HWant to track down Kanye West? If you're John Safran, just go and knock on his door. Safran, who flew from Melbourne to Los Angeles with a vague interest in the rapper's recent anti-Semitic comments, is a Jewish-Australian comedian and journalist with a history of outlandish stunts, often working with Louis Theroux and John Theroux. He is said to be on the same level as Ronson, but he arrived outside a city. West's mansion in Calabasas, California. He wandered around until he found an old water bill addressed to West, and after getting an idea of the location, he started meeting with his neighbors.
“Is it fun living next door to West?” Saffron asks Ernie across the road. “No, that's terrible,” Ernie said, rattling off a long list of nonsense about planning permission and cars blocking traffic. But Greg doesn't really care about him. West's people invited his family to his church service. It was “really, really great.”
It turns out West hasn't been seen there in a while – And neither is his security guard.
This is the heart of Safran's latest book, Squat, a freewheeling chronicle of a week he spent squatting at West's mansion. He calls this period a “writer's retreat.” Others would simply call it trespassing. Safran initially had no intention of staying illegally in West's home, but once she realized it was possible, the idea turned to “Nazis, hip-hop, book writing, voyeurism, all my personal interests.'' It now satisfies many conditions. After stocking up on camping supplies, he spends a very strange week wandering the property, slipping into unlocked doors, and trying to better understand West's psyche, all the while sleeping in the rapper's bed and stumbling into his pantry. I scavenged.
Safran isn't really worried about how West would react if he found out that a 52-year-old stranger from Australia had squatted in his home and written a book about it. “I just hope we have bigger fish to fry,” he says. “So if I'm doing this, there's clearly something wrong with me.”
Safran's verbal summary of Squat will be understood by anyone familiar with his line: “Kanye West was pro-Hitler, but I'm me.” If you don't, Saffron says this in the name of good television and in the name of poking at cultural, political, religious and ethnic divisions. tried to join the Ku Klux Klan As a Jew. “Married” a Muslim relative of Osama bin Laden. He was crucified in the Philippines. He wore blackface on the streets of Chicago. It asked Muslim clerics to help deliver a fatwa to Australian television presenter Rove McManus. And I received an exorcism.
We met at Saffron Synagogue in Melbourne. There he was finishing up the irreverent shoot of “Ye Marke.” It's a yarmulke made from old sneakers from Yeezy, a fashion line that West once partnered with Adidas. The collaboration ended when West's repeated anti-Semitic outbursts became too much of a burden for the label and many other companies. Mr. West claimed that his personal wealth plummeted by $2 billion in one day. He later released a song in which he apologized in Hebrew “to the Jewish community” and then said, “I can't be anti-Semitic because I've had sex with a Jewish bitch.”
But as Safran points out, even this part is more complicated than it appears. Adidas founders Adolf and Rudolf Dassler were members of the Nazi party, and the company supplied shoes to the Wehrmacht before its factories were repurposed for military production. These are the “entanglements” he likes to tell, stories that are much more complex than they appear. “Another writer might think, 'I wish Kanye was white, because then it would be easier to write about him being a racist,'” Safran says. “I’m the opposite, it’s more interesting that way.” because he is black ”
aAfter saffron hides In Ye Marche's car, we headed across the road to get some coffee. Servers recognize him immediately. He said he works at a church across the street from Saffron Synagogue.
“Hey, if you want to start a really exciting crusade,” Saffron says, leaning in conspiratorially. “I know the rabbi.”
It's remarkable how outlandish some of Safran's efforts still remain 20 years later. Consider John Safran's race relations episode. His TV series is about cross-cultural dating. He visited an Israeli sperm bank to make a donation, but instead had a Palestinian boom microphone operator masturbate into a cup. He then went to the West Bank and donated his own sperm (shared sperm). Attempting to create “Jalestine” children It will probably heal the divide. It was shocking in 2009, and it's still shocking now.
“It's society's fault for breaking into Kanye West's house,” he says now, sounding faux seriousness. “The signs were there. You could have stopped me.”
Safran had been a hip-hop fan since childhood (“I was probably more into Public Enemy than the members of Public Enemy,” he writes), but his interest in West came from It was after anti-Semitic riots broke out. Why would the world's biggest rapper appear on Alex Jones' show with a balaclava and a Bible and say, “There's a lot to like about Hitler''? But Squat is not just about Western issues, but also about the rise of broader anti-Semitism, the shared history of Jewish Americans and black Americans, and Safran's own Jewishness.
