Rapper, now known as Ye, apologises to his family and to the Black community and says he loves Jews, blaming his bipolar disorder for his ‘poor judgment and reckless behaviour’
Kanye West has taken out a full-page advert in the Wall Street Journal apologising for his antisemitic behaviour. “I am not a Nazi or an antisemite,” he wrote. “I love Jewish people.”
In a letter titled “To Those I’ve Hurt”, he attributed his inflammatory actions, including making profoundly offensive statements and selling T-shirts bearing swastikas, to his bipolar-1 disorder, which he said he developed as a result of medical oversight failing to diagnose a frontal-lobe injury sustained in a car crash in 2002.
West – now legally known as Ye – said that as a result of the disorder, he “lost touch with reality”, prompting him to gravitate towards “the most destructive symbol I could find, the swastika”.
Despite a previous apology to the Jewish community in 2023, in February 2025, West started selling the swastika T-shirts, prompting the commerce platform Shopify to take down his webstore. In May, he released a song called Heil Hitler, which sampled a speech by Hitler and praised the Nazi leader. The song was banned in Germany owing to laws against hate speech and extremism, but went viral online. Last week, rightwing influencers including Andrew Tate and Nick Fuentes were filmed making Nazi salutes to the song as it played in a Miami Beach nightclub. West also engaged in Holocaust-denial.
