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Does anime have a Nazi problem? Some Jewish fans think so.
TAIPEI (JTA) — When the Season 3 plot twist of “Attack on Titan” aired in 2019, viewers wasted no time in jumping online to discuss what they saw.
In the world of “Attack on Titan” — an extremely popular Japanese anime series now in its final season, which started in March and does not have a known end date — humanity has been trapped within a walled city on the island of Paradis, surrounded by Titans, grotesque giants who mindlessly eat any person who gets in their way.
In the third season, the Titans’ origins are revealed as a group called the Eldians, a group that made a deal with the devil to gain Titan powers with which they subjugated humanity for years. A group called the Marleyans later overthrew the Eldian empire and forced them into ghettoes, forcing them to wear armbands that identified their race with a symbol similar to the Star of David. Political prisoners were injected with a serum that turns them into the terrifying Titans.
The implications that a race meant to represent Jews had made “a deal with the devil” to achieve power were too much for some to bear. Fans debated the meaning on Twitter and Reddit as think pieces pointed to the show’s “fascist subtext” and possible antisemitism as ratings and viewership climbed. Some viewers defended the series as a condemnation of those ideas and a meditation on moral ambiguity, but others said the plot’s condemnation of fascism was too weak. The New Republic in 2020 called “Attack on Titan” “the alt-right’s favorite manga.”
Either way, in November 2021, the show’s production team announced it would cancel the sale of Eldian armbands — the ones Eldians were forced to wear in their ghettos — explaining that it was “an act without consideration to easily commercialize what was drawn as a symbol of racial discrimination and ethnic discrimination in the work.”
“Attack on Titan” is only the latest manga (a specific type of Japanese comic books or graphic novels) or anime (TV shows or movies animated in the manga style) series on the chopping block. As it continues to gain popularity outside of Japan’s borders, the Japanese animation medium as a whole has been hit with criticism for alleged glorification of antisemitism, fascism and militarism. The debate has been fueled by a stream of examples: the literal evil Jewish cabal in “Angel Cop,” (references to Jews were later removed in the English-language dubbed version), the Fuhrer villain in “Fullmetal Alchemist,” the Nazi occultism (in which Nazis channel the occult to carry out duties or crimes) in “Hellboy,” and the Nazi characters in “Hellsing” and “Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure” to name a few.
Western viewers are not the only ones taking issue. Fans of “Attack on Titan” in South Korea — which was subject to Japanese war atrocities during World War II that Japan continues to deny — have taken issue, too. Revelations from Hajime Isayama, the creator of the original “Attack on Titan” manga, that a character in the series was inspired by an Imperial Japanese army general who had committed war crimes against Koreans were met with heated discussion and later death threats from Korean fans online. Some also pointed to a private Twitter account believed to be run by Isayama that denies imperial Japan’s war atrocities.
“Ridiculous the lengths a fandom will go to downplay the blatant antisemitism in a series and protect and lie about the creator of said series,” wrote one Twitter user. “[Y]ou doing this and ignoring koreans and jewish people says a lot.”
These themes are so common in manga and anime that some independent researchers like Haru Mena (a pen name) have begun creating classifications for the many Nazi tropes that make regular appearances. Mena, a military researcher who lectures annually at the Anime Boston convention about World War II and Nazi imagery in anime and manga, says the phenomenon is a result of how Japan remembers its role in World War II — not as the aggressor, but as a victim of war.
“Japan does not want to be the bad guy. They love to have other people be the bad guy,” he said. “That’s why they’re using all these Nazi characters. We all agree Nazis are bad, war crimes are bad, no decent self-respecting nation would ever do [what they did].”
But many Jewish anime fans, like Reddit user Desiree (who did not offer her last name for privacy reasons), have taken issue with the way some anime and manga series portray Nazis while reducing the Holocaust to narrative devices.
