Billy Joel is not an artist who often gets political. But in the second part of his HBO documentary, Billy Joel: And So It Goes, he has some very strong words for President Donald Trump regarding the comments he made after 2017’s Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia.
While Billy says in the film that he “never liked getting political onstage,” he did just that after Trump responded to the rally of white nationalists by giving a speech in which he said there were “some very fine people on both sides.”
Not long after the speech, Joel came out onstage at Madison Square Garden with a yellow Star of David on his jacket as a way of protest. He explained in the film, “I had to do something. I was angry.”
“Here they are marching through an American city saying, ‘Jews will not replace us.’ We fought a war to defeat these people!” he says. “And then when Trump comes out and says, ‘There were very fine people on both sides,’ he should’ve come out and said, ‘Those are bad people.’ There is no qualifying it. The Nazis are not good people. Period!”
Joel, whose father’s family escaped Nazi Germany, adds that while he didn’t want to “get up on a soapbox,” the star was his way of doing something. He said that he wore it “basically to say, no matter what, I will always be a Jew.”
Part two of Billy Joel: And So it Goes premieres Friday on HBO. Part one and two will also stream on HBO Max.
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