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The Dominican Republic was a haven for Jews fleeing the Nazis. A museum project could tell that story.
SOSUA, Dominican Republic (JTA) — Sitting inside a small wood-frame shul just around the corner from Playa Alicia, where tourists sip rum punch while watching catamarans glide by, Joe Benjamin recounted one of the most uplifting but often forgotten stories of Jewish survival during the Holocaust.
“I was bar mitzvahed right here,” he said, pointing to a podium at the front of the sanctuary in La Sinagoga de Sosua. It was built in the early 1940s to meet the spiritual needs of about 750 German and Austrian Jews.
At the time, the Dominican Republic was the only country in the world that offered asylum to large numbers of Jewish refugees, earning the moniker “tropical Zion.”
Benjamin, 82, is president of the Jewish community of Sosua and one of only four surviving second-generation Jews remaining in this touristy beach town on the northern coast of the Dominican Republic. His parents were part of the unconventional colony of Jewish immigrants who established an agricultural settlement between 1940-47 on an abandoned banana plantation overlooking the Atlantic Ocean.
“When I talk about that, I get goosebumps,” Benjamin said. “This is a distinction that the Dominican Republic has. It was the only country that opened its doors to Jews.”
Joe Benjamin, president of the Jewish Community of Sosua, inside the sanctuary of La Sinagoga. (Dan Fellner)
At the 1938 Evian Conference in France, attended by representatives of 32 countries to address the problem of German and Austrian Jewish refugees wanting to flee Nazi persecution, the Dominican Republic announced it would accept up to 100,000 Jewish refugees. About 5,000 visas were issued but fewer than 1,000 Jews ultimately were able to reach the country, which is located on the same island as Haiti, about 800 miles southeast of Miami.
Benjamin was born in 1941 in Shanghai, the only other place besides the Dominican Republic that accepted large numbers of Jewish refugees during the Holocaust. Shanghai, then a divided city not under the control of a single government, did not require a visa to enter. About 20,000 Jewish refugees immigrated there, including Benjamin’s parents, who fled Nazi Germany in 1939.
In 1947, with a civil war raging in China, Benjamin’s father realized the country “was getting a little difficult” and looked for another place to raise his two children.
“I think my father read it in a newspaper – there was a Jewish refugee colony in the Dominican Republic,” he says. “My father had no idea where that was, but he said, ‘I’m going there.’”
Benjamin’s family took a ship from China to San Francisco, a train to Miami, and then flew into Santo Domingo, the Dominican Republic’s capital city. At that time, the city was officially called Ciudad Trujillo after the country’s dictator, Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic from 1930 until his assassination in 1961.
Photos of some of the 750 Jewish refugees who settled in Sosua in the 1940s on display at the Gregorio Luperon International Airport in Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic. (Dan Fellner)
Historians suggest the Dominican dictator’s motives in accepting large numbers of Jewish refugees at a time when so many other countries — including the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom — turned their backs were fueled more by opportunism than altruism. It’s believed that Trujillo wanted to improve his reputation on the world stage following the 1937 massacre of an estimated 20,000 Black Haitians by Dominican troops. Furthermore, Trujillo liked the idea of allowing a crop of mostly educated immigrants who would “whiten” the country’s population.
“He was a cruel dictator,” Benjamin said of Trujillo. “But it’s not for me to judge. Because for us, he saved our lives. If you’re drowning and someone throws you a rope, you hold on to it. You don’t start asking his motive. You just hold on.”
In 1947, Benjamin was among the last group of Jewish refugees to arrive in Sosua, one of about 10 families known by the other colonists as the “Shanghai group.” The Sosua settlement was run by an organization called the Dominican Republic Settlement Association (DORSA) that was funded by the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee in New York.
“DORSA would give you 10 cows, a mule, a horse and a cart,” said Benjamin. “My father by profession was a cabinet-maker. He thought he was going to do that here. But there was no market for that. So he dedicated himself to farming.”
Benjamin said conditions in Sosua were “primitive” and a difficult transition for many settlers who had been city-dwellers in Europe. Still, he spoke fondly of a childhood in which he was relatively insulated from the horrors that befell so many other Jewish children his age.
“We had enough to eat,” he says. “We enjoyed the beach. And I went to a Jewish school.”
