Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
News

Rap Star Takes Pro-Israel Stance

Tuesday night was Hammer time on the Tovia Singer Show.

The erstwhile rap star M.C. Hammer voiced his staunch support for Israel on Singer’s New York-based radio show, which airs on Israel’s Arutz 7 radio station. Hammer (nè Stanley Kirk Burrell) spoke about the Holy Land, black-Jewish relations and the loss of his fortune in the 1990s.

“I’d like to say shalom to everybody. Hello and God bless you,” Hammer said after Singer introduced him. “It’s an honor to be on the air in the great, great place of Israel.”

When asked why Israel was suffering so deeply, Hammer said, “My Jewish brothers in Israel have to understand: There will always people who are jealous… Israel is loved by God!”

During the early 1990s Hammer was among the most popular rap stars in the world after his song “U Can’t Touch This” topped the American pop charts. He could be seen with his posse of friends, walking around in vests with no shirts and his garish, trademark gold lamè parachute pants. However, by the middle of the decade he was broke, and he subsequently found Jesus.

God “needed to get my attention,” Hammer said on the show. “He needed to slap me with both hands and say, ‘Wake up, Hammer!’”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.

If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.

Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism. 

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.