“I think that most people who are telling these stories aren’t coming from an area where this would be as personally familiar,” she said. “There’s almost no resonance to it. Because they take away all these details they make it a big trope.”
hi
anime and manga have an antisemitism problem
good day
— Kay (he/they, she for friends only) (@Cayliana) February 19, 2022
East Asian interest in Nazi imagery has also bled over into the West in the form of news headlines in recent years — involving everything from Nazi-themed bars and parades to Nazi cosplay in Japan, Taiwan, Thailand and Korea.
But some experts say that repeated references to Nazi villains and World War II in manga and anime have more to do with Japanese history and culture than with antisemitism.
“There is a fascination with Nazism in Japan to some degree or another,” said Raz Greenberg, an Israel-based writer whose Ph.D. research examined Jewish influence on Japan’s “God of Comics,” Osamu Tezuka, an artist sometimes referred to as Japan’s equivalent to Walt Disney. In 1983, Tezuka released the first in a five-volume series called “Adolf,” a popular manga set in World War II-era Japan and Germany about three men with that name — a Japanese boy, a Jewish boy and Hitler.
“I think there’s something fascinating about Nazi aesthetic, certainly for countries that never actually participated in the war against the Nazis. But I don’t think it’s that different from, say, the way George Lucas made the Empire in the ‘Star Wars’ films very Nazi-like in its aesthetic,” Greenberg said.
As Greenberg notes, Western media is also full of Holocaust references — some more successful in its repudiation of Nazi ideology than others — like the numbered tattoos and recent use of a Lithuanian prison camp as a filming location in the Netflix hit show “Stranger Things.”
“What makes people angry is, people think when the Japanese approach it, they approach it without understanding. And it’s easier to think that they don’t understand it when you look at a show like ‘Attack on Titan,’” Greenberg said.
Liron Afriat, a Ph.D. candidate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem’s Asian Sphere program and the founder of the Anime and Manga Association of Israel, said while shows like “Attack on Titan” reference the Holocaust and use World War II-era imagery, it’s likely that Western viewers are misinterpreting its intended parallels to Japanese politics. … particularly Japan’s past of aggressive and corrupt militarism and late former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s attempts to reinstate a non-defensive military.
“Western people are very eager to jump to conclusions when it comes to Asian media. This is something I see a lot in my work and it’s very frustrating,” she said. “There is a sense that because Japanese pop culture is so popular nowadays, it’s very easy to kind of dogpile on it and say it’s racist.”
In recent decades, anime series have been watched by hundreds of millions of people around the world, and the medium has gone from being seen in the West as a geeky niche genre to a mainstream phenomenon. Though show creators may be conscious about their references, some fans say the fascist and Jewish references, especially the more clear-cut ones — like the Jewish conspiracy in “Angel Cop” — have real-life consequences.
Many in the anime fan community today remember a 2010 incident at Anime Boston when a group of cosplayers dressed up as characters from “Hetalia: Axis Powers,” a series that anthropomorphized Axis and Ally countries, was photographed making Nazi salutes just around the corner from the city’s Holocaust memorial.
“It used to be like, I can go to an anime convention and they would be selling uniforms that were clearly meant to be Nazi uniforms, but sans the swastika,” Desiree said. “And then over time, I noticed conventions started banning that kind of thing.”
“JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” features a Nazi character named Rudol von Stroheim. (Screenshot from YouTube)
Noah Oskow is the managing editor of the digital magazine Unseen Japan and a Jew who has lived in Japan for seven years. He recalled similar experiences at U.S. anime conventions.
“I think that it is problematic to portray Nazis and the Holocaust in the very frivolous way that it’s often portrayed,” he said. “Even in a place that is so far removed from Japan, that aesthetic of Nazis from manga or anime was seeping into somebody’s choices in a far-removed anime and manga event.”
Oskow says recent portrayals of Nazis and fascism in anime and manga lack the depth necessary to confront an issue like the Holocaust, but that some subtext in shows like “Attack on Titan” is likely missed by Western viewers since it is created for a Japanese audience.
