South Park Strikes a Raw Nerve

A decade ago, I was an avid fan of South Park.

I’d seen every episode and even met the creators, Trey Parker and Matt Stone, at opening night of the national tour of their musical, Book of Mormon.

While I haven’t streamed the show consistently since season 20, I occasionally stumble across scenes on social media and chuckle at the humor. But after a particular clip in the most recent episode, Conflict of Interest (Season 27, episode 5), drew harsh condemnations from leading voices in the hasbara industry, I had to watch the episode for myself. 

One of the opening scenes of the episode catches the main characters, South Park Elementary students Stan Marsh, Kenny McKormick, Eric Cartman, and Kyle Broflovski discussing a new “Prediction Market App” that allows users to place bets on a range of everyday topics, with the breakdown of the predictions determining the payoff for each side of the bet.

The active bets at the school include “Will the girls soccer team win on Friday,” “Will there be a snow day this month,” “Will school lunch include tater tots this week,” and finally, “Will Kyle’s mom strike Gaza and destroy a Palestinian hospital” – with only 5% of users saying yes. 

For those unfamiliar with the show, Kyle Broflovski, is Jewish. His family are the only Jews in South Park (in a musical holiday special, he sings the song “It’s Hard to be a Jew on Christmas”). His friend, Eric Cartman, consistently bullies him for being Jewish, so it’s no surprise that when he incredulously asks why his mom would destroy a Palestinian hospital, Cartman simply responds, “Cuz she’s a Jew.”

When Kyle demands that Cartman take down the bet, Cartman innocently shrugs, saying he didn’t post the bet and isn’t planning to wager with the terrible odds. When Kyle angrily storms off, vowing revenge against whoever posted the bet, Cartman mutters, “Man, you just bring up Gaza to a Jew and they flip out, maybe these are pretty good odds…”

Tellingly, this wasn’t the scene that upset liberal Zionists like Hen Mazzig or rightist Zionists like Betar Worldwide. It’s likely that most of the Jews offended by the clip from the last minute of the episode that went viral, neglected to do the bare minimum of watching the episode, to say nothing of understanding the nearly 30 years of lore behind the episode, before erupting on the internet with righteous indignation. 

But this is exactly what makes the episode so funny and painful. It not only nails three dynamics of the American discourse around Israel’s war in Gaza on the head. It also successfully engendered all of these dynamics in the real world in the form of responses to the episode. 

These three dynamics, which take center stage in the first three minutes of the episode, are:

1. Goyish gaslighting around the connection between anti-Semitism and criticism of Israel – the juxtaposition of the explicitly anti-Semitic bet on Kyle’s mom (“Cuz she’s a Jew”) with banalities like school lunch and elementary school soccer games, and Cartman’s derision of Kyle’s rage.
2. Jewish paranoia that leads to unhinged and counterproductive defensiveness – Kyle’s threat, “This is such bulls***, I’m gonna find out who started this and I’m gonna f***ing rip him a new a**hole!” 
3. Digital media profiting off of the other two dynamics playing out – the medium of Prediction Market App, and the media that reports on these apps in the next scene.

These three dynamics return repeatedly throughout the episode. But before dwelling too heavily on this plot line, the show weaves in and out of the deep absurdity that made it famous, with South Park’s version of Jesus doubling as a school counselor reminding students to turn off their phones, and Fox News broadcasters discussing the hottest bet on the Prediction Marketing App – whether Satan and President Donald Trump’s ”demonic butt baby” love child will be a boy or a girl, while in the White House, the parents fight over whether or not to carry Satan’s pregnancy to term. This contrast with ongoing plot threads from earlier episodes in the season (a controversial dynamic introduced in season 19) reminds viewers that it’s all just absurd comedy, and not to take any of it too seriously, which serves as a meta-level expression of the aforementioned gaslighting dynamic. 

As the scene shifts back to South Park Elementary, Kyle confronts Jimmy, a physically handicapped student whose extracurriculars include standup comedy, for betting that his mom would bomb a Gazan hospital. Kyle’s misplaced anger at his stuttering, crutch-ridden peer undermines his appeal to reason when he tries to explain that “Israel and Gaza is a very serious matter,” and Jimmy replies, “Oh, I know, Kyle. I told a joke about Gaza on a zoom meeting yesterday and nobody laughed. I guess it’s not even remotely funny…” before breaking into his signature punch line grin and signing off with, “Wow, what a terrific audience.”

