Ice Cube is at the tip of the iceberg' of black anti-Semitism
Get rid of that devil, real simple. Put a bullet in his temple. 'Cause you can't be a nigga-for-life-crew with a white Jew telling you what to do. That's the message delivered by Los Angeles rapper Ice Cube on his aptly named new album "Death Certificate." Several songs are overtly racist and anti-Semitic, and one actually calls for the murder of Jerry Heller, the Jewish manager of Ice Cube's former group, N.W.A. (Niggers With Attitude). Ice Cube split with the group last year under acrimonious circumstances. Rap is a largely (though not exclusively) black style of dance music in which a "rapper" recites lyrics over a synthesized backbeat. This is not the first time a rap musician has been labeled anti-Semitic. Two years ago the group Public Enemy came under fire when one of its members, Professor Griff, made several anti-Semitic declarations. Protests from Jewish rights activists led to an unrepentant Griff being booted out of the group. Like Public Enemy, Ice Cube has been blasted by Los Angeles's Simon Wiesenthal Center (a Holocaust and anti-Semitism research institute), which has urged a countrywide retail boycott of the record. "It's not a trend yet," says the center's associate director, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, of anti-Semitic rap, "but I'm very, very worried. We have to look at this not only within the context of music, but as it reflects the ongoing tensions between Jews and blacks in America."
The boycott call is likely to fall on deaf ears in record stores. Ice Cube the self-proclaimed "nigga you love to hate" whose music also glorifies rape and cop-killing is one of America's most popular rappers as well as a star of the hit movie "Boyz N the Hood" about life in Los Angeles's black ghetto. In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, the 22-year-old rapper denied he was anti-Semitic. According to Ice Cube: "Saying he's (Heller) a Jew doesn't mean I don't like Jews or I'm using that word as a negative. I don't like him, but it's not because he's Jewish… I respect Jews. They're unified in a way I would like to see blacks unite." According to Steve Hochman, a Los Angeles Times rock writer who has frequently interviewed the rapper, Ice Cube's denials are at best naive, and most probably "a rationalization." He attributes the anti-Jewish rhetoric to Ice Cube's having "found Louis Farrakhan," noting that the singer has joined the ranks of other rappers (Brand Nubian and the X-Clan) who have become sympathizers of the radical black Muslim movement, the Nation of Islam. The irony is that many Jewish music industry figures are deeply involved in the rap music business, most prominently the 27-year-old wunderkind rock mogul Rick Rubin, producer of Public Enemy, Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys. These executives defend rap's more offensive aspects as honest expressions of the black ghetto experience protected by the First Amendment. But one Jewish record company executive, who asked not to be named, admits he is confused by the Ice Cube controversy. His fervent, lifelong support for free-speech rights, he now acknowledges, "may not be geared to the long-term survival of the Jewish people," and he is not sure that Jewish record executives are the best people to thrash out the implications of that possibility. Most of the executives he knows "don't feel personally threatened by lyrics like these. They don't think of themselves as particularly Jewish, so when someone says Kill the Jews,' it's not them they're talking about." Music writer David Samuels is more scathing on the industry's role. "This is an industry that doesn't give two craps about music or morality," he says. "If they were moral they wouldn't be marketing half the stuff they do. Why, when it comes to anti-Semitism, should they suddenly go moral? Who can say that anti-Semitism is worse than (rap's) inciting gang violence?" Samuels maintains that rap's anti-Semitic lyrics don't so much reflect the rage of the street so much as cash in on it. "Its obviously a shallow, cynical way of positioning oneself as being street' and genuine," he says. "If these rappers really were anti-Semitic, one would like to see them live up to their beliefs and stop working for record companies owned by Jews or having Jewish publicists. One would hardly want to dignify them with the label of anti-Semites. Much more frightening, I think, is the degree to which genuine anti-Semitism has permeated black American culture. What you're seeing reflected in the music isn't even the tip of the iceberg."