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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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Candace Owens and the Dangerous Myth of ‘Talmudic Jews’
Candace Owens speaks at CPAC on March 2, 2023. Photo: Lev Radin via Reuters Connect
In a recent viral video responding to Ben Shapiro’s accurate description of her long-standing pattern of spreading baseless fear and animus, Candace Owens urged her audience to “wake up” about Jews, Judaism, and what she called “Talmudic Jews.”
As part of that exhortation, she recommended a book titled The Talmudic Jew, presenting it not as a historical artifact, but as a suppressed key to understanding not only Shapiro, but Jewish behavior and morality writ large.
This is not a new genre of argument. It is one of the oldest weapons in the antisemitic arsenal.
Owens’ framing follows a familiar script: for those predisposed to view Jews as powerful, alien, or suspect, the explanation is presumed to lie hidden in Jewish religious texts.
The Talmud, in this telling, is not a complex legal and ethical corpus but a secret code — one that allegedly explains Jewish behavior and justifies suspicion toward Jews as a group. Owens’ invitation for non-Jews to “wake up” is actually an invitation to stop seeing Jews as human beings — let alone as neighbors or fellow citizens — and to begin seeing them as something else entirely: a threat.
In the same video, Owens widens the accusation. She urges viewers to believe that Jews are behind conflicts pitting “Christian against Christian” and “Christians against Muslims” around the world — an echo of a medieval antisemitic fantasy that casts Jews as the hidden engineers of war and civilizational collapse. This trope, documented for centuries, has no basis in history. Its function is not explanation but absolution: it diverts responsibility away from actual political, religious, and imperial actors, and deposits it onto a convenient, ever-available scapegoat.
Owens then extends this logic further, telling Black audiences that “white people” were not responsible for the Transatlantic slave trade — or slavery more broadly — and that Jews were. This claim is not merely false; it is grotesque.
The Transatlantic slave trade was a European enterprise, driven by explicitly European Christian empires — British, Dutch, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and later American — whose colonial economies depended on enslaved labor. Likewise, the vast Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades were driven primarily by Arab-Muslim empires and traders over many centuries. Between roughly the 7th and 19th centuries, European and Arab imperial systems conquered and controlled much of the known world — and they were the principal engines of slavery wherever it was practiced. Jews, overwhelmingly a tiny, marginalized minority without imperial power, were not — and could not have been — the drivers of these systems.
The Talmudic Jew, the book Owens cites approvingly as the purported “key” to understanding Jews, was written by August Rohling, an Austrian, German-language Catholic theologian of the late 19th century whose work relied on mistranslations, selective quotation, and outright fabrication. Rohling did not attempt to understand rabbinic Judaism. His aim was polemical: to portray Judaism as inherently immoral and hostile toward non-Jews, and to argue that Jewish emancipation in Western Europe had been a catastrophic mistake.
Rohling’s book was discredited even in his own time. Contemporary scholars demonstrated that he mistranslated Hebrew and Aramaic texts, stripped legal debates of context, treated marginal opinions as binding doctrine, and in some cases invented quotations outright. Yet the book endured because it served a purpose: it gave readers permission to see Jews not merely as wrong, but as inherently dangerous.
That durability proved deadly. In the 20th century, Rohling’s arguments were revived and repurposed by Nazi ideologues, who cited anti-Talmud literature like The Talmudic Jew as supposed evidence that Jewish tradition itself justified exclusion, persecution, and annihilation. The book did not cause the Holocaust — but it helped supply the intellectual scaffolding that made genocide conceivable.
Owens’ amplification of Rohling is therefore not incidental. It places her squarely within a long and infamous lineage of antisemitic accusations that treat Jews as the hidden hand behind social conflict, moral decay, and historical evil.
When Owens speaks of “Talmudic Jews,” she is not describing a religious practice. She is issuing an indictment: that Jews are governed by a hidden code that renders them morally alien and hostile to the societies in which they live. That indictment depends on a fundamental misrepresentation of the Talmud itself.
The Talmud is not a single book or a secret code. It is a sprawling legal record spanning centuries, comprising 63 tractates and more than 2,700 folio pages, dense with debate, disagreement, and layered interpretation. It preserves arguments rather than decrees, questions rather than answers, and features minority opinions alongside majority rulings. To lift a line from this corpus and present it as “what Jews believe” is not scholarship. It is distortion.
