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Roger Waters uses Anne Frank’s name at German concerts, prompting calls for punishment from Jewish groups
(JTA) — Roger Waters projected Anne Frank’s name at recent concerts to draw comparisons between Israel and Nazi Germany, leading Germany’s Orthodox rabbinical association to call for a ban on Waters performances in the country.
Observers told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that Waters, the former Pink Floyd frontman known as a leader in the boycott Israel movement, has lumped Anne Frank together with Palestinian Al Jazeera journalist Shireen Abu Akleh in on-screen projections at concerts on his current tour. Abu Akleh was killed on an assignment in the West Bank last year.
The screen at Waters concerts also frequently shows a pig-shaped balloon emblazoned with the logo of an Israeli armaments firm. He reportedly at times dons an SS uniform and symbolically shoots a machine gun into the crowd.
Some say the 79-year-old rocker plays with antisemitic stereotypes, going beyond political criticism into incitement of hate. German media “went into the shows and were disgusted by them; it is such blunt and disgusting propaganda they are hearing, and the music is really in the background,” said Sacha Stawski, Frankfurt-based pro-Israel activist and founder of Honestly Concerned.
Waters, who won many hearts in Germany through Pink Floyd’s live “The Wall” concert in 1990, recently performed concerts in Berlin and Munich and was on to Frankfurt, where he had successfully appealed a court order to ban the event. That concert is scheduled for May 28.
The city of Frankfurt had called Waters “one of the most widely spread antisemites in the world,” over imagery and Israel critique at his past concerts, in its attempt to ban him from playing there. Munich’s mayor had also unsuccessfully attempted to block a Waters show.
If they cannot stop him in the courts, opponents said they will continue to try to sway public opinion.
“My goal is to educate about his hatred, to make sure less and less people go into these concerts,” said Stawski, a main force behind efforts to challenge Waters in the Frankfurt court, which claim that Waters is antisemitic. Several German cities have passed legislation barring state-funded venues from hosting events for the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement that Waters champions.
Charlotte Knobloch, head of the Jewish community of Munich and Upper Bavaria, said at a protest before Water’s concert last Sunday in her home city that she was frustrated by the courts.
“Since October 2022, there have been arguments about this concert. Legal motions and media headlines have been produced en masse — without yielding any result,” she said. “So that now, in May, we are standing here protesting against a concert that is taking place exactly as Roger Waters always wanted it to.”
Politicians joined in the protest with Knobloch, and even the management of the Olympia Stadium, on monitors ahead of the concert, explicitly distanced itself from the singer’s politics, according to the Suddeutsche Zeitung.
“What do the regular affirmations of ‘Never Again’ by politicians and statements that antisemitism has no place in Germany actually count for, if at the same time errant interpreters and intellectual arsonists are offered a public space to blatantly spread their hatred of Jews and Israel?” read the May 22 statement from the Orthodox Rabbinical Conference of Germany, led by Rabbis Avichai Apel, Zsolt Balla and Yehuda Pushkin. “It is deeply shameful that in no case in Germany has it so far been possible to ban the clearly antisemitic and anti-Israeli concerts of Roger Waters.”
The Belltower journalist Nicholas Potter, who observed the May 17 Berlin concert, argued that Waters promoted antisemitic language.
In speech bubbles on an LED screen in the Mercedes-Benz Arena, Waters blamed the world’s troubles on “THE POWERS THAT BE,” which Potter described as “an ominous, overpowering elite that is not explicitly named — this is an antisemitic blueprint on which many conspiracy narratives work.”
Before the event, BDS supporters outside the arena handed out flyers and held up banners, one of which read, “Jews, Israelis and internationals all agree with the Roger,” added Potter, noting that the average concertgoer appeared to be white, German and around 60 years old.
Waters has had little new to say about the allegations of antisemitism and has not apparently changed his tune. According to the Suddeutsche Zeitung newspaper, hours before his concert in Munich, Waters posted a message on Facebook calling Israel a “tyrannical, racist regime.” He compared the BDS movement to Germany’s Nazi-era White Rose resistance movement, whose leaders, including siblings Hans and Sophie Scholl, were beheaded by the Nazi regime.
His remarks were in keeping with his comments in an interview with Spiegel Magazine in March. He denied that he had ever been an antisemite, and added that it was “bizarre that my career should now be attacked on the basis of allegations made by the Israel lobby.”
