Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

2 listen or not 2 listen? ADL chief launches new podcast with Nick Cannon

The pair describe ‘2 Hate or Not 2 Hate’ as a place to navigate thorny issues like race, but it’s unclear if audiences are interested

Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt has unveiled a new podcast with an unlikely co-host: Nick Cannon. The podcast is called 2 Hate Or Not 2 Hate.

Cannon, best known for acting in movies such as Drumline and hosting America’s Got Talent and The Masked Singer, infamously unleashed a torrent of antisemitic remarks on an episode of his podcast Cannon’s Class in 2020. Among the statements were praise for Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan, promotion of conspiracy theories around the Rothschild family and saying that Black people are “the true Hebrews.” When he made the comments, Cannon was speaking to Professor Griff, the rapper famously fired from pioneering hip-hop group Public Enemy for making antisemitic statements in 1989. 

Cannon quickly apologized for the episode and met with a representative for the Simon Wiesenthal Center.  

In the inaugural episode of 2 Hate Or Not 2 Hate, Cannon said the idea for the podcast came from his having built a relationship with Greenblatt in the years since his remarks. In tweets promoting the podcast, Greenblatt repeatedly referred to Cannon as his “good friend.”

The pair said the goal of the podcast is not to police speech or engage in cancel culture, but to help guide people through thorny issues. 

“I think we’re in this moment now where our conversations are so charged, everything is so politicized. Issues of race, issues of faith, issues of gender, issues of identity. These are fissures and it seems like there’s a fuse that’s ready to explode,” said Greenblatt, adding he hopes the podcast will be a place to discuss those issues in a calm, constructive way. 

It’s unclear how much traction the podcast has gotten with listeners since its January launch. Podcast platforms such as Spotify do not release download or subscriber data for podcasts. On YouTube, the first episode has had fewer than 700 views in the three weeks since it was released. The most recent episode, released on Sunday, has only 191 views as of Wednesday morning.

However, clips from the show have been performing better on social media. Several posted to Cannon’s Instagram account have received more than 100,000 views.

Update: This article was updated to add viewership data from the clips of the show on Instagram.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.