Earlier this month, Macklemore walked onto the stage at MetLife Stadium in a keffiyeh, told 80,000 people to say “Free Palestine,” accused Israel of apartheid and genocide, and performed “Hind’s Hall” while images from Gaza played on the screens behind him. Within roughly a week he was off Ed Sheeran’s tour. Robert Kraft confirmed that Macklemore had been barred from Gillette Stadium, pointing to those performances and to a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery. The rapper has since claimed that stadium owners gave Sheeran an ultimatum.
You can argue about whether that was the right call. Reasonable people are arguing about it right now, and the free speech objections are not frivolous. But set the merits aside and look only at the clock. A private citizen with a name on a building reviewed a set of facts, concluded a line had been crossed, and acted in days.
Now travel about 90 miles south, to a row house in South Philadelphia.
There sits the Lemkin Institute for Genocide Prevention, a Pennsylvania 501(c)(3) that took the name of Raphael Lemkin, the Polish Jewish jurist who coined the word “genocide,” lost 49 members of his family to the Nazis, drafted the framework that became the 1948 Genocide Convention, and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize 10 times. The institute has no affiliation with the Lemkin family. No authorization. No relationship of any kind. It simply took the name, and it has spent the years since Oct. 7 aiming Lemkin’s word at the Jewish state, while raising money and selling branded merchandise under that name.
When Joseph Lemkin, a cousin of Raphael Lemkin and president of the Jewish Bar Association, asked the institute to stop, it refused. In October 2025 it publicly labeled the family “genocide deniers,” and on the same day launched an emergency fundraising appeal off the dispute. The institute denies wrongdoing, calls the campaign politically motivated, and says other Lemkin relatives support its work.
So the family went to the state. In April, Joseph Lemkin, the European Jewish Association chaired by Rabbi Menachem Margolin, and counsel Alan Milstein and Jeffrey Resnick of Sherman Silverstein filed a 30-page memorandum with Gov. Josh Shapiro’s (D-PA) office and the Pennsylvania Bureau of Corporations and Charitable Organizations. More than 110 Holocaust and genocide scholars, organized by Dr. Rafael Medoff of the Wyman Institute, signed a letter backing them. In June, 100 individually verified letters went to the governor, Attorney General Dave Sunday, the Justice Department, the IRS, and Pennsylvania’s congressional delegation. Israel’s diaspora affairs minister wrote to Shapiro directly, asking that the matter move without unnecessary delay. In July, the state opened an inquiry, correctly scoped to the use of the name and compliance with charitable solicitation law rather than to anyone’s opinions.
It is now September. Sheeran’s tour resumes Friday in Philadelphia. The Lemkin Institute will still be operating under a Holocaust survivor’s name, a few miles away, when the lights go up.
Understand how modest the request is. Nobody has asked the institute to retract a position or soften a word. Not one sentence of its output. It can publish every opinion it holds about Israel tomorrow, forever, at any volume, under any name it invents. The family is asking for the name back. That is the entire ask, and it is the kind of ask that state charity regulators resolve as a matter of routine when the registrant is not politically fashionable.
Governor, you know this instinctively. You would not tolerate the Shapiro Institute for MAGA for a single business day. Not one. Your lawyers would be filing before lunch, and nobody in Harrisburg would call that censorship, because it would not be censorship. It would be a man declining to have his name conscripted into a cause he finds abhorrent. A family that buried 49 people in the Shoah is entitled to the same courtesy under the same statutes. You, of all people, understand what it is to have the Jewish part of your life turned into a target.
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What this case needs is what the Macklemore case got: someone with standing who decides the delay itself has become the story. Kraft did not wait for a commission. He read the file and picked up the phone.
The Lemkin family has spent a year filing. They should not need a billionaire to be heard. But if that is what it takes, then somebody with Kraft’s spine should call Harrisburg this week and say the obvious out loud. This is not acceptable. It should not still be happening.
Warren H. Cohn is CEO of RocketshipPR and a contributing columnist at JNS.