Kanye West bought a Super Bowl ad. His product? A swastika T-shirt.
The T-shirt, which comes in three sizes and sells for $20, is the latest in a long series of blatantly antisemitic acts and statements by Ye
Kanye West at Milk Studios for an Adidas + KANYE WEST partnership announcement on June 28, 2016 in Hollywood, California. (Jonathan Leibson/Getty Images for ADIDAS)
(JTA) — Among the star-studded Super Bowl ads that viewers saw during Sunday’s game was an awkward 30-second spot, filmed vertically on an iPhone, in which the rapper Ye talks about his new teeth and instructs the audience to go to Yeezy.com.
As of the morning after the game, when they visited the site, shoppers could find exactly one item for sale: a white T-shirt emblazoned with a swastika.
The T-shirt, which comes in three sizes and sells for $20, is the latest in a long series of blatantly antisemitic acts and statements by Ye, formerly known as Kanye West. The ad aired on some local Super Bowl broadcasts just days after Ye embarked on his latest antisemitic rant on the social network X, declaring his dislike for Jews, praising Adolf Hitler and calling himself a Nazi. On Sunday night, he announced he was quitting the platform.
The T-shirt is labeled “HH-01,” using a common neo-Nazi shorthand for “Heil Hitler.”
Yeezy, West’s fashion label, was one of the more prominent casualties of his initial stream of antisemitic remarks in the fall of 2022. Following public backlash, the sportswear company Adidas dropped its $2 billion-a-year partnership with Yeezy.
In Sunday’s ad, Ye somewhat haltingly tries to promote the brand.
“What’s up, guys? I just spent like all the money for the commercial, um, on these new teeth,” Ye says in the ad, wearing a blue hoodie and displaying his teeth. “So, once again I had to shoot it on the iPhone. Um, um, um, go to Yeezy.com.”
It’s our birthday and we’re still celebrating!
We hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, we’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s independent Jewish news.
This week we celebrate 129 years of the Forward. We’re proud of our origins as a Yiddish print publication serving Jewish immigrants. And we’re just as proud of what we’ve become today: A trusted source of Jewish news and opinion, available digitally to anyone in the world without paywalls or subscriptions.
We’ve helped five generations of American Jews make sense of the news and the world around them — and we aren’t slowing down any time soon.
As a nonprofit newsroom, reader donations make it possible for us to do this work. Support independent, agenda-free Jewish journalism and our board will match your gift in honor of our birthday!
Support our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.
