Grazia magazine fired its newly-appointed ‘diversity champion’ for posting anti-Semitic tweets and joking about the Auschwitz gas chambers.
By Yakir Benzion, United With Israel
The Italian weekly women’s magazine Grazia magazine fired the “diversity champion” of its UK English edition for posting vile anti-Semitic comments on Twitter, the Daily Mirror reported Sunday.
Author and model Stephanie Yeboah, 31, works out of London, England and is known for being a plus-size advocate for body positive image and diversity, but she got herself into hot water for posting some downright ugly comments about Jews.
Her comments about the Holocaust were shocking.
“Every Jew has an attic but not every attic has Jews,” one social media posting said, but there worst comments were about the Auschwitz death camp.
“AUSCHWITZ Gas Chamber Music LMAO SMH (laughing my a** off, shaking my head),” Yeboah tweeted.
“There have been bigger and more horrific genocides. They happened to brown people, though, so I guess it doesn’t matter, huh?” Yeboah wrote earlier this year after commemorations of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp.
When the offending Twitter posts were published by Private Eye magazine last week, Yeboah came out with an apology, but she had already shot her magazine career in the foot.
“We will continue to support her as she further educates herself in collaboration with the Jewish community. Grazia continues to champion diversity and inclusion and stands firmly against anti-Semitism,” the magazine’s German-owned publisher, Bauer Media, said in a statement after she was fired.
Yeboah is known to be a supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement in London, and said recently her goal was to “teach women how to live in their truth and not be bound by the shackles of this very patriarchal, capitalist society that thrives on white supremacy.”
However, Yeboah makes an undisclosed amount of money as a model for top brands who push their lines to her 200,000 Instagram followers, the Mirror reported.
Yeboah admitted in her apology that she was “very ignorant” about the Jewish community and took quotes from the media and used them.
“To plead ignorance is no excuse, I should have known better than to make these kinds of comments about events which remain a source of unimaginable trauma for the Jewish community,” Yeboah wrote.
She admitted her Auschwitz comment “ended up diminishing the seriousness of the tragedies that the Jewish community have faced.”
One major retailer said it was reviewing whether or not to continue working with Yeboah, while several others had not yet commented on the issue.