On NGE Ideology, Hip Hop Culture, and Jay Electronica’s New Album
In the New York hip hop scene, Jews are often inextricable from Blacks.
This doesn’t mean that hip hop is a Jewish music form. It doesn’t mean that hip hop is an expression of primarily Jewish culture. It doesn’t mean that Jews are, on any principal level, pioneers of a cultural form which reflects the struggles, passions, and daily lives of Black New Yorkers. It is simply reflective of the cultural and sociological background of New York City, the birthplace of hip hop, an inherently localized and community-based form of artistic expression which touches on what my friend, longtime activist Mohammed Harun Arsalai, calls “Low-End Theorism” — an expression of intellectual thought reflective of localized civil societies, and emerging directly from communities themselves rather than adhering to an often supremacist framework of external academic analysis.
Jews and Blacks, throughout their collective histories, have both faced uniquely applied and uniquely defined struggles. But when apparently unaligned and uniquely marginalized groups become subjected to a dominant, overarching cultural structure, such as the structure imposed by white elites in the city which Rudy Giuliani lovingly referred to in his 1994 inaugural speech as “The Capital of the World”, many of these struggles suddenly become shared, and independent communities find themselves aligned in addressing common issues of oppression and persecution.
In this sense, it’s unsurprising that Jews living in New York City during the 20th century were involved in the incipiency of hip hop as an art form.
[Editorial note: Much of the cultural crossover between Jews and Blacks in the New York music scene resides in punk rock subculture, and its subsequent intersections with hip hop, especially through dub music. Whereas I maintain knowledge of hip hop culture and some knowledge of dub music and early dub culture, I’ll avoid addressing this particular angle, since punk music culture isn’t my vibe.]
Owing to its status as a localized musical form reflective of the communities it has emerged from, and given that hip hop rapidly expanded from its roots to take hold in various communities across the United States and the world, it’s tough to compile an inclusive list of Jewish artists and the relative impact they’ve had on contemporary hip hop culture. In lieu of a lengthy research paper on this issue, below is a small collection of some prominent Jewish individuals who shifted the culture in major ways.
“Gave away more hits than Rick Rubin.” — Jadakiss, “Cutlass”.
Rick Rubin is the co-founder of Def Jam alongside Russell Simmons, one of the most prominent and successful Black businessmen in New York, who has, to his credit, built his empire largely around ownership within the Black community. Rubin is himself a Jew from Long Beach Island, and alongside Simmons, contributed as much as almost anyone to the industry early on — although he’d only stay with the label for four years, in a split which Simmons says resulted from Rubin’s trend away from hip hop and towards groups like Slayer. His mainstream popularity in this regard stems mostly from signing the Beastie Boys, a trio of Jewish rappers from the historically Jewish neighborhood of Williamsburg in Brooklyn — but Rubin was producing hip hop music before co-founding Def Jam, and the Beastie Boys were pulling off a transition from hardcore punk to hip hop before they signed to the label, even before Rubin was brought on as a live set DJ and occasional in-studio producer for the group.
“Okay, so who we rolling with, then? (We rolling with Rush.) Yeah, Rushtown Management.” — Eric B. and Rakim, “Paid In Full”.
Rush served as the artist management apparatus of Simmons’ Def Jam Recordings empire, and was founded alongside it in the early 1980s. This leads easily into the role of Lyor Cohen, who did A&R work for a slew of early hip hop acts who are now easily considered pioneers of hip hop music. Cohen is an Israeli-born Jew whose parents emigrated to the United States, and who became principally involved in the New York hip hop scene in the early 1980s.
Dame Dash, pictured above, despises Lyor Cohen with every single fiber of his being. He has lots of words for him, even going so far as to say that “I coined the term culture vulture because of him”, given Cohen’s propensity like other label executives to fold into the overarching white-dominated power structures of the music industry. “Lyor don’t listen to no rap music,” Dame said. “He don’t even listen to music, and he never did. […] He profits off our dysfunction.” This highlights the overarching dynamic at play, whereby Black culture is subjugated to white-dominated power structures in a seemingly controlled manner which seeks to keep marginalized groups outside spheres of influence while allowing them some flexibility by which to engage with the political economy.
