Will someone please tell the guy in the bear suit to sit down?
Signs, confetti cannons, silly string. Please, sir, you’re distracting Kyrie Irving, which, as you well know, is not allowed.
This week, four rabbis walked into a Utah Jazz game. They sat on the front row. All four whipped out small signs that read: “I’m a Jew and I’m proud.” Somebody complained and they were forced to put their signs away.
Their signs violated a venue policy that forbids … distraction?
This all sounds like a bad joke.
Nobody laughed, although that policy is laughable.
The signs were aimed at Mavs guard Kyrie Irving, who in the past had given some folks, certainly Avremi Zippel and his fellow Utah rabbis, the impression that he was antisemitic. He was suspended by his team at the time of his offense, the Nets, but he had been less than apologetic for recommending on social media a hateful antisemitic film.
Zippel and the other rabbis wanted to make a statement.
The Utah Jazz issued their own statement a day later, saying the signs violated arena rules put in place “so that games can be played without distraction and disruption. No matter where someone is in the arena, if a sign becomes distracting or sparks an interaction with a player, we will ask them to remove it.”
Isn’t that what most signs held by Jazz fans are intended to be and do? These are competitive basketball games, not cotillion. What about expressions that are yelled? I’ve gone to Jazz games for more than three decades, and most of what I’ve heard from the crowd has been disruptive. Like telling Charles Barkley, when he was a player, that he stinks. Or informing James Harden in no uncertain terms that he’s a flopper and a ball hog. Or wearing T-shirts that read: “Fisher lied.”
There are thousands of examples, some of them clever, some of them stupid, some of them funny, some of them nasty, most of them meant to make opposing players and referees uncomfortable, so as to give the home team an advantage.
Sometimes it’s OK to distract and disrupt.
If anything, written or spoken, that bothers or distracts a player is verboten, folks might as well be buying $250 tickets to attend Sunday school.
Why then was a line drawn this week with the rabbis’ message?
“Bottom line: there was one person, in a building of 18,000+, that was triggered by the sign that says ‘I’m a Jew and I’m proud,’” Zippel wrote in the aftermath of the controversy. “Why that bothers him so, to the point that it sparks an interaction, should be the real question anyone is asking.”
A complaint about a proclamation of being proud to be a Jew would be a complaint about what’s free to do in America, what should be free to do. The rabbi is right. If those signs angered Irving, who’s the one with the real problem, the player or the supposed provocateur? The player is the provocateur.
The Jazz’s statement went on to say that the “issue was the disruptive interaction caused by usage of the signs, not the content of the signs.”
So … not the content, only that the content drew a reaction.
But why?
Zippel’s sign was not a disruption. It was not a message about Israel’s war with Hamas. It was a message directed at Irving for the things he’s said and done in the past and the antisemitism that persists in our world.
There’s nothing offensive or disturbing about a rabbi being a proud Jew, or a priest being a proud Catholic, or an imam being a proud Muslim, or a bishop being a proud Latter-day Saint.
It is offensive and disturbing to be a racist, to be a bigot, to be profane, to be hateful.
And the difference between those separate entities and actions should be obvious to the Jazz and to the NBA, to anyone.
Irving’s reps now deny that the guard complained about the rabbis’ signs. It should be noted that Irving has also denied the earth is round, so there’s that.
But if Irving is being truthful in his denial, that means someone somewhere on this flat rock — someone inside the Delta Center — did take issue with the rabbis’ signs and that’s something everyone everywhere should be concerned about.
Don’t be distracted by anything else.
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