Kanye West seen in Los Angeles, May 13, 2023. (MEGA/GC Images)

(JTA) — Shortly after he aired a Super Bowl commercial for a website selling a swastika T-shirt, and two days after posting an antisemitic rant on X, the rapper Ye announced that he was quitting the platform.

One week later he was back — and tweeting about Jews again.

“I am not under Jewish control anymore,” he wrote on Monday. “In war you take a couple loses [sic].”

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He also wrote, “There’s [a] lot of Jewish people I know and love and still work with.”

By Tuesday morning, all the tweets had been deleted. But in the stream of all-caps posts the previous day, Ye, formerly known as Kanye West, defended selling white shirts featuring a black swastika on his website and wrote that “a few specific Jews not the entire race for crying out loud but a few specific Jews came together and did everything they could to destroy me.” He added that he was “not playing victim just refreshing everyones memory.”

He also wrote, after the e-commerce company Shopify stopped working with his site to sell the swastika shirt, that no one else had agreed to sell it. He also defended the symbol — widely recognized in the Western world as the emblem of the Nazis — because it has historically been a feature of Indian and other Asian religions. He name-checked Harvey Finkelstein, who helms Shopify and is descended from Holocaust survivors.

He said he’s been thinking of selling the shirts for eight years — far predating his first stream of public antisemitic comments in late 2022.

“I remember going to Japan and gasping when I saw what is known as the swastika on clothing,” he wrote in all-caps. “It felt illegal to even look at it thats how I had been programmed.”

He added, “I then found out that swastika had many different meanings and many different names.”

Ye has been one of the most vocal and prominent purveyors of antisemitic invective since October 2022, and less than two weeks ago called himself a Nazi. He and his wife, Bianca Censori, are reportedly on the verge of divorce.

At present, his online store displays a handwritten message saying that it’s “coming soon,” followed by a heart symbol.

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