Certainly, Dame sees Lyor Cohen as an outsider who seeks to profit off a culture which isn’t his — although profiteering is an act which Dame isn’t inherently opposed to, provided it remains reflective of the communities which are being promoted. “It’s all about finding ways to make money off an upscale urban product,” he said in a 2006 New York Magazine interview. “That’s what I do. I’m a businessman. Period.”
Cohen’s role in the hip hop industry remains tenuous — but as Joe Budden argues, his role in elevating young black artists to positions of influence and control appears to secure his role within the industry, at least in a basic sense.
“You need a posse the size of the Nazis to attack this, and you’re more optimistic than the Sounds of Blackness.” — MC Serch, “Back to the Grill Again”.
You probably know Serch for his input in bringing up Nas, but he’d been making music for years prior. Serch himself is the best person to talk to for commentary on his role as a Jewish man in hip hop culture, and even relatively early on, with their hit “Pop Goes the Weasel”, Serch and 3rd Bass had a salient commentary on hip hop culture’s evolving role in the overarching American music industry.
“For Scott Storch. (My mellow, my man.)” — Black Thought and Malik B. of The Roots, “Mellow My Man”.
Another New York-born Jew, Storch eventually found his foothold in the industry through the path of working with the Philadelphia-based live hip hop band The Roots (then Square Roots), where he served as keyboardist for their early live albums and later moved into production work, including for major artists such as Xzibit, Terror Squad, G-Unit, DMX, and The Game — these names being a small sampling of the fact that Storch has, at this point, effectively contributed production work for nearly every single major hip hop or hip hop-adjacent musical artist in the industry.
“Got a call from Dru-Ha. (You got the memo that I sent you?) LAX, two hours, n****, have two rentals.” — Starang Wondah of O.G.C., “Bounce to the Ounce”.
Alongside Buckshot of Black Moon, Dru-Ha moved from working with the Brownsville-based hip hop collective on Nervous Records to founding Duck Down Music, one of the most highly influential and underacknowledged elements of hip hop culture which has been singlehandedly responsible for shifting cultural tropes in hip hop and establishing new norms within the culture. A White Plains Jew, Dru-Ha founded the label alongside its principal co-founder and creative director, Buckshot, and manages it to this day.
“You about to see how far that Paul Rosenberg’ll go.” — Royce Da 5'9", “Second Place”.
Rosenberg doesn’t need to be talked about, really. If you’re unaware of his massively outsized role in influencing hip hop culture, hopefully you’re at least cursorily aware of Eminem’s role in shifting the culture. Rosenberg met Eminem around 1997, began managing for him, and co-founded Shady Records alongside him, a venture which would eventually develop into a media empire. Rosenberg is still one of the most active, well-known, and well-respected figures in hip hop.
“Jerry Heller and Eazy are more Ruthless.” — Ras Kass, “Bishop”.
Look beyond the incendiary nature of Ice Cube’s “you let a Jew break up my crew” line in the infamous anti-N.W.A. diss track, “No Vaseline”. While superficially anti-Semitic, this line isn’t actually reflective of any of the issues referenced within this article, since it draws more broadly on a generalized sense of anti-Semitism within the overarching American culture, rather than drawing on a specific subset of thought within hip hop culture.
Alongside Eazy-E, Heller — despite the overwhelming and likely accurate allegations of impropriety which tarnished his reputation as a manager and which sees him as a likely candidate for the title of “culture vulture” given his tendencies to exploit and subjugate a culture which he is outsider to — was uniquely influential in elevating Jewish participation in west coast hip hop. Beyond bringing up the duo which would eventually go on to form the Black Eyed Peas, Heller and Eazy-E also signed the Jewish duo “Blood of Abraham,” which at one point was spending Hanukkah in Santa Monica, only to be pulled into the studio to record their first and only Ruthless release, “Future Profits”. Two of their most famous releases concern the shared history of persecution in the United States between Blacks and Jews, and their most famous track addresses the imposition of a dominant cultural structure across uniquely defined ethnocultural communities in America, with the lyrics: “Stabbed by the steeple, scalpeled by the chapel, the choir’s got my tongue, and the preacher’s got my Adam’s apple. All choked out against the confession stand, I told you once before, I’m definitely not the motherfucking man.”
