When American rapper Macklemore took the stage as Ed Sheeran’s opening act at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey on September 4 and 5, he used the platform to make a case for Palestinian liberation before audiences estimated at roughly 80,000. He performed “Hind’s Hall”—a protest song named for Hind Rajab, a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed in Gaza in 2024 and inspired by Columbia University students who occupied and renamed a campus building in her honor—and addressed Jewish audience members directly: “To all of my Jewish brothers and sisters: Criticism of Israel, criticism of apartheid, being against genocide in no way is a criticism of you.”
The New England Patriots own Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Massachusetts, where Sheeran was scheduled to play September 25 and 26. Patriots owner Robert Kraft announced on September 14 that Macklemore would not appear at those dates, despite the milquetoast nature of the rapper’s criticism of Israel. Kraft’s statement read: “Based on Macklemore’s recent actions, material shared from the stage during Ed Sheeran’s shows in New Jersey, and a broader history of antisemitic rhetoric and imagery that we believe has been deeply offensive and hurtful to the Jewish community, we determined that his participation in the September 25th and 26th concerts at Gillette Stadium would cross that line.”
Messina Touring Group then announced that multiple venues had notified the company they would not host remaining shows with Macklemore on the bill, ending his participation in the American leg of the tour. Macklemore alleged that Kraft rounded up other stadium owners and handed Sheeran an ultimatum: remove Macklemore or lose the venues. Kraft did not publicly address that allegation. Reporting by the Wall Street Journal and TMZ identified several owners who backed Kraft, including Carolina Panthers owner David Tepper, Atlanta Falcons owner Arthur Blank, and Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie—all who are of Jewish extraction.
The man who allegedly orchestrated all this came from money and built far more of it. Born in 1941 to an observant Jewish family in Brookline, Massachusetts, Kraft attended Columbia University and earned an MBA from Harvard Business School in 1965 before starting his career at his father-in-law’s packaging company, Rand-Whitney Group. He later founded International Forest Products in 1972, growing both companies into one of the largest privately held paper and packaging operations in the United States. In 1998 he brought those holdings together under the Kraft Group, a diversified private holding company that today includes real estate, sports franchises, and a private equity portfolio alongside the original paper businesses.
His most consequential business maneuver began in 1988, when he bought the Patriots’ stadium out of bankruptcy for $22 million—a property most considered nearly worthless at the time. Crucially, the sale included the team’s existing lease on the stadium, which ran through 2001. That lease gave him decisive leverage when St. Louis businessman James Orthwein, who had bought the Patriots in 1992 intending to relocate them as the St. Louis Stallions, offered Kraft $75 million to buy out the remaining years and clear the way for the move. Kraft turned down the offer and instead made a bid for the team itself. On January 21, 1994, he took control of the Patriots for more than $172 million, the highest price ever paid for an NFL franchise at the time. The Patriots have since won 6 Super Bowls under his ownership.
Kraft has paired that sports career with prominent Jewish communal philanthropy and deep financial support for Israel. The Genesis Prize Foundation—whose annual $1 million award has been called the “Jewish Nobel”—named him its 2019 laureate. He directed the prize money toward groups fighting antisemitism and what the foundation described as efforts to delegitimize Israel, through a grants competition called “Speak Out for Israel.”
After receiving the award, Kraft announced a $20 million personal commitment to establish the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, which renamed itself the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate in 2025. The Patriots say Kraft has committed $150 million to the organization since its founding. The alliance presents itself as a broad-based effort against antisemitism, though its founding mission explicitly included opposition to the Palestinian-led Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement and what Kraft described as efforts to undermine Israel.
The group’s Command Center, located at Gillette Stadium, says it monitors more than 500 million public social media posts each day concerning antisemitism, Judaism, and Israel. The organization uses that data to supply what it calls actionable intelligence to university and community leaders about online conversations. The Harvard Crimson reported in October 2026 that Harvard has met with Blue Square staff and benefited from what university officials called “invaluable” information from the platform, raising questions about where monitoring ends and surveillance of faculty and students begins.
Like many in the Jewish community, Kraft has been a zealous advocate of “criminal justice reform”—a euphemistic label for policies that allow for non-White criminals to get back out on the streets and start terrorizing law-abiding people. Kraft also co-founded REFORM Alliance in January 2019 alongside rapper Meek Mill, Jay-Z, Fanatics CEO Michael Rubin, and others, after Meek Mill was reincarcerated for a technical parole violation. The organization pushes for legislation to shorten probation and parole terms. Separately, the Kraft Family/Patriots Player Collaborative Fund gave $1 million to local equity organizations in 2020 in 10 monthly installments of $100,000 each, chosen in collaboration with Patriots players. One of those grants went to the Rian Immigrant Center, which provides legal, educational, and support services for immigrant and refugee families.
His political contributions span party lines. FEC filings show the Kraft Group donated $1 million to AIPAC’s United Democracy Project super PAC in July 2022. The Kraft Group also gave $1 million to Donald Trump’s 2017 inaugural committee via its holding company, one of several NFL owners to donate at that level.
Kraft has faced scrutiny unrelated to his political advocacy. Florida prosecutors charged him in February 2019 with 2 misdemeanor solicitation counts at the Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter. A state appeals court ruled that police had violated the rights of Kraft and other defendants by secretly installing video cameras inside the spa, and suppressed the recordings. Prosecutors declined to appeal that ruling and dropped the case in September 2020, saying the video was the evidence linking him to the charges. He was never convicted.
In April 2024, as pro-Palestinian encampment protests entered their sixth day on campus, Kraft announced through the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism that he was withdrawing support from Columbia—a school where he had previously donated millions, funded the Kraft Center for Jewish Student Life, and had an athletic field named in his honor. “I am no longer confident that Columbia can protect its students and staff,” he wrote, “and I am not comfortable supporting the university until corrective action is taken.”
The abrupt cancellation of Macklemore’s tour dates demonstrates that Jewish oligarchs like Robert Kraft operate not merely as sports magnates, but as assertive institutional gatekeepers who readily mobilize capital and infrastructure to protect the interests of their tribe. While naive observers view NFL owners solely through the lens of entertainment and commerce, Kraft’s swift orchestration of stadium boycotts reveals the concrete mechanisms through which elite power enforces boundaries around speech regarding Israel. So long as progressive cultural figures like Macklemore rely on corporate-owned arenas to broadcast their convictions, they will discover that the real arbiters of American public life possess both the will and the resources to silence them at a moment’s notice.
NEXT:
Villains of Judea: Haim Saban
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Your article about Robert Kraft revealed the depth and scope of the Power that Jewish Oligsrchs have in the U S. I elusive that Jewish wealth and influence and amity to cancel Artists' ability to effectively communicate with audiences about very serious concerns amand threats to our freedom to dissent meaningfully! ataTgevAm35ucan people remain far too reluabtvon the Jewish owned and controlled media. THE AMERICAN PUBLIC IS INERT by default..But soon Americans may be unable to access information about Jewish predation in general. This is vety disturbing!
dangerous level that
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