For the past three years, Jewish multibillionaire Robert Kraft’s organization, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism (now the Blue Square Al
For the past three years, Jewish multibillionaire Robert Kraft’s organization, the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism (now the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate), has released anti-antisemitism Super Bowl ads.
This year’s commercial just dropped. From left to right to center, the ad has been repudiated by practically the entirety of the Jewish community. The following is what I would do instead.
Over the past few years, a couple of things have become abundantly clear to me:
There is no shortage of real-life, violent antisemitism we could highlight, from the long list of synagogues set on fire since October 7th to the Bondi Beach Massacre this past Hanukkah.
Reporting on the overwhelming majority of post (and pre) October 7 antisemitic incidents never makes it past the Jewish echo chambers.The general public doesn’t even know.
Instead of depicting a fictional scene, this Super Bowl ad could have highlighted these very real antisemitic incidents, bringing them into the consciousness of the general public. After all, last year, 127.7 million people tuned in to watch the Super Bowl, over 8x the number of Jews in the world. What a missed opportunity.
"This sh*t isn’t working. Why not show a montage of very real antisemitism that occurred in America this year? You could make a supercut of burned down synagogues, Jews being beaten up and spat on, over 50 swastikas painted on a playground, Jews being set on fire in Colorado, images of the crime scene after two people were murdered leaving the Jewish museum in D.C., Kanye releasing a song called HH, I could literally go on and on and on." @thesnarkysemite on Instagram
Audiences shouldn’t just be exposed to the reality of being a Jewish person today; they should also understand clearly how distorted or false media and political narratives about Jews – including narratives about Israel, the Jewish state – directly incite violence.
For example, an ancient synagogue in Tunisia was set on fire in response to the Al Ahli Hospital blood libel. In May 2025, two individuals were shot dead outside a Capital Jewish Museum event in response to the libel that Israel would starve 14,000 Palestinian babies in Gaza within 48 hours.
In a similar vein, audiences should understand how politicians and activists across the political spectrum weaponize antisemitism and the fight against antisemitism to advance their political objectives, rather than out of care or support for the Jewish people.
ADDRESS CONTEMPORARY ANTISEMITISM
...not the antisemitism of the time of our parents and grandparents.
We need to be really honest: Jewish kids in school, for the most part, are probably not hearing too many “dirty Jews.” They are, however, being pressured to drop important parts of their history, family, and identity in the name of social justice and in order to fit in. They are called colonizers, genociders, baby killers, Nazis, and white settlers…by their teachers. If they are a “dirty” anything, that would be a “dirty Zionist” (or the KKK slur “Zio”), not “Jew.” They are harassed and bullied not in the school hallway, but into accepting a revisionist account of their family history and values. They’re being told that speaking up for themselves, expressing discomfort with antisemitic language, or naming the bigotry against them is nothing but a tool to silence Palestinians.
Calling out the overt antisemitism of our parents’ and grandparents’ eras is so easy. It’s a lot harder, and therefore much more important, to identify the newer, more covert expressions of the world’s oldest hatred.
To fight antisemitism, you have to, at a minimum, understand antisemitism. And if you understand antisemitism, you’ll at the very least consider why a $15 million ad slot, paid for by a Jewish multibillionaire, may not be a smart idea, especially when said ad potentially reinforces antisemitic conspiracies: that Jews play the victim, that Jews control the media, that Jews use their wealth to manipulate public opinion.
Of course, antisemitism is the antisemites’ fault, not Robert Kraft’s, however misguided this advertisement. But we really need to be asking ourselves where our resources are best spent. Super Bowl ads could expose our reality to millions of new viewers, but to do that, they’d have to actually expose our reality, not depict fictional scenarios that reinforce the tropes weaponized against us. We have to make people think about things they haven’t thought about before. We have to think ahead and consider how different ads may land if we want to fight this strategically.
It sure doesn’t seem like it. Robert Kraft founded the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism in 2019 and released the first Super Bowl commercial in 2024. Since 2019, antisemitic hate crimes in the United States increased by 103%.
I love that the Jewish community is resourceful and finds creative solutions to our problems, instead of waiting on others to come through for us. But I have to wonder whether this is the best use of our community’s resources and creativity. While I hesitate to say that these ads are making antisemitism worse, it seems pretty clear that they aren’t making it better.
