Sneaker maker Nike has apologized for using the phrase “Never Again” in a billboard placed along the route of Sunday’s London Marathon.
Critics of the billboard — featuring a red background and large black letters reading “Never Again. Until Next Year” — lambasted the company for using a phrase often used by Jews and others as a reminder to heed the lessons of the Holocaust.
“The idea that @Nike would make light of the holocaust using Hitler-red imagery in a post-October 7th world is stunning,” the activist Jewish investor Bill Ackman wrote on X.
“I don’t believe for a second there was any ill malice, but please understand the concern with using the words ‘Never Again,’ what they represent and why this was in poor taste,” tweeted Arsen Ostrovsky, an attorney and pro-Israel activist.
In its apology, obtained by the Forward, Nike said the temporary billboard was part of a campaign to “inspire runners and the copy was based on common phrases used by runners.” The phrase was meant to echo runners who often swear off long races immediately after completing one, only to return for another round later.
“We did not mean any harm and apologize for any we caused,” the company said.
Nike is not the first entity to court controversy for using an otherwise common term that at least since the 1960s has been associated with calls to prevent another Holocaust. In 2018, survivors of the deadly school shooting in Parkland, Florida, took the hashtag “#NeverAgain” to promote their national gun control campaign. The phrase has also been used in protests against Donald Trump’s Muslim ban during his first term, in remembrance of Japanese internment during World War II and recalling the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.
In some of those cases, the adopters were at least directly or indirectly referencing the Holocaust and using “never again” as an injunction not to repeat the kinds of actions that lead to intolerance and genocide.
Writing in the conservative British magazine The Spectator, the columnist Jonathan Sacerdoti said he was stunned when he first saw the billboard in London.
“It would have taken just one set of discerning eyes, one solitary voice, one ‘sensitivity reader’ to raise a gentle objection,” wrote Sacerdoti, whose column last week focused on Holocaust remembrance. “Did not a single Jew suggest that it might be inappropriate? Did not a single non-Jew, with a grasp of history or an awareness of today’s climate, flag it? If not, why not? Was this ignorance, carelessness, or a chilling indifference? Either way, the result is insulting and profoundly distasteful.”
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