La Sinagoga de Sosua in the Dominican Republic served the spiritual needs of the Jewish refugees who found a safe haven in Sosua during the Holocaust. It’s now open only for the high holidays. (Dan Fellner)
The school, originally called Escuela Cristobal Colon, opened in 1940 in a barracks and was attended by Jewish children as well as the children of Dominican farm workers. The school still exists and is now called the Colegio Luis Hess, named after Luis Hess, one of the Jewish settlers. Hess taught at the school for 33 years and lived in Sosua until his death in 2010 at the age of 101.
While the children attended school, men worked on farms and women cooked dinner for their families, who ate communal style. Beds were lined with mosquito netting to prevent malaria. As men greatly outnumbered women — Trujillo did not allow single Jewish women to enter the country — intermarriage was common.
Over time, the agriculture venture failed and DORSA instead decided to promote a beef and dairy cooperative, Productos Sosua, which ultimately proved successful.
After finishing high school, Benjamin moved to Pittsburgh to attend college (he’s an engineer who once built and flew his own airplane), got married and started a family. After 17 years in the United States, he decided in 1976 to return to the Dominican Republic, where he became an executive with Productos Sosua. He worked there until he retired in 2004, when the firm was sold to a Mexican company.
“All my life I talked about Sosua as my home,” he said. “I like it here. Everybody knows me.”
A street mural recognizes Sosua’s Jewish history on the main road connecting Sosua with Puerto Plata on the north coast of the Dominican Republic. (Dan Fellner)
Today, Sosua is vastly changed from the sleepy town in which Benjamin was raised. In 1979, an international airport opened in Puerto Plata, just a 15-minute drive to the west. Sosua morphed into a congested tourist destination known for its golden-sand beaches and water sports. It also became a hub of the Dominican sex tourism industry.
Most of Sosua’s Jewish population immigrated to the United States by the early 1980s. Benjamin estimates that only 30-40 Jews remain in Sosua, most of whom are not religiously observant. As a result, the synagogue hasn’t been able to financially sustain a permanent rabbi for more than 20 years. Services are held only on the high holidays, when a rabbi is flown in from Miami.
Benjamin says a group of seven Jews chips in about $2,500 a month to pay for security and other operating expenses.
“It’s very hard to get the Jews here to pay,” he said. “When we bring in the rabbi, we try to charge something. But we don’t get any people if we charge.”
Next to the synagogue is a small museum called the Museo Judio de Sosua, which offers a window into the town’s Jewish roots. Five years ago, the U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo donated $80,000 to the museum to preserve and digitize its archives. However, the museum, which is badly in need of repairs, has been closed for the past year.
The Museo Judio de Sosua, which tells the story of the Jewish refugees who found a safe haven in the Dominican Republic during the Holocaust. The museum is closed while the community waits for funding to reopen it. (Dan Fellner)
Benjamin has been in discussions with the Dominican government in hopes it will soon finance a major renovation of the museum that would include an exhibition hall big enough to accommodate 100 people for events. Benjamin says he is optimistic the project, which has a price-tag approaching $1 million, will be green-lighted by the government.
“They are very positive about it because it could become a tourist attraction,” he says, noting that Puerto Plata and nearby Amber Cove have become popular port-stops on Caribbean cruises originating in Florida. “If it comes to fruition, it will be in the next year. Because if they don’t do it by then, the government changes. And the next government never continues what the previous government started.”
Otherwise, there are only a few remnants of Jewish life in Sosua for visitors to see. In Parque Mirador overlooking the Atlantic, there is a white cement-block star of David, built to honor the Jewish refugees. About 70 Jews, including Benjamin’s parents, are buried in a Jewish cemetery about a five-minute drive south of the synagogue.
The main street connecting Sosua with Puerto Plata has a street mural depicting the town’s history that features a large star of David right above a scuba-diver. And two of the most prominent streets in Sosua — Dr. Rosen and David Stern — still bear the names of two of the colony’s Jewish founders.
Dr. Rosen Street in downtown Sosua is named after Joseph Rosen, one of the founders of the Dominican Republic Settlement Association. (Dan Fellner)
There had been an exhibition about Sosua’s Jewish colony at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York but it closed several years ago. All the more reason, Benjamin says, that the Sosua museum reopens as soon as possible so that the story of the Jews who found a Caribbean cocoon to ride out the Holocaust isn’t forgotten.
