In The Atlantic, Helen Lewis traffics in very subtle, but very dangerous race-mongering that should have no place in a publication which trots out its anti-racist foundations in its hagiography and marketing schemes. Jeffrey Goldberg, the Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic is Jewish; he should’ve known better. But that is consistent across the board: the failure of “The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat” is an editorial, moral and leadership failure that falls directly at his feet. It is disgraceful that a Jewish man that came so hard for Kanye West’s antisemitism could not see the anti-Blackness and the instrumentalization of Jewishness to write a blog post to silence and discredit me, who is a person of Jewish descent, just like Nancy Spector, the subject whom she claims has been “scapegoated” and falsely claims is a mentor to me. Spector’s Jewishness becomes a variable by which Lewis tries to solicit sympathy for her and humanize her through representational politics, while ignoring Spector’s racism. Lewis does not make mention of the same Jewish heritage for me, which is a consistent feature of her sloped, biased and lazy journalism.

Above you can see screenshots taken from my Twitter timeline, in which I reference my Jewish heritage, and have done so for years. I am not Jewish; in Rabbinic law, one is Jewish through the mother. My mother is the daughter of a man who is of Jewish descent, through his mother, making my grandfather a Cuban Jew, while also being a Catholic Cuban thorough his father, my great-grandfather. This is not really the time or place to go into my connection with Jewish faith and culture, and it is a shame that Goldberg’s failure requires that I share what is not my responsibility to share. It is another instance, in the countless of many in this whole failure of Goldberg’s, to make a Black woman responsible for his job, and to compensate for his blindspots — and soft affection — for the mediocrity of the unqualified writer that he hired. Goldberg let his weakest and most unprepared solider fire the first round. This is how wars get started.

There are a few red flags: Lewis takes the time to provide as much nuance as her skills and reporting will allow, to Spector. This does not happen for me. Spector is identified as being from Albany; I am from Texas, despite the fact that I am from Dallas is searchable. I could be wrong, but I could not find an interview online that said that Spector was from a “middle-class” family in “Albany”. These identifying bits of information, and Lewis’s other talking points that lack evidence but sound incredibly similar to Spector’s talking points in her sustained whisper campaigns to which there are witnesses and corroborating paper trails. When Spector’s (alleged) participation is considered, it’s pretty wild to consider how my Jewish heritage is erased in The Atlantic, given the authority in which Spector felt qualified to speak for me about it; in an editorial meeting when advocating for Black people — specifically, the capitalization of the “B” in Black and other forms of editorial respect — Spector shut down my reasoning, saying, “Well remember, you have Jewish blood too.” The room went silent, and though the two people in the room will probably say they don’t remember, I do. Thankfully, there’s an email confirming that this meeting happened. So, it’s a bit insidious, when Spector’s (alleged) participation is considered as an active source for otherwise unknowable and unevidenced claims in Lewis’s blog post, and my Jewish heritage has been flattened, which would have problematized a lot of Lewis’s arguments.

Jewishness has been in my life for personal and familial reasons, and I make the distinction and respect for Rabbinic law, the passage of time (we are generationally and generations removed) and my own privacy that I say I am of “Jewish descent” and not “Jewish”. I want to appreciate the heritage and inheritance, and the role that it’s played in becoming who I am without having to litigate the politics of Jewish bloodline, records and the pogroms in the public when, like for many non-White people who are Jewish or of Jewish descent, the story is full of burned records, racism, terrorism and other variables that are complex. I have and will continue to assert that I am not Jewish, and should not be asked or called upon to take up space in that way; there a number of Black Jews unpacked this with more care, nuance and expertise than what I can offer and that it deserves, so I will direct people to them: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Soraya McDonald, Michael Twitty and Rebecca Pierce are four of the many Black Jews that I learn from and that write about Blackness, Jewishness and Black Jewishness in a thoughtful, accessible and nuanced way.

Lewis admitted to, in lieu of being able to interview me, scouring my public Twitter timeline for information. A sort of Poundland version of Gay Talese’s New Journalism. Not only could she not find a lot of the information that she was looking for, she failed to do a thorough search which would’ve shown her that like Nancy Spector, I am also of Jewish descent.

Lewis mentions Spector’s Jewishness in as a means of positionality and mentions “Black” 37 times. It is obsessive, like other features of the blog post. And obsession is ultimately a rhapsodic violence, which is fundamentally why Spector’s Jewishness is mentioned at all, and mine is not. Lewis is, to quote someone whom I discussed this with, “misusing Jewish experiences with violence and hate.” And considering the writer, this is absolutely on brand. As much as Lewis trolled my Twitter, to have missed my references to my Jewish heritage is A) to have intentionally ignored this huge fact in order to write a slanted, biased and ultimately violent blog post that refused to adhere to journalism or even publication guidelines, or B) basic research was not done. The missing gaps and the reality that the public that was supposedly served by “The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat” are evident with the public asking more questions when this key information is revealed to them, and one person backtracking their bullying comment. This is directly related to the intentional misinformation of Lewis’s blog post.