This scene brilliantly displays the multi-layered gaslighting, through the pshat (surface level understanding) of Jimmy’s dismissive comedy, and the deeper subtext of the interplay of identity politics and ableism. Viewers on the left, already inclined to be sympathetic to the Palestinian cause, are likely to interpret this as a patronizing and oppressive encounter between Kyle, with his ableist and white-passing privilege, and Jimmy as an oppressed victim of misplaced Jewish rage (the Palestinians). 

And when Kyle rages further that his mom would “absolutely lose her s***” if she found out that people were making light of the situation in Gaza, since “there’s been a conflict in Israel for thousands of years, and Jews and Palestinians are not football teams that you bet on,” his hyperbolic overreaction, both regarding the history of the conflict and his mother’s response, once again has the opposite of its intended effect, leading more students to bet that his mother will in fact blow up a hospital in Gaza.

Not missing a beat, Jimmy continues gaslighting Kyle, encouraging him to just file a complaint with the company that manages the website, a thinly veiled reference to reporting social media posts as anti-Semitic. The implication here is that if the bet is truly unfair, if it’s actually anti-Semitic, of course the “highly professional strategic advisors” of the app will remove it. It ignores the financial incentive such posts carry for the company, disincentivizing that form of censorship except in the most egregious instances, and the tragic dynamic of Jewish censorship of anti-Semitism bolstering beliefs in Jewish control of the media. And if the bet isn’t removed, the implication is that it’s because Kyle’s just being defensive and oversensitive, and has nothing to do with the self-serving layers of corporate and government bureaucracy. 

As the episode progresses, Cartman, noticing that the betting odds that Mrs. Broflovski strikes a hospital are rising, while thinking he knows her well enough to know it’s not actually going to happen, hatches a scheme. By playing on Kyle’s sensitivity, he can push him towards more unhinged, defensive outbursts that will continue to spike the odds on the app, allowing Cartman to make a lucrative exit when, low and behold, no hospitals are attacked by Kyle’s mom.

Cartman’s duplicity hinges on stoking anti-Semitism on the one hand, while reassuring Kyle that anti-Semitism is dangerous and that his only recourse is to fight against it. This brilliantly parallels decades of American policy in West Asia, propping up antagonistic monarchs and dictators across the region (with countless historical examples of US presidents and their secretaries of state deriding the Jewish state behind closed doors with these leaders), while reassuring Israel that its qualitative military edge (thanks to American arms) is what keeps those enemies at bay, and paying lip service to values-based solutions.  

As the episode pans to Mrs. Broflovski at a restaurant for lunch with her friends, the episode’s critique shifts from the hyperbolic absurdity of the Prediction Marketing App bet to the all-too-real social reality that it parodies.

The scene is one that Jews with non-Jewish friends in North America and Europe have lived through repeatedly since the beginning of the war. As her friends seemingly  innocently ask her what she thinks about the situation in Gaza, to which she responds, “I think it’s horrible, a lot of people are dying,” they continue to egg her on.

“Do you feel like you need to do anything about it?” “Probably nothing, you’re going to do nothing about it,” until they elicit the destructively defensive response, “Are you implying that Jews in America have some kind of obligation to do something about it??? You want to vilify my faith, is that it???””

Her friends immediately walk things back, with the typical gaslighting, but it’s too late. She storms out, decrying their uneducated opinions, informed by celebrities rather than books. 

The episode then delivers a classic South Park punchline – the friends all pull out their phones, and laughingly vote that she’ll bomb the hospital, because “she seems pretty pissed off” and “there’s really no money to be made” on betting that an angry American Jew won’t bomb a Gazan hospital, drawing us back from the real to the absurd, highlighting the reality that makes the absurd so painfully real.

It becomes clear that everyone in South Park knows about the bet except Mrs. Broflovski when she brings it up at home at the dinner table (they’re eating ḥalla bread and matza ball soup). Her husband sheepishly insists that nobody has asked him about Gaza, and it’s clear from his expression that he knows why. This sends her into another rant, while their baby son, Ike, places a bet himself that his mom will bomb a hospital in Gaza.

When Kyle tries to calm her down by suggesting, “I’m starting to think that us Jews should just lay low for a little bit,” she declares in indignation, “There, now my son is complacent, this is one Jewish household that will not put up with it anymore.”

The writers play on decades of Holocaust education around the dangers of complacency to simultaneously insinuate that she is going to act to prevent more deaths in Gaza, while the context of the episode hints that the “something” she’s gonna do may just be actually blowing up a hospital. 

