Haddish spun her win out into a teachable moment, telling the kids “you just got to believe in yourself as much as you can.”
How I found out I won a Grammy while working on @KidsSayDarndest I am so Honored to share with the kids. Full situation is on my YouTube page. pic.twitter.com/pYzmt4nIgo Tiffany Haddish (@TiffanyHaddish) March 15, 2021
Obviously we’re
kvelling for Haddish, whose win more than makes up for our discomfort over another preshow win, a choral work called “The Passion of Yeshua,” which seems ripe for the liturgy of Jews for Jesus. The late Leonard Cohen, sadly, did not win for Best Folk Album but the album was probably miscategorized anyhow.
‘Neo-Racism’ in the Justice Department
When President Joe Biden nominated Kristen Clarke to head the U.S. Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, critics on the right raised some important red flags. Among them, questionable views Clarke had expressed when she was an undergraduate at Harvard University. As the
Free Beacon reported, Clarke had publicly embraced theories of black racial superiority, including spurious claims such as “human mental processes are controlled by melanin that same chemical which gives Blacks their superior physical and mental abilities.” She added that, “Melanin endows Blacks with greater mental, physical and spiritual abilities something which cannot be measured based on Eurocentric standards.”
In 1989, the rapper known as Professor Griff made anti-Jewish comments that derailed his career.
More than 30 years later, when Griff appeared on the actor Nick Cannon’s podcast in July, their conversation about that moment nearly derailed
The divergent paths these two men traveled offer a kind of test case of celebrity
teshuvah, or repentance the broad theme of the Jewish High Holidays, which begin this weekend and show the role that Jewish leaders can play in legitimizing, or not, the
teshuvah of Black entertainers who have offended Jews.
Cannon, after issuing two public apologies for referencing antisemitic ideas, was embraced by rabbis and leaders of Jewish organizations who saw the podcast as a teachable moment. They spent hours with Cannon on private phone calls and public Zoom conversations to show him why his comments had been unacceptable.