TikTok star Montana Tucker to emcee DC embassy event for Israel’s 75th anniversary

JTA — TikTok star Montana Tucker, who documented a family trip to Auschwitz last year for her millions of followers, will emcee the Israeli embassy in Washington’s event celebrating Israel’s 75th anniversary.

The 30-year-old actress and singer is best known for her short dance videos, which often include celebrities. She has over nine million TikTok followers and close to 3 million Instagram followers.

Tucker’s selection as the emcee for the Israeli embassy event, to be Tuesday at the National Building Museum in Washington, D.C., comes as the star builds a reputation for Jewish content.

Last June, Tucker and her mother visited Auschwitz, the former Nazi death camp that is now a museum and memorial in Oswiecim, Poland. Tucker’s great-grandmother and other relatives were murdered there during the Holocaust.

Tucker narrated a series of short videos about the trip, which she titled “How To: Never Forget” and collected into a 23-minute video on YouTube in January, ahead of International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

A press release for the embassy event linked to the video series.

She has said that she was inspired in part to educate others about Holocaust history and antisemitism by Kanye West’s series of antisemitic rants last fall. She was also disturbed by a 2020 Claims Conference survey on millennial and Gen Z knowledge of the Holocaust that found that 63% of those demographics in the United States did not know six million Jews died during World War II.

In March, Tucker then posted a conversation she had with second gentleman Doug Emhoff, who had visited Auschwitz in January and who is also focused on efforts to combat antisemitism. She had attended the first White House Jewish Women’s Forum days earlier.

Tucker, who grew up in Boca Raton, Florida, and also releases pop music, was close with her grandparents who survived the war and recorded testimony for Steven Spielberg’s USC Shoah Foundation archive.

“My whole life, I always knew my grandparents’ stories,” Tucker told Variety in January. “I’ve always felt very, very attached to them. They used to speak at all the schools down in Florida. My zaide [grandfather in Yiddish]… would wear a pin that said, ‘I’m a survivor.’”

Tucker also has ties to Israel, where she had her bat mitzvah ceremony, as Jewish Insider reported. She said it’s a “big priority” to visit again soon.