Cami Even-Esh, better known by his stage name Kosha Dillz, didn’t always want to be known as a Jewish rapper. Rather than having to address antisemitism or radicalism, he would prefer to continue writing songs about love, break-ups, or even depression instead of a diss track against misplaced anti-Israel activism or a call for the return of the hostages captured on Oct. 7.
Even as Even-Esh finds himself meeting this responsibility to use his creativity time and again on projects tackling the problems of the post-Oct. 7 world, he explained to the Magazine that he seeks to do more than just challenge other artists like Macklemore – he wants to find common ground and spread understanding of the complexity of the conflict.
Released earlier in June, his song “Time for a Conversation” was written as an answer to Macklemore’s pro-encampment anti-Israel protest song “Hind’s Hall,” but the Israel-American rapper preferred to call his latest song a “response track” rather than a “diss track.” He didn’t think it was productive to insult those who were new to the long-lasting Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The song challenged Macklemore’s claims of genocide in Gaza, that he didn’t address the need to bring home hostages, and his ignorance about the subject.
“I’m Israeli-American, and because I have Palestinian friends and this is a conflict between these two parties, I find it weird to start involving other people who randomly chime in,” said Even-Esh. “I saw him speak at the Palestine rally in DC, and it was three, four weeks into the war. I was doing interviews, and I’m like, ‘How is this happening? How is somebody speaking on behalf or in front of [people relevant to the conflict] while there are other people that have the ability to do so?’” he asked.
“I’ve known Macklemore for a long time; I’ve known him for many, many years. Played festivals with him, known him personally and was in touch with him during the war,” said Kosha Dillz. “Macklemore has a brand that he could have tried to [use to] advocate to bring people together.”
Even-Esh felt that his fellow rapper was stuck in a binary culture in America, which didn’t exist in Israel, “where you’re either on this side or you’re on that side.”
A person can’t really understand the conflict without seeing events in the US and visiting Israel. Even-Esh was on his fourth visit to the Jewish state when he spoke to the Magazine, and he was already planning his fifth. He had headlined his own show in Tel Aviv.
The hostages
KOSHA DILLZ had been to dozens of pro-Palestinian and pro-Israel rallies in the US, but on his most recent trip to Israel he experienced the rallies on Tel Aviv’s Kaplan Street calling for elections and a hostage deal. He said the rally was “eye-opening to me.”
“It now includes family members of hostages. It includes people who have just lost faith in the war, which many of us are all losing. We want it to end,” said Even-Esh. “Then I feel it is also just nice to be there, and there are people that are disagreeing with each other, and that’s just basically it.
“They’re not really fist-fighting or anything like that. They’re not wearing masks, and they’re talking; they’re actually all sharing information with each other. And there are so many miniature spin-off groups of this group with this T-shirt, that group with that T-shirt. And people are explaining how they’re in hi-tech or they’re coffee baristas, or they’re professors, and they all go to the military and they all still protest.”
People were disagreeing but united under the same blue and white flag, Even-Esh said of the Kaplan protests. The binary political culture in America, in which Macklemore had created his song, was missing those types of conversations he heard at the Tel Aviv demonstrations.
Even with the pro-Israel camp in the US, “if you even criticize [the failures of Oct. 7] at all, it’s almost seen as a sign of weakness. So you got to be all in on every sign, this organization, AIPAC, this PAC, whatever. You have to be all in on it or else you’re the enemy. [Political polarity] is just a construct of life in America, I think. It’s either A or B.”
Even-Esh compared political discourse in the US to an old Nintendo video game controller with a few buttons, and Israel discourse to an Xbox controller that has many different buttons and options. Some people in the States had criticized him for attending the protests, which were seen as a sign of weakness.
“Everything needs to be unity, unity, unity. The reality is, I mean, weakness exists. That’s okay,” he said. “It’s okay to lose a war... we just need to figure out how to get these people [the hostages] home. And that’s what a lot of people are learning. If there was a different prime minister, maybe this war could have been over at six months.”
EVEN-ESH HAS tried to break through the American strictures, noting that there are “various people in the Palestinian and Israeli communities who are trying to do it, and [this issue] just doesn’t rise to the top because there’s a lot of stuff out there.
“It’s really hard to deliver a good conversation, good news, and things that are positive to the world – it takes a lot of physical effort,” the Jewish rapper said.
