Soviet style

Run The Jewels came onstage to Queen’s ‘We Are The Champions’, and I remember feeling like I had just entered a parallel universe. I was walking up the steps to stand on the side of the Pyramid stage at Glastonbury; the greatest stage in the world. And I passed a man that looked like Jeremy Corbyn. There was a sea of about 100,000 people out in front of me; the size of crowd usually reserved for the headline slot, not an afternoon set. I was surprised they were here for Run The Jewels. I knew the tour manager for Run The Jewels at the time. He used to always slide into my DMs. And when he invited me to see the rap duo side-of-stage, I thought it would be fun. (However life hack: standing side-of-stage is a shitty experience full of wankers, and the sound is better offsite with headphones). What I didn’t know was that Jeremy Corbyn would be speaking before they got onstage. He introduced the band’s dual rappers El-P and Killer Mike, but not before he made his rousing political speech to an enraptured audience who cheered for him like he was the Messiah. It was mental.

“Politics is actually about everyday life. It’s about all of us: what we dream, what we want, what we achieve and what we want for everybody else.”

Yes, it was for everybody else, except the Jews.

Anyway those were some of Corbyn’s Che Guevara lite words, among a load of other lies. I remember that above me in the same side-of-stage area was the human collection of scarves and bangles known as Johnny Depp, gleaming like he’d just snorted a line out of Corbyn’s arsehole. This was either a moment before or after that shitstain also made a speech to a large crowd about assassinating President Trump. I didn’t attend that, but a colleague at NME did. “I lie for a living,” said the disgraced actor. Accurate. 2017 was the year abusive con artist men were platformed at Glastonbury music festival, apparently. (The #MeToo movement didn’t take off until October of that year, so there was time to pretend that none of this ever happened).

Anyway, I witnessed what felt to me like a Nuremberg rally from the by-this-point notoriously antisemitic (“he’s just (obsessionally) critical of the Israeli government” they say!) Labour party leader at the festival I called my spiritual home, and when Run The Jewels came tumbling out after him, and the PA was booming “We are the champions, my friends”, I suddenly felt like I was a stranger in a foreign land. Record scratch. Beam me up, Scotty. Fuck this shit. I felt invisible. I no longer felt like a Glastonbury goer. I felt like a Jew. I felt erased.

I wrote about what happened this weekend at Glastonbury already here, and the manner in which a festival known for peace, art and inclusivity descended into a death cult rally calling for the murder of Jews. But I am here to say: the seeds of what happened this weekend at Glastonbury were sown years ago.

A highly-billed act at Glastonbury this year got onstage in front of thousands of people and chanted “death death to the IDF”. The IDF is Israel’s army, and every Israeli serves, whether Jewish or Arab or Christian or Druze or otherwise. This is a socially acceptable incitement to kill Jews, broadcast to millions of people. You can try to pretend that it was about something else but it absolutely was not. It was a call to murder the Jews, celebrated by a nation of middle class young British people and their at-home viewers. It is the clearest sign that Britain is broken beyond repair.

The Black dreadlocked artist was called Bob Vylan. Dude, you called yourself after A JEW. (They always project, and they’re always obsessed). And he wasn’t the only act. There were many. Amyl And The Sniffers (yes, that’s a real band name, and they were always crap). Kneecap. And others that were not broadcast by the BBC. The crowds were a sea of Palestinian flags and keffiyehs. And Haim went to kosher it all. Good for them. You know what would have been truly punk at Glastonbury festival 2025? Someone with an Israeli flag.

Was there an act onstage at Glastonbury screaming DEATH DEATH TO THE CHINESE REPUBLIC, or DEATH DEATH TO PUTIN’S RUSSIA, or DEATH DEATH TO THE IRANIAN REGIME, or DEATH DEATH TO NORTH KOREA? No there was not. If there were, it wouldn't be broadcast to millions of people. But for the one Jewish state, it's fine. Tim Davie, you fucker. Resign.

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We the Jews have been purged from society, and it has happened over time.

I recall years ago, probably around 2021 and the beginnings of some shocking out-in-the-open antisemitic incidents in major centers of America, Bari Weiss on a private Zoom between myself and a few of the original voices at the time Bari said something to the effect of: “Do you think this is going to be like Nazi Germany or is it going to be more… Soviet style?”

It was the latter. Welcome to dissidence.

I’ve been considering lately, but particularly over the last few weekends, what it must have felt like to be a Jew in Soviet Russia. In the ‘90s, I went to school with two Jewish kids from Russia – Maria and Boris – who had to escape the hell that they had found themselves in. What happened in the USSR wasn’t like Nazi Germany where Jews were executed en masse (although the Bolsheviks did hunt for Jews in the earlier decades of the 20th century). It was instead a society of perceived moral purity that had chosen Jews as the source of blame and purged them from public life in a painstaking, dehumanizing way. It was insipid, and it wasn’t always about ideology but a general distrust of Jews during an instable and socially, economically and politically anxious time (the Jews were jealous, possessive, controlling, all the things the accuser is guilty of, and if Jews were purged, the problems would go away). Antizionism was the politically acceptable method of hating Jews. It was categorically deemed not antisemitism. (Sound familiar?) Jews were disappeared from business, from social sets, from every strata of life. To the naked eye, it didn’t look like anything as serious as it was, but the hatred was hiding in plain sight.