This cultural context makes the next portion of analysis very, very hard to address. Because whereas Jews and Judaism have played an integral role in both growing and defining hip hop culture, so, too, has the ideology of a novel revival movement: the Nation of Islam.
The overwhelming bulk of analysis on the Nation of Islam approaches the group from a terror studies perspective. Whereas the Southern Poverty Law Center accurately identifies the organization as a hate group, and whereas federal law enforcement operations as early as 1955 sought to portray the organization as a predominantly radical Islamist extremist organization, this perspective has skewed subsequent academic, sociological, and anthropological analysis on the NOI and its latent influences not only in hip hop culture, but in Black culture across the United States. As a result, there exist very few analyses of NOI ideology and its offshoots as a neutral narrative force present in these subcultures.
Faced with a sheer absence of cultural history and collective identity upon being forcibly stripped of it, the Black diaspora in the United States tended largely towards adhering to the facets of Christianity imposed by early European slavers. This spiritual respite allowed diasporic Blacks the ability to create a somewhat unique cultural form, rooted in Christianity, which persists throughout many communities to this day.
But as Black liberation and self-agency progressed at a crawling pace in the United States, conditions were soon primed for a collective dissemination of the idea that historical absence serves as a defining factor for the Black diaspora. This process took many subforms, including the more generally dominant form of Afrocentrist ideology, as popularized in part by the Zulu Nation. but through the efforts of Master Wallace Fard Muhammad and his subsequent followers, Nation of Islam ideology eventually emerged as an overwhelming definitive force among Black communities on the east coast, eventually proliferating through Harlem and the rest of New York City through the efforts of Malcolm X, Clarence 13X, and other spiritual NOI leaders. Owing to their existence in a time of collective cultural revival for Black Americans, many of these ideological forms saw a substantial crossover, often exchanging tropes with and adopting cultural elements from one another.
At its core, NOI ideology should ostensibly be inoffensive to those outside the dominant white power structures in America. It is Islamic in the sense that it supposes Allah to be the creator of the universe, but bears little resemblance to contemporary Islamic ideology beyond these underpining frameworks. Moreso, the Nation of Islam attempts to address the historical absence of collective cultural history among Black Americans, and supposes that the Black man is the original human being, a descendant of the Tribe of Shabazz, and one of the original creations of Allah over 66 trillion years ago. In contrast, the white race is seen as a relatively recent creation, having been made 6,600 years ago by the scientist Yakub, who is supposedly analogous to the Biblical character Jacob. The Poor Righteous Teachers belonging to the offshoot Five-Percenter Nation (Nations of Gods and Earths) ideology take this one step further, supposing that the [Asiatic] Black man is himself the physical manifestation of God walking the earth, resulting in the acronym: “Arm, Leg, Leg, Arm, Head.” Both ideologies suppose that the white race exist as impostors on this planet, a geneaological creation of the evil Yakub in an attempt to out-breed the descendants of the Tribe of Shabazz by slowly transitioning the skin color of the population from black to brown to white. The scientist Yakub, after all, while himself being a Black man and a descendant of the original man on earth, sought to bastardize the original Tribe of Shabazz in order to create and lead his own tribe of “chosen people”.
You might see where this is going.
Being the Biblical patriarch, Jacob is seen as the direct historical ancestor of the descendants of the 12 Tribes of Israel, and thusly, contemporary Jews are often referred to in both philo-Semitic and anti-Semitic contexts as the “chosen people of God”. This creates an uncomfortable ideological dynamic within the Nation of Islam, which seems to establish a directly anti-Semitic dichotomy between the concept of Judaism and the concept of the Tribe of Shabazz and the Yakubites. Indeed, this dichotomy emerged as a significant guiding force within much of NOI thought, leading to the present association between the NOI and its offshoots with anti-Semitic sentiment. The current head of the organization, Minister Louis Farrakhan, is rightfully seen as an overt and unabashedly virulent anti-Semite, and these critiques extend back to the original teachings of Master Wallace Fard Muhammad.