Lewis weaponizes Spector’s Jewishness against me and this was the point. The online harassment, which ranged from death threats, bullying, to people telling me to apologize to Spector and the Guggenheim, and people saying that I ruined a “Jewish woman’s career” was exactly the point. Lewis dabbles via insinuation that I am antisemitic — I took a Jewish woman out! — but like so much of her piece, fails to have evidence for such, and she fails to hold Spector accountable for her the mistakes which might have factored into why she ultimately lost her job. Lewis does not mention Spector’s unprofessional taunting the White House, which that alone almost — and one could argue had she been Black, it would have — cost her her job as the Guggenheim’s Chief Curator. Hate is what Helen Lewis does best, and The Atlantic pays her to do it. Emboldened with training at one of the most notorious right-wing tabloids on the planet, The Daily Mail, and an editorial staff asleep at the wheel, Lewis foments the mob by pitting the identities of Spector and myself against one another, knowing that the ignorance, racism and trust in the assumption that “if it’s printed in The Atlantic, it’s true” will take care of the rest.

Above is a screenshot of an example of one of those online harassments. The person deleted their comment when I said that my grandfather was Jewish, perhaps knowing that their argument was bunk. It’s somewhere deep in the archive, but their comment was along the lines of ruining Spector’s career in part because she was Jewish. That’s not a really good reason to erase it though, that you found out that I was of Jewish descent. The comment should’ve been erased because the theory — that I ruined Spector’s career by speaking up because of her racism — is wrong. The onus and pressure should not be on me — and it is — to not speak about the ways in which Spector tried to ruin my scholarship, exhibition, reputation and career. Spector being Jewish isn’t a protection against the reality that in this chapter of art history, she was an awful human being, from top to bottom, and still is behaving like one.

Being of any descent does not prevent you from having internalized self-hatred; in fact, those are some of the worst offenders. It is after all, a Black woman whose voice you hear encouraging the Guggenheim to organize a campaign of slander, misinformation and character assassination. I would never use identity in this way, especially because I have publicly said that I am not Jewish. However. The fact that I have publicly for years identified as a person of Jewish descent, a number of my college friends can attest to this, I have Jewish family members who are still alive, one of my siblings is matrilineally Jewish, and other connections are a hugely important variable in the equation. Journalism is meant to complicate and elucidate what we think we know about the world and ourselves, and all Helen Lewis did was present half-baked pablum, which was using the tactical language of race war agitators mostly found on websites like Breitbart and Stormfront. Which, if that’s what she’s into, that’s fine — but Jeffrey Goldberg will have to justify to how these tactics found their way into The Atlantic, on top of the multiple fact checking problems that have been laid bare on the website.

There are more examples of this, but I don’t think I need to create an entire page of examples, considering that there is more ground to cover, and this is not my responsibility. My DMs were flooded with messages demanding I apologize to Spector, that I got it all wrong, that I ruined a Jewish woman’s career, which picked up pace in the days and weeks after, when two Black celebrities were in the news for their antisemitic rhetoric and actions. I have no doubt that the number of people accusing me of ruining a Jewish woman’s career has everything to do with the recent and deeply sad news of Kanye West and Kyrie Irving’s trotting out antisemitic tropes. Again, I feel a number of Black Jews have unpacked this with care, nuance and expertise than what I can offer, so I will direct people to them: Chanda Prescod-Weinstein Soraya McDonald, Michael Twitty and Rebecca Pierce are four of the many Black Jews that I learn from and that write about Blackness, Jewishness and Black Jewishness in a thoughtful, accessible and nuanced way. There was a terribly missed opportunity here for The Atlantic to do incisive work, or perhaps, even hire one of them, provided they were even interested, to properly report. Jeffrey Goldberg, a Jewish man and Editor-in-Chief of The Atlantic failed so very badly here, and his “blind spots” aren’t just that; they’re dangerous black-outs. These “blind spots” encouraged hate and harm by agitating the anti-Blackness that goes hand-and-hand with antisemitism, when there are people qualified to do this work.

