Macklemore Sells Golf Pants. We Made Him a Martyr.

Macklemore said two words at the MetLife stadium and lost a tour. Yuval Abraham won a prize in Venice for NAZA and a minister came for his citizenship. I am a Zionist and I am asking my own people to please, please stop doing this.

I went home for Rosh Hashanah. Four and a half hours on a bus that smelled like someone had microwaved fish in 1998 and then sealed the windows, which is the correct way to enter the Days of Awe, spiritually speaking. My mother had eleven people coming and a seating chart. My father asked me twice what my major was, in the tone of a man hoping the answer had changed since June.

Phone went in the drawer Friday afternoon. It stayed there through erev, through Shabbat, through the first day landing on top of Shabbat, through the second day, all the way to stars out Sunday night. Call it forty-nine hours, same as everybody else who keeps it. Two days of not knowing anything. Honestly? Elite. Ten out of ten. I ate an unreasonable amount of my grandmother’s honey cake and I did not read a single reply guy.

Then I turned the phone on.

Besties. My phone did not just load. It detonated.

Two stories, one feed, no survivors. Macklemore got kicked off the Ed Sheeran tour, and Israeli government ministers want to strip two filmmakers of their citizenship for winning a prize in Venice. My For You page served them in alternating slices like a terrible layer cake. Israeli journalist, Macklemore, film critic, Macklemore, Knesset member, Macklemore, someone’s aunt from Boca, Macklemore.

The algorithm knows me so well and I hate that about it. It looked at my two days of silence and went, ah, she’s rested, she can take a beating.

So I’ve had a day to sit with both of these, and I’ve arrived at a conclusion I want to state up front so nobody has to guess where this is going.

Everybody involved in both of these stories played themselves. Every single person. Nobody gets out clean. Some of these people are my own team and they played themselves the hardest.

Let’s go.

Part one, in which a man from 2012 is handed a time machine

Quick briefing for anyone who was also in the drawer.

On September 4 and 5, Macklemore opened for Ed Sheeran at MetLife Stadium. Eighty thousand people. He came out in a keffiyeh, told the crowd that a big part of why he wanted this tour was so he could stand in a stadium and say two words, said Free Palestine, and then performed Hind’s Hall, his 2024 protest song named for the Columbia building occupation, which was itself named for Hind Rajab, the six year old killed in Gaza. Gaza war footage on the stadium screens behind him. He shouted out the Columbia protesters, Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace by name. Then he addressed the Jews in the building directly and told us that criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, opposition to genocide, none of that is a criticism of us.

Pink, who is Jewish, reposted a StopAntisemitism story about it, got dragged for a week, and then on September 11 put out a long statement of her own. Her whole point was that the part that got her wasn’t the Free Palestine. It was him standing there and deciding on our behalf what was and wasn’t about us. She wrote that we don’t get to have that decided for us, which, respectfully, ate. (Olds: it was extremely well put.)

Then Robert Kraft called Ed Sheeran.

Macklemore’s account, posted to Instagram on Monday, is that Kraft told Sheeran he wouldn’t be allowed to play Gillette, that Kraft then rallied other stadium owners into a collective ultimatum, and that Sheeran was told: drop him or lose the venues. Sheeran’s team removed him from the rest of the US leg. Kraft has since put out a statement defending the call, saying Gillette doesn’t provide a platform for hate speech, that this was about Macklemore’s broader history and not about Palestinian suffering being unreal, and offering to sit down with him and talk it through.

Okay. Two things, and they are both true at once, which is a concept the internet has decided is illegal.

No one made him do this.

Thing one. Kraft owns the stadium. That is what owning a stadium means. He can book who he likes. He is not the government, this is not the First Amendment, and there is no constitutional right to a support slot. The man founded the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism in 2019 and has spent years and a genuinely wild amount of his own money on it. Nobody should be shocked that he has opinions on this. Nobody is obligated to hand a microphone and a stadium screen to a guy who once performed in Jewface.

