Jewish Journal of Los Angeles/ March 28, 2024
Originally published in German on www.Achgut.com. Click here for German version.
Candace Owens broke out as a right-wing media star around the time when I moved to Berlin in 2016. I saw in her a role model and kindred soul. As a black woman, she encouraged her own community to question their historic loyalty to the Democratic party in America, calling for “Blexit”, the exit of blacks from a party that she argued only exploits black suffering to lure votes. She was beautiful, articulate, brave, and charismatic.
Around the same time, I became a media curiosity in Germany as a rare Jewish voice telling Germans that welcoming Muslim migrants from countries steeped in anti-semitism, misogyny, and fascism wasn’t a correction to their Nazi past, but rather, a deranged continuation of it. For some, I was a breath of fresh air, Jews included, perhaps in the way Owens was for black conservatives who wanted to think for themselves and not the way left-leaning social justice outfits like the NAACP encouraged them to think.
I even remember, as I started “The Orit Arfa Show” for a German publication called www.Achgut.com, founded by prominent German-Jewish writer, Henryk Broder, I was inclined to liken it to “The Candace Owens Show,” which hosted by conservative media giant, Prager University. She passionately questioned her guests with wit and insight. I even purchased her book, Blackout, which she promoted ad nauseam on her Instagram channel.
But I could not get past the first two chapters. It didn’t read like a down-to-earth, honest coming-of-age memoir of a conservative black woman having been raised by her grandparents. It read more like an Ivy League college application essay filled with superfluous fancy, big words. I wondered how blacks from the inner-city could even relate to it. I returned it to Amazon.
Read the rest here.