For our readers! Excerpt from "Levi's Unbuttoned" by Jennifer Sey
The smash hit book will wake you up!
The following is an excerpt from Jennifer Sey’s book "Levi’s Unbuttoned.” It’s lifted from a chapter called "The Work" - which is usually no work at all. Mostly the work amounts to canceling those accused of wrong-think. Grab the book and enjoy!
“The Work”
Excerpt from "Levi’s Unbuttoned” by Jennifer Sey
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In the summer of 2021, I received an email from our CFO at Levi’s. He told me an employee on his team was concerned about an “influencer” we were using for Gay Pride month, considering him out of step with the values of the company. According to the employee, this social media star had expressed “violence” in his posts and the employee was very concerned that we would associate our brand with him. He didn’t name names so I was left to sleuth a bit and troll all of the influencers we were currently working with.
I said I’d look into it, but it took some digging. In this age of social media, we employed hundreds of social media stars to endorse our products. I searched Instagram, our primary social media mode. Found nothing. Switched over to Twitter, a platform we rarely used because it’s just not visual, which is the preferred purview for fashion brands. I found him. Or what I assumed had to be him by process of elimination.
All I could come up with was a gay fashion blogger from New York who was also Israeli. He had Jewish stars and Israeli flags in his profile. I was mystified. Could that be it? It had to be. The fact that he expressed support for the right of Israel, his native country, to exist was violence, according to some.
The antisemitism of the Left, which puts Jews in the “white” category in the racial binary, and not just white, but super white, had been nagging at me for years. Jews are placed at the top of the woke racial pecking order supposedly because they have money, power and influence. They do not deserve sympathy and they certainly do not deserve the status that comes from victimhood. According to some, like Whoopi Goldberg, the Holocaust was not an ethnic cleansing. It was just a bunch of white people arguing with each other. On The View, in February 2022, Goldberg insisted that the Holocaust was “not about race” it’s just “white people doing it to white people, so y’all going to fight amongst yourselves.”
This dynamic had started to roil me in the summer of 2017 when a group of Jewish women were asked to leave the Dyke March in Chicago, a celebration within the city’s Pride activities during the month of June. The Dyke March is seen as less corporate and more inclusive than the larger Pride Parade. But women carrying a rainbow flag adorned with a star of David were asked to leave by the parade’s organizers. The organizers claimed that it wasn’t antisemitism that made them do it; it was anti-Zionism.
The line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism can be blurry, but it wasn’t blurry here. Although the Pride marchers’ flag was adorned with a star of David, meant to represent their Jewish heritage, they carried a typical rainbow Pride flag. It was not an Israeli flag, which looks very different. The Israeli flag is blue and white; no rainbow.
This isn’t an isolated incident. The contemporary Left is rife with antisemitism.
For example, take Ilhan Omar, a prominent left-wing Democrat and the member of Congress from the fifth district of Minnesota, who says things like: “It’s all about the Benjamins” when responding to a journalist’s question in 2019 about why U.S. political leaders support Israel. Her inference being, there is no good reason for the United States to support Israel. It is only done because the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) buys influence. Not because Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East and shares many of our values.
As for financial influence, teachers’ unions also give a lot of money to political candidates. In the 2021 gubernatorial recall special election in California, the teachers’ unions gave over two million dollars to keep Gavin Newsom in office, rewarding him for keeping California public schools closed for the previous year, as they had wished. Do I like special interest groups influencing politics? Groups such as the American Federation of Teachers (AFT)? No. I don’t like it. But treating AIPAC differently than other special interest groups is not only hypocritical, it reeks of antisemitism.
Further evidence of the anti-Israel/anti-Jewish push from the Left is the BDS (Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions) movement. In May 2021, the United Educators of San Francisco, the city’s teachers’ union, announced its support of BDS, when the majority of students were still doing Zoom school from their bedrooms. They were the first K-12 teachers’ union in the country to make such a pronouncement. At the time they made this declaration in defense of BDS, the vast majority of San Francisco public school students had not set foot in an actual classroom for well over a year. But the union saw fit to expend time and energy on crafting this very important announcement which has nothing to do with its actual job.