“Look at what’s happening in the world — there is a rise in antisemitism,” he said. “It’s very important that our history is documented. It will also be a place where Dominican schoolchildren can come and learn about Judaism.”
With the museum closed, the only place in the area to see photos of the Jewish settlers on public display is the departure lounge in Puerto Plata’s airport. Next to a Dominican band serenading travelers with meringue music, there is a display of pictures showing the colonists riding horses, tilling the fields, attending school and praying in La Sinagoga.
“When they came here, the Jews found no antisemitism at all in this country,” said Benjamin. “They were as free as anybody. They had a wonderful life.”
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A new grocer is moving into Squirrel Hill. Its rival says the deal isn’t kosher.
PITTSBURGH — Mister Rogers was from Squirrel Hill, and it was here that he built a career on a small, perhaps radical idea: that showing up for your neighbor, day after day, is its own kind of moral work.
It is a strange thing, then, that the neighborhood that made him famous — the same one that gathered in 2018 after the deadliest antisemitic attack in American history — is now consumed by a fight over what neighborliness is worth when there’s money, and a family’s retirement, on the line.
For three decades, one grocery store has anchored Squirrel Hill’s kosher life. Soon it will have new company: a rival supermarket opening just blocks away. The family that runs the original store says the new store was built in part on their own private financial records, shared in confidence during a sale that fell through. The newcomer, for its part, says it has “acted properly” throughout.
The dispute is now headed to a rabbinical tribunal, where both sides will make their case.
This is a very Squirrel Hill kind of story, intimate enough that it’s hard to separate the business from the relationships underneath it. It’s also part of something bigger: the fight reflects a broader shift already underway in kosher retail, where small, single-location grocers are increasingly competing not just with each other but with regional chains and delivery networks that didn’t used to reach a market this size.
‘Cheek by jowl’
By midafternoon on a recent Thursday, Murray Avenue Kosher is deep into its weekly pre-Shabbat rush — cashiers ringing up customers as fast as they can, stockers racing to keep pace with what’s flying off the shelves. Behind the deli counter, a line of people wait while workers slice cold cuts and pack containers of whitefish and kugel.
On the front door hangs a sign reading “Israel — We Stand With You,” put up after the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, 2023. A few feet away, on a window, is a Steelers poster — a small reminder that this is a Jewish community that is also, unmistakably, a Pittsburgh one.
For Ellie Feibus, 39, who lives within walking distance, the store is less an occasional stop than a daily habit: coffee some mornings on her way to work at a synagogue preschool, lunch, dinner in the evening, a Thursday wine tasting. She often has her dog, Anschel — a blind, toothless, 12-year-old pug — with her. She greets people by name, wishing “Good Shabbos” to those she passes and “Hi, honey” to several others.
When Feibus got COVID during the pandemic, she called Aryeh Markovic, who runs the store with his parents, Saul and Beth. He personally delivered groceries to her doorstep. Without being asked, he added a container of chicken soup.
It’s that kind of care, she said, that would be hardest to replicate in a new store: “the part that’s going to be missing.”
Step outside and you’re in the heart of Squirrel Hill, home to a large swath of Pittsburgh’s roughly 50,000 Jews, three day schools and about a dozen synagogues across the denominational spectrum — a community that has been here, largely intact, for generations.
“In Squirrel Hill, everybody lives cheek by jowl,” said Mark Oppenheimer, who wrote a book chronicling how the neighborhood held together after the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting. “Even the more liberal and Reform Jews will power-walk with the Orthodox on their lunch hour. In a lot of cities there’d be real distance between those worlds. Here, there isn’t.”
The neighborhood’s epicenter is the corner of Murray and Forbes avenues, adjacent to the Jewish Community Center, and the same intersection where the community gathered for a vigil the Saturday night after the shooting.
That corner was, until recently, home to a Rite Aid. But after the financially strapped drugstore chain declared bankruptcy in 2025, the building became available to lease.
Deal or no deal
Yitzchok Glassner, a transplant to Pittsburgh, wanted to get into the kosher supermarket business. The timing seemed fortuitous. Saul and Beth Markovic bought Murray Avenue Kosher in 1996; their son Aryeh joined as a partner in 2021. By last year, Saul and Beth were ready to retire — just as Glassner came looking for a store to buy.