Still, he says, as a Jew, there is a discomfort with these depictions, and the problems with simplifying themes like fascism and genocide should not be ignored just because the product came from Japan — particularly as stereotypes about Jews as having outsize influence remain common. In Japan, as in other East Asian nations such as South Korea, China and Taiwan, books and classes on how to become as smart and wealthy as Jews — believed to be among the most powerful people in media and finance — are not uncommon.
“In my years of discussing Jews with Japanese people…they really think of Jews as an ancient historical people or the people who were killed in the Holocaust unless they have some sort of conspiratorial idea. But most people have no conception of Jewish people,” Oskow said. “So when they’re portraying Jews in manga or anime or any sort of media, and when readers or viewers are engaging with that media, I just don’t think there’s this thought of how a Jewish person would perceive how they’re being portrayed.”
Jessica, a 29-year-old Jewish and Chinese anime fan from Vancouver who also requested her last name be left out of this article, said she deliberately chooses not to watch shows such as “Attack on Titan” and “Hetalia” because she finds the discussions about them among fans to be unproductive and frustrating. Desiree echoed Jessica’s experience of being ignored when raising the topic of antisemitism within the medium or within the fan community on platforms such as Reddit.
“I saw the reactions of other Jewish fans and, more importantly, saw the reaction of the goyish fans — the way ‘Hetalia’ fans did the sieg heil in front of a Holocaust memorial, the way that [‘Attack on Titan’] fans would swarm concerned Jewish fans in droves to tell them that they should perish in an oven, and I decided I didn’t want anything to do with anime that attracted that sort of fanbase,” Desiree said.
“Attack on Titan” returned to streaming services on March 4 with the first part of its final season. In the first episode, the protagonist Eren, whom audiences have followed for a decade, begins carrying out a global genocide known as “the rumbling” with the end goal of destroying all Titans for good and bringing peace. The end result is a wipeout of 80% of humanity, an act that Eren believes was the only path to freedom. He thinks humans must all suffer as a consequence of being born into the world — a nihilistic philosophy that can be found among the manifestos of school shooters and incels.
In the original manga series, Eren’s supporters on the island militarize in order to defend Eren’s violent act, chanting a slogan: “If you can fight you win, if you cannot fight you lose! Fight, fight!” The ending was seen as morally ambiguous and was not popular with fans, who mostly refuted it due to poor writing. Many hope that the anime series will go a different route in its final episodes, which have not yet been released or given future release dates.
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There’s something rotten in our approach to antisemitism. Tucker Carlson exposed it
The federal government has cracked down on antisemitism from the left, while ignoring or justifying antisemitism on the right. That’s a cold, hard and very uncomfortable fact.
After anti-Israel protests swept campuses amid Israel’s military response to the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, Congressional panels subjected university administrators to withering public cross-examinations over antisemitism. President Donald Trump’s administration levied millions in fines, and withheld or threatened to cancel billions in federal funding, including to university medical research.
It was a quick and harsh reaction to protests that, in some cases, veered into antisemitism and singled out Jewish students. “Nobody gets the right to harass their fellow students,” Vice President J.D. Vance said at the peak of the student protests. “Nobody gets a right to set up 10 encampments and turn their college campuses into garbage dumps. And nobody gets the right to block their fellow students from attending class.”
Contrast that to Vance’s reaction earlier this month, when the conservative broadcaster Tucker Carlson hosted the far-right activist Nick Fuentes on his popular podcast, kicking off a massive debate about the mainstreaming of extremist views on the right.
Fuentes, who has expressed admiration for Adolf Hitler and Joseph Stalin and called for the execution of “perfidious Jews,” told Carlson that the great challenge to American social harmony is “organized Jewry.” Carlson didn’t push back. And when asked for comment, Vance said he didn’t want to take part in Republican “infighting.”
Trump, too, declined to join the Carlson critics.“I mean, if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it. Get the word out. Let them,” Trump told reporters.
