By Allie Cohen
Amongst all of the scary costumes and movies to see this Halloween, nothing paled close in comparison to the fear I felt after hearing what happened on Sunday, October 31, 2021. Members of the Tau Kappa Epsilon fraternity house came back to hot sauce smeared across walls and cabinets of the house, smoke detectors ripped out of the ceiling and blue detergent poured over a copy of a Torah. Following this, GW Chabad’s Rabbi Yudi Steiner received an anti-semitic email from a person under the pseudonym of Lisa Brewer that commended the events that took place at the fraternity.
While the above is disheartening, antisemitism is not a foreign concept to the GW community. Just two years prior, a GW student was recorded on a Snapchat video to another student that “we’re gonna [expletive] bomb Israel, bro.” The hate does not stop there. A year before that, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), reported that nearly 60 percent of hate crime attacks were targeted against Jews and Jewish institutions in the US. Undeniably, antisemitism is alive and well. Yet the dimensions and ways that it pervades GW, the US, and the world at large remain murky; one of them being the fashion industry.
Throughout history, the fashion industry has had a series of raging antisemites. For starters, fashion icon Coco Chanel was outed as a German spy in 1944, and British designer John Galliano was fined in France for verbally abusing Jewish and Asian people. As time has shown again, history likes to repeat itself. Today, Zara is one of the top contributors to preserving this hate in the fashion industry. Below is a closer look at their most explicit and contentious antisemitic clothing.
The Green Swastika Bag
In 2007, a purse found in Zara’s stores incorporated four green swastikas. Zara claimed that the bag came from an external supplier and the symbol had not been visible when it was selected. Yet, considering that Zara belongs to Inditex, the world’s biggest fashion group, I highly doubt that not one single person saw the swastikas. There has been much debate about whether the swastika can be reincorporated into the mainstream due to its prevalence in Hindu and Buddhist culture as a symbol of peace dating back to ancient history way before the Nazis; but in Zara’s case, this was blatantly anti-semitic.
To provide a further understanding of why this is anti-semitic, the owner of Inditex, who is the parent company of Zara, is Roman Catholic, not Buddhist or Hindu. Although the supplier of the bag was Indian, because it was being sold by a brand that has no association with Hinduism or Buddhism, the Western meaning of the symbol was displayed in the context of Zara distributing the bag. Therefore, any excuse to state that the swastika was either not seen, or used as a Hindu or Buddhist symbol is invalid.
The *Yellow Star* in the Striped Pajamas
For anyone able to stomach watching a movie about the Holocaust, The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is probably one of the first films that come to mind. The movie is titled after the uniforms the Jews and the other people in the concentration camps – Roma, gay people, the disabled, anyone who opposed the Nazis, amongst other “undesirable people” – were forced to wear. Additionally, Jews wore a yellow Star of David, so the Nazis could identify who was Jewish. While neither the uniform nor the yellow star ever should have had a place in history, it especially doesn’t belong in 2014. Yet Zara managed to appropriate the attire for fashion. Specifically, across Zara’s stores in various countries, Zara sold pajamas that featured white and blue stripes and a six-pointed yellow star on the front. To make matters worse, a spokesperson for Zara’s parent company Inditex stated that the garment aimed to resemble a sheriff in classic Western films. No matter what it was meant to represent, it is shocking that no one on Zara’s team made the connection between the six-pointed yellow star and striped shirt. Even if it wasn’t Zara’s intention, the same mistake can only be made so many times.
The Distressed Pepe the Frog Skirt
In 2017, Zara received backlash from customers after offering a skirt with embroidered frogs that looked eerily similar to Pepe the Frog. While the cartoon frog was once harmless, Pepe the Frog has developed into a symbol of both racism and antisemitism. Specifically, Pepe the Frog, aka sad frog, was first introduced as a cartoon on the in-line Boy’s Club in 2005. Following its introduction, alt-right groups such as 4chan and 8chan reappropriated the frog into a symbol of hate. Pepe’s significance as a hate symbol was amplified in 2016, following Trump’s election. Pepe also made its appearance at the Capitol Riot, where rioters, many if not all are part of extremist groups, came with masks that displayed the frog. While the ADL has disclosed that context does shape the meaning of Pepe, given the timing that Pepe has been recently used as an extremist symbol, the timing of selling clothing with Pepe was extremely insensitive.
While Pepe and the swastika still garner much debate about their meaning, and subsequently, whether they are anti-semitic, Zara is, at best, ignorant to the part they’re playing in continuing to spread hurtful, antisemitic symbols. In turn, Zara, and the fashion industry, have become another catalyst that allows antisemitism to grow and spread, further indirectly and directly driving others to commit hateful acts, such as what we saw at the Tau Kappa Epsilon House. Going forward, we must combat antisemitism by addressing the areas of society that have created a narrative in which antisemitism is enabled, and in some ways, encouraged; it starts with Zara.
