Nike, Don’t Just Do It

It’s the week between Yom HaShoah and Yom HaZikaron. The week between remembering our six million murdered, and honoring our fallen soldiers and terror victims. The week when Jews all over the world are already breathing a little heavier, our chests a little tighter, our grief collective and raw.

And in this sacred window of memory and mourning, Nike decided to go full red-and-black and plaster the phrase “Never Again” across their London Marathon ad — stylized in fonts and colors disturbingly reminiscent of Nazi propaganda — followed by the punchline: “Until next year.”

Never Again… Until next year? Really?

This wasn’t just tone-deaf. It was offensive, dangerous, and shockingly stupid — especially coming so soon after Adidas’ tone-deaf SL72 sneaker ad. In mid-2024, Adidas faced significant backlash over an advertising campaign for its SL72 sneakers, which were originally released during the 1972 Munich Olympics — a Games tragically marked by the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes by the Palestinian group Black September. To add fuel to the fire, the campaign featured Palestinian-American model Bella Hadid, known for her outspoken support of the Israel-hating Free Palestine movement. 

That ad already alienated swaths of the Jewish community. Neither ads were accidents. These were deliberate choices made by rooms full of professionals who should have known better. Who probably did know better. Who either didn’t ask a single Jew, or ignored the answers if they did.

..if you’re serious about being anti-racist, inclusive, or justice-driven — that includes Jews. You don’t get to fight for all minorities but one.

Here’s the thing about the phrase “Never Again” — it’s not just words to us. It’s a vow. A collective promise rooted in genocide and blood and the loss of two-thirds of Europe’s Jews. It’s carved into Holocaust memorials, printed on placards at antisemitism protests, and whispered in Hebrew and Yiddish by survivors and descendants alike. It is not a punchline. It is not a tagline. It is not for sale.

And Nike, a global corporation with endless resources, has no excuse for this kind of failure. None. Their apology — a few limp sentences buried online — wasn’t an apology. It was a pathetic corporate shrug. No admission of harm, no commitment to do better, no clear consequence for the people who greenlit it.

Let’s be very clear: this is how antisemitism normalizes. It starts as jokes. Slogans. Style choices. It creeps in quietly, dressed as edginess or irony, and then hides behind branding. That’s how it worked in the 1930s, too. They called it nationalism. They sold it in bold fonts and red-and-black graphics. And then people died.

We’ve seen this playbook before. So have our grandparents. And their grandparents.

Ask a Jew. Use basic f*cking common sense. If you’re a multi-billion-dollar company and you’re about to launch a campaign with historical language tied to genocide and visual choices that scream fascist chic — maybe take a beat. Maybe Google it. Maybe, I don’t know, reach out to one of the hundreds of Jewish consultants, designers, historians, or community leaders out there.

This isn’t cancel culture. This is consequence culture. This is what happens when you play with trauma like it’s a prop.

To every corporation out there: if you’re serious about being anti-racist, inclusive, or justice-driven — that includes Jews. You don’t get to fight for all minorities but one. You don’t get to say “Never Again” — then make it a slogan for a running ad.

Because for us, it was real. It still is. And if history has taught us anything, it’s that we say “Never Again” not as branding — but as a warning.

So don’t ask us to calm down. Don’t gaslight us with corporate-speak apologies. Don’t pretend this was an oversight.

We remember. We see you. And we will not let our trauma be your marketing gimmick.