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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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Suspicious Explosive Package Targeting Jewish Leader Heightens Antisemitism Fears in Argentina
People hold up pictures of the victims of the AMIA Jewish center bombing during a ceremony to mark the 22nd anniversary of the 1994 attack in Buenos Aires, Argentina, July 18, 2016. Photo: REUTERS/Enrique Marcarian
Argentina’s authorities are investigating yet another suspected antisemitic incident after a suspicious package addressed to a local branch president of the country’s main Jewish umbrella organization was intercepted, further heightening alarms among community leaders amid a recent surge in attacks.
On Wednesday, the Pilares del Rosario medical center received a package containing explosive material addressed to Gabriel Dobkin, who serves as both the institution’s director and president of the local branch of the Delegation of Argentine Israelite Associations (DAIA) in Rosario, a major city in the central-eastern Santa Fe province.
According to local media, clinic staff received a package containing a pack of Philip Morris cigarettes wrapped in transparent tape, which the facility’s manager said felt unusually heavy and immediately aroused suspicion.
Because the package had arrived unrequested via a delivery service, the clinic’s manager quickly raised concerns and called in the police explosives unit.
Police bomb squad dogs later detected explosive material inside the cigarette pack. According to the ongoing investigation, the package also contained a strange substance, though authorities have not yet released further details.
After digging a pit in the facility’s backyard, police experts carried out a controlled detonation of the material.
Even though the package did not include an automatic triggering mechanism, it reportedly contained a number of coins intended to serve as shrapnel in the event of an explosion.
Local law enforcement is treating the incident as a targeted antisemitic attack, describing it as either an attempted act of violence or, at the very least, an act of intimidation.
As the investigation continues, detectives are still analyzing the substance found inside the package but have not yet determined its composition or origin. Surveillance footage from the area is being reviewed, and staff from the clinic are also expected to be interviewed.
DAIA Rosario strongly condemned the attack, describing it as a troubling escalation of threats against Jewish institutions, reflecting a wider atmosphere of hostility toward the community.
“This is an expression of hatred that not only targets the Jewish community, but also undermines the fundamental values of coexistence, respect, and democracy. Such acts must be condemned unequivocally and confronted with resolve. Simply denouncing them is not enough — decisive action is essential,” the organization said in a statement.
“Impunity cannot be an option. Every act of antisemitism that goes unpunished sends a message of tolerance toward hatred,” it continued. “Every firm response from the state is a clear signal that society will not back down. To prevent these acts from recurring, determination, action, and justice are essential.”
This latest incident comes amid heightened security concerns within Argentina’s Jewish community after unknown individuals threw a homemade firebomb at the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish Community Center in La Plata, a city in southeastern Buenos Aires Province, last Sunday.
The Buenos Aires Security Ministry and Police Counterterrorism Division have opened an investigation into the incident, examining possible links to another attack last week that appears to share a similar modus operandi.
The Israelite Literary Center and Max Nordau Library in La Plata were also targeted last Thursday when unidentified individuals threw a homemade Molotov-type device at the building’s entrance.
Although the device failed to ignite, it shattered the building’s windows and caused some material damage. Fortunately, no fires broke out and no injuries were reported.
In response to these latest attacks, Jewish institutions across the country have strengthened preventive protocols and reinforced internal security and surveillance measures.
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US, Israel Cripple Iran’s Nuclear Weaponization Work, New Report Shows
Symbolic mock-ups of Iranian missiles are displayed on a street, amid the U.S.-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 22, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
More than two months into the war, Iran’s ability to develop nuclear weapons has suffered a major setback as US and Israeli strikes have ravaged critical facilities, crippled essential infrastructure, and killed personnel central to Tehran’s nuclear ambitions, according to a new analysis
On Friday, the Institute for Science and International Security (ISIS), a Washington, DC–based think tank, released a new assessment of the impact of Israeli and US strikes on Iran’s nuclear program, concluding that the attacks significantly damaged Tehran’s ability to advance nuclear weapons development, particularly by disrupting its weaponization activities.
A nuclear program generally begins with uranium enrichment, the process of producing material that can power civilian reactors or, at higher levels of purity, be used in a nuclear weapon. Much of Iran’s enrichment infrastructure was destroyed during last year’s 12-day war.
The second element is weaponization, which involves the design, testing, and production of the components needed to assemble a functioning nuclear device — a central focus of the more recent Israeli and US military campaign.
According to ISIS’s newly released report, at least six confirmed nuclear-related sites were destroyed so far, with three additional locations possibly connected to the program also struck, bringing the total number of targeted facilities linked to nuclear weapons development to between nine and 12.
Since the start of the war earlier this year, Israel and the United States have struck a wide range of military-industrial facilities involved in missile, drone, and conventional weapons production.
However, the report indicates that some previously undisclosed sites may also have had connections to Iran’s nuclear activities, potentially raising the true scale of the damage.
By analyzing satellite imagery, the report concludes that Iran’s ability to successfully complete a nuclear weapon has been significantly degraded, with the strikes greatly extending the timeline required to produce a bomb while sharply increasing the likelihood of technical failure.
Before the June 2025 war, intelligence assessments estimated Iran could likely produce a nuclear weapon in less than six months with a high probability of success.
Now, the regime’s chances of successfully completing the weaponization process are considered technically low even over a one- to two-year period, largely because the strikes destroyed not only facilities, but also critical equipment and personnel involved in the final stages of bomb development.
ISIS’s latest findings contradict earlier US intelligence assessments, which reportedly concluded that Iran’s nuclear timeline had not been significantly delayed, arguing that such data is inconsistent with extensive visible destruction across key nuclear sites.