The same thing is happening now. I have been purged from my own life. Every single facet of my life has been impacted, without exception. I am the dirty little secret of people who wouldn’t dare publicly associate with me for fear of the consequences. I am not allowed to be in public places or homes with Jew haters who feel uncomfortable in my presence (they excel at evading the truth that it’s because they hate Jews, of course, which they put on full display in broad daylight). I am not to make myself known in rooms that disagree with me (it’s a “political” thing). I must walk on a different side of the street, or preferably stay behind doors. Just a suggestion. No signs. No hard and fast rules. No answers as to why. Just because.

Like I say, it’s not Nazi Germany and we are not being herded into the cattle carts and the gas chambers. It’s something just as odious and insidious where we are being forced into an invisible gulag without walls, denied the most basic consideration and human decency from our neighbors, made to feel ashamed that we appear in three dimensions at all. The intention is to make life unliveable for us. If you don’t see it, you’re part of the problem.

There has been a conscientious removal of Jewish people from all aspects of public life. The moral purity test that is imposed is that you will pass as a Jew in society if you denounce the only Jewish state in the word, Israel. “Eve, you should drop the Zionism” has been said to me over many a dinner table over the last five years. Again, a suggestion. They want to help me. Here: a favor for free, from me to you. Erase yourself.

If you do that, you will be exalted by the Jew haters as their prized possessions. The show pony suicidal Jews. It’s as nuts as telling a Finnish person that they’re only acceptable if they denounce the state of Finalnd. You’re Japanese? Denounce the state of Japan and we’ll accept you. This is the moral purity test that has been established for temporary safe passage for Jews into polite society. If you don’t pass the moral purity test, you are free game for all types of societal abuse and gaslighting. The gaslighting is the worst part - a constant migraine of denial by everyone around us that the abuse is happening (or it’s minimized as some sort of soap opera of social media drama), or - worse - recognition that it’s happening and that it’s justified. Because gEnOCiDe.

For me, it’s been ten years of suffocating closing walls, wondering how much longer the oxygen will last. Ginsberg: “I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness.” Every social justice warrior has lost their head. Mamdani is the new crowned prince of the Wokes. The young Black elite are all over a Marxist demagogue who wants to run New York City into the ground. Listen to any Iranian who escaped to America during the 1979 revolution. They will tell you the following: the Islamists pretended to be socialists to take control of the minds of the youth. The Left have become inseparable from Islamofascists. They think like Nazis. They speak like Nazis. And they take action like Nazis.

These people don’t have the guts to pick up a weapon and kill us. They want us to become our own executioner. We are weaponized and tokenized by politicians and causes. We are used and stolen from by friends and colleagues. We are treated as keepsakes and accessories. We are a kink, an obsession, a seasonal costume. And then we are discarded.

Dear gentiles: keeping the peace with Jew haters instead of doing the right thing by Jewish people and society at large is suicidal. Here’s why. If you side with Jew haters there’s one thing you’re guaranteed in life: failure. Look at every society in history that has purged its Jews. Did they succeeed? No. Every one of them failed. So it’s your choice, but you have to pick. Appease the Nazis, or side with the Jews and keep us around. You cannot, however, do both. Because if you continue to pat the fragile egos of the Nazis, the Jews will still leave, and then you’re fucked. Society isn’t sick with a cancer but with a rabies that is making people pathologically enthusiastic about throwing the Jews down the well for a sense of their own freedom. It’s up to you. But if you want to have a happy and prosperous future, choose us.

(Case in point: Rubio has stripped Bob Vylan and bandmates of their US visas. To quote your own song “Bob”: “heard you want your visa back? Shut the fuck up.”)

Dear Glastonbury goers. Forgive me, I know you’re on a nightmarish comedown right now, but this is important. Whenever I’ve spoken to my friends in the music industry including those who played Glastonbury this weekend, and their managers, even their legal teams; you’ve all said that what happened on Octoner 7 was awful “but Gaza”. So it’s clearly very complicated for you. Here’s the thing. At the festival you attended and participated in this weekend, multiple performers called for the deaths of Israelis and Jews in alignment with the terrorist organizations Hamas and Hezbollah, and given you haven’t said anything, we are all assuming you agree. So thanks for clearing it up.

Oh and “Dr” Shola. Dr Seuss is more qualified than you. You published a book but you’re not a writer. You are perpetually on TikTok and/or doing self-promotional gigs that have nothing to do with law. Do you have case work or is it “lawyer” for funsies?

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I may sound capable in these essays, on these pages, in these margins, but there is something between the lines. I am desperate to wake people up. I have been sounding the alarm for years. And I have been right. I would search through every single sentence, phrase, comma and exclamation mark I have ever used if I could just find the words to convince the people I love the most of what’s right in front of their eyes. Instead the words lodge in my throat, and I want to scream: I will remember who I am and what I have done. I will hold onto my history, my achievements, my memories. I will go where I can be seen. I will walk in the sunlight. I will stand in the crowd at the concert. I will not be hidden. I will not be told there are places I cannot sit. Do not vanish from my side. Do not disappear me. Do not tell me Jews are not wanted here. I have seen this movie before. I will be seen. I will be heard. I will not be erased. This Jew shall pass. I shall pass, dammit.

I was there. I was in the restaurant. I was at that premiere. I attended that concert. We went to that strip club. I shared that drink that night. We laughed at that joke. That 5am hotel room trashing happened. We lived that story. We wrote that line together. You felt what I felt. We saw the same sunrise. We were friends. We knew each other for years. We fell asleep in each other’s arms. It happened. I will not be erased.

I check the websites of the magazines I used to write for: GQ. Vulture. Billboard. NME. The Guardian. I search my name. I see if my published pieces are still there. I wait for the day they are deleted. I will not be erased.

I will not be erased.

I will not be erased.

Fuck you for trying.