Get the word out? What, exactly, is going on?
Ignoring horseshoe theory, at our peril
Defenders of this lopsided response might argue that the administration actually has leverage over universities in the form of billions of taxpayer dollars. The government has legal recourse to hold colleges and individual students accountable.
Carlson’s choice to play nice with Nazis, on the other hand, is a matter of free speech — even if it is ominous, incendiary speech. What action could the government take against a privately-funded podcaster?
The obvious answer is: At least condemn it. But that has not happened at any level of this administration.
Carlson himself, in a long new interview with a New York Times reporter, downplayed Fuentes’ overt antisemitic statements and positioned himself as someone who, like Fuentes, merely questions U.S. policy toward Israel.
“Mr. Carlson said he abhors antisemitism and that he has numerous Jewish friends who share his qualms with the Israeli government,” wrote the Times reporter.
If that sounds awfully familiar, it’s because anti-Israel protesters at the other extreme say much the same things. Some of their best friends are Jewish, and they too hate what Israel’s leaders are doing.
American Jews are witnessing the horseshoe theory of politics in real time — the idea that the far-left and the far-right bend more toward each other than to the center. The ideology that the extremes are converging on is that Jews are the problem.
Both extremes, beginning with outrage at Israel, have a propensity to slide into overtly anitsemitic conspiracy theories that blame Israel for the Iraq War, 9/11, NYPD violence, manipulating Congress, and the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Meanwhile, the political leaders who can confront both these extremes through words and policy, only seem to be hammering away at one side: the left.
A virus among young conservatives
The organized Jewish community, too, is highly attuned to instances on the left when anti-Israel attitudes bend toward outright Jew hatred. The most vocal critics of New York’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani accused him of just that — fomenting antisemitism and supporting antisemites in opposing Israel.
Immediately after Mamdani’s election, the ADL announced it was debuting a special program to monitor his administration for antisemitism.
But the ample evidence that a growing segment of the right is slipping back into the well-worn alliance that characterized the United States in the 1930s, when isolationists and antisemites made common cause against the Jews, doesn’t raise the same institutional alarms.
Trump has engaged with the extremist right, where antisemitism and anti-Israel sentiment have both flourished for years, since the beginning of his first presidential run. Yet his Jewish supporters have given him far more leeway than they would ever think of giving Mamdani.
Meanwhile, that antisemitic segment of the conservative movement has quietly expanded, and found increasing tolerance in mainstream conservative spaces. The conservative analyst Ron Dreher wrote recently that he estimates some 30 to 40% of the Republican Gen Z’ers who work in official Washington are Fuentes fans.
Antisemitism “is spreading like a virus among religious conservatives of the Zoomer generation,” he wrote.
Antisemitism for me, but not for thee
That boom might explain the disparity between Trump and Vance’s stance on college protesters and on Carlson and Fuentes.
Like so much else in our polarized society, antisemitism itself has become politicized. Your Jew-hatred is abhorrent, the thinking goes, but mine is free speech. Yours must be prosecuted. But I’m just asking questions.
The best hope American Jews have is that enough brave souls from across the political spectrum will step up and speak out, even against their own political tribe, knowing the dark fate of societies that go down this path.
Dreher, in a private meeting with Vance earlier this month, told the vice president that standing up to Nazis and their publicists like Tucker Carlson is not “infighting,” but a fight for the soul of the Republican Party, and of the U.S.
No word on how Vance responded. But can I suggest the ADL monitor him, too?
The post There’s something rotten in our approach to antisemitism. Tucker Carlson exposed it appeared first on The Forward.
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‘My teenager’s going to boarding school. I’m panicked she’ll face antisemitism’
Dear Bintel,
My daughter’s dream, throughout middle school, has been to go to a private boarding high school. I didn’t fight her on it because it was so out of our price range. My plan was to let our finances be the villain. She ended up finding the money herself through grants and scholarships and was accepted.
