Micah's Read of the Week, Vol. 120
Thanksgiving recap, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Kanye, Kyrie, and Antisemitism, Micah Recommends, New Yorker Cartoon of the Week, and more.
Hello, and welcome to Micah’s Read of the Week.
This is a newsletter filled with things Micah Wiener finds interesting. Check out the archive of previous newsletters here.
Thanksgiving Recap
We had a wonderful Turkey Day at our home. We’re very lucky.
We feel very thankful to be surrounded by family and friends. A special thanks to my brother-in-law Ryan who helped tremendously (and made unreal mashed potatoes and gravy).
I hope you had a nice holiday as well. Plus: Mizzou, James Madison, Texas, and the Cowboys all won. It was a great weekend.
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar on Kanye, Kyrie, and Antisemitism
‘Black people have to know that when they mouth antisemitism, they are using the exact same kind of reasoning that white supremacists use against blacks.’
There’s been a lot going on recently. This piece from Bari Weiss’ substack was published last week. This means it doesn’t even include the fact that our last president, and current presidential candidate, spent his Thanksgiving dinner hosting multiple anti-semites. Seriously.
Anyway, let’s introduce Kareem:
Kareem Abdul-Jabbar retired from the NBA in 1989, but he remains one of the greatest basketball players of all time.
He is still—even with Michael Jordan and Steph Curry and Lebron and Shaq and Kobe—the NBA’s all-time leading scorer (38,387 points) and the league’s only six-time MVP.
As Jews say every Passover: It would have been enough.
But there’s so much more that makes the 7-foot-2-inch Abdul-Jabbar a true giant. His religious conviction, his integrity, his wide-ranging intellectual proclivities, his outstanding performance in the 1981 movie Airplane!—and the unusual fact that this black, Muslim basketball star has been a consistent and outspoken voice against antisemitism.
BW: I want to focus on Farrakhan’s influence. He believes that Jews are parasitic, that Jews are behind a plot to exploit black Americans, and that blacks are the real Jews from the Bible. We’re hearing these ideas come out of the mouths of musicians like Kanye West (“Jewish people have owned the black voice”) and athletes like Kyrie Irving (“I cannot be antisemitic if I know where I come from”). For many Jews, hearing this kind of rhetoric is shocking, but many black Americans have noted that these views are more commonplace than we’d like to admit.
KAJ: Certain black leaders do exactly what certain white leaders do who want to gather followers, money, and power: They find a scapegoat they can blame. They can’t blame others who are marginalized because of the color of their skin, like Latinx or Asian-Americans, so they go for the default villain of fascists and racists: Jews.
What astounds me is not just the irrationality of it, but how self-destructive it is. Black people have to know that when they mouth antisemitism, they are using the exact same kind of reasoning that white supremacists use against blacks. They are enabling racism. Now they’ve aligned themselves with the very people who would choke out black people, drag them behind a truck, keep them from voting, and maintain systemic racism for another hundred years. They are literally making not only their lives worse, but their children’s lives. The fact that they can’t see that means the racists have won.
Micah Recommends
EarlybirdCBD’s Cyber Monday Deal
Stock up fam. It’s the best deal of the year. This is the good stuff. earlybirdcbd.com.
The 2022 Sunday Scaries Holiday Gift Guide
Check this unique and stylish guide from my friends Will, Barrett, and Sally.
Candle warmers, signature scents, and sweat sets — oh my!
Willie Nelson Live at Budokan
From Texas Monthly:
On February 23, 1984, Willie played to a packed house at the Nippon Budokan, in Tokyo. Maybe it was because he’d released his landmark Willie and Family Live album in late 1978, or, equally likely because he’d flooded the market with an unheard-of seven albums in 1982, that Columbia decided to shelve Willie’s Budokan set. And there it sat, in the vault, for almost forty years, a mythical lost recording. But now, finally, Sony’s Legacy Recordings is giving it a proper release as a two-disk CD set.
The record is essentially a time capsule, an exquisitely detailed snapshot of Willie and Family’s live show at a time when Willie was first becoming a worldwide, one-name celebrity.
There was also the absence of weed. Paul McCartney had made international headlines four years earlier when he was caught with eight ounces of pot at Tokyo’s Narita International Airport and jailed. Disinclined to earn that kind of press or spend time in the pokey, Willie played the short Japanese tour with no smoke. Budokan may be the only known recording of Willie playing 100 percent straight.
I enjoyed my first listen. But, don’t take my word for it. Longtime sideman Mickey Raphael is effusive in his praise for the “new” live set.
“We were young and firing on all cylinders,” says Raphael. “It’s a great showcase of what we sounded like in the eighties, which was a peak for us. It was a special period.
“If I was going to tell someone who’d never listened to Willie what records to start with, I’d tell them Teatro, Red Headed Stranger, and this one. For real.”
New Yorker Cartoon of the Week
Did Micah practice yoga this weekend?
Yes. 60 minutes Saturday at Searsana Dripping Springs.
That’s 43 in-person weekend classes in 47 weeks this year. Time to start doubling up.
Recipe Corner returns next week, by the way,
More Micah
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