Julian Casablancas, lead vocalist and primary songwriter of The Strokes, recently appeared on viral YouTube series SubwayTakes, hosted by Kareem Rahma. And he wasted no time claiming “American Zionists” get the benefits of white privileged people but talk like they are Black people during slavery:
Nepo baby @Casablancas_J of @thestrokes says that American Zionists get the benefits of white privileged people but talk like they are Black people during slavery. A horrid take from someone who truly gets the benefits of white privilege – and uses it to sh*t on Jews. pic.twitter.com/lo5j1UVNoT
— David Lange (@Israellycool) April 22, 2026
To be clear, by “American Zionists” Julian Casablancas means American Jews. Let’s put to bed any suggestion he means also non-Jewish Zionists. It is clear from Rahma’s responses about “going to a wedding in Tel Aviv” that he understood it this way too.
And note how they joked about Casablancas losing his career, implying American Jews are powerful and destroy careers in the entertainment industry if they disagree with you.
It’s always the same script: take the oldest antisemitic tropes – Jews control careers, Jews are secretly privileged, Jews exaggerate their victimhood – dress them up in trendy activist language, and pretend it’s brave truth-telling instead of recycled bigotry.
A bit about so-called American Jewish “white privilege”: True, many American Jews are affluent – the result of hard work – but they are also oppressed. According to the latest figures from the FBI, despite constituting only 2% of the U.S. population, Jews were the target of roughly 69–70% of all religion-based hate crimes and about 16–18% of all hate crimes overall. And it are people like Julian Casablancas who are only adding fuel to the flames of hatred.
Julian Casablancas can talk about white privilege, having been born with a silver spoon up his tuchus. Born to a Danish model and a businessman, he attended an exclusive school. He has always been a millionaire, even before his rock career. He currently has an apartment in Manhattan, New York City and a family home in upstate New York.
Perhaps it is this white privilege that had led Casablancas to assuage his guilt with this “anti-Israel” activism. It is what all the “cool kids” do these days, especially the rich.
Ultimately, Casablancas is playing a character we’ve seen a thousand times before: the bored aristocrat cosplaying as a revolutionary. By framing the most targeted religious minority in America as the ultimate oppressors, he isn’t “speaking truth to power.” He’s punching down from the safety of his Manhattan penthouse.
There is nothing rebellious about echoing the oldest prejudices in history. It’s not rock and roll; it’s just a rich kid looking for a new way to feel righteous at the expense of the truth.