When Kyle begs her to stop before she makes things worse, the stereotype of the neurotic Jewish mother that has been central to Sheila Broflovski’s character since the first season is on full display. She yells, “Worse?! How could it be any worse???” before storming off to find whoever is responsible for the anti-Semitism, still fully unaware of the bet.

As Cartman bets all of his mother’s savings on the app, where the odds have now flipped with 95% wagering that Kyle’s mom will in fact blow up a Gazan hospital, the school is shocked to learn that Mrs. Broflovski has traveled to Israel to get to the bottom of things. The innuendo in the previous scene is on full display as Cartman and Kyle both express their panic that Mrs. Broflovski’s actions in will make things worse: Cartman fears that he’ll lose the bet and all of his mom’s money (why else would she fly to Israel?) while Kyle is simply worried that she’ll make a scene that will exacerbate his peers’ anti-Semitism and his own ostracization for defending her. 

When Kyle’s efforts to get the bet removed finally succeed, rather than evoking any self-reflection (over the absurd anti-Semitism of the bet), his friends fume over the bet they think they would have won. He surprised Cartman when he confided that he knows why his mom traveled to Israel – to yell at Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu for making life for American Jews impossible due to the increased anti-Semitism that the war has produced.

The episode fades out with her unhinged rant underscored by a klezmer riff.

When the clip of final scene went viral, Zionist Jews on social media were scandalized and offended that South Park would blame Israel for anti-Semitism in the United States. At the same time, certain profiles from the American far-right and pro-Palestine left celebrated that South Park was finally criticizing the Jewish/Israeli “genocide” in Gaza. But by missing the full trajectory of the episode, which simultaneously criticized the absurdity of some online activism against Jews/Israel and the self-destructive tendency of Jews to react to perceived anti-Semitism in ways that reinforce anti-Semitism, they fell into the trap of South Park’s writers – becoming the living embodiment of the art to which they were responding.

At the same time, other voices from within the Jewish community and without faithfully played the role of Sheila and Kyle’s non-Jewish friends, reassuring them that it’s just South Park, they make fun of everyone, that it’s just a joke that shouldn’t be taken seriously.

These voices, too, ignore the raw nerve that this episode strikes and the biting social critique that the creators of South Park so artfully bury in the absurdity of animated adult comedy. This ignorance makes it impossible to have an honest, nuanced conversation about the actual state of anti-Semitism in North America, the relationship between Jews in the Diaspora and the Jewish state, and more constructive ways for Jews to respond to Jew-hatred.

Finally, like all good mass media companies in the 21st Century, Paramount demonstrated the economic benefits of jumping into the deep end of the vapid online Israel-Palestine discourse, as well as corporate self-deprecation.

The South Park writers knew exactly how audiences would respond to the episode’s central plot, and they were more than happy to include a soft critique of the media’s profiteering attitude towards anti-Semitism in particular, and sensationalist, rage-bait filled internet discourse in general, knowing that the clip’s reverberations would bring a healthy stream of clicks and views, while satiating viewer’s appetites for punishing the media through the laughs of that self-deprecating critique.

South Park has truly mastered the medium of “art imitates life imitates art.”

But by taking a step back to analyze the episode’s critique, as well as its responses, we can more levelheadedly reflect on what lessons we can learn. 

For Jews in the diaspora, the most urgent call is to not be controlled by our fear.

As King David reminds us throughout his prophetic psalms, the first step when engaging our enemies is to arm ourselves with the confidence that HaShem is with us as we fight his fight, and that from the eternal perspective of Israel’s historic purpose, we have nothing to fear from those who wish us harm. 

As soon as we approach the struggle against anti-Semitism, not from a place of panic and fear, but from a place of confidence and a genuine desire to redeem ourselves and the world from darkness, we can develop calculated, measured plans for advancing our story and addressing the claims of our detractors.

Leading scholars of anti-Semitism like Dara Horn argue that living Jewish life, and telling stories of Jewish life, is a far more effective method of combating anti-Semitism than talking about how bad Jew-hatred is, whether focused on the Holocaust or any of its ideological predecessors or successors. And here at the Vision Movement, in our online ATID leadership program, we teach participants to see the sparks of truth in competing narratives.

Through a deep understanding of Hebrew logic, we push tomorrow’s Jewish leadership to confidently face criticism, to internalize and learn from it, and to advance the Jewish story by growing from that encounter. 

Especially in the month of Tishrei, a month of personal, national, and universal self-reflection on how we can be our best selves in the coming year, this admittedly offensive South Park episode should be taken as an opportunity for the type of growth and introspection that can push the children of Israel to reach our full potential.