And yes, that happened, and the olds need to remember it and the youngs need to learn it. May 2014, EMP Museum in Seattle, surprise set, Macklemore comes out in a black wig, a long beard and a big prosthetic hooked nose and performs Thrift Shop. His explanation, which I have read several times now for pleasure, was that it was a disguise, the noses at the costume shop were all big because his own nose is small, and that he ended up with a witch nose. He said a Jewish stereotype never crossed his mind, that people at the show thought he looked like Ringo Starr, or Abraham Lincoln, or Humpty Hump with a bowl cut. Seth Rogen replied that if you asked someone to assemble an Antisemitic Jew costume, that is precisely the shopping list. B’nai B’rith called it deeply offensive. He apologized, sort of, and linked the ADL at the bottom like a footnote.

Was it deliberate? I actually don’t think so. I think it was worse than deliberate. I think it was available. I think the shape was sitting right there in his head where he didn’t have to go looking for it, and he reached for it the way you reach for a light switch in your own house.

Thing two, and this is where my own side needs to sit down.

Guys. Guys. What did you just do.

Macklemore’s last culturally relevant moment was in 2012. Thrift Shop. The one where he buys a coat. Then The Heist beat good kid, m.A.A.d city for Best Rap Album, and he texted Kendrick Lamar an apology saying he got robbed, and then, because he cannot help himself, he screenshotted his own private apology and posted it. That is the defining Macklemore act. Not winning the thing. The screenshot. The compulsion to be witnessed being good.

The man has been coasting on a thrift store joke for fourteen years, besties. Fourteen. He is not a current artist. He was the opener. The opener. His job was to play for the people still finding their seats with a forty dollar beer in each hand. Half that stadium was there for Sheeran’s loop pedal and could not have picked Macklemore out of a lineup that also contained a coat rack.

And Jewish institutional America looked at a man whose last number one was fourteen years ago, who has done Dr Pepper twice, Bose with Russell Wilson, T-Mobile with Kesha, and a run of PGA Tour FedEx Cup Playoffs promos, and handed him a martyrdom.

Besties, he owns a golf pants company. I need that to sit in the room with us. The man from Thrift Shop founded a golf lifestyle label called Bogey Boys in 2021, it does tartan and leopard sweater vests and seventies collars, and in 2023 it went into a collaboration with Adidas. He plays four days a week. He has teed off at Pebble Beach in a tartan suit.

Now hold that thought, because Adidas had a week too.

On September 8, four days after MetLife, Adidas apologized. Not for Macklemore. For Shalev Biton. Biton is an Israeli runner who lost his left leg in May 2021 when an anti-tank missile fired from Gaza hit his vehicle on the Israeli side of the border, who went through rehab and came back to running on a prosthetic, and who appeared in a local Israeli campaign for the company’s single shoe service, a program built for people with limb differences. Pro-Palestinian accounts ran boycott calls, Javier Bardem joined in, and Adidas global headquarters distanced itself from its own regional campaign and said it never meant to cause offense. Biton posted that he’d been buried under an international wave of abuse and mass reporting and asked his followers to stand with him.

So let me lay the calendar out. September 4: a man Adidas is in business with puts on a keffiyeh in front of eighty thousand people. September 8: Adidas apologizes for having put a one-legged Israeli runner in a shoe ad.

I want to be precise about what I’m saying, because it is not what you think. I am not asking Adidas to drop Macklemore. I have spent this entire post arguing that dropping him is the single dumbest move on the board. Leave him alone. Let him sell his pants.

What I’m pointing at is which association got treated as a liability. Putting a disabled Israeli athlete in a shoe ad cost Adidas enough that global headquarters put out a statement inside a week. Being in business with a man who once performed in a fake hooked nose has cost them nothing, because nobody has organized anything about it and nobody is going to. One of those things has a boycott attached. The other one has a clothing line.

This is not a man outside the machine. This is a man with a sponsorship deal, who has been in the commercial breaks since I was in kindergarten, and whose main creative output of the decade is resort wear for a sport he correctly describes as having a rich old white guy problem.

I have never been old enough to notice a world where this man mattered.

He found the one sentence the machine wouldn’t put on a billboard, and instead of letting that be the story, we made the machine the story for him. For free.

Was Kraft entitled to do it? Completely. Did doing it get anyone anything? Let’s check. Before the ultimatum, one opener said Free Palestine to a stadium, some people cheered, some people walked out, it was a bad night. After the ultimatum, every outlet on the planet ran a story whose one sentence summary is rich Jewish sports owner organizes cartel of billionaires to silence musician.