In June 2025, Glassner expressed interest in Murray Avenue Kosher, and the two sides signed a non-disclosure agreement. Over the course of several weeks, the Markovic family handed over the store’s tax returns and profit-and-loss statements.
Glassner wanted to put his supermarket — with the name Murray’s Market — in the former Rite Aid building. Doing so meant winning approval from a bankruptcy judge working with Rite Aid, who needed proof the new venture could pay the rent. The Markovics allege that without their permission or knowledge, Glassner submitted their financial records along with a declaration stating that Murray’s Market was, in Glassner’s words, “acquiring Murray Avenue Kosher.” No such acquisition existed.
The Markovics say that they had yet to reach a deal with Glassner when he told the court he was acquiring Murray Avenue Kosher. They also claim that Glassner broke the non-disclosure agreement by sharing their private financial information, which is now in the public record as part of a filing in the Rite Aid bankruptcy case.
“Nobody is going to buy the business now if there’s a competing store opening 200 feet down the block,” said Shaya Markovic, Aryeh’s brother. “Had we known he intended to use the documents to open a competing store, my parents would never have given them.”
Talks between the Markovics and Glassner broke down.
Brandywine Communities, the owner and landlord of the former Rite Aid building, announced in August that Murray’s Market was granted the lease. Renovations are expected to begin in the coming months with a planned opening in 2027.
Whether it gets there without further complications is an open question. The underlying fight — over whether Glassner owes the Markovics anything and what should be done if he does — is now headed to the Beth Din of America, a rabbinical high court.
A different kind of court
Few outside the Orthodox Jewish world have ever heard of the Beth Din of America, let alone know that a fight like this one could end up decided there, by a panel of rabbis rather than a judge or jury.
Murray Avenue Kosher’s Markovic said what he wants is straightforward: financial compensation from Glassner for damages he believes were caused to his business.
Glassner struck a different note: “In the interest of peace, we attempted to reach an understanding with another establishment, but sadly, those efforts were unsuccessful,” read a statement he sent to the Forward. “Nevertheless, throughout the process, we have acted properly, and we remain confident that all matters will be settled amicably.”
The Beth Din of America functions much like private arbitration in the secular world. Both sides have to agree to bring a dispute there, and once they do, the ruling is binding. A losing party can’t simply refile the same case in civil court and abide by that ruling instead.
Cases like this one are typically decided by a panel of three rabbinic judges. The Beth Din of America, modeled after the rabbinical courts in ancient times, maintains a roster of rabbis it works with, each with different specialties — one might have more experience with family law, another with contracts and business disputes. Some of the rabbis are lawyers themselves.
The arbitration can take place at the Beth Din of America’s Manhattan offices, or any other location that the parties and the Beth Din agree to, with follow-up sessions sometimes held over Zoom.
Sources who have previously worked with the Beth Din of America expect a case like this to be litigated in the coming weeks — with perhaps a slight delay due to Yom Kippur and Sukkot. A written ruling can take additional weeks to finalize.
Rabbi Yitzi Genack of the Vaad Harabonim of Pittsburgh, which certifies kosher establishments in the city, did not respond to multiple requests for an interview. A spokesperson for Brandywine Communities, the landlord and owner of the former Rite Aid building, declined a request for an interview.
A street with history
The new Murray’s Market is not facing off only against one other kosher option.
Directly across the street from Murray Avenue Kosher, the local Giant Eagle — a large regional supermarket chain — runs its own in-house kosher bakery and stocks a decent selection of kosher meat: cold cuts, chicken, beef, steak and brisket. There was already competition, in other words, long before Glassner decided to open a new store.
“For over a century, many important kosher establishments have served Pittsburgh’s diverse Jewish community, including Adler’s Delicatessen and Grocery, Kosher Mart, Murray Avenue Kosher, and Prime Kosher,” read a statement from Glassner. “For many years, these establishments — often operating side by side — contributed greatly to the Jewish community.”
