cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/11125375
“I’m aspirationally Jewish,” Musk said. “So I was like, ‘What are people talking about with this antisemitism?’ Because I never hear it at dinner conversations."
Elon Musk said he is “Jewish by association” during a conversation with conservative commentator Ben Shapiro after a visit to the former Nazi concentration camp in Auschwitz, Poland.
Musk, the Tesla CEO and owner of social media platform X, made the comments during a conference on antisemitism organized by the European Jewish Association. The association had arranged for Musk to make a private visit to Auschwitz, where an estimated 1.1 million Jewish people were killed during the Holocaust.
“I must admit to being somewhat frankly naive about this. In the circles that I move, I see almost no antisemitism. … Two-thirds of my friends are Jewish,” the billionaire tech mogul said in a video posted on YouTube by Bloomberg Technology. “I have twice as many Jewish friends as non-Jewish friends. I’m like Jewish by association.”
Yeah, this would be a dumb thing to say even if wasn’t bullshit.
I mean, plenty of people don’t encounter antisemitism in their daily life. So what? I don’t either, for the most part, because I don’t associate with antisemites, but I’m not dumb enough to imply that my social bubble represents the wider world. I am capable of reading, so I do have some idea of what goes on outside my bubble, and I am cognizant of the limits of my personal experience. The conversations I personally have at the dinner table do not have broad social implications.