Director of Olympic opening ceremony fired for past jokes about the Holocaust

The Tokyo Olympics logo.
(Image credit: Lintao Zhang/Getty Images)

The Tokyo Olympic organizing committee announced on Thursday that it has fired the director of the opening ceremony, Kentaro Kobayashi, after jokes he made about the Holocaust resurfaced.

Kobayashi is a comedian, and Japanese media is reporting that in 1998, he wrote a script that made light of the genocide, which included the line, "Let's play Holocaust." This is unacceptable, Rabbi Abraham Cooper of the Simon Wiesenthal Center said in a statement, and "any association of this person to the Tokyo Olympics would insult the memory of six million Jews and make a cruel mockery of the Paralympics."

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Catherine Garcia, The Week US

Catherine Garcia is night editor for TheWeek.com. Her writing and reporting has appeared in Entertainment Weekly and EW.com, The New York Times, The Book of Jezebel, and other publications. A Southern California native, Catherine is a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.