For the third year in a row, Jewish philanthropist (and majority owner of the New England Patriots) Robert Kraft has paid for a commercial to “combat anti-Semitism” to air on the most expensive ad space available – during the Super Bowl.
This year, these coveted ad spots are running at ten million dollars for 30 seconds. Kraft’s ad is clearly a colossal waste of resources that could be better used elsewhere.
The actual financial cost is not the only problem with this. The ad is immeasurably counterproductive and exposes a fundamental misunderstanding by Diaspora Jews of their own situation.
The ad opens in the halls of a high school with an apparently assimilated Jewish student walking the halls to the tune of whispers and teasing. He opens his locker to see a post-it on his back with the words: “Dirty Jew” scribbled.
The young boy is shaken, but is quickly comforted by a young black teen, who places a blue sticker on top – in reference to the viral social media campaign – and assures him that “he knows how it feels.”
The ad ends with the information that two out of three Jewish teens experience anti-Semitism.
First of all, the ad reduces anti-Jewish attitudes to a kind of irrational juvenile (and perhaps antiquated) hatred. According to the ad, anti-Semitism is simply racism against Jews. It ignores its historic roots in Christian theology and how it’s often deployed for the benefit of a host society’s ruling class.
While anti-Black racism and anti-Semitism are indeed both systemic forms of oppression that serve to uphold an unjust system, they take radically different forms.
The ad, which was challenged by Jews of all backgrounds as tone-deaf, counter-productive and as a tool of erasure, in fact only served to perpetuate the dangerous position that enables and empowers systemic anti-Semitism.
Kraft’s ten million dollar ad buy only reinforces the idea that powerful Jews use their money to manipulate dumb gentiles and silence critique.
Paying so much money for a commercial against anti-Semitism during the Super Bowl actually strengthens the depiction of the Jewish community as a powerful group using its wealth to manipulate goyim into seeing Jews as oppressed.
It doesn’t even matter how good or bad the actual commercial is. It’s the strategy itself that contributes to systemic anti-Semitism.
Hasan Piker, a vocal Twitch streamer, showcased in his critique the inherent harm of the ad.
“White hands made this” he said, arguing that the writers are completely politically unaware of the power structures that animate both anti-Semitism and anti-black racism.
Piker further argued that anti-Semitism is merely episodic individual acts of hurting another person’s feelings while anti-Black racism is genuinely systemic. Negating Jewish oppression, his conclusions are emblematic of how systemic anti-Semitism operates and how this ad actually perpetuates it.
Kraft’s commercial reflects the Jewish community’s inability to understand its place in North American society, perpetuating rather than challenging anti-Semites as a system of oppression.
Mirroring efforts on campus by Jewish donors to weaponize their contributions to silence anti-Israel student groups, the cringy blue square campaign is an apparent attempt to highlight all of the Jewish contributions to the United States specifically and Western civilization more broadly.
Fundamentally, Kraft’s Super Bowl ad serves as an extravagant symbol for all the US Jewish community’s many fruitless efforts to make gentiles like them while foolishly reinforcing anti-Jewish tropes.