I won’t get into the allegations of anti-Semitism against Minister Farrakhan and the movement which he currently leads, as they have already been written about extensively from various perspectives. I will also refrain from delving into the allegations of his involvement in the murder of Malcolm X, the nuances of his sermons, or his particular influence in hip hop culture. Whereas Farrakhan is a prominent figurehead for this ideology, he still serves as a peripheral function of cultural proliferation in this case: Farrakhan’s role is solely as a hinge between the various dynamics discussed in this piece.
In hip hop culture, splits in Nation of Islam ideology are almost as important and definitive as the facets of that ideology itself. It’s well known that Malcolm X split from Louis Farrakhan, who himself split from the Honorable Elijah J. Muhammad’s son, Warith Deen Muhammad, and subsequent splits among spiritual leaders such as Clarence 13X resulted in the ideological amalgam which we see today. This dynamic is what has made NOI/NGE culture inextricable from hip hop culture, and thusly inextricable from the broader evolution of Black culture in the United States: more important than any extraneous notion about how others should be perceived is the central tenet of self-agency and definitive cultural identity among Black Americans, and how each community has evolved these frameworks to address their own unique struggles.
That’s why certain artists, who are seen as followers of Minister Farrakhan and as the most influential proponents (the “Fruit of Islam”) of NOI/NGE culture in music today, offer a seemingly inaccurate and bastardized interpretation of this dominant ideological form which has rooted itself in hip hop culture.
Take Jay Electronica, perhaps the most legendary proponent of NOI ideology in the dictionary sense of the word. Fans awaited his studio debut for years, and on March 13th, it finally dropped, with heavy input from Jay-Z, who is technically uncredited on the album. Jay appears on all but one of the album’s vocal tracks, and both artists take the “Islam” portion of the Nation of Islam to its fullest extent, dropping so many one-off Islamic and Qur’anic terminologies that even Ben Norton would blush.
It’s indisputable that Jay is a Soulja, and this is by no means an attempt to marginalize his contributions to the industry: he was born in the Magnolia, a collection of housing projects in uptown New Orleans which birthed Cash Money and which was subsequently razed in order to create a new series of heavily gentrified community housing projects — two historical footnotes which I still believe are somehow connected.
Jay has been active in the industry for many years, and even engaged in a lengthy relationship with the legendary Erykah Badu, with whom he has one daughter. He was also managed for a period of time by and infamously carried on a romantic relationship with Kate Rothschild, an heiress of the Rothschild family and the ex-wife of Ben Goldsmith, the investment banker and UK Green Party activist.
Perhaps owing to his apparent status, Jay Electronica’s self-promotional efforts have often included establishing a sense of mystique around himself and his work, somewhat akin to Your Old Droog, leaving fans wondering what will come next. Throughout all of this, the one overarching fact about Jay Electronica remained: that he was a faithful and close-knit adherent to the Nations of Gods and Earths.
So earlier this month when Jay dropped his long-awaited debut album, “A Written Testimony”, it was unsurprising that the intro track opened with a sermon from the Minister Farrakhan.
The very first words spoken on the album are by the Minister Farrakhan. They come from a sermon he has delivered in some form several times, but which was perhaps sampled directly from his speech at the Atlanta Civic Center in Atlanta, Georgia, on June 26th, 2010. The intro track on the album begins:
“I don’t want to waste any time. I ask the question, ‘who are the real children of Israel?’, and I’d like to answer it right away. Like any good lawyer in a courtroom, he tells you what he’s gonna prove, and then he goes ahead and proves it and let [sic] the jury make the decision. The honorable Elijah Muhammad has said that almighty God Allah revealed to him that the Black people of America are the real children of Israel, and they, we, are the choice of God. And that, unto us, he will deliver his promise.”
The album then cuts into the second track, “Ghost of Soulja Slim”, featuring Jay-Z. [Editorial note: rest in peace, Slim.] A separate speech from the Minister Farrakhan plays, and the dialogue on the album continues:
“Are you scared to death, Negroes? […] Just sit down. Don’t you talk out to defend our enemy! You sit down and you shut up, and tell your master to come on out and deal with this.”
As though to dismiss any assertion that his lyrics aren’t reflective of anti-Semitism, Jay Electronica continues on the same track, rapping the line: “I came to bang with the scholars [editorial note: a likely reference to the 5% Poor Righteous Teachers], and I bet you a Rothschild I get a bang for my dollar. The Synagogue of Satan want me to hang by my collar, but all praise due to Allah, subhanaahu wa-ta’ala (سُبْحَانَهُ وَتَعَالَىٰ).”