Bestie. Listen to that sentence out loud. The most durable lie about us is that we quietly run the entertainment industry and punish anyone who steps out of line. That lie has always had a problem, which is that it has no facts attached to it, so it has to be asserted rather than reported. What happened this week is that it acquired a news peg. A named billionaire, a named stadium, a named tour, a phone call, an ultimatum, and a musician removed the following Monday. None of that makes the lie true. All of it makes the lie citable, and a lie with a citation gets a second life measured in decades.

I’m not saying eat it. I’m not saying smile through it. I’m saying there was a version of this week where a guy nobody has thought about since the second Obama term said a thing at a concert, a Jewish pop star with actual current relevance answered him better than any press release ever could, and the news cycle moved on by Tuesday. That version was right there. It was free. And instead we are going to be hearing about this one for the next decade.

Part two, in which my own government reads the room upside down

Now the other half of my feed.

You’ve probably read ck’s piece already, and if you haven’t, go do that, because he did the actual reporting and I’m not going to redo it here. Short version of where I land: I have the same problems with NAZA that he does.

Twenty four anonymous sources whose identities, units and proximity to the systems they describe cannot be checked by anyone. Reporting that the film leans on for corroboration, which was written by the film’s own director, co-published by the outlet that then went on to produce the film, with one of that outlet’s reporters working the edit. ck called that marking your own homework and I can’t improve on the phrase, so I’m stealing it. It isn’t a conspiracy, it’s ordinary media incest, and the actual scandal is that nearly every review sailed straight past it. I also haven’t forgotten the 83 percent number from last August, where “the army couldn’t put a name to them” got laundered into “they were civilians,” which is a different claim wearing the first one’s jacket.

So no, I’m not cheering. And I will absolutely watch it the second I can, because I don’t hold opinions about films I haven’t seen, and neither, I’d gently note, does anybody currently demanding these two be stripped of their citizenship.

Which brings us to the response, and I need everyone to brace.

Culture Minister Miki Zohar went on X on Sunday night, called the film vile, accused Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor of treason against the state, and announced that as Minister of Culture he would act immediately to revoke their Israeli citizenship.

As Minister. Of. Culture.

ck went and checked whether he can actually do this, and he can’t. Since the 2022 Supreme Court ruling it takes the interior minister to file, the justice minister to approve and judges to sign off. The culture ministry appears nowhere in that chain, and ck’s read is that Zohar wasn’t describing a step he intends to take, he was issuing a press release for people who will never get past the headline. That’s correct and I’d only add one thing: he’s the guy in charge of museums and the national soccer program announcing a denaturalization. That is giving hall monitor with a walkie talkie. (Olds: it is the energy of a person performing an authority they do not have, in front of an audience that will never check.)

Ben Gvir posted that they’re a disgrace to the whole Jewish people and that Hamas would welcome them with open arms, because Ben Gvir is a troll with a ministry. ck wrote yesterday that he’s not sure any single Israeli has handed our enemies more ammunition than the man we put in charge of national security, and I’m not going to pretend I have a more generous read than that. I don’t. I agree with him.

Completely unedited photo of future Otzma Yehudit MK Talia Gotliv.

Then by Monday it was Netanyahu himself on Telegram calling it shocking and framing it as Antisemitic incitement coming from inside the house. Likud MK and future Ben Gvir buddy Tally Gotliv said the army should have hit harder. Because of course she did. And then, and this is the part I want people to actually register, Avigdor Liberman piled on too, calling them Israel haters selling out the country for a moment of applause. Liberman is opposition. So when you see this filed overseas as “the Netanyahu government,” clock that it isn’t only the coalition. This is a much broader Israeli reflex than one cabinet, and pretending otherwise lets a lot of people off a hook they’re standing on.

Here’s the thing, and it’s the same thing as part one.

NAZA is a film about a state that its makers say kills people it shouldn’t and then denies it. The prosecution’s theory of the case, in essence, is: this state cannot tolerate being told the truth about itself.

And the government of that state responded by trying to take away the filmmakers’ passports.

Besties, that is not a rebuttal. That is the closing scene. You didn’t argue with the movie, you performed it. You could not script this more neatly if you tried: a film whose entire thesis is this state punishes the people who describe it accurately, answered by the state attempting to punish the people who described it. Every festival audience that watches it from here on will already know how it ends, because you told them.