The book begins with a pro-Palestinian rally in Sydney, which Safran attended because: New South Wales Police advised Jews not to go.Squats took shape long before the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on Israel and the Gaza war. Safran attended the Australian rally last year, but couldn't find a way to incorporate it into the squat without it feeling like an “afterthought.”
“It would be interesting to see a book come out that looked at this sideways, about identity and how people put pressure on you.” [explain]Why are you Jewish? ” he says.
The week spent at West's mansion was not a pleasant one. He is disturbed by the decorations, including a room where human-sized ragdolls are mysteriously piled up. He is a light sleeper in the rapper's bed, terrified of being caught by nosy neighbors, the police, and even West himself. He uses rainwater in a bucket to cook stale pasta. (The water bill he found out? It was unpaid.) He starts accidentally hurting himself in strange ways until his exhausted brain decides he's cursed. “Aren't I the guy who interviews weirdos anymore?'' he asks impatiently. “Have I become a weirdo?”
There's a sense that perhaps Saffron's odd business is finally getting to him. “If you justify this trespass as nihilistic thrill-seeking, you won't be able to change yourself,” he writes. “If that's what I want, I'll train to surf. No, Kanye is toying with my family's story for his art.”
SAfran grew up in a Jewish family in Melbourne. His father took him to synagogue on Fridays but “kept his cards close to his chest” when it came to his beliefs. His mother's side was a very religious family in Poland until the Holocaust. Only his grandparents survived. His mother was born in Uzbekistan, where she fled Europe. “After that, God was dead to them,” Safran says. This was probably his first cultural flaw, he recalls, and it now feeds him. “We come from a proud Jewish family who also believe that God is dead, and we have a pretty good case for that.”
Saffron had never even made a prank call before becoming famous. But through his years of television and radio work, John Safran developed the playful, fearless, and confrontational character of John Safran. But in Squat, he worries that he's become numb from decades of playing this version of himself, and says, “When I was buying drinks for Holocaust revisionists, , I was sure that my grandmother would have been able to explain it had she been alive.”
“I don't know if I enjoy my job or not. It's very stressful to be outside,” Safran says. “I get scared. But when I'm working, there's a logic to it. I'll give you an example of approaching the Klan. It's my job to approach the Klan, so I don't want to approach someone on the street. Fear and duty drive me – otherwise it feels like a very unpleasant waste of resources. go there”
It's hard to know where saffron's limits are when it comes to “going there.” There's a moment in Race Relations when one of Safran's friends gets furious because of a stunt. “flat you You need to make a point that that’s enough,” his friend yelled at him. Saffron is not without boundaries. He is only willing to step into them for our entertainment. He aims for laughs more overtly than Theroux, and more in-your-face than Ronson. (All three of them know each other, he says, “and they all want each other in this job.”)
Safran's job was physically demanding. In 2022, he had a stent inserted to deal with heart problems, partly due to his decision to start vaping and smoking for his book about big tobacco, Puff Pieces. It was something. I'm addicted. ”The world has changed a lot since he first started knocking on doors. “Everything is basically gonzo now because everyone has a smartphone and a YouTube channel. So it's not enough to just be gonzo, I have to be the one who broke into Kanye's house. is.”
Aside from the odd week she spends at West's mansion, Safran has been flying around Los Angeles and New York, doing her best to meet up with him and West's Australian girlfriend and rumored wife, Bianca Sensori. “I swear to you, everyone in Melbourne has a connection to Bianca and no one can deliver,” he groaned.
Although he has not met West or Censoli, he manages to befriend West's pastor in Los Angeles, has numerous conflicts with staff, and even – as Safran hears on legitimate authority – West… He even tracked down a rabbi who might have given him private lessons. Judaism.
In many ways, he actually thinks squats are more interesting. do not have Meeting with West. “I wouldn't have squatted in his mansion and I can see that people think it's a big laugh, so that worked out for the best.”
What would Safran have said if he had knocked on Calabasas's door and West had answered? “I still don't know,” Safran said, shrugging his shoulders and being eternally cocky. “Hey, can you hold my Yemarke?”
