Dear Bey and Jay,
I hope you’ll forgive the informality. When you’ve spent most of your life listening to you two, as most of my friends and I have, you feel a certain familiarity. And when you spend your life as a dancer—choreographing, rehearsing, performing, creating playlists for events or for cleaning your apartment—the two of you actually become a deeply woven part of the fabric of life. Can you imagine being on a dance team in the late ’90s and early 2000s and not blasting “Jumpin’, Jumpin’” or “Survivor” on repeat? Jay, in college, we were warming up to “Lucifer,” performing to “Bring ’Em Out” and, for a twist, the beautiful “My 1st Song.” Of course, in the car with the windows down we were rapping “Izzo” even earlier. Bey, watching the evolution has been a wonder and I teared up the first time I heard “16 Carriages,” not just because it’s stunning but because it was so fun and so rare to hear something that completely unexpected—but B’Day will always be my favorite Beyoncé album. There is no limit to the amount of times I will request “Get Me Bodied” in my life, whether at a club or at a bat mitzvah. And I will drop it low at both.
Today, “Clique” popped up at random in my playlist. At first, I thought nothing of it, except that I couldn’t believe I’d forgotten about this song for so long. Sometimes it takes a minute to wake up into the twilight-zone world of 2026. Like the first morning of a trip, in the waking moments with your eyes closed, when your dreams still shimmer and you think yourself at home. After a second, I remembered I don’t listen to Kanye anymore—not after his tweets, not after his anti-Semitic rants, not after the song on the latest album that I can’t even bring myself to name. Then I thought, I don’t think Bey and Jay have made any kind of attempt to distance themselves from this hateful person who was once their friend and close collaborator. And I really wish they would.
I know there are a lot of demands on you. A lot of things people wish you would do. Any number of causes people might ask you to support. This one seems to me not only worth everyone else’s time, but worth your own. One of the lessons of history is that catastrophes happen by increments.
If you are looking around scared of the signs you’re seeing, something is already happening. It’s past time, not for some, but for everyone, to remember that evil spreads when unchecked. It’s past time and still time to be proudly Jewish, practicing or not. I resent that I have to even write this. I resent that a letter just came to my cousin’s school “addressing antisemitism on the staff,” and I am supposed to pretend this is normal. It is not. It is insane. Wake up, everyone. I resent that, having grown up in America in the ’90s, absolutely unable to believe a time would
ever come when thoughts like this would be necessary—they are.
At this point, Mr. and Mrs. Carter, it probably doesn’t even matter whether you distance yourself from Kanye in so many words. He’s ill; we know this. He is maybe, in some degree, like Ezra Pound: brilliant, innovative, sick, hateful. He has evidently apologized—but he is dangerous, because certain people listen to him and he opens hateful doors, and we’ve seen it. We’ve seen it in ways far outside the Internet, including banners over highways that I sort of still cannot believe ever happened.
Whether or not it is your responsibility to loudly and publicly denounce him, I’m not sure. I think it is. But it would be help of the largest magnitude for you, America’s royalty, to say loudly how important it is for Jews to feel safe and welcome in America and everywhere, to say that this should not even have to be said, to say loudly that anti-Semitism is the world’s oldest hatred and that such delusion will not be tolerated anywhere. It might even be a good time for you, Jay, to apologize for the problematic lyrics in “The Story of OJ.” I always look past them because you are such an earnest, warmhearted lyricist, and person, I assume, elsewhere.
One of the lessons of history is that catastrophes happen by increments.
When you grow up Jewish, you start to become accustomed to the feeling of discovering the next anti-Semitic person you had once loved. Poets, authors, singers, politicians. Each time it hurts. Sometimes, it pierces. (T. S. Eliot, looking at you. Roald Dahl. Hardly able to look at you. I used to read Matilda on repeat, flipping back to the first page immediately after finishing the last. I wish I hadn’t remembered this example.)
The question for me has always been how it is even possible that people with such virtuosic gifts to sing of the beauty in human existence could simultaneously be stupid enough to engage in group hatred. This basest form of stupidity. A secondary (and clearly naïve) question follows: how could they not figure that their prejudices would hurt their Jewish fans? Are they not aware that they have young readers of all backgrounds who read themselves right into their universal characters and think “thank you for this human story”?
Why do I tell you this? Because as I listened to the first two verses of “Clique,” I wondered which pop culture figures I’d be most devastated if it turned out they were anti-Semitic. Yours were the first names I thought of. Both of you have meant so much at every stage of my life. Once, as my mom drove me to the hospital with an unnerving bout of colitis and she asked what she should put on the radio, the answer was “anything from 4.”
When my little sister and her friends (aged 10) had to choreograph a small dance for the annual pool party, the song choice of course was “No, No, No.” When I finish writing this, I’ll play “Cuff It.” Feel-better music. What holds us together is always so much stronger than what divides us. The lie has always been the reverse.
Like millions of people, I’ll be forever grateful for what you’ve given me. Truly my life would not be the same without it, would be missing an entire pattern of joy without it. Where there is dance, there is joy: a joy that fights heartbreak. You’re not obligated to say something, to step into this upside-down environment of hate like I’ve never seen in my lifetime, to use the deep power of your voices to affirm inclusively “we are all Jews”—but, it would be a matter of profound import if you did.
This is not the time to defend or stay silent about vaguely or potentially anti-Semitic lyrics; it’s not the time to be silent about horrifying words from old friends and horrifying actions that follow them. This is the time to condemn, loudly, clearly, fully, this virulent form of hatred which evidently creeps up whenever the world feels it has too much to handle.
Use your eyes. Use your voices, the soundtrack to my life. Waiting for you—let’s see if we can ever learn anything from history. If we can be better.
Thank you for decades’ worth of making life better,
—Jordi