“I’m trying to bring people together. That’s going to be me putting on other Jewish artists, other Palestinian artists, working with people that I naturally work with anyway, and sharing that because I want everyone to feel like we could have a [conversation]. There’s no space right now to have a discussion at all – anywhere.”
Kosha Dillz had done a few conversation videos with a friend of his, a Palestinian-Israeli rapper and actor who had lost family in Gaza.
Even-Esh had visited encampments and tried to film conversations with protesters. At the beginning, people were less guarded. Later, he said people were afraid of having their identities shared online because of something they said, but he argued that as long as they don’t say anything violent or radical, no one was going to put them on the news.
“I remember having a conversation with someone who worked at Interfaith Work between Jews and Palestinians in Harvard,” Even-Esh recalled. “As he found other videos and heard what he said and how he came off, he really got uncomfortable.”
He had a conversation with one activist who had been doxed after a video showed him throwing a punch at a pro-Israel counter-protester, but from the activist’s perspective he had seen a pro-Palestinian girl being assaulted and wanted to protect her. The rapper recalled how a teenage Orthodox Jew joined the conversation, and mentioned that he didn’t feel safe wearing his kippah (skullcap). The pro-Palestinian activist assured him that he could wear a kippah around him, and he would protect him.
“Sometimes I think about those conversations and about a lot of stuff that doesn’t get out. But I did think about how he made the 17-year-old kid feel really comfortable, and he was a religious Jewish kid, and we had a really cool moment,” said Even-Esh.
HE HAD encountered uncomfortable ideas at some campuses, where he heard people calling Zionism a pyramid scheme, and professors teaching how to sanitize their rhetoric of antisemitism so they could avoid repercussions. However, he came from a different background, was older, and had been in jail and injured before. He had a different understanding of violence and what feeling unsafe meant than many students did.
“The big reason why they feel unsafe is because of people who are coming from outside the college and are more trained protesters, which I saw at UPenn [University of Pennsylvania] with my own eyes. That is definitely what’s happening and a big reason why people would feel uncomfortable,” the rapper noted.
The current levels of antisemitism and the cultural impact of Oct. 7 had been glimpsed before in the tragedies that Jews had already experienced, but Even-Esh said that the current situation was different. Macklemore’s song, as well as his response, came out of a cultural environment focusing on tragedy.
“We’re at the point where culture is being developed out of tragedy. There’s the Oct. 7 In Their Own Words play. There’s the Nova Music Festival Exhibition that was traveling. They’re making films about Oct. 7. Lior Razz just dropped something about Oct. 7. Macklemore is making songs about Palestine,” the rapper said. “I was making love songs and songs about depression and breakups before. And now you’re like, ‘Oh, I got to go full Jew-mode.’”
Kosha Dillz said that he used to be mocked for his Jewish stage name and tried to change it to KD Flow. Eventually he accepted that it was a part of him and that now, because of the name and premise, most people knew him for being funny or light-hearted. But he had to take a more serious tone to be creative and draw media attention to the plight of the hostages.
'Jews count, too – not ‘me too, unless you’re a Jew’
THE JEWISH musician didn’t think he could match Macklemore’s fan base with his response song, but he had already been in the sphere of making content on Oct. 7, and felt that if he didn’t address the facts and add context to the situation with his own song, then nobody else would.
“My thing is just continuously to advocate for what I feel is right,” said Even-Esh. When he had decided to do a music-video response to Macklemore, “I was in Chicago, and we just did an encampment tour of 12 college campuses, shot a documentary, and performed 18 shows in 18 days.”
He met Hersh Goldberg-Polin’s cousin along the way, he said, which was why it became a personal song for him to include a call to free the Hamas hostage. The rapper explained that the song’s end goal “is for some of these people to visit the Nova Exhibition.”
“I’m going to do a ‘Bring the Family Home tour,’ which is the first song I made on October 7,” said Even-Esh. “I just wanted to make an image of tough Jews in the music video and, like, Lower East Side with a Shofar. I’m like, we’re going to bang this out and we’re going to fight back. Now, that’s developed into an entire movement for what I’ve been doing, or at least seeing at my shows, that people are like, ‘Bring family home.’”
The goal, however, was to eventually retire the song: “to eventually stop performing this song when we bring them all home.”
“I was making funny, silly, dumb songs. I don’t want to make serious songs about Israel – I really don’t. I want to make a hit song and go to bed and become rich and famous,” he joked.
“I want to use creativity for fun and to enhance people’s joy and laughter.”