A Chicago television station made a slight error in the art it selected for a segment on Tuesday noting that sundown marked the beginning of Yom Kippur, the holiest day on the Jewish calendar.
Here is a screen cap of what the Windy City’s quarter million Jews saw if they were tuned in to WGN News:
One Jew who saw the image was magazine editor Marc Karlinsky, who tweeted:
Holy crap, @WGNNews, this is your stock photo for a Jewish holiday?? Nobody thought that’s a bad choice of photo? pic.twitter.com/z7BNuvGybS
— Marc Karlinsky (@MarcKarlinsky) September 23, 2015
For readers on whom the significance is lost, the yellow Star of David emblazoned with the word Jude (German for “Jew”) is the patch Jews were required to wear on their sleeves in German-occupied territories during the Nazi regime up to and including the Holocaust. The network apologized for its mistake a half hour after the broadcast, and the following day issued an apology online that read:
Last night we ran a story to recognize Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. Regrettably, we failed to recognize that the artwork we chose to accompany the story contained an offensive symbol. This was an unfortunate mistake. Ignorance is not an excuse. We are extremely embarrassed and we deeply apologize to our viewers and to the Jewish community for this mistake. We are investigating how this situation occurred, reviewing our in-house policies and making changes in order to avoid such mistakes from happening in the future. Thank you for your understanding. We promise to do better.
As long as we are on the subject of mistakes, I would point out to Katherine Krueger, who ran a version of this story at Talking Points Memo under the heading “Chicago TV Station Wishes Jews A Happy Yom Kippur With Nazi Emblem,” that Jews do not wish each other a “Happy Yom Kippur.” The holiday is set aside for solemn reflection and prayers to the memory of loved ones who have died.
