard to define. I think it's because it makes me confront my own confused Jewish identity, and the different ways we all define ourselves.
I'm of Jewish heritage, but I'm not Jewish. My Dad grew up in a strict Jewish family in South Africa in the 1950s, but moved to England in the 1970s and married my Mum, a non-Jewish woman. This did not go down well with half of my Jewish family, who disowned him.
To that wing of my family, my Dad, my Mum, my sister and me just don't exist. Because my Dad married out of the faith, we have been erased.
My Jewish heritage, then, is tied into that conflict. Any attempt to claim it feels like I have to deny my non-Jewish family.
My Jewish heritage, then, is tied into that conflict. Any attempt to claim it feels like I have to deny my non-Jewish family.
(I should stress I also have loads of Jewish family who moved from South Africa and DO love and accept me as family even though I am decidedly not Jewish and married a Northern Irish Protestant in a Presbyterian church, so... Like I say, it's all very complicated.)
Given my complicated Jewish heritage, I feel uncomfortable talking about antisemitism. I didn't have a bar mitzvah, I only did Shabbat on Fridays at Jewish friends' houses, I've been to church more than synagogue. Can I really claim to have any understanding of it?
That's why, usually, with anti-Semitism in the discourse, I treat it like any other bigotry that I have no direct experience of - something I try to fight against while deferring to people who have actually suffered because of it. This week though something changed.
Wiley's tweets aren't anything I haven't seen before - they're a tediously racist screed that aren't really worth spending time on. It's the fact that this (formerly) great artist that I loved sees "the Jews" as an evil monolith, a single community controlling the world.
His tweets come from a place of ignorance - in that they literally ignore the people who don't fit in his worldview (black Jews, poor Jews, working class Jews, progressive Jews, socialist Jews) to advance a racist conspiracy theory and portray them as the enemy of black people.
Except when I refer to Jewish people as "them" I'm erasing my own identity, my own heritage. In a way by ignoring my Jewish past I'm just adding to this perception that the Jewish community is a single monolith with its own interests where no identities overlap.
The debate around Wiley's anti-Semitism has brought home the way that the discourse reduces people to a single identity and pits them against each other for sport. It kills the nuances, the individual complexities, and makes the loudest and worst of us represent the whole.
Wiley's racism is used as a weapon against black people to discredit the BLM movement, which then in turn is used as an example of how the Jews control the media and how they can never be trusted. Hatred begets hatred and we allow it to flourish.
I'm tired. I'm tired of fitting myself into a box to navigate a debate that's rigged against all of us, that pushes more poison out into the world. I'm tired of being too Jewish for the racists and not Jewish enough for people like my extended family. I'm tired of being divided.
