Contact B'nai B'rith

1120 20th Street NW, Suite 300N Washington, D.C. 20036

info@bnaibrith.org

202-857-6600

The Times of Israel wrote a story about the Australia B’nai B’rith Anti Defamation Commission Chairman Dvir Abramovich’s condemnation of social critic Camille Paglia and her labeling of pop star Taylor Swift as a “Nazi Barbie.” “Such obscene and insensitive equations have no place in our cultural discourse and only serve to demean and trivialize the memory and suffering of the victims,” Abramovich said. Click here to read the full story on TimesofIsrael.com

An Australian Jewish group has criticized author Camille Paglia for referring to Taylor Swift as an “obnoxious Nazi Barbie.”

The chairman of the Australian B’nai B’rith Anti-Defamation Commission said Paglia’s comments, which she published in an article for the Hollywood Reporter on Thursday, were “obscene.”
 
“While Paglia is entitled to her views about Taylor Swift’s music and performance, her absurd and offensive comparison of Swift to the Nazis, whose genocidal policies and actions resulted in the systematic persecution and slaughter of six million Jews and millions of others in the Holocaust, betrays an ignorance of what really happened in Hitler’s Third Reich,” said Dvir Abramovich, according to a report in the Sydney Morning Herald on Saturday.
 
“Such obscene and insensitive equations have no place in our cultural discourse and only serve to demean and trivialize the memory and suffering of the victims.”

Paglia, an eminent feminist academic and social critic, made headlines last week with her polarizing essay about Swift, who is among the best-selling American musicians of all time.

“Swift herself should retire that obnoxious Barbie routine of wheeling out friends and celebrities as performance props,” Paglia wrote.

Paglia’s argument focused on Swift’s “girl squads” and the way she often surrounds herself with celebrity friends on and off stage.

“Writing about Swift is a horrific ordeal for me because her twinkly persona is such a scary flashback to the fascist blondes who ruled the social scene during my youth,” she said.