In the 1940s, Murray Avenue supported at least 10 kosher butchers, a handful of kosher poultry stores, two fish stores, six bakeries and 14 grocery stores, according to Eric Lidji, director of the Rauh Jewish History Program & Archives at the Heinz History Center. Rabbi Bernard Poupko, who led Congregation Shaare Torah in Squirrel Hill from 1942 to 1996, once called the street the yidisher gas, the Jewish street, even as the businesses lining it kept changing hands.
Adler’s Delicatessen is a case study in how the markets have changed. Founded in the late 1910s, it became a Murray Avenue fixture — until the Adler family sold it, in 1974, to U-Se Chu, a Korean immigrant. Under Chu’s ownership, the deli kept its kosher-style menu and its Jewish character for decades, before the family retired and sold it in 1997.
On Murray Avenue, in other words, a kosher institution outliving — or even changing hands entirely from — its founding family is not a new story.
A larger trend
Kosher shopping in Squirrel Hill does not even require a storefront anymore. Evergreen, a kosher supermarket chain with locations in New York and New Jersey, makes bulk kosher deliveries to eight cities across the Midwest as well as to Pittsburgh — part of a broader pattern of national and regional players reaching smaller Jewish communities that, until recently, only had access to whatever their local grocer carried.
Customers have noticed. Feibus, a devoted Murray Avenue Kosher shopper, said some of Pittsburgh’s newer transplants from the northeast have grown used to bigger, more polished kosher chains like Seasons and want the same thing locally. The Grove, a South Florida-based kosher supermarket chain, has added locations in Ohio and Michigan in recent years. Many Costco and Trader Joe’s locations across the country stock kosher chicken and other products for Jewish customers.
This fight is bigger than one grocer and one new competitor. Mom-and-pop kosher stores no longer have these smaller Jewish communities to themselves.
Not everyone in the neighborhood sees a second kosher store as a threat. Ronna Harris Askin, 78, a longtime Squirrel Hill resident, said she plans to shop at both.
“Competition is always good,” she said. She’s fond of Murray Avenue Kosher — it “mostly meets my needs,” she said — but doesn’t think one store should have to carry the whole neighborhood. “It’s good for the economy to have two places. It makes everybody be on their toes to do a good job.”
Harris Askin has seen the alternative firsthand. Her daughter and son-in-law live in Toco Hills, a heavily Jewish Atlanta neighborhood, where both Kroger and Publix stock kosher meat and other products alongside two dedicated kosher markets — evidence, to her, that a bigger Jewish community can support more kosher retail without strain.
What comes next
Markovic isn’t waiting around to find out what the Beth Din of America decides.
He’s already working on what comes next at Murray Avenue Kosher. In the coming months, he plans to move the deli counter to a new space in the store and expand its offerings to include restaurant menu items like chicken sandwiches and hamburgers. He’ll be adding tables for seating. He has also hired a chef to make fresh sushi daily.
A year ago, Markovic was contemplating getting out of the business. Now he is doing the opposite: pouring money into the same store he nearly sold, betting that the surest answer to a rival two blocks away isn’t a rabbinical court, but a better rotisserie chicken.
“It’s imperative to get it done quickly,” Markovic said. One of his brothers is flying in to help him push through the vendor calls and the small decisions that used to take him weeks to get to. “I have ninety-seven phone calls in between everything I want to do,” he said, and laughed, a little wearily, before picking up to answer another one.
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Israeli army weighs legal action against NAZA film makers amid calls to revoke their citizenship
(JTA) — The Israeli army chief of staff on Monday ordered the military to examine possible legal action over “NAZA,” a documentary alleging that Israeli forces knowingly killed large numbers of civilians in Gaza.
The 80-minute documentary by Israeli filmmakers Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, won the Special Jury Prize at the Venice Film Festival on Saturday, two days after its premiere there drew a 25-minute standing ovation. In Israel, it drew widespread condemnation from Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, senior military officials, former hostages and other public figures.
Eyal Zamir requested that Military Advocate General Maj. Gen. Itai Ofir “examine security aspects and possible involvement in relation to the leak of classified materials used in the production of the film” as well as advance “possible legal actions regarding the film and those involved in it.”
Zamir also convened senior IDF officials, including the deputy chief of staff, the military advocate general, the air force commander and the commander of the elite 8200 military intelligence unit to address what the army says are the film’s distortions.
In a statement announcing the meeting, Zamir denounced the film’s allegations as “blood libels,” a “deliberate distortion of reality” and “false and grave accusations” against Israeli soldiers and commanders.
