He read four minutes off a piece of paper to 20,000 people. It wasn’t perfect. But the people calling it a fraud — on both sides — are missing the entire point of why any of us write anything at all.

On the night of June 5, my phone lit up with a message from a former sorority sister.

omg. Dave Matthews just gave a speech live in concert about how much he loves Jews. JACKI. IT WAS YOU. it had to be!

I wrote back the only thing a normal person can write back in that situation.

She did not stfu. Her husband had been streaming the Raleigh show and heard it live, and within an hour I was watching a grainy couch-tour video of Dave Matthews standing alone at the microphone, holding a piece of paper — which, if you ask anyone who has followed this band for thirty years, is itself the headline.[1] The man memorizes thousands of songs. He free-associates between them for ten minutes at a stretch. Multiple people in the DMB Jew Crew, fans who have seen him more times than they can count all over the world, said the same thing in the same thread: they have never once seen Dave read from a page on stage.

So either I was in active psychosis, or Dave Matthews had read my blog post — the one about how his West Palm Beach crowd chanted “f*** the Jews, f*** those kikes” while my friend walked his family out of the show[2] — and was now responding to it, in writing, in front of 20,000 people and a livestream. It was, and I mean this clinically, the single most out-of-body experience of my life. It was not on my bingo card.

I have now watched it more times than I’d like to admit. And here is where I’ve landed.

First, the thing I actually mean: thank you

I want to start with gratitude, because I’m afraid it’s going to get lost in everything that follows, and it shouldn’t.

Dave Matthews did not have to do this. There was no press conference forcing his hand, no sponsor threatening to walk. A blog post by a civil rights attorney in Florida made its way into his orbit, and instead of ignoring it — the safe, easy, defensible move — he sat with it, was bothered by it, and felt compelled enough to write something down and say it out loud to a stadium. That is not nothing. In a culture where the default response to criticism is to lawyer up or log off, a famous person who listens and then answers in public is so rare that half the internet assumed it had to be fake.

He got real things right, too. He drew the distinction  — that disagreeing with Israeli policy should never be twisted into license for bigotry against Jews. He said he was sorry for any pain he caused. He named October 7 directly and called it a horror, and he disclosed something genuinely disarming: that he spent that morning at his best friend’s son’s........

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