“For all I care, they can try to cancel every concert I do in Germany. I will fight them in court,” he told Spiegel. “It’s a tragedy for Germany that they even try. Because the message to the world is: We Germans don’t care about human rights and freedom of expression.”
People should take Waters at his word and stay away if they disagree with his politics, said Stawski, referring to the fact that Waters also tells Pink Floyd fans who don’t agree with him to “f*** off,” via the arena screen.
“If you are a fan of Pink Floyd but do not want to go along with the antisemitism, buy a CD of Pink Floyd and do not damn well go into these concerts,” Stawski said.
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Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’
(JTA) — In the fall, a video of Nick Fuentes criticizing Donald Trump drew the praise of progressive ex-Congressman Jamaal Bowman.
“Finally getting it Nick,” Bowman commented, apparently recognizing some common ground between himself on the left and Fuentes, on the far right, who said in the video that Trump was “better than the Democrats for Israel, for the oil and gas industry, for Silicon Valley, for Wall Street,” but said he wasn’t “better for us.”
Now, Fuentes says there is actually no common ground between him and those on the left.
“My problem with Trump isn’t that he’s Hitler — my problem with Trump is that he is not Hitler,” Fuentes said during his streaming show on Tuesday, which focused mostly on the potential for an American attack on Iran.
He continued, “You have all these left-wing people saying, ‘Why do I agree with Nick Fuentes?’ It’s like, I’m criticizing Trump because there’s not enough deportations, there’s not enough ICE brutality, there’s not enough National Guard. Sort of a big difference!”
Fuentes, the streamer and avowed antisemite who has previously said Hitler was “very f–king cool,” has been gaining more traction as a voice on the right. His interview with Tucker Carlson in October plunged Republicans into an ongoing debate over antisemitism within their ranks, inflaming the divide between a pro-Israel wing of the party and an emerging, isolationist “America First” wing that’s against U.S. military assistance to Israel.
Once a pro-Trump MAGA Republican, Fuentes has become the leader of the “groyper” movement advocating for farther-right positions. The set of Fuentes’ show includes both a hat and a mug with the words “America First” on his desk.
In a New York Times interview, Trump recently weighed in on rising tensions within the Republican Party, saying Republican leaders should “absolutely” condemn figures who promote antisemitism, and that he does not approve of antisemites in the party.
“No, I don’t. I think we don’t need them. I think we don’t like them,” replied Trump when asked by a reporter whether there was room within the Republican coalition for antisemitic figures.
Asked if he would condemn Fuentes, Trump initially claimed that he didn’t know the antisemitic streamer, before acknowledging that he had had dinner with him alongside Kanye West in 2022.
“I had dinner with him, one time, where he came as a guest of Kanye West. I didn’t know who he was bringing,” Trump said. “He said, ‘Do you mind if I bring a friend?’ I said, ‘I don’t care.’ And it was Nick Fuentes? I don’t know Nick Fuentes.”
Trump flaunted his pro-Israel bona fides in the interview, mentioning the recent announcement that he was nominated for Israel’s top civilian honor and calling himself the “best president of the United States in the history of this country toward Israel.”
Fuentes, meanwhile, spent the bulk of his show on Tuesday speculating that Trump will order the U.S. to attack Iran, and concluded that “Israel is holding our hand walking us down the road toward an inevitable war.”
The post Nick Fuentes says his problem with Trump ‘is that he is not Hitler’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’
(JTA) — Larry Ellison, the Jewish founder of Oracle and a major pro-Israel donor, has recently been in the headlines for his media acquisition ventures with his son.
The new scrutiny on the family has surfaced a decades-old detail about Ellison: that he once rechristened a superyacht after realizing that its original name carried an antisemitic tinge.
In 1999, Ellison — then No. 23 on Forbes’ billionaires list, well on his way to his No. 4 ranking today — purchased a boat called Izanami.
Originally built for a Japanese businessman, the 191-foot superyacht was named for a Shinto deity. But Ellison soon realized what the name read backwards: “I’m a Nazi.”