The film “adopts narratives of Israel-haters, defames our soldiers and commanders, and seeks to present the IDF as deliberately acting unlawfully,” he said.
“This is a dangerous attempt to deprive us of the legitimacy to defend ourselves against the worst of our enemies, and in the process, to put IDF soldiers and commanders in real danger,” Zamir added.
The IDF said in a separate statement that it “categorically rejects” the film’s allegations and questioned the credibility of its anonymous sources. It said some claims about national and military strategy were “clearly beyond the knowledge of junior-level soldiers” and that intelligence personnel cited in the film “by definition would not have been involved” in some of the situations described. It also rejected what it called the film’s portrayal of unintended civilian deaths from lawful strikes as deliberate killing or part of a “genocide.”
The Hamas-run Gaza health ministry says that over 70,000 people have been killed in the war launched by Hamas on Oct. 7, 2023, with deadly raids inside Israel. The army does not dispute the number, but says that a substantial portion of the dead are fighters. Gaza’s health ministry does not distinguish between fighters and civilians.
The military also disputed NAZA’s depiction of artificial intelligence in targeting, saying such decisions are made “by human personnel only.” It said anticipated civilian harm is weighed against the expected military advantage before a strike is approved and that attacks are not carried out when that harm would be disproportionate.
The IDF added that it had only seen excerpts and a trailer, and asked the filmmakers for a full screening before responding comprehensively.
Israeli government agencies, including the Foreign Ministry, also met Monday to coordinate a response to the film and sent Israeli diplomats abroad talking points rebutting its allegations. The talking points accused NAZA of turning “the truth on its head” and serving as a “disguise for Hamas propaganda,” according to a foreign ministry document cited by Ynet.
Netanyahu also condemned the film on Monday, calling it “shocking” in a video posted to X.
“We’re fighting worldwide antisemitic incitement, but when it comes from within us, it’s intolerable,” he said.
Culture Minister Miki Zohar went further, asking the Interior Ministry and Population and Immigration Authority to examine whether Abraham and Szor’s conduct could justify revoking their Israeli citizenship. Zohar accused the filmmakers of harming Israel abroad and said officials should examine whether the way material for the film was obtained or published could amount to treason or assisting the enemy during wartime.
Released hostage Eliya Cohen, who was held in Gaza for 505 days, also attacked the filmmakers, accusing them of spreading lies about soldiers who fought to bring him home and of endangering Israelis and Jews abroad. Cohen urged the public to hang posters with photos of the filmmakers so that “when they walk down the street they will feel ashamed.”
“People should spit on them,” he said. “The blood of our friends, the blood of Diaspora Jews, is on their hands.”
Abraham defended the film in a tense interview Monday with veteran Channel 13 journalist Raviv Drucker, who pressed him on how the filmmakers verified the accounts of the 24 anonymous soldiers.
“I have to tell you that as a journalist, I don’t think I would have aired this,” Drucker told Abraham, arguing there was “no supporting evidence” publicly available to independently confirm the claims.
“We don’t have their names, we don’t have their units,” Drucker said. “We don’t have the dates of the events, places, or who was hit. We basically have nothing to hold on to, to refute or confirm these very serious testimonies.”
Abraham said editors at The Guardian, which produced the film, had access to the underlying material. “The identities of the people were verified, the cases they discussed were verified,” he said.
He also accused Israeli television of failing to seriously investigate civilian casualties and rules of engagement in Gaza during the war. “NAZA” is the Hebrew acronym for “collateral damage.”
More than 700 Israeli film professionals signed a petition backing Abraham and Szor, accusing officials of waging an “unprecedented campaign of incitement and vitriol” against the filmmakers that they said came close to legitimizing of violence. Signatories included Ari Folman, Hagai Levi, Shlomi Elkabetz, Shira Geffen and Nir Bergman.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Macklemore got canceled. Kanye is playing sold-out shows. What’s the difference?
Moments after Seattle rapper Macklemore led fans in New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium in a call to “Free Palestine” that ended his opening spot on a national tour, another notorious rapper, despite years of toxic, antisemitic behavior, played to a sold-out crowd in Chicago’s Soldier Field for the second night in a row: the artist formerly known as Kanye West.