Now I’m panicking because I’m afraid she’ll experience antisemitism or anti-Israel hate. She experienced that in middle school but she came home and we helped her. I don’t want to hold her back but I worry high school is too young to deal with this alone. She’s very proud of her Jewish and Israeli heritage and wears a Star of David necklace from her grandma everywhere. Any advice?
Signed,
Worried Mama
Dear Mama:
First of all, congratulations on raising an incredible daughter. Self-directed, resourceful, smart — I know plenty of adults who are far less successful at setting goals and realizing their dreams than your amazing teenage girl!
But I also want to recognize something that you don’t bring up, and that’s your heartbreak at losing this golden child. You probably thought you had another four years before this baby bird would leave the nest. Now suddenly she’s flying away much sooner than expected. That’s a huge adjustment for any parent — and it’s not just about your desire to protect her from a potentially hostile world. Many of us grieve when kids leave home, even when those kids are older than yours. You see the empty bedroom, the missing dinner plate, the “one less” member of the family at every gathering, and you just want to cry.
So let’s acknowledge that pain. You weren’t ready for this to happen so soon, and it’s OK to feel sad about it. You’re going to miss her something awful, and I’ve no doubt that no matter how well she does at boarding school — and I bet she will thrive — she’s going to miss you too. But that’s what cellphones are for, right?
Now let’s talk about your antisemitism worries. Your daughter already had to deal with this in middle school, so there’s no guarantee that a local high school would be less problematic than boarding school. The difference, of course, is that when she was living in your house, she had immediate access to your wisdom.
But you’ve already helped her develop coping skills. The proof is that she still proudly wears her Star of David. She’s not afraid. She’s not hiding. She’s ready to take on the world. She knows you’re only a phone call or text away, and you’ll always be there to listen, with unconditional love and support as needed.
Just don’t go overboard with the warnings and advice. Sometimes kids don’t want to burden their parents if they think we’re freaking out about something. They try to protect us by holding back, and that can make it worse for them.
In fact, when you say you’re “panicked” on her behalf, I can’t help but wonder if that’s part of what’s driving her to leave the nest so young. Is it possible she needs some distance from your emotions? I don’t know, but it might be helpful for you to have a few sessions with a therapist about separating your feelings from hers. You need to figure out how to express concern without suffocating her.
You might also reach out to the boarding school’s guidance counselors. I’m sure they’re used to helping parents manage their anxiety over sending a young teen away from home. Perhaps there’s even a parents’ group where veterans who have older kids can share how they’ve coped.
I’d also ask the counselors how the school typically handles student conflicts and bias. Offenses related not only to religion but also to race, ethnicity, politics and gender have unfortunately become commonplace in our world, and every school has had to develop protocols for dealing with these situations. My hope is that you’ll feel comforted knowing what policies are in place to support your daughter, and that the wonderful job you’ve done raising her so far will keep her flying high.
Signed,
Bintel
What do you think? Send your comments to bintel@forward.com or send in a question of your own. And don’t miss a Bintel: Sign up for our Bintel Brief newsletter.
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Some blame Qatar and unions for K-12 antisemitism. Experts say that’s the wrong focus
While antisemitism at colleges and universities gets the most attention, discrimination against young Jewish students is also growing in pernicious ways that often have less to do with nuanced political debates over Israel than outright bullying, including Nazi salutes, jokes about Hamas killing Jews and memes in the online forums where many students socialize.
These incidents have prompted a growing interest in countering K-12 antisemitism — the Anti-Defamation League is ramping up pressure on districts and a new political action committee is seeking “pro-Jewish” school board candidates. But alongside these efforts has been a hunt for a boogeyman supposedly driving the problem.
The Foundation for Defense of Democracies, an influential neoconservative think tank, along with Republican lawmakers in Congress have sought to lay the blame on Qatar for “fueling anti-Jewish bigotry in K-12 schools” by, among other things, distributing for years a map of the Middle East to some schools that omitted Israel.