That distortion is not accidental. It is the engine of a genre designed to turn Jewish complexity into Jewish hate.
Candace Owens presents herself as a truth-teller urging her audience to “wake up.” What she is really doing is attempting to mainstream a discredited and dangerous form of antisemitic propaganda — one that history has already tested and found catastrophic. When such claims are broadcast by someone with her reach and influence, they do not merely misinform. They habituate. They train audiences to see Jews as a civilizational menace. And once a people are cast as a menace, cruelty is easily rebranded as responsibility — and even as self-defense.
Terrible moments in history do not repeat themselves automatically. They are repeated when influential figures persuade their followers that ancient libels are newly discovered truths.
Micha Danzig is an attorney, former IDF soldier, and former NYPD officer. He writes widely on Israel, Zionism, antisemitism, and Jewish history. He serves on the board of Herut North America.
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We Need Elie Wiesel’s ‘Against Despair’ Right Now
The late Professor Elie Wiesel, speaking at the Algemeiner’s 40th anniversary gala, on April 22, 2013. Photo: Sarah Rogers / Algemeiner.
As antisemitism is again surging across the world, it can feel frightening and isolating to be Jewish.
The familiar question returns: how do we hold on to our identity and our pride, when the world seems intent on testing both?
Every generation of Jews has faced its own test of endurance. Ours is unfolding now, as antisemitism again plagues our streets, our campuses, and our interpersonal relationships. Many Jews feel vulnerable, isolated, and unsure how to respond.
In 1973, shortly after the Yom Kippur War, Elie Wiesel answered that question in a speech at the United Jewish Appeal’s National Conference.
Wiesel addressed a Jewish community grappling with fear and uncertainty, reeling from the surprise attack that cost the lives of more than 2,500 Israelis. Decades later, that speech, titled Against Despair, offers a roadmap for reclaiming our pride by drawing strength from our history and traditions.
Against Despair begins with a striking observation about our people: “To me, the essence of Jewish history is mystical and not rational. From the strictly rational viewpoint, we should have long ago yielded to the pressures and laws of the enemy … The mystery of our survival is matched only by our will to survive in a society embarrassed and annoyed by our presence.”
It is a reminder that Jewish endurance stems from the countless generations of Jews who chose courage over surrender. We survive because our history, culture, and traditions carry us forward in a world that has too often attempted to eliminate all three.
As he continues, Wiesel reminds us that no Jewish person is ever truly alone. He says, “When Jews are sad in Jerusalem, Jews everywhere reflect their sadness … An assault on Jews anywhere means an attempt to humiliate Jews everywhere.”
The individual may struggle, but we are connected across time and space. Facing adversity is not only about personal resilience — it is about our collective responsibility to safeguard the moral center of our people.
Professor Wiesel shows us how to confront despair head-on. He teaches that surviving and resisting antisemitic persecution while remaining Jewish is more than a physical phenomenon; it’s an existential one that has sustained Judaism across millennia, a way to honor all those who came before. He reminds us that choosing life is an active endeavor that takes precedence over mourning. Jewish joy and Jewish education are themselves acts of resistance.
“Faced with despair,” said Wiesel, “the most difficult but most beautiful [option] of all [is] to face the human condition and do so as a Jew … We shall resist them in our own Jewish way, which means that we will not allow them to tell us when to be joyous and when to mourn, when to sing and when to be silent.”
This is the heart of Wiesel’s thesis: Jewish identity is itself a moral stance. To live as a Jew is to face life, history, and human cruelty with awareness, integrity, and hope. Even when the world seems hostile, even when antisemitism threatens, Wiesel shows us that we are called to endure, to remember, and to celebrate Jewish life with pride.
Reading Against Despair is a practical guide for living proudly and resiliently in a difficult world. Ultimately, Wiesel asserts that despair is not an option. Jewish survival has always required vigilance, courage, and the refusal to let hatred define us.
“For this is the essence of being Jewish; never to give up — never to yield to despair.”
Every Jewish person should read Against Despair. Not simply to reflect on the past, but to understand how Jewish history, values, and traditions offer strength for the present. For Professor Wiesel, hope is not something one passively receives. Instead, it is a necessary asset we must create for ourselves, a personal duty we owe to our forebears and our children alike.
