Minnesota teens mock Jews being sent to Auschwitz in TikTok video
Image by Getty Images
(JTA) — Two Minnesota high school students were criticized for sharing a video titled “Me and the boys on the way to camp,” which photoshops them dancing in a Nazi boxcar and happily skipping into Auschwitz, on the video social media platform TikTok.
The video contains humorous music whose lyrics include “Tell everybody I’m on my way.”
In response, the two boys shown in the video — posted by a high school student from Nicollet High School in Nicollet, Minnesota — were assigned a research paper titled “Hitler’s Final Solution at Auschwitz.”
The incident was first reported by TC Jewfolk.
Steve Hunegs, executive director of the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, said in a statement that he is “increasingly concerned about a grave empathy deficit, which enables students and others to weaponize their knowledge about the Holocaust to insult the memory of the victims of the Holocaust, and further traumatize Jews at a time when we are experiencing a demonstrative increase in anti-Semitism.”
Hunegs praised Nicollet Public Schools Superintendent Denny Morrow for the “seriousness” with which he has approached the incident.
Morrow wrote to the students: “Your recent decision to post a video on TikTok depicting the Nazi Auschwitz concentration camp during World War 2 as a playful excursion has crossed several lines of decorum.”
He called it “an affront to our school and community to portray that one could be educated here, and then, choose to demonstrate such a callous disregard for the plight of others.”
TikTok reportedly boasts around 800 million users worldwide.
The post Minnesota high school students mock Jews being sent to Auschwitz in TikTok video appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
A message from our Publisher & CEO Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
We’ve set a goal to raise $325,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.
If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