Jay’s pleasantly unique use of SWT notwithstanding, it’s clear that he seeks to assert main-line Nation of Islam ideology — that is, the ideology which is being actively promoted in sermons by the Minister Farrakhan. The “bang for my dollar” line may well refer to the intimate relationship Jay carried on with Kate Rothschild, but the second line, as confirmed by Jay in a series of now-deleted Twitter posts, is a back-reference to the Book of Revelation in the New Testament of the Bible, where the line appears twice:
“I know thy works, and tribulation, and poverty, (but thou art rich) and I know the blasphemy of them which say they are Jews, and are not, but are the synagogue of Satan.” — Revelation 2:9
“Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan, which say they are Jews, and are not, but do lie; behold, I will make them to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee.” — Revelation 3:9
In their full Biblical context, these chapters are often cited alongside the suggestion that Jews are at best murtadeen and at worst munafiqun among the true chosen people of God — whether that be Christians, or, in this case, the ideological followers of the Nation of Islam. It’s a theme the Minister Farrakhan has picked up on extensively, and rebroadcast across many of his sermons.
Farrakhan expands on the concept of the “Synagogue of Satan” significantly in a series of 58 lectures from 2013 to 2014 titled “The Time & What Must Be Done.” In several lectures, Jews are the principal topic of discussion, with Minister Farrakhan casting many anti-Semitic dispersions throughout. In the 21st lecture, he concisely explains why this Jewcentric focus exists:
“Our problem, brothers and sisters, is that we don’t know ourselves or the time. We don’t know God, or the enemy of God. And as long as we are blind to this crucial and critical knowledge in this time then we are open to be deceived misused and continue to be used by our open enemy as a tool and a willing slave. So it is absolutely necessary that we untie you from the forces that have you bound.”
The Minister Farrakhan continues, asserting that Jewish rabbinical theology is a function of Satan and a bastardization of the Torah:
“As we have been discussing the Synagogue of Satan and how these Satanic Jews wrote a book with their hands, the Talmud, to make it equal or even superior to the revealed word of God found in the Torah.”
He continues, citing the late Jewish-American novelist Herman Wouk, in asserting that the Talmud is the “circulating heart’s blood of the Jewish religion,” making clear that in this case, he considers all Jews in all walks of life to be murtadeen who seek to stray others from the righteous path of God.
The idea that Jews comprise a murtadeen class is a belief which originates moreso in hadith than in Qur’anic scripture, which itself is interpretive in its assertions on the Jewish peoples across various suwar but in which the Prophet Muhammad generally maintains that, alongside Christians, Jews comprise an ahl al-kitaab class. Certainly, the former idea of Jews as apostates has been expanded upon significantly by Nation of Islam theologians and ideological leaders, to the point where Medievally inspired anti-Semitism now serves as a defining factor for organizational Nation of Islam ideology.
The rapper, sociologist, and social activist Phil Mandelbaum, who performs under the stage name AWKWORD, wrote a fantastic piece on this case from the perspective of Jewish issues and their intersection with hip hop culture, with a story tip which was later ripped without credit by the editors of the Jewish Daily Forward.
Himself a Jew and a longtime element of the hip hop industry who has worked with artists such as Sean Price, Joell Ortiz, and Atmosphere, Mandelbaum notes accurately the overlying elements of anti-Semitism within Jay’s lyrics. “I have [..] always been careful to stay true to myself, never overstep my boundaries, and show deference as an ally and invited guest in what is essentially a Black urban culture,” he says. “So, when I call someone or something out for being anti-Semitic, it’s probably because they/it are/is. When I shed light on the anti-Semitism in Jay Electronica’s music, I do so understanding the historical and present-day relevance. For thousands of years Jews have been persecuted, often for the very inaccuracies referenced by the rapper: Satanic-worship; shady financial practices; secret, centralized control of society.”
