I’m Jewish, and I love Ye’s music. But I feel guiltier listening to the artist formerly known as Kanye West than I do eating a pork dumpling. Two weeks ago, Ye went on his latest rant on X, spewing outrage in every direction, from his denigration of late designer Virgil Abloh to his adulation of Diddy to his professed allegiance to Adolf Hitler.

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I’ve tried to tune him out, in order to keep tuning in to his songs. I’m 17, and Ye is a central figure in popular music and therefore in adolescent culture. Still, social media - both Ye’s posts and the Twitter storm that’s ensued - makes it impossible to forget the ugly things that the musician has said and continues to say.

To be sure, I’ve long believed in the notion of separating the art from the artist. It’s why, for example, after recently re-reading The Sun Also Rises in English class, I still count it among my favorite books - despite the pejorative descriptions of the central Jewish character.

And I’ve been taking a similar approach with Ye since 2023, when his first wave of anti-Semitic remarks hit the internet. He subsequently apologized for those slurs, doing me and my friends a favor in the process, at least temporarily.

Early on, we had an apt strategy for avoiding the uncomfortable reality of the man behind the songs. Our unspoken formula was to acknowledge briefly and awkwardly our misgivings before going ahead and listening anyway. When I was sitting in math class, sharing AirPods with one of my best friends who isn’t Jewish, and Ye popped up on her screen, her eyes widened and she looked at me apologetically.

“I know, I know,” she said. “I don’t like him at all. But his music is pretty good…" She laughed, and I laughed too. I did not mind; in fact, I liked the song a lot.

After that moment, it became a running joke: She would give me a half-smile of contrition each time we’d listen. More recently, my other friend, staunchly Jewish in his identity, couldn’t muster up anything better. On a July night last summer when a Ye song came on, he turned up the volume and said jokingly, “I love Kanye. Who cares?"

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Now, when I scroll through TikTok, the tone of the conversation surrounding Ye and his recent acts continues to be one of humor - wrapped in a desire to look past his “quirks” and his “flaws.” Every other video I see has commentary on Ye’s diatribes. Some are memes, and some are jokes about his recent rants. All the while, young people continue to love him, despite the fact that he rescinded his 2023 apology - and recently went a step further in his adulation of Hitler and Nazism.

We seem to be distracted by the fact that he makes great music, that he connects with our generation, and that he’s easy to make fun of. But when the artist continues to spew hate, and the art continues to be made, is it time to stop listening - and to start speaking up? I am not proud of laughing along when I come across the memes on TikTok; there’s a nagging piece of me that’s saddened, even scared, and deeply troubled.

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As I walked to school the other day, my playlist shuffled to a Ye song. I was torn between enjoying it and turning it off. So I listened to half of it before skipping ahead to the next song and vowing to call my rabbi.

When we spoke, and I asked his views on Ye’s recent rant, my rabbi told me that he doesn’t like to give oxygen to people using hatred for attention and publicity. And on the one hand, I agree. In theory, it is not worth giving breath to remarks so outrageous that they shouldn’t even be acknowledged.

But on the other hand, Ye had a following on X of 32.3 million, roughly double the worldwide Jewish population. Whether attention should be given or not, it has and it will be. Despite his X account being taken down, Ye’s hatred lives on through screenshots and other people’s posts. And when a man with so many followers spews such violent xenophobia, it is bound to catch on, and it is impossible not to address.

Lost amid the talk these days about a constitutional crisis, my own generation is facing a very different sort of crisis: a moral one. As a minor, I had no say in the last election. But my friends and I do have a say when it comes to who we choose to celebrate in popular culture, no matter how young we are…or how susceptible we might be to the magnetism of a celebrity. This beloved rap star is continually, repeatedly, and unapologetically spewing vile anti-Semitic remarks, and we’ve chosen collectively to make less of it than we should.

I don’t profess to have an alternative solution; I myself haven’t stopped listening to Ye’s songs, and I’m not sure I even know what that might accomplish. But I do know we are not doing well enough with this test. We need at least to be serious and thoughtful about what we are witnessing, take a stronger stand against the hateful vitriol (even if we do consume the music), and - above all - stop pretending that it is just words.

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I have considered one possibility: Perhaps anti-Semitism so glaring from an artist so widely celebrated will have a paradoxical effect. Ye’s fans are mostly younger people, part of my generation, one notorious for its lack of knowledge about the Holocaust. According to a recent survey by the Claims Conference, nearly half of Gen Z and Millennials in the U.S. could not name a single concentration camp.

It pained me when I had to explain what the Holocaust was to one of my non-Jewish friends; I was glad to inform her but upset that I had to. Maybe Ye is inadvertently teaching his followers - should we choose to pay attention - that anti-Semitism is not some far-off concept or historical footnote, but rather a present-day reality both near and urgent.

I still have a music library full of Ye songs. My friends - and my generation - sure aren’t going to stop listening to him, and that’s their right. But what is clear to me is that we are past the point of laughing awkwardly and shrugging this off. Now is the time to face the music.