New York subway ads promoting the Amazon streaming series “The Man in the High Castle” are getting poor reviews from some commuters.
The campaign for the show, set in an alternate reality in which Germany and Japan won World War II and occupy parts of the United States, feature train car seats wrapped in iconography resembling that used by Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.
Ann Toback, executive director of The Workmen’s Circle, a Jewish cultural and social and economic justice organization, told the Gothamist website that the ads were offensive to relatives of those brutalized by the German and Japanese regimes during the war.
“I shouldn’t have to sit staring at a Nazi insignia on my way to work,” Gothamist quoted her as saying.
The issue has blown up a bit on social media, with critics accusing New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority of hypocrisy for allowing the show promotions while previously rejecting ads “pro-Israel, anti-jihad” ads proposed by Pamela Geller’s American Freedom Defense Initiative, ads promoting underwear for menstruating women and those agitating on behalf of an increase in the minimum wage.
But Metropolitan Transit Authority spokesman Kevin Ortiz said that as of Tuesday morning, the agency had received one complaint about the promotion — which is running on one train and also includes 260 posters in stations.
They feature a refashioned American flag featuring not the swastika but Nazi Germany’s imperial eagle symbol, as well as symbols incorporating elements of the Japanese rising sun.
Ortiz said the ads don’t violate the agency’s neutrality standards and so had to be allowed.
“Unlike CNN, the MTA is a government agency and can’t accept or reject ads based on how we feel about them,” he said in an email.
Among other things, the standards approved in April ban political and false or misleading ads, sexually oriented material, ads that promote smoking, “material the display of which the MTA reasonably foresees would imminently incite or provoke violence” and any ad that “demeans or disparages an individual or group of individuals.”
The campaign is scheduled to end December 14, according to Ortiz.