To consider that I was also of Jewish descent and the way that I was treated at the Guggenheim — a museum established by a Jewish collector, Solomon R. Guggenheim — and by Spector is not only further embarrassing, it highlights that there is absolutely nothing that will prevent White people and White institutions invested in treating you as less than a person when that is the mission of their work, institutions and belief system. It also did not stop Spector’s racism. At no point did me being of Jewish heritage stop Spector from racial terrorizing me as a Black person, and trying to claim ownership of my work, to this day. Or if we consider that Spector most likely participated in Lewis’s blogpost, me being of Jewish descent has not stopped Spector from attempting to control my narrative, which has felt an incredibly strange and somewhat obsessive — like Helen Lewis!— need to control. Me being of Jewish descent has not stopped Spector from wanting to control a public narrative about what happened during the Basquiat exhibition, despite the fact the evidence looks terrible, and she knows this, which is partly why she will not speak on the record. Spector and I, both being of Jewish descent, did not, and has not stopped a quiet — but loud if you’re listening in the right register — campaign of misinformation, lies and essentially harassment, when she knows full well how badly she endangered my work and an entire field. Jewishness at a Jewish museum never made Spector, a Jewish woman, treat me as a full human being. It is not just embarrassing that the first Black curator at the Guggenheim was treated this way — it’s even more deranged when you consider that there is a thread of Jewish heritage running through it all. It makes the story even worse. And Spector knows this, the Guggenheim knows this, and I’m going to say there’s a high probability that Lewis knows this too. In attempting to silence me, this part of the story is silenced as well. When the fact that Spector knew that I was of Jewish heritage is considered, it begs a lot of questions — why did create a panel of another curator’s work without them, especially if you both are Jewish? Why would you attempt to add yourself as a co-curator to work that’s not yours and misrepresent the scholarship of another person of Jewish descent?

The answer would arrive here: because none of those things mattered more than the fact that I was Black, and for Spector, Black people are not equal to White people, which is why she didn’t hire any at the Guggenheim. And when she did hire them as staff (Ashley James), she did so under the duress of trying to cover up her misconduct. The first Black co-curator that the Guggenheim trots out because he cannot speak for himself, Okwui Enwezor, was not even hired by Spector, as she was just a senior-curator at that time. Spector didn’t even hire a Black curator during her 18 months at the Brooklyn Museum, where their track-record of dealing with Black artists far supersedes the Guggenheim’s (but where she picked up James). I was the first Black curator that Spector hired for their scholarship and ability to carry off a blue-chip exhibition, and we see how that turned out. James was not hired for these reasons. James was hired specifically for her ability to carry water — James did not have the requisite experience for the Associate Curator job that she landed — and willingness to help the Guggenheim cover up what actually happened, as evident by the recordings. Spector hired James mostly to mislead the public and donors about her mismanagement of the Basquiat exhibition, which would have opened up other Pandora boxes of issues. In some respects, the racism was the part that the Guggenheim was least worried about, when you consider the accounting and the books, the IP issues which are incredibly serious.

Spector’s track record more than speaks for itself. And it is a failure of journalism that it has not been allowed to. It speaks louder and longer than anything I, or even she, could say about her.

Spector is like a lot of privileged, New York White (Jewish!) people who think that they are liberal: she only understands Black people through the extremes of servant and celebrity/exceptionalism. They only know their housekeepers (and even then) or the Black Candidate That Went to Harvard and Lives on The Upper East Side That They Voted For. They have no real lived experienced with Black people who do not aspire to be them, and do not need them. It’s why Spector asked Hank Willis Thomas, who has no experience working with her in a museum setting because the Guggenheim never organized an exhibition of his work, despite their friendship, to speak on her behalf, and indirectly, dis-credit me. And it’s why Spector tried to repeatedly treat me as the help, despite the fact that it was my scholastic IP that the entire show foundationed upon. I refused to contort my body or centuries of history to fit into Spector’s worldview, and quite frankly, when she couldn’t treat me as a form of exceptionalism — in part, because I kept reminding her that I was Black, not just of “Jewish blood” as she said — she tried to subject me to the role of servant, because it’s all she really knows. In fact, if you look at it, that’s how she basically treated Ashley James, a high-end cleaning lady. Hear how Spector quietly and passively thanks James, after she goes on the record to plan conspiracy, saving Spector from having to do the dirty work herself. But what other Black people are willing to do and pretending to be, to be in spaces that do not see them as human, is not my business — unless that guest pass is built on my work, body, reputation and family land and legacy of firsts.