As Mandelbaum says, these lyrics from Jay Electronica are plainly anti-Semitic, but the disservice done by the lyrics isn’t necessarily done towards the Jews, who face far more prominent and threatening elements of culturally dominant anti-Semitism on a daily basis. Instead, it proves a disservice to overarching NOI/NGE culture, which by and large eschews most elements of anti-Semitism which aren’t otherwise found in other dominant American cultural forms.
If NOI/NGE ideology in its current form is anti-Semitic, that means the hundreds of hip hop artists across nearly four decades who have promoted byproduct forms of main-line NOI/NGE ideology are themselves inherently anti-Semitic. If this were the case, Dru-Ha wouldn’t have worked so hard to put out Smif-N-Wessun’s new NGE-centric album, “The A.L.L.”. He wouldn’t have kept working with Duck Down for decades, and he certainly wouldn’t have flown the Clik out to North Carolina to work with 9th Wonder. If NOI/NGE ideology in its current form is anti-Semitic, one might expect him to feel existentially threatened. At the least, as a relative outsider to a Black urban culture, one might expect him to take a step back from this perceived anti-Semitism.
But he clearly doesn’t — and that’s because NOI/NGE ideology, in its current form as having proliferated throughout much of hip hop culture in America, is not externalized.
Around the time when hip hop took over mainstream pop music, Black culture began to be universally reflective on an obvious level among the broader white cultural structures in America. Outsiders subsequently took this opportunity to offer outsider perspectives, including on the NOI ideology found within hip hop culture. They viewed Farrakhan’s sermons and organizational teachings through an externalized lens, with an emphasis on the remarks made about others. Despite all this, Black Americans continued to rely on NOI/NGE thought within their own communities from an internalized perspective, seeking to use it as a force by which to parse their own realities, actions, and uniquely defined existence. Far from either its ideological foundations or its main-line philosophy as promoted through the structures of the organizational Nation of Islam, NOI/NGE ideology as found in modern Black culture serves as a staple by which to define ever-evolving Black experiences, not as a frame of reference by which to address factors found among external cultural groups.
“You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America? This is how they did it.” — Jay-Z, “The Story of O.J.”.
Which brings us to this line by Jay-Z, the Tom Cruise of the organizational Nation of Islam movement, and perhaps the most popular and most influential proponent of Farrakhanism in America today.
On “The Story of O.J.”, Jay-Z establishes a specific narrative: The growing cultural dominance of Blackness in America, in contrast with the reflexive hostility towards Blackness by dominant American cultural structures, and how those factors impact a Black person’s navigation through these elitist and insular structures in which they suddenly find themselves playing a marginal role.
The song is an accurate gauge, at least from my own inherently externalized perspective, of the Black struggle in America. It defines what is faced by Black Americans who are still subjected to a de facto imposition of “separate equality” by virtue of an Orientalist power structure which treats its own citizens as outsiders. The rapper and sociologist Phil Mandelbaum (AWKWORD) notes this dynamic: “We get all our trends, slang, style, etc. from black culture, wanna watch them play sports and bet on them, but don’t want them to have equal rights or real power.”
And so Jay-Z, who in many aspects is still an outsider despite his status as a billionaire, reflects the path by which Blacks may rise to relative elitism: by investing in real estate.
“You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America? This is how they did it.”
Jay-Z later defended this line, insisting it was an intentional overexaggeration akin to his portrayal of Blacks in the song and associated music video. “Of course, I know Jewish people don’t own all the property in America. I own things,” he said on the Rap Radar podcast.
But an overexaggeration wasn’t his intention.
First, Jay-Z establishes the narrative of how dominant white cultural structures in America portray Blacks, and how Black Americans are participant in these definitions. “House n****, don’t fuck with me. I’m a field n****, with shined cutlery,” he says, establishing the perceived internal contrast between two directly comparable groups which view themselves as different due to the influence of dominant cultural structures.
Using overexaggerated tropes, he continues outlining a likely path by which Blacks are able to succeed despite a power structure which necessitates their marginalization: “I told him, ‘please don’t die over the neighborhood that your mama renting. Take your drug money and buy the neighborhood, that’s how you rinse it.’”
This narrative continues generally, with Jay-Z expanding on it and adding flourishes throughout, before it hits the line in question:
“You ever wonder why Jewish people own all the property in America? This is how they did it.”
