A single song performed at MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford has set off a public dispute between two of pop music’s biggest names, more than a week after the concert itself ended.
On Sept. 4, rapper Macklemore opened for Ed Sheeran at the Bergen County stadium and used his stage time to perform “Hind’s Hall,” a song critical of Israel’s conduct in Gaza. He repeatedly chanted “Free Palestine” as a slideshow of war footage played behind him.
The performance drew immediate criticism from concertgoers and online commentators. An Instagram account called “Stop Antisemitism” posted a video calling the set “awful.” Singer Pink reposted that video to her Instagram story without initially adding her own commentary — a move that drew its own wave of backlash from people who accused her of taking a pro-Israel stance.
Pink stayed largely silent for a week before posting a lengthy statement on Instagram on Sept. 11, saying she wanted to speak in her own words rather than let others’ framing stand.
“I’ve been quiet in my own words for a week, which you know isn’t like me. So here they are,” she wrote.
She said the repost “said things in words I didn’t write, and I wouldn’t have chosen all of them,” adding, “a repost isn’t a statement” but that she’d rather be disagreed with for what she actually said.
Pink, who said she was “born a Jew,” wrote that people had assumed her views without asking. She reiterated a position she said she has held since October 2023: that Hamas is a terrorist organization, that Palestinians deserve a future that honors their humanity, and that protecting innocent life comes first “everywhere.”
She pointed to her past work with UNICEF, saying she has spent time with children “on both sides of that fence,” and said she wasn’t going to “litigate a complex war in an Instagram caption.”
Pink said her objection was to Macklemore specifically, recalling his 2014 Grammy performance of “Same Love” and a later incident in which he performed in what she described as a “hooked nose, a black beard and a bowl cut,” calling it a “random costume” — something she said “every Jew I know knew exactly what it was.” She said Macklemore apologized at the time and she let it go.
“Then last weekend he stood in front of a stadium full of music-loving families, with violent images from a war on the screens, dedicated a song to the movement of his choice, and then took the mic to tell all of the Jews in the stadium that it wasn’t about them,” Pink wrote. “You don’t get to decide that for us.”
She said the East Rutherford performance, not the phrase “Free Palestine” itself, prompted her repost, and said she wasn’t calling for Macklemore to be fired or silenced. “What I need is to be able to say, as a Jewish mom, ‘that scared me, and it scared people I love,’ without being told our fear is just propaganda,” she wrote.
Pink also referenced her 2006 protest song “Dear Mr. President,” written in response to the Iraq War, as evidence she has long been willing to take unpopular stands. She wrote that she now feels a similar isolation defending her own community, saying she has noticed phrases like “From the river to the sea” and the word “Zionist” used as an insult in her comments section by people who hadn’t asked what she actually believes.
She closed her statement by addressing both the anniversary of 9/11 and the Jewish holiday of Rosh Hashanah, writing that she planned to “light the candles, dip some apples in honey, pour a glass of wine” with her family. “Shana tova,” she wrote.
Macklemore responded to the earlier backlash over his MetLife Stadium set with his own Instagram video, saying one reason he joined Sheeran’s tour was to have the chance to say “Free Palestine” before a large crowd. “Wanting all humans to be treated equal should never be controversial,” he wrote.