The Jewish factor is more complicated and nuanced than what The Atlantic could provide, and it’s an ironic failure that a Jewish man at the helm is presiding over this particular failure. By platforming lies and misinformation, The Atlantic has also platformed hate, and emboldened harassment, death threats and online bullying which were harmful, hurtful and could have been stopped had The Atlantic not published a blog post filled with information that they knew was missing or incorrect. They have also platformed the same misinformation and calls to violence that Goldberg called out when he retweeted this image of anti-Semitic people, emboldened by Kanye West, spreading hate above a Los Angeles freeway. When Adidas further refused to act on West’s antisemitism, Goldberg joined the ranks of other Jews that called them out with this tweet, bringing up Adidas’s Nazi past. So, why is it okay for Goldberg to then allow this sort of rank-and-file misinformation with his staff writers? Is it okay for The Atlantic to embolden the public to send me death threats, bullying, accusations of antisemitism because they didn’t do their jobs, and they platformed a writer who brings with her an audience that espouses the same beliefs of hate? Why is it okay for the same publication to then erase my Jewish heritage in a story about me, that they published without proper fact-checking? It’s beyond racist, and an editorial second-class citizenship that I am meant to accept. It sends the message that not only do Black people not deserve thoughtful, nuanced and factual treatment and that other people can speak for them, but Black Jewish people do not count when Goldberg uses his platform to speak out against efforts which marginalize Jewish people and people of Jewish descent. It is the same anit-Blackness which has made me, and I know others feel unwelcome in (White) Jewish spaces. The double-standards are specifically why I often do not seek community with them, and I am more comfortable synthesizing that heritage and inheritance through other means, less hostile (and racist) spaces and why I prefer to consider it as a personal history, and leave it at that. It’s the behavior, actions and beliefs of people like Nancy Spector and Jeffrey Goldberg who make a lot of (Ashkenazi) Jewish spaces deeply uncomfortable, unwelcoming and hostile to and for Jews of color. This article is a great starting point to learn more.

Goldberg shared an article titled, “Learn About Jews From Jews, Rather Than Those That Hate Them”, and I can’t help but to wonder if he feels that way, why did he think that it was okay for Lewis to write “The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat” which traffics and tropes in subtle anti-Black, antisemitic rhetoric via omission, and written by someone - Lewis— who has a long standing record with Black women and other women of color and transwomen for hate? Goldberg responded in quote tweet to this tweet, wherein which Josh Gad asked Adidas,

“…Can he single out a single faith and group of people with hatred and vitriol and it doesn’t matter? Asking for a friend.”

Why is okay for Lewis to single out Black women, trans women and other people for harm, misinformation and for his publication to deputize her to write the same “hatred and vitriol” that Goldberg does not accept for Jewish people? Would Goldberg have allowed someone with a parallel track record like Lewis’s in its demonstrated record of harm, but instead, this hypothetical person’s target was Jewish people, write a story about Jewish people? Probably not. So, I want to know why Jeffrey Goldberg thought that the public didn’t deserve better, or why I, as a human being who is in this context Black and Cuban Jewish, didn’t deserve better from The Atlantic? To paraphrase the article Goldberg shared, why is he allowing someone who has shown hateful behavior when we consider the lived experiences of Black women, to write about Black women? And why aren’t all forms of Jewish experience and heritage equally worthy of respect, nuance and protection as the Jewish identity that he recognizes as his own?

Goldberg rightly called out Adidas’s Nazi past to highlight the correlation of a brand’s past racist and genocidal history, and how they enable harm, racism and misinformation by platforming one person with a track record of antisemitism, anti-Black behaviors and rhetoric, which are frankly, dangerous. But in this case, his brand is the Adidas, and what Goldberg platformed is incredibly dangerous in the precedent that it establishes for writing about Black people, without fact, in a “flagship” publication. “The Guggenheim’s Scapegoat” authorizes unqualified writers with a track record of hate to write about women and other people like me, and The Atlantic is willing to print it and legitimize this sort of right-wing, race war mongering, even when they know that it’s not been properly fact-checked. The Atlantic is a brand which was founded as an anti-slavery publication, but that has never had a Black person as an Editor-in-Chief or as CEO. That’s a pretty damning track record for a publication that has a lot of pride in using abolition and it’s part of a movement to end chattel slavery and genocide here in the US as a part of its narrative. The Atlantic is Adidas in this particular context — they’ve chosen to endorse Helen Lewis and platform misogynoir, a deeply anti-factual blog post that then incited harm, character damage, death threats and other bullying in part, because it was built on a racist rhetoric of an “angry Black woman” torpedoing the career of a Jewish woman, while neglecting to mention that the “angry Black woman” was also of Jewish descent. To build this narrative and trope, Goldberg’s Kanye eschewed facts, fact-checking, due diligence and industry standards.

What is Jeffrey Goldberg going to do about the Kanye West that he platforms at The Atlantic? What will he do about the absolute mess that he allowed, on his watch? I am not sure, but the past record of Goldberg’s ability to accept ownership of his “lapses” of judgement might tell us something.