The report also argues that there are no signs Iran has resumed uranium enrichment activities, as facilities repeatedly targeted by Israeli and American airstrikes remain heavily damaged with no detectable reconstruction efforts underway.
Despite extensive damage to the regime’s infrastructure, the report cautions that Iran’s nuclear threat has not been fully eliminated.
ISIS has identified tunnel complexes near Esfahan and Natanz in central Iran that were not directly targeted and are believed to contain most of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile, including roughly 440 kilograms enriched to 60 percent — far above civilian requirements and much closer to weapons-grade material.
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ICC Prosecutor Karim Khan Sidesteps ‘Genocide’ Accusations Against Israel
International Criminal Court Prosecutor Karim Khan speaks during an interview with Reuters in The Hague, Netherlands, Feb. 12, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Piroschka van de Wouw
Karim Khan, the embattled chief prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC), has cast fresh doubt on accusations that Israel committed “genocide” in Gaza, arguing in a new interview that no legal conclusion has yet been reached in the ongoing legal battle.
In a lengthy interview with anti-Israel journalist Medhi Hasan this week, Khan refused to engage in the popularized rhetoric labeling Israel’s military campaign against Hamas terrorists in Gaza as genocidal, even as pressure mounts on the ICC by activists to pursue more sweeping charges against Israeli officials.
When asked directly whether Israel’s conduct amounted to genocide, Khan emphasized the need for sufficient evidence to level charges against Israeli officials and that prosecutors must follow evidence and legal standards rather than political narratives.
“So, you’re not ruling out that there could be a warrant in the future?” Hasan asked.
“Everything is a function of evidence,” Khan responded, arguing that accusing Israel of genocide for political purposes would be “reckless.”
“You’re saying in the past three years there hasn’t been evidence of genocide in Gaza?” Hasan asked, visibly flummoxed.
Khan lamented the “suffering” in Gaza but reaffirmed that the ICC could not proceed in making final judgements about the nature of Israel’s military operations in Gaza without sufficient evidence. He asserted that officials within the ICC are vigorously analyzing the case and that he cannot reveal more about the nature of the investigation.
“So, genocide is not off limits?” Hasan pressed.
“No crime is off limits if the evidence is there,” Khan responded.
Khan has come under fire for making his initial surprise demand for arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, on the same day in May 2024 that he suddenly canceled a long-planned visit to both Gaza and Israel to collect evidence of alleged war crimes. The last-second cancellation reportedly infuriated US and British leaders, as the trip would have offered Israeli leaders a first opportunity to present their position and outline any action they were taking to respond to the war crime allegations.
Nonetheless, Khan’s latest remarks are likely to reverberate through international legal and diplomatic circles, where the genocide accusation has become one of the most contentious aspects of the war between Israel and Hamas. Over the past two years, an array of humanitarian organizations and human rights experts have accused Israel of “genocide” in Gaza. These accusations have been controversial and widely contested, with critics alleging these groups and individuals lack sufficient evidence.
Khan’s comments come as the ICC faces intense scrutiny over its investigation into the conflict. In November, the ICC issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, his former defense minister, Yoav Gallant, and now-deceased Hamas terror leader Ibrahim al-Masri (better known as Mohammed Deif) for alleged war crimes and crimes against humanity in the Gaza conflict. The ICC said there were reasonable grounds to believe Netanyahu and Gallant were criminally responsible for starvation in Gaza and the persecution of Palestinians — charges vehemently denied by Israel, which has provided significant humanitarian aid into the war-torn enclave throughout the war.
US and Israeli officials issued blistering condemnations of the ICC move, decrying the court for drawing a moral equivalence between Israel’s democratically elected leaders and the heads of Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war in Gaza with its massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Israel says it has gone to unprecedented lengths to try and avoid civilian casualties, noting its efforts to evacuate areas before it targets them and to warn residents of impending military operations with leaflets, text messages, and other forms of communication.
Another challenge for Israel is Hamas’s widely recognized military strategy of embedding its terrorists within Gaza’s civilian population and commandeering civilian facilities like hospitals, schools, and mosques to run operations and direct attacks.
The ICC has no jurisdiction over Israel as it is not a signatory to the Rome Statute, which established the court. Other countries including the US have similarly not signed the ICC charter. However, the ICC has asserted jurisdiction by accepting “Palestine” as a signatory in 2015, despite no such state being recognized under international law.
Genocide is among the most difficult crimes to prove under international law because prosecutors must establish specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group.
Hasan, one of the most prominent anti-Israel critics in media, has spent the past two years unleashing an unrelenting barrage of criticism against the Jewish state, repeatedly accusing the Israeli military of pursuing a “genocide” in Gaza.
In the interview, Khan also forcefully denied allegations of sexual misconduct that have engulfed his office in recent months, accusing critics of politicizing the claims amid the ICC’s high-profile investigations into Israel, Russia, and other global conflicts. He dismissed suggestions that his pursuit of Israeli leaders was intended to distract from the allegations against him, saying that he did not have evidence to substantiate the claim.
Khan further alleged that senior Western officials attempted to pressure the ICC over its investigation, including what he described as warnings from prominent American and British political figures about the geopolitical consequences of targeting Israeli officials.
The ICC’s investigation has placed the court at the center of an increasingly bitter international divide over the Gaza war. Khan’s comments won’t settle the debate, but the ICC prosecutor appeared to signal a more cautious legal approach than some of Israel’s fiercest critics have demanded.