On Monday, Macklemore paid the price for that Sept. 4 show where he accused Israel of genocide and apartheid while opening for English singer and songwriter Ed Sheeran. That gig ended when Robert Kraft, owner of Boston’s Gillette Stadium, said Macklemore was not welcome there for Sheeran’s two scheduled shows.
The shutout went beyond Gillette. With 10 more shows left on the tour, eight including Macklemore as the opening act, Kraft rallied other stadium owners to bar him too. Macklemore was removed.
“The venue’s and promoter’s decision was final,” Sheeran wrote on Instagram. “Macklemore coming off tour was the promoter’s decision. It was not mine. I have spent this week trying to build bridges, to find a solution and unfortunately, was unable to do so.”
On Tuesday, Sheeran’s three other opening acts and his back-up band withdrew in solidarity.
On that list of stadiums that barred Macklemore was AT&T Stadium in Arlington, Texas, where tickets to see Ye in November went on sale last week. But there was no mention of canceling that show.
Neither Soldier Field nor AT&T Stadium responded to the Forward’s inquiries about why Ye was still welcome there despite his escalating antisemitism over the years.
In 2025, his antisemitic conduct hit a fever pitch when he ran a Super Bowl ad directing viewers to an online store that briefly sold a $20 T-shirt emblazoned with a black swastika. He also released a music video on X titled “HEIL HITLER (HOOLIGAN VERSION),” featuring the lyric “So I became a Nazi, I’m the villain,” which surpassed one million views. He was banned by Twitch after appearing in a livestream giving a Nazi salute and shouting “Heil Hitler.”
So is hating Jews more acceptable than hating Israel?
Not exactly, said Ari Ingel, executive director of The Creative Community for Peace, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting antisemitism in the entertainment industry. Macklemore has shown no signs of remorse or intention to understand why his actions were harmful.
Meanwhile, Ye has paid a hefty price for his antisemitic rants over the years, losing lucrative deals with Adidas, Gap, Balenciaga and Universal Music Group. And while some still question Ye’s sincerity and he has more work to do, he did apologize, Ingel said.
“Kanye is still being held accountable for his statements,” Ingel told the Forward. “He’s not working with the biggest promoters in the industry … We have not let go of all the harm he has caused yet, but his team has put him on a better path.”
Though Ye has performed in some European shows, his headline act at this summer’s Wireless Fest in London was canceled after the U.K. denied him a visa to travel to the country. Concerts in Italy, Russia and Poland also got nixed.
Here in the U.S., his promoter has only been able to book select stadiums for this 2026 tour, including the New Orleans Superdome, San Antonio Alamodome, and two shows at Soldier Field in his hometown of Chicago.
In San Antonio, Mayor Gina Maria Ortiz Jones unsuccessfully tried to prevent Ye’s July 4 show in the city-owned stadium. But backlash against pulling the plug was too intense and the show was allowed to go on. U.S. Sen. Rick Scott also sought to cancel Ye’s June shows at Raymond James Stadium in Tampa, another publicly-owned venue scheduled to host Sheeran on Nov. 7.
Ye’s shows have featured the spectacle that he is known for – the artist performing on top of a gigantic spinning globe in the center of the stadium with billows of fog, laser light shows, fireworks and surprise guest appearances. His setlist covers the span of his career, minus the song “Heil Hitler.”
Macklemore, by contrast, commandeered what was supposed to be a family-friendly show to deliver a not-so-family-friendly, even hostile, message, Ingel said. He didn’t just speak briefly about the plight of Palestinians, which would have been within his right to do. While singing “Hind’s Hall,” his tribute to pro-Palestinian protesters who occupied a building at Columbia University, he projected images of war and encampments on giant screens and led the crowd in a call and response, creating an atmosphere where Jewish fans felt threatened.
“Ye, despite the previous statements, is not doing that at his shows,” Ingel said. “He’s not whipping up the crowd into a frenzy of antisemitic hatred.” If he did, his tour would undoubtedly come to a screeching halt.
“Stadiums are not going to allow their venues to turn into forums for hate,” Ingel said. “This is about bringing people together.”
And so far, ironically, that’s what Ye’s shows try to do by sticking to the music. Unfortunately, Ingel said, Macklemore did not.
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