Teachers unions have also come under special scrutiny, especially after a contingent of National Education Association members unsuccessfully tried to cut the union’s ties with the ADL over the summer. Eric Fingerhut, chief executive of the Jewish Federations of North America, went on a self-described “rant against the NEA” from the stage of his organization’s annual conference this week in which he described the union as “invidious” and “one of the biggest, most serious problems that we have.”
This framing presents the plight of young Jewish students as an especially daunting front in the ongoing fight over how Israel is treated in American society; most concerns about both the NEA and Qatar are focused on growing hostility toward Israel.
But away from the conference’s main stage, experts working on the issue had a less conspiratorial outlook.
“It’s exciting to believe that if only we get rid of foreign funding we could solve this problem,” Hindy Poupko, a top lobbyist for the UJA-Federation of New York, said during a Tuesday panel on K-12 antisemitism. “It’s not true.”
Poupko added that some Jewish leaders were painting unions with too broad of a brush in describing them as anti-Israel and she credited the positive relationship Jewish organizations in New York City have with local unions, including the teachers union, for their success in blocking a ceasefire resolution at city council.
***
Rather than a sinister plot to seed classrooms with antisemitism or a political agenda about Israel, Poupko and the other experts suggested the problem was much more prosaic: Teachers have limited time and resources to learn about Jews, Israel and antisemitism.
David Bryfman, chief executive of the Jewish Education Project, said that many teachers simply Google to find information to teach about current events and are increasingly turning to ChatGPT — the artificial intelligence chatbot — to build lesson plans plagued by the flimsy sourcing and false information caused by the bot’s “hallucinations.”
One effective solution has been to provide classroom materials that teachers can easily integrate into their lessons. UJA-Federation distributed lesson plans pegged to Jewish American History Month to New York City schools along with posters of “Jewish heroes,” including authors Judy Blume and Emma Lazarus.
They’ve also promoted an interactive theatrical performance, featuring actors portraying Anne Frank and Martin Luther King Jr. who come to classrooms for a show that weaves together the writings of both figures.
The local Jewish federation in Toronto realized that the only lessons about Jews in many schools centered on the Holocaust, so they wrote materials about ancient Israel that could be worked into the block on “ancient civilizations” taught to every fourth grader, and distributed books about Hanukkah to teachers.
And Bryfman is working on a database of educational resources about Jews and Judaism that teachers can both access directly and that will be given to artificial intelligence models with the hope that, when teachers search online in the future, they’ll turn up more accurate information.
***
None of these are groundbreaking solutions, but I appreciated hearing about them because they provide an important reality check. If we imagine antisemitism to be the result of a malignant conspiracy — Qatar turning teachers into sleeper agents for Hamas, or the NEA seeking to indoctrinate kindergarteners against Israel — the challenge of addressing it can seem insurmountable in the absence of a magic bullet.
Certainly, hanging a poster of Ruth Bader Ginsburg in a middle school hallway isn’t going to solve antisemitism. But these kinds of practical interventions can help make Jewish students feel included at a time when many are feeling stigmatized and isolated.
Poupko said that, at least anecdotally, Jewish students had reported excitement at seeing their school hold an assembly block on Jewish heritage month for the first time, and data has found that Americans who personally know at least a few Jews are less likely to believe antisemitic stereotypes.
That’s the same logic behind a George Washington University project that offers a summer institute for faculty at schools of education at universities around the country, some of whom come in not knowing what the “Hebrew Bible” refers to, according to Ben Jacobs, the professor who runs the program.
And Be the Narrative, a group that trains Jewish students to present basic information about Judaism to their non-Jewish peers, found that 78% of teachers believed the presentations helped reduce antisemitism in their schools.
One throughline in all of these strategies is that they’re focused on working in good faith with teachers and school administrators. This is much harder when organizations view them as enemies rather than potential partners, as Fingerhut was encouraging.
“We can’t out mob the mob,” Poupko said. “Our special sauce is relationships with the people who are actually in positions of power.”
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