Uncategorized
‘Fleishman is in Trouble’ hits FX Thursday. Just don’t call it a Jewish series, says its creator.
(JTA) — From Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s point of view, her best-selling 2019 novel “Fleishman Is in Trouble” wasn’t all that Jewish. She’s a little perplexed by the deluge of press junket questions about its Jewish essence.
“It’s funny: I don’t think of it as a Jewish book. I know people do,” she said.
Brodesser-Akner, a journalist famous for her sharp celebrity profiles, is now the showrunner of the book’s star-studded TV adaptation, an 8-episode FX series that debuts on Hulu on Thursday. In the story, Toby Fleishman (played by Jesse Eisenberg) is a 41-year-old Jewish hepatologist who has recently divorced Rachel (Claire Danes), his ambitious, icy, blonde theater agent wife. Early on in the story, Rachel disappears in the middle of the night, leaving Toby with their two children and a truckload of resentment. Toby, who had a nebbishy and romantically insecure youth before marrying Rachel, is now drowning in the sexual bounty of dating apps.
On Zoom, Brodesser-Akner was speaking a few days after the show’s blowout bash at Carnegie Hall and Tavern on the Green, an iconic Central Park restaurant. “I’ve never been to an event like that. It was 600 people,” she said. It sounded like a scene that could have been plucked right from “Fleishman,” which is set on the extremely wealthy Upper East Side, and in which the responsibilities of marriage and parenthood are at odds with the ambitions and personal longings of its middle-aged characters.
Brodesser-Akner, 47, who was both adrenalized and a little frazzled, had to balance the premiere with parenting duties — she’s a mother of two boys, ages 15 and 12. “I’m still picking sequins from my teeth.”
As a writer, Brodesser-Akner likes to play with the power of subjectivity, and she built “Fleishman” on it. Though the story begins as Toby’s, it eventually morphs into a “Rashomon”-esque take on the divorce and what really went wrong in the Fleishmans’ marriage. The story is narrated by Libby (Lizzy Caplan), Toby’s friend from their year abroad in Israel. A former men’s magazine writer, Libby is now a lost and frustrated stay-at-home mom in suburban New Jersey (and a stand-in for Brodesser-Akner). Adam Brody steals scenes as Seth, an immature finance bro and another year-in-Israel friend with whom Toby reconnects after the divorce. (His presence is a homecoming of sorts for those of us who spent our tween years watching him play a different Seth in “The O.C.”)
“I don’t think of it as a Jewish book,” says Taffy Brodesser-Akner.
Brodesser-Akner pieced together the story’s Jewish elements: a doctor named Fleishman, a bat mitzvah, Friday night dinners, a year abroad in Israel, a few jokes about Jews being bad at home repairs (which is the subject of a very funny scene in episode six between Toby and Seth). There are a few insidery details that she fails to mention, like a fake Jewish sleepaway camp called Camp Marah, which sounds like the real Camp Ramah but roughly translates to “Camp Bitter” in Hebrew. Does all this add up to a “Jewish” story?
“I read ‘The Corrections’ by Jonathan Franzen, and it mentions Christmas I think 47 times. I read ‘Crossroads’ and it’s about the family of a youth minister. But neither of those is ever called a Christian book. This is called a Jewish book. I don’t object to it being called a Jewish book. But to me it’s mostly an American story. As a writer and as an observer of the culture, I think that calling this a Jewish book is proof of the answer to an old question: are Jews considered Americans? And the answer is no.” She threw in her characteristic meta analysis: “So now you have a very Jewish profile. How Jewish is that, Sarah?”
The self-aware comment is a good reminder that although her responses may be unguarded, she has not forgotten that she’s on the record. A name in New York media, Brodesser-Akner wrote for GQ and is now a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, having profiled Gwyneth Paltrow, Ethan Hawke and Tom Hanks and written about the Joshua Cohen novel “The Netanyahus,” the television show “Thirtysomething” and much more. She inserts herself often into her writing, not to make it about herself, but to remind the reader that every profile is by nature filtered through the lens of the writer crafting it. Her writing is searing, self-deprecating — so raw it’s still bleeding and often quite funny.
“I wrote the book the way I would write a profile, just like I always do. But this man doesn’t exist,” she said.
RELATED: 5 Jewish places that inspired Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s ‘Fleishman Is in Trouble’
We had tried to meet in person near her home on the Upper West Side, but by the time she was available, I was in Tel Aviv, placing us along the Israel-New York axis on which “Fleishman” is set. When Toby suddenly calls Libby to tell her he’s getting divorced, he catapults her into memories of their early twenties in Jerusalem. Those thoughts make Libby miss the possibilities of her youth, the ones time has ruthlessly and inevitably extinguished. Eventually her longing for her past becomes so overwhelming that it threatens her marriage to her menschy and patient husband, played by Josh Radnor. (For more longing-for-younger-days while in Israel content, Brodesser-Akner wrote a Saveur essay about vegetable soup in Jerusalem — her Proustian madeleine. Interviewing Brodesser-Akner from my friend’s apartment in Tel Aviv, a city where I lived in my twenties, I found the theme of longing for the past hit almost too close to home.)
Part of the reason Brodesser-Akner doesn’t think the “Fleishman” story is all that Jewish is that she doesn’t feel all that Jewish — at least not relative to her mother and sisters, who are aligned with the Hasidic Chabad-Lubavitch movement and live within a few blocks of each other in Crown Heights, Brooklyn.
“I don’t think any writer has ever gotten it right,” she says of her Jewish background. “They say I was raised Orthodox. It’s interesting because it always makes me look like the