“Izanami and Izanagi are the names of the two Shinto deities that gave birth to the Japanese islands, or so legend has it,” Ellison said in “Softwar,” a 2013 biography. “When the local newspapers started pointing out that Izanami was ‘I’m a Nazi’ spelled backward, I had the choice of explaining Shintoism to the reporters at the San Francisco Chronicle or changing the name of the boat.” He renamed the boat Ronin and later sold it.
The decades-old factoid resurfaced this week because of a New York Magazine profile of Ellison’s son, David Ellison, the chair and CEO of Paramount-Skydance Corporation.
Skydance Corporation, which David Ellison founded in 2006, completed an $8 billion merger last year with Paramount Global. Larry Ellison, meanwhile, joined an investor consortium that signed a deal to purchase TikTok, the social media juggernaut accused of spreading antisemitism. Together, father and son also staged a hostile bid to purchase Warner Bros. but were outmatched by Netflix.
After acquiring Paramount, David Ellison appointed The Free Press founder Bari Weiss as the editor-in-chief of CBS News, in an endorsement of Weiss’ contrarian and pro-Israel outlook that has been challenged as overly friendly to the Trump administration.
Larry Ellison, who was raised in a Reform Jewish home by his adoptive Jewish parents, has long been a donor to pro-Israel and Jewish causes, including to Friends of the Israel Defense Forces. In September, he briefly topped the Bloomberg Billionaires Index as the world’s richest man.
In December, Oracle struck a deal to provide cloud services for TikTok, with some advocates hoping for tougher safeguards against antisemitism on the social media platform
The post Larry Ellison once renamed a superyacht because its name spelled backwards was ‘I’m a Nazi’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs
(JTA) — For the second year in a row, Jewish star third baseman Alex Bregman has signed a lucrative free-agent contract with a team that is run by a Jewish executive and plays in a historic ballpark in a city with a significant Jewish community.
Last year, it was the Boston Red Sox. Now, Bregman is headed to the Chicago Cubs — a team whose Jewish fans possess almost religious devotion.
Bregman, who had opted out of a three-year, $120 million deal with Boston, has signed a five-year, $175 million pact with the Cubs. It is the second-largest contract ever signed by a Jewish ballplayer, behind Max Fried’s $218 million contract in 2024. Bregman previously signed a five-year, $100 million extension with the Houston Astros in 2019.
Bregman, who played the first nine years of his career in Houston, has been one of baseball’s premier third basemen over the past decade, with three All-Star selections, a Gold Glove, a Silver Slugger and two World Series rings. He’s also heralded for his leadership on and off the field.
Bregman grew up in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he played baseball in high school and also, according to his mother, was once teased while leaving school for a bar mitzvah lesson. His grandfather, the onetime attorney for the Washington Senators whom she said Bregman called “zeyde,” gave him a collection of baseball cards featuring Jewish players.
His great-grandfather fled antisemitism in Belarus and fell in love with sports in the United States, The Athletic reported in 2017, as Bregman hurtled toward his World Series win.
“It’s the fulfillment of four generations of short Jewish Bregmans who dreamed of playing in the major leagues,” his father Sam, now the district attorney in Albuquerque’s county as well as a Democratic candidate for New Mexico governor, said at the time. “The big leagues and the World Series. One hundred twenty years in America fulfilled by Alex in this World Series.”
Bregman has also been vocal about his Jewish pride. He celebrated Hanukkah with a local synagogue in Houston, and following the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel that launched the Gaza War, Bregman drew a Star of David on his hat during a playoff game and participated in a video of Jewish players calling on fans to support Israel.
Some Jewish fans hoped Bregman’s shows of solidarity with Israel would lead him to suit up for another new squad this spring, Team Israel at the upcoming World Baseball Classic. But Bregman announced this week that he will play for Team USA again. Another Jewish ballplayer, Rowdy Tellez, will rejoin team Mexico, taking two big names off the recruitment board for Israel.
Back in 2018, as Bregman was first emerging as a major star, he said he regretted taking a pass on Team Israel the previous year, when it made it to the second round of play. Suiting up for the U.S. team, Bregman had just four at-bats as a backup player.
Now, he has selected a jersey number for his Cubs era that reflects his aspirations.
“I wore No. 3 because I want a third championship,” Bregman said during his first press conference with his new club on Thursday.
The post Alex Bregman, who drew a Jewish star on his cap after Oct. 7, inks $175M deal with the Cubs appeared first on The Forward.