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This is a guest essay by Ellen Ginsberg Simon, a Jewish mother, recovering lawyer, and compliance and ethics professional.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
Dear Ed,
For a week, your Jewish fans waited with increasing dismay for you to respond, react — to say anything — after your concert at MetLife Stadium was hijacked by Macklemore and transformed into an anti-Zionist rally.
As the silence from your team grew deafening, our disappointment turned to resignation. We knew we would have to let go of yet another artist willing to platform Jew hate.
After all, anyone who has not lived under a rock for the past decade knows Macklemore’s record. You invited him to open for you and represent you on your tour knowing that he had once donned a large rubber nose and wig to cosplay as a Hasidic Jew, like a Jewish version of Sambo. You knew his track record of turning concerts into radical, “pro-Palestinian” rallies over the past three years. He began screaming about genocide before Israel had even responded to October 7th, while the country was still sifting through the detritus for its dead.
Macklemore claims the two of you have been friends for 15 years. Given that history, it appears you knew exactly whom you were inviting onto your stage and were willing to platform him — and die on that hill.
Any musician knows how much preparation goes into a concert of this magnitude. Sound checks, lighting checks, AV checks — including, presumably, the Gaza war video Macklemore aired alongside his anti-Zionist song. It is inconceivable that you and your team failed to notice his intentions. Plausible deniability does not exist in this scenario.
Your reaction, however, feels worse than the most rabid pronouncements of Javier Bardem, Mark Ruffalo, or John Cusack. Their respective mad ravings and extremist, performative shenanigans are almost comical in their inanity. You did not rant in support of Macklemore’s free speech rights or mount a soapbox to declare Israelis genocidal maniacs.
No.
Instead, you showed us the more mundane side of how a real genocide germinates.
It took whole countries of complacent people to serve as Hitler’s willing executioners. They did not all need to embrace his ideology. All they needed to do was turn a blind eye to rabid hate. All they had to do was convince themselves that looking the other way, pretending not to see, absolved them of complicity. In doing so, ordinary Germans, Poles, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and so many others enabled mass murder on a hitherto unseen scale.
They, too, believed they were not complicit because they stood still and silent while morality around them melted to ash.
As it turns out, the more mundane side of complicity is the most terrifying of all. All it takes is for someone like you to normalize Jew hate for history to repeat itself. The Holocaust was not perpetrated by the SS or the Brownshirts alone — the “true believers.” It was also facilitated by people who convinced themselves they bore no responsibility because they were not the ones carrying out the unimaginable.
The fact that you only took action to remove Macklemore from your tour when Robert Kraft refused to welcome hate into his own house — and then tepidly claimed you were not taking sides — demonstrates that your self-proclaimed apolitical stance is nothing more than base self-interest. It is the same instinct for personal survival at the expense of those around you that typified so much of 1930s Europe. Only when your livelihood was affected did you suddenly find yourself capable of making a choice.
Anyone who claims to be apolitical is either delusional or lying. Silence does not indicate neutrality. It is neither passive nor harmless. It is an active political choice of its own.
It is the choice of the cowardly bystander who watches his friend being beaten up on the playground, hoping the bullies will spare him. It is not the choice of the upstander who protects his friends with a stiff moral backbone, even if doing so means walking away with a black eye himself.
Elie Wiesel recognized this game, identified it, and decried it in his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech. The voice of a lost generation, Wiesel taught the world: “We must always take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormenter, never the tormented. Sometimes, we must interfere.”
And who were the victims? The tormented?
Jewish families who spent their hard-earned money to bring their children to hear you. Families who patronized you because they believed you stood for something wholesome and beautiful, not empty and callow.
Let me paint a picture of what your concert meant for Jewish children who loved your music and came to cheer for you.
During the concert, my 12-year-old daughter received a text from a friend expressing her shock and fear at what was unfolding around her.
Fear.
That is what your supposed lack of “complicity” engendered in your young fans. You sat silent and pretty while children at your concerts were bullied and exposed to hate speech that you tacitly condoned through your silence, all under the guise of neutrality and innocence.
That child’s mother told me this was her third time seeing you. It will also be her last. She described feeling appalled and completely caught off guard, unsure where to go or what to do as she found herself surrounded by hate, outnumbered, and responsible for the safety of a young girl. She asked her daughter whether she wanted to take a walk until the ranting ended.
“The worst part was that people applauded this,” she explained. “It made me nauseous. It made me sick to my stomach. I was upset. My daughter was upset. It was just so wrong, and I was completely appalled. I sat in my seat furious the rest of the night. My sister has since deleted all of Sheeran’s music from her Spotify. Basically, we’re done. And then he permitted it to happen again the next night and has said nothing since then for a week. The lack of response from Sheeran’s team speaks volumes.”
Another Jewish mother I know attended the second night at MetLife with her 10-year-old daughter. When the chants of “Free Palestine” began, she ushered her child out of the concert and into the concession area, hoping to protect her from the crowds cheering Macklemore’s descent into blood libel.
Her daughter was reluctant to return to their seats, riddled with anxiety. She could not understand why everyone was screaming and angry at her people. In the days since, she has continued talking about the experience with her friends, unable to shake its impact.
Her mother explained, “I felt so, so angry that my daughter was there for it. I felt like the opportunity to protect her and shield her from it was taken away from me — a decision that, as her mom, should be mine, not Macklemore’s or Sheeran’s.”
Now you face the backlash of your other openers and band members quitting in response to your decision to remove your erstwhile pal from the tour. It appears that the other artists involved in your concerts are on the same page as Macklemore.
A man is known by the company he keeps. The company you have chosen to surround yourself with was happy to traumatize Jewish children at a music concert and apparently unconcerned with the murder of other Jewish children at a music festival.
We Jews lack the numbers to make any meaningful impact on your income stream by deleting your music from Spotify or boycotting your shows. Your career will survive this moment perfectly intact, even if this tour founders.
However, as Jews spent 25 hours in self-reflection and admonishment for Yom Kippur this week, I exhort you to take a moment for some deep soul-searching of your own.
Is this the message you want your art to convey? That certain children will not be safe at your concerts? Have you considered the impact of your shows on unsuspecting fans who will carry these memories with them for a lifetime, forever associating you and your songs with trauma and bullying?
I do not actually think you want that.
I think that, like the average German of the 1930s and 1940s, you simply want to go about your life, record your albums, and not have to worry about these problems.
No one is asking you to make political speeches or politicize your concerts and music in the manner of Macklemore. We are asking you to consider the consequences of your pretended non-complicity and agnostic attitude when you knowingly invite people onto your stage who will leave your own customers in fear.
As another Jewish mother who attended told me, “I’m all for everyone having their own opinions about things, but you’re a celebrity. There’s no reason for celebrities to bring their politics to stage. This isn’t part of your job. Do your job. We don’t take our political beliefs into our workplace, so why do you think it’s okay to do that in yours?”
We are not asking you to scream louder than Macklemore and his ilk. We are asking you to show compassion, forethought, and care in deciding whom you invite onto your stage, so that a Jewish mother who brings her third-grader to your show does not have to spend the following week tucking a crying child into bed.
That is not asking you to declare sides, censor anyone, or polemicize on your perspective of Middle East affairs.
It is asking you to demonstrate the common decency that the average, silently complicit citizen of Nazi Germany lacked: the decency to recognize threats and bigotry rather than turn a blind eye while actively hosting and platforming them.
This is not a heavy lift.
A heartfelt, eloquent, and well-reasoned plea. It will never reach the ears that need to hear it and that wouldn't listen if they did. But thank you for it.
And consider the wonderful tribute from Boy George! We will dance again!
https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=3016555235403152