Against Despair is more than a speech; it is a call to action. It shows us how to meet the modern expressions of age-old antisemitism with the ideas that sustained Wiesel and other Survivors in the darkest of times.
Our very existence is proof that Jewish hope is not naive. It is our essence and our inheritance. We must follow Wiesel’s example by reminding ourselves and the world of how we’ve endured for millennia: taking pride in our Jewishness and fighting to ensure that our descendants have the opportunity to do the same.
Mike Igel is the Chair of The Florida Holocaust Museum’s Wiesel Archive & Legacy Council.
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If Israel Wants to Increase Immigration, It Should Take These Steps
New olim disembark at Tel Aviv’s Ben Gurion Airport on the first charter aliyah flight after he Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas attacks, arriving to begin new lives in Israel. Photo: The Algemeiner
Gideon Sa’ar, Israel’s Minister of Foreign Affairs, recently made an impassioned plea for Jews to “come home” in light of surging antisemitism around the globe, including the Bondi Beach massacre in Australia.
But antisemitism alone won’t trigger a mass exodus of Jews to Israel — at least not yet. If Israeli leaders really want to persuade large numbers of Jews, especially Jews in the West, to immigrate to Israel, they must make some fundamental changes to the country. Right now, there are too many aspects of life in Israel that make it unattractive to Western Jews.
For instance, the whole process of immigrating to Israel can be quite daunting, especially if Israeli authorities question your Jewishness.
While Israel’s Law of Return grants any Jew the right to come to the country as an “oleh” (immigrant), this isn’t what always happens in practice, particularly when radical rabbis get involved. Thus, a prospective oleh is often required to produce some sort of proof, such as a letter from a local rabbi, attesting to their religious involvement in the Jewish community, when all they should be legally required to produce is proof of their Jewish ethnicity.
Worse still, Israel doesn’t recognize many non-Orthodox streams of Judaism, which is extremely problematic considering that most Jews in the West are not Orthodox. In short, many Jews in the West won’t immigrate to Israel if the state doesn’t recognize them as Jews.
Many Western Jews who are secular also won’t want to live in a country where there’s no public transportation on Saturdays or other Jewish holidays and no civil marriage or divorce. Hence, if Israel’s leaders are intent on persuading Jews in the West to immigrate to the Jewish State, they should reform some of these onerous religious restrictions.
Another major impediment to persuading Jews in the West to “come home” is Israel’s living standards. Right now, most Jews in the West enjoy a better standard of living than Israel can offer. To improve Israel’s standard of living, the Bank of Israel, OECD, and Israel’s Ministry of Finance have made a number of recommendations, including increasing labor productivity by reducing regulation and encouraging more Haredi men and Arab Israelis to participate in the workforce.
One major problem with Israel’s living standards is the high cost of living, which is among the highest in the OECD group of countries. Few Jews in the Diaspora will want to immigrate to Israel if they know the country’s cost of living is so absurdly high. The solution advocated by the OECD, former Competition Authority heads, and social protest movements is increasing competition in the economy and reducing import barriers. Israelis pay high prices for many goods, especially food products, due to the dominance of large conglomerates and monopolies, as well as restrictions on imports.
Housing is also very expensive in Israel. In fact, housing costs are the single largest drag on household living standards in the country. To alleviate this, the Bank of Israel, State Comptroller, and housing task forces have recommended measures such as releasing more state land faster for residential development and speeding up the country’s planning and permitting process, which is among the slowest in the OECD.
Over the last few years, the government has made some reforms to lower the cost of living and raise living standards, but there’s still much more to be done. Change is slow due to many factors, including the nature of Israel’s fractured party politics and the difficulty of creating and maintaining coalition governments, as well as resistance to reform by powerful business interests. Furthermore, Israel’s immense security challenges consume budgetary resources, political attention, and bureaucratic capabilities.
Indeed, perhaps the biggest factor discouraging Jews in the West from immigrating to Israel is the security situation. After all, many Jews would be hesitant to leave the West, where the prospect of war is almost zero, and go live in Israel, a country surrounded by bloodthirsty enemies determined to wipe it off the map. Unfortunately, Israel’s ability to control its security situation is limited, because peace is simply not possible if Israel’s enemies don’t want it.