Wednesday night, on the first night of Passover, Kanye West stood on top of a dome at SoFi Stadium with a projection of the earth spinning beneath his feet.
Tens of thousands of people screamed in excitement.
There was no mention of antisemitism or the song called “Heil Hitler” that Kanye released less than a year ago. Nobody mentioned the swastika T-shirts, the Wall Street Journal apology, the cycle that has now repeated itself so many times it has its own recognizable shape. He just performed, and the crowd cheered. And somehow, someone decided that placing this comeback on the first night of Passover was a good idea, which was either an oversight or a choice, and I genuinely don’t know which one is worse.
This is the piece the industry doesn’t want to read. Read it anyway.
Here’s what actually happened last night, stripped of the production notes and the glitz and glam: A man who released a song with the words “Heil Hitler” in the chorus, a man who sold swastikas as merchandise, who called himself a Nazi, who praised Hitler so many times and in so many different interviews that journalists stopped treating it as news, performed his comeback show at one of the most prestigious venues in the United States.
General admission tickets for Thursday night’s second show are listed at $537.80 on Ticketmaster. He is tenth on Spotify’s year-end list for top artists in America. His new album “Bully” is breaking streaming records.
The rehabilitation is complete. And nobody seems to be willing to ask, who decided that?
Who decided that Kanye West deserved the influence and the fame after years of demonizing Jews?
The entertainment industry has a very particular way of pretending it doesn’t make decisions. Streaming platforms restored his catalog without a press release. Labels that swore they were done with him started quietly accepting that Kanye was back, and it was OK. Booking agents, including the one who put him in SoFi Stadium, made a calculation so buried in contractual language that no single person has to own it publicly.
The music industry decided that Kanye West’s antisemitism had a commercial shelf life, and that shelf life has now expired. That the outrage cycle could be waited out, and Kanye could start making them money again. A public apology timed with the precision of a surgeon would be sufficient to reopen the doors. One million people queuing on Ticketmaster for a single SoFi announcement was the only thing that mattered.
And here’s the most uncomfortable part: they were right. It worked. Last night proved it worked.
My grandparents fled Iraq and Tunisia. Not as a lifestyle choice, but because Jewish life there was dismantled systematically. Jewish property was taken, and Jewish communities were erased. They had to rebuild from nothing, which they did. But they never spoke much about what they’d lost. For them, it was a particular kind of grief, the kind that doesn’t have the luxury of expression.
I think about them when I try to describe what it means to watch this happen on Passover night, specifically. The holiday that exists entirely for Jews to say: we were persecuted, we survived, we remember. And on that night, in Inglewood, California, a man who chanted “Heil Hitler” performed to a sold-out stadium while his daughter joined him onstage, and the crowd sang along to every word of the old songs, and nobody said anything, and it all felt completely, terrifyingly normal.
That’s not Kanye’s doing. He’s been consistent. He told us exactly who he was. It was the industry that decided it didn’t matter.
There is a specific kind of statement made by silence. When Kanye walked onto that stage and offered no acknowledgment of what he’d done, that wasn’t a mistake. It told every Jewish person watching that the apology in the Wall Street Journal was exactly what it looked like: a strategic document timed to a release cycle, not a reckoning. It told every non-Jew watching something more dangerous: that you don’t actually have to fear punishment for attacking Jews. You just have to wait.
The fans outside SoFi told reporters they were there for the music, not the controversy. That they understood his history of mental illness, and they could separate the art from the artist. I don’t doubt that most of them truly believe that. But the outcome is the same: 70,000 people were saying that it didn’t matter what Kanye said about Jews or how dangerous he made things for the Jewish community. And the music industry was paying close attention to that statement.
Kanye will be heading to London in July to headline Wireless Festival for three nights. The British Jewish community is living through record-high antisemitism right now. The mayor of London called the booking wrong, and the Jewish Leadership Council called it deeply irresponsible. But the Wireless Festival saw those 70,000 fans and knew they could keep those tickets up for sale.
I want to be precise about what I’m not arguing. I’m not arguing that Kanye West should never perform again. I’m not arguing that loving his music makes you an antisemite. I’m not even arguing that the entertainment industry is uniquely villainous; it is just reflecting the culture it operates in, and the culture has made its own choices.
What I am arguing is this: the industry should be honest about the choice it made.
It chose commerce over accountability. It chose the streaming numbers over the statement they made. It chose to treat antisemitism as a reputation problem with a known solution — wait, apologize, release, perform — rather than as something that requires a more durable response.
And it made that choice on behalf of all of us. Without asking.
On the first night of Passover, the earth spun beneath Kanye West’s feet at SoFi Stadium, and the crowd screamed, and nobody said a word about any of it.
That’s not a Kanye West story. That’s our story. And we should at least be honest about what chapter we’re in.
Hen Mazzig is a writer and Senior Fellow at the Tel Aviv Institute. He has written for Rolling Stone, Los Angeles Times, NBC News, and more.
