In the incredibly under-appreciated Bullet, Tupac Shakur has beef with the Jews, namely, Mickey Rourke’s Yiddishe ex-con, Butch “Bullet” Stein. Not too many people saw the movie (even Jewdar somehow didn’t know about it until last year) but we think we know a few who did. According to recently released FBI files, the Jewish Defense League used to make some shekels by issuing death threats to assorted rappers (including Shakur and Eazy-E), and then offering their “protection” for a fee. There’s so much wackiness involved in this story, we’re not sure where to begin, but one thing we do love is the notion of supposedly bad-ass gangsta rappers having their lunch money taken by a bunch of Jewish nerds.
1) Nobody’s quite sure if that story is true.
2) To characterize the JDL as “nerds” (which is to say harmless smart guys) is probably miscommunicating what’s going here, if this story is true. I’m not saying that Shakur or other rappers are squeaky clean, but the JDL practicing extortion and requiring a fee for protection is bad behavior and makes them not harmless nerds but more like the mafia. In other words, I don’t think it’s wise to celebrate this sort of behavior (even if you guys are wonderfully irreverent) when the Black community is always looking for a reason to call us racists.
Who’s celebrating? We just think that element is funny.
We don’t dispute the thuggishness of the JDL, but “nerd” doesn’t necessarily imply “harmless.” (Eichmann, sitting there calculating railroad timetables, was most definitely a nerd.) Can we, on the eve of Passover, play nice and split the difference by calling them “thuggish nerds?”