And for what? Zohar cannot do it. Everybody knows he cannot do it. He knows he cannot do it. The interior ministry has been asked to look at whether it’s even legally possible, which is the government equivalent of your friend saying she’ll “look into” coming to your birthday. Nothing is going to happen. The only actual output of the entire exercise is a week of headlines in thirty languages saying Israel tries to strip dissidents of citizenship, which will outlive every single person quoted in this paragraph.

What I actually want

I’m a Zionist. Not quietly, not with an asterisk, not in the “I support Israel’s right to exist but” way where the but is doing all the lifting and the first half is a hall pass. I think the Jewish people are entitled to self determination in our homeland and I think that’s the most normal sentence in the world. Someone called me a scum of the earth parasitic Nazi Jew puke in public, under their own name, with my handle attached, and I logged back on the next morning. Bye Felisha!

Which is exactly why this week has me chewing through drywall.

Because being a Zionist means wanting Israel to be good at this. Not just right. Good. Competent. Formidable. And what I watched from the drawer, in two separate hemispheres, was our side reaching for the lever marked make it go away when the lever marked win the argument was sitting right next to it, unlocked, labeled, and fully fucking functional.

Look at what actually landed this week. Not the ministers. The IDF Spokesperson’s Unit, which went point by point: the 500 civilian strike described in the promo clip was never planned, approved or carried out; strike approval was done by human beings and not by a machine; some of the excerpts have junior personnel describing strategy several pay grades above them; and none of the twenty four can be checked by anyone. That is an argument. You can test it. It can be wrong, which is what makes it worth something.

And then there’s the number ck flagged, which I cannot stop thinking about. The army’s own working estimate is somewhere around two to three civilians for every operative killed. Sit with that. It’s a terrible number to say out loud and it is also, in dense urban combat against an enemy that fights from inside apartment blocks, roughly what a military that is trying and sometimes failing produces. It is not what a machine designed to kill indiscriminately produces. The army’s own arithmetic does more damage to the film’s central thesis than every minister in the cabinet managed between them, and it did it without threatening one single person’s passport.

That’s the play. It was always the play. Show your work. Name the error. Make them answer.

Instead: two threats, one from a guy who owns stadiums (do we have a rich old white guy problem too?) and one from a guy who “owns” museums, both of them aimed at the microphone rather than the message, and both of them landing as a free upgrade for the exact people they were meant to diminish.

Criticizing your government is not treason. It has never been treason, not here, not anywhere I’d want to live. And Kraft’s stadium is Kraft’s stadium and he can book whoever he wants, and I’d still have let the man play, because an opener saying two words to a half empty bowl is a bad night that ends when the headliner walks on, and a blacklist is a permanent entry in his Wikipedia page and ours.

Log off. Drink water. Shana tova, I guess.

Addendum, Wednesday, in which everybody gets worse

I filed this and the week kept going. Three updates, and the third one is in Hebrew, and it’s the one that actually matters.

One. The tour is cooked.

Ed Sheeran posted Tuesday saying the call wasn’t his, it was the promoters, which is a sentence that has never once worked. Within hours he lost Finneas, Aaron Rowe, Lukas Graham, and Beoga, who are not some support slot, they are his own house band and they co-wrote songs he plays in the middle of his set. Ms. Rachel said he caved. Ms. Rachel, besties. The toddler song lady clocked him. He is now touring until December with zero opening acts, which means eighty thousand people are going to be seated and staring at an empty stage thinking about Macklemore, which is the exact opposite of the intended outcome.

Let’s tally. A blacklist designed to deny one man a stage has cost the headliner his entire lineup, generated a second and much bigger news cycle, and put the phrase “artists must not be silenced” into roughly nine hundred outlets. Forty-eight hours. Aura points: negative infinity. I wrote the prediction down on Monday like a woman who has seen this movie before and knows how it ends.

Two. Plot twist, the opps hate the movie too.

I need everyone who was ready to fight me over part two to sit down, because the pro-Palestinian internet has spent this entire week absolutely shredding the makers of NAZA.

Not defending them from Zohar. Attacking them. Ali Abunimah of Electronic Intifada called the ovation a nauseating spectacle and said the soldiers in it belong at a trial, not a gala. Susan Abulhawa wrote that Palestinians have been screaming this for decades and only Israelis get believed. Rima Hassan asked how many people clapping had ever taken Palestinian testimony seriously. One post read “anonymizing Nazis, monetizing Palestinian suffering.” Another said Yuval Abraham has blood on his hands.

