Shahak Shapira

Shahak Shapira (born 1 April 1988) is a German-Israeli artist, comedian, author and musician, currently based in Berlin. He was born in Petah Tikva, Israel, and raised in Oranit. His maternal grandfather was a Holocaust survivor, and his paternal grandfather, Amitzur Shapira, was an Israeli sprinter and coach for the Israeli track and field team at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich who was murdered by Palestinian militants in the Munich massacre. In 2002 Shapira immigrated with his mother and younger brother to Germany, settling in the town of Laucha in Saxony-Anhalt.

After being attacked on a subway on New Year's Eve 2014 for asking a group of men to stop singing anti-Semitic songs, Shapira wrote an autobiographical book about his youth in Israel and Germany, which featured on Germany's Der Spiegel Bestseller list. In 2015 he launched the "90's Boiler Room", a parody of the music broadcasting platform Boiler Room, replacing live music with 90s pop hits, and the videos gained millions of views.

In early 2017 he launched the controversial online art project "Yolocaust", combining selfies from the Berlin Holocaust Memorial with footage from Nazi extermination camps to point out the disconnect of cheerful pictures at a somber site. In August 2017 his "#HeyTwitter" project saw him spray 30 homophobic, Islamophobic, anti-Semitic and racist tweets outside Twitter's German headquarters in Hamburg after the company failed to remove the posts. In September 2017, in collaboration with the satirical party Die PARTEI, he took control of a number of far-right Facebook groups. After the start of the Gaza war he worked on projects including "Stand With Humans" and "Baklavas From Gaza: Comic Relief for Israel and Palestine".