Despite Jay-Z’s rebuttal, this line isn’t the same as any other line in the song which seeks to intentionally cast a racist trope upon Black Americans. It asserts a specific overexxagerated trope, but not to the same end as any of the other tropes in the song are asserted.
Jay-Z seeks to portray Black Americans through the lens of the historical tropes associated with slavery and racism in the United States in the context of asserting that these tropes are false albeit being universally adhered to, and must be willfully navigated by a Black person seeking to rise to success in America. In contrast, he subsequently asserts the anti-Semitic “Jews own property” trope in the context of it being a truthful statement, which must also be navigated by a Black person seeking to rise to success in America.
One interpretation sees the line as acknowledging, inherently, the persecution of Jews in the United States, and this is likely Jay-Z’s intention behind the line — to acknowledge that Jews, alongside Blacks, have also been persecuted by dominant American cultural structures. It becomes anti-Semitic when we consider that Jay-Z seeks to “otherize” Jews by utilizing this trope, demonstrating thusly that whereas Jews have also faced persecution in America, they somehow managed to evade the impositions of cultural supremacy and emerge as leaders of influence in American society and government — and “this is how they did it.”
Jews achieved success by the same paths as Blacks, and throughout the 20th century were subjected to a forced marginalization by the dominant American cultural structures in a similar manner to Blacks, which saw Jews being excluded from “typical” industries and forced to pave their own path in the fields of art, sports, entertainment, and other fringe areas of work.
Look at Bumpy Johnson, who, as the investigative journalist and mafia researcher Nicholas Gage once wrote, “took the only safe road open for a black gangster — exploitation of fellow blacks.” Johnson worked closely with the Genovese Crime Family and with Lucky Luciano, himself a close associate of Meyer Lansky, both of whom engaged in the syndicated exploitation of their own Italian and Jewish communities. As the mafia historian Carl Sifakis noted in 1987, in offering a perspective on the likely formation of a new Black mafia, “there is no doubt that, as today’s ghetto occupants, these ethnic groups [blacks and Hispanics] have become the prime criminals — in terms of ordinary crime — that the Jews and Italians were before them and the Irish before that.” This take is dated, and offers a clue as to Sifakis’ own personal beliefs and biases, but its primary takeaway with regards to marginalization is accurate, because all aforementioned groups experienced structurally similar if uniquely incomparable degrees of persecutory isolation by the dominant white American power structures throughout the 20th century.
This is all to say that, in contrast to the narrative promoted by Minister Farrakhan, NOI/NGE ideology in its broadly reflective form throughout contemporary hip hop culture is not anti-Semitic — and popular artists like Jay-Z and Jay Electronica, who seek to propagate specifically anti-Semitic elements of this ideology through their lyrics and deference to the organizational Nation of Islam, offer a great disservice to the popular perception of NOI/NGE culture as it exists today.
Not that any of this commentary matters. As Jay Electronica says, “if it come from me and Hov, consider it Qur’an. If it come from any of those, consider it haram.”
Further Readings, Watchings, & Listenings:
- Minister Farrakhan’s “The Time & What Must Be Done” Lecture Series: http://muhammad-mosque-12.com/ttwmbd/
- Elijah Muhammad, “Message to the Blackman in America” https://www.amazon.com/Message-Blackman-America-Elijah-Muhammad-ebook/dp/B0054R9C1M/
- Phil Mandelbaum, “Jay Electronica is Anti-Semitic. We Shouldn’t Ignore It.” https://medium.com/@philmandelbaum/jay-electronica-is-anti-semitic-we-shouldnt-ignore-it-8305eb50b25
- Joe Budden Podcast, August 2018: “Is Lyor Cohen a Culture Vulture?” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mmTQLaylns
- The Holy Qur’an, particularly Surat al-Ma’idah and Surat Bani Isra’il.
- Supreme Understanding Allah, C’BS Alife Allah, Sunez Allah, “Knowledge of Self: A Collection of Wisdom on the Science of Everything in Life” https://www.amazon.com/Knowledge-Self-Collection-Science-Everything-ebook/dp/B0038YXDCW
- Jay Electronica, “A Written Testimony” https://tidal.com/browse/album/134189334
Follow the author on Twitter @JettGoldsmith.
