Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Fast Forward

Mayor Pete Was Totally ‘That Guy’ Posing At Holocaust Memorial

Democratic presidential candidate and South Bend, Indiana mayor Pete Buttigieg was criticized on social media on Sunday after a 2017 photo was resurfaced that showed him posing at Berlin’s Holocaust memorial.

The photo, taken by his husband Chasten in 2016, showed Buttigieg posing among the stones at the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe. Chasten Buttigieg’s caption: “This guy.”

Buttigieg is the Democratic candidate with the most support from American Jews, according to a Forward analysis from July. But he has been criticized by some Jews for promising to put conditions on military aid to Israel.

This kind of thing has happened before. The singer Pink, who is Jewish, was criticized earlier this year for posting Instagram photos of her children running between the stones. And selfies taken there and at the Auschwitz concentration camp in Poland have long been criticized by many Jews upset that visitors don’t appreciate the sites’ gravity.

Indeed, the photo of Buttigieg, and particularly the accompanying caption, attracted criticism on social media:

Aiden Pink is the deputy news editor of the Forward. Contact him at [email protected] or follow him on Twitter @aidenpink

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.