And here is where I had to put my phone face down on the table.

Their structural complaint about this film is the same as mine.

Mine: twenty four anonymous sources means nobody can verify anything, so don’t build a case on testimony that can’t be tested. Theirs: twenty four anonymous sources means confessed perpetrators got to talk without consequences, shielded by the filmmakers.

Same hole. Same objection to the same design choice. We just disagree about who’s hiding in it. I think it might be protecting people shading the truth. They think it’s protecting war criminals from a courtroom. Two sides screaming across the identical gap in the identical film. The girls are fighting and they are fighting about the same thing.

So Yuval Abraham currently has the culture minister after his passport, the IDF chief of staff ordering a review of legal action against him, and Electronic Intifada calling his movie a gala for murderers. Full pincer. Universally despised, zero consensus on the charge.

One of those posts accuses him of amplifying fabricated claims about October 7 rapes that never happened. That is not film criticism. That is atrocity denial wearing a review as a hat, and it’s coming from the side the movie is supposedly for.

Three. It sounds so much worse in Hebrew.

English coverage is getting a sanded down version of this, and I speak the language, so allow me.

Ben Gvir’s post, which read in English as generic slop, is actually written. He opened with Isaiah 49:17, m’harsayich u’machrivayich mimech yetzei’u, your destroyers and demolishers shall come from within you. Then the pun. NAZA is an acronym for nezek agavi, collateral damage, which is the army’s own shorthand and the source of the title. Ben Gvir called the two of them ha’nezek ha’yashir of the Jewish people. The direct damage. (Olds: he made a dad joke out of the words for dead civilians.) I hate that it’s clever. It’s clever.

Zohar’s Hebrew statement includes a line the English write-ups mostly dropped, where he says this is exactly why he led his cinema funding reform, so Israeli citizens stop paying out of pocket for films that harm IDF soldiers. So the citizenship thing isn’t a spontaneous crashout, it’s a commercial. He has a policy to sell and two people to sell it with. Then by Monday morning he’d gone to the Interior Ministry with much more careful lawyer words, saying free expression can’t be cover for treason if it turns out they crossed that line. If. He talked himself down from immediate denaturalization to a conditional in under twelve hours and nobody made him do it.

The Chief of Staff called the film alilot dam. Blood libels. The head of our army reached for the medieval accusation that Jews murder children for our rituals, the one that got Jews killed in Damascus and Kielce and about two hundred places in between, and he applied it to a documentary made by two Jews. Sir. That term means something specific. It is not a synonym for a film you didn’t like. Every time we spend it on something that isn’t one, it’s worth a little less the next time somebody does the real thing to us.

A hostage survivor who was taken from Nova and held for 505 days put out a video saying people should spit on them in the street. I’m not going to be snide about that man for one single second. He has earned every feeling he has, including that one. But somebody who loves him should have told him the internet would take that clip and run it in thirty languages, and that it would be filed forever under what Israelis do to Israelis who talk.

And the part that actually got me: the petition. 1,642 Israeli film professionals signed it this week. Their complaint isn’t Zohar’s legal theory. It’s that people are attacking a film they haven’t watched, and that the responses have included death threats, which they note are not criticism and not part of any legitimate argument. Ynet’s own coverage says the same thing in passing, that the rage here is coming mostly from people who haven’t seen it.

They’re right, and it goes wider than they meant. The ministers haven’t seen it. The Chief of Staff calling it a blood libel hasn’t seen it. The guy calling it a gala for murderers hasn’t seen it. The accounts calling it the most important documentary of the decade haven’t seen it. Everybody on earth is reviewing a press cycle and doing it with total confidence.

I haven’t seen it either. Difference is I said so, and I’m not asking anybody to lose their citizenship over a movie I have not watched.

What a week. Touch grass. Drink more water. I’m going to go lie down.

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Uh. Based.

I love being Jewish and I love writing. When I grow up I want to be Olivia Reingold. I'd be all "Hey Bari, wanna get lunch babe?" and every day I'd show up in another impossibly chic outfit. Does anybody even read this? Called a "Scum of the earth parasitic Nazi Jew puke' eagerly fellating Bibi. Yay me!

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