Why not announce a boycott of Chinese-made goods? It is widely known and reported on that the Chinese government is engaged in human rights abuses of ethnic Muslims in China, the Uyghurs. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has pursued a policy of mass incarceration of more than one million Uyghurs with no sort of legal due process. Why doesn’t the San Francisco teachers’ union announce a boycott of anything coming out of China, like iPhones and Nikes, because of these human rights abuses? Could the fact that they really like their iPhones and Nikes have anything to do with it? What Israeli products are so integral to their lives that giving them up would be a real sacrifice? SodaStream? Feta cheese and couscous at Trader’s Joe’s? A boycott of Israeli goods doesn’t require much from the protester at all.
Another reason is because criticism of China is considered unacceptable as it could be construed as racism because Chinese people are not white. But criticism of Jewish people, and boycotts of Israel, are laudable by many on the Left, because Jews are considered to be white, therefore privileged. And it is impossible to discriminate against privileged white people. And of course, there is clearly some antisemitism at play.
But more importantly, why is the teachers’ union focusing on anything other than:
1) Getting schools open during covid. 2) Teaching our kids.
As I’ve shared, I am Jewish. Though, as my husband often says, I have less of a religious impulse than anyone he has ever met. And by “less” he means zero. Daniel was born in Israel and holds an Israeli passport. He served as a medic in the Israeli army in his twenties.
He is also secular but holds a deep pride in his heritage. And his father, now deceased, held leadership positions in the Anti-Defamation League and the Chicago Jewish Federation for many years. His dad also taught at the University of Tel Aviv in the late sixties and seventies, which is why my husband was born there. And speaks fluent Hebrew.
All of this is to say that we are both Jewish and have personal connections to Israel. But that doesn’t mean that we aren’t critical of some Israeli policies, just as we are critical of some American policies. And, we are also proud of Israel, just as we are proud of America.
Back to our Levi’s Pride influencer with Israeli flags in his Twitter profile. I reached out to the head of marketing and her social media lead regarding the complaint from the employee in Finance. I explained the concerns and gave my perspective that these concerns were not actually concerning. She told me that they’d already received com- plaints and had “de-emphasized” his role in our LGBTQ campaign in celebration of Pride month. In this case, “de-emphasized” meant we had stopped using him in the campaign entirely. Levi’s Wokes had done it again.
I said: “Guys [again with the guys, oops], why? He’s a fashion blogger. He writes about fashion. He’s also gay. So what if he’s proud of being from Israel?”
But again, I was too late. Again, we’d bowed to the mob.
I pulled my marketing leadership team together. I told them it was enough with the unforgiving intersectionalism. In a world of influencer marketing, we were never going to please everyone all the time. People have opinions. That’s okay. We needed to stand by our people. They are using their voices as we encouraged people to do in our own campaigns. If we liked him for his gay fashion blogging, we could stand by his being Israeli. Can we please just get back to marketing jeans not pandering to the woke mob?
But the woke genie was out of the bottle.
In the world of woke-ism there is no forgiveness, as I was about to learn firsthand.
Grab a copy, sit down over the holiday break and ready this amazing tome! Jennifer has done an incredible service for us all!
I don't have much sympathy for anyone that engages in, promotes, condones, accepts, or pushes immoral sexual behavior such as homosexuality, etc, whether this person is Jewish or white or black or purple does not matter. I mean gee whiz, where is their moral underpinning? It's not an objective morality it is totally subjective so what do you expect? What do you appeal to for moral base? Popular opinion? Majority rule? Law? How has that worked out through history. Most people here including the author will absolutely refuse to think thru to the logical conclusion of this.
Ask her about her opposition to self-defense.
People like this with contradictory positions about rights and freedom are the ones who made possible the very existence of the problems she then rails against. If that’s not hypocritical, I don’t know what is.
https://russellmadden.substack.com/p/freedom-except-for?s=w