Members of the Jewish community are telling Nike to Just Don’t Do It after the footwear company debuted a new advertisement that appears to make light of a Holocaust remembrance slogan.

Red billboards with the text “Never Again” — a phrase commonly tied to the Holocaust — above the message “Until Next Year” were plastered along the London Marathon route on Sunday. Although the advertisement was likely meant to encourage race participants to run through the pain, members of the Jewish community across the world voiced their outrage with Nike’s insensitive phrasing. 

“What, I wondered, has a running race to do with the Holocaust?” a Jewish British journalist, Jonathan Sacerdoti, wrote in an essay for the Spectator in which he describes his shock upon seeing the bright red advertisement. Mr. Sacerdoti, in his scathing rebuke of Nike, notes that in a recent essay he published regarding Holocaust Remembrance Day — which Jews worldwide commemorated just last week — he focused entirely on the promise of “Never again.”

Now, he was seeing that same line used by Nike’s marketing team. “How could a giant like Nike — and all the many people involved between conception and execution — fail to recognize the most solemn and famous usage of those words?” he asked before coming to a more harrowing conclusion: “Or worse, perhaps they did, and decided it did not matter.” 

Regardless of whether the ad was the result of “ignorance, carelessness, or a chilling indifference,” Mr. Sacerdoti called the slogan “insulting and profoundly distasteful.” 

Other members of the Jewish community aired similar frustrations. “To take a slogan about the Holocaust, and use it for entertainment, is simply grotesque,” wrote a popular Orthodox Yeshiva teacher in New Jersey, Rabbi David Schlusselberg. 

“What is this? Is this real? What on earth did Nike mean by this?” asked pro-Israel activist Hillel Fuld, whose American-Israeli brother was killed by a Palestinian terrorist in Israel. 

Nike has not addressed the controversy. The company has not yet responded to the Sun’s request for comment. 

This is not Nike’s first go-around with anti-Semitism. The apparel company was called out in 2014 for a World Cup ad with anti-Jewish overtones, and in 2022 was forced to cut a shoe line with Brooklyn Nets basketball player Kyrie Irving after he refused to disavow his endorsement of an antisemitic film. Yet some Jewish influencers said after this latest incident, they will no longer patronize the footwear company. 

“I will ‘never again’ purchase anything from Nike,” declared Jewish American student, Eyal Yakoby, who sued the University of Pennsylvania for its mishandling of antisemitism. An Israeli journalist, Noa Magid, shared an image of the billboard on X along with a curt message to Nike: “You will never see a dime from me.”