I Believe in Speaking Up. That’s Why I Couldn’t Watch Macklemore.

I had been back in America for less than three days when I walked into MetLife Stadium, still half living on Tel Aviv time. My twin sister and I grew up on Ed Sheeran’s music and spontaneously decided to purchase concert tickets that morning.

“Listen, there’s one thing,” she warned me, “Macklemore is opening, but we’ll just get there after.” It didn’t even need to be a conversation. I knew what she meant.

As we entered MetLife Stadium, I was struck by the size. I was used to the bustle of Tel Aviv, but I’d forgotten the sheer American grandiosity of stadiums (and beverages). The first thing I noticed walking through the metal detectors was how different this felt. In Israel, security at a concert isn’t just background noise you tune out. It’s a mental checklist you run without meaning to: exits, distance to the nearest shelter, who’s standing too close to the barrier. Nova taught an entire generation of Israelis to always keep our guard up.

When I saw my first keffiyeh, my internal warning system snapped to attention. I took a deep breath, reminding myself that in New Jersey, I had the luxury of not needing to equate a concert with a terrorist attack.

I honestly hadn’t given the whole Macklemore controversy much thought. As we entered the stadium, I was forced to confront it. The years since Oct. 7th have been the most difficult of my life. I couldn’t stand to hear Macklemore shout “Free Palestine,” not because I inherently disagree with the notion, but because I am still grieving, and that grief is nowhere close to finished.

I was supposed to fly back to Israel from my home in NJ on October 9th to start my final year at Tel Aviv University. Instead, I sat, stuck, watching my country come apart from six thousand miles away with no idea what to do with myself. I wasn’t just grieving “my Jewish brothers”; I was grieving my actual friends and acquaintances: Ron, Dan, Aidan, and Hersh. These were real people, real faces, real relationships.

This morning, when the Jewish news outlets started posting about Macklemore’s set, I couldn’t ignore the discomfort. So, I started googling. I typed, “Why did Macklemore,” and before I could finish the sentence, autocomplete offered me “get canceled.” I had intended to type: “become pro-Palestinian,” but Google’s response felt like its own small piece of evidence.

A Reddit thread on why he’d fallen off called him fake, preachy, unforgivable, and manufactured. Then I clicked on “Hind’s Hall,” the song he’d performed at the concert the night before. I’d already seen the Stop Antisemitism posts, the videos of him singing it in the same stadium I’d been in hours earlier, but I had never actually listened to the song. It had millions of views, and the comments underneath were striking. Thank you for speaking out. Overnight, the same instinct that had gotten him canceled was being celebrated as courage.

That’s the part I keep coming back to: intent versus impact. In the song, and in his statements since, he borrows a language he already knows — police brutality and white supremacy. In this vernacular, who gets called a resistance fighter and who gets called a terrorist depends on the color of their skin and the size of their bank account. Macklemore is not wrong that those forces are real. He’s just applying a framework built for America’s history onto a conflict that predated it by about three thousand years.

Twelve days after Nova, Macklemore posted on Instagram calling for a ceasefire. A few sentences in, the tone shifts away from sympathy for the Israeli victims. The moment he starts a sentence with “But…,” I stop reading. I know where this is going. I lived it.

In Judaism, there’s a teaching that saving one life is like saving an entire world; that every human being represents a whole universe of thoughts, relationships, and future generations. I believe that about Palestinian lives. I also believe it about my friends who are gone. Those two beliefs should be able to exist side by side, and maybe Macklemore didn’t set out to make me feel like they couldn’t. But that is the binary the pro-Palestinian movement has built: Jewish life is worth less, simply because Palestinians are suffering more.

There are two million Arab citizens of Israel. Jewish communities trace back further than most nations. There are Palestinians who never got to choose the circumstances they were born into, and there are Israelis who were born into a country still learning what safety is allowed to feel like. I’m about to vote in my first Israeli election, and I keep wondering if Macklemore knows there’s a whole current in this country pushing for something other than what he’s seeing on the news. If he truly cares about Palestinian freedom, there are Israelis standing right next to that fight who he’s never mentioned.

I’m in a particularly self-reflective period right now as what would have been a close friend’s birthday lines up with my own birthday, and the Jewish New Year. And while I know this next part won’t sound diplomatic, it’s honest: I don’t want a free Palestine if it means more of my friends don’t turn twenty-four. I also don’t want an Israel that stays at war forever, or a generation of Gazan kids who grow up believing the only way to survive is deciding whose life matters more. I got to choose to move my life to Israel. But the Israelis and Palestinians who pay the price for this conflict never got to choose anything at all. So when Macklemore got up on that stage and the whole stadium erupted in cheers, I wasn’t there for it. I was listening to nostalgic songs with my sister in the parking lot, waiting for Ed Sheeran instead.

I don’t hate Macklemore for saying what he said. I think he’s trying, in the only language he’s ever been handed; I just wish he understood that the words that make him feel heard are the same ones that make people like me feel erased from the room.

An excerpt from my latest piece for The Times of Israel. Read the full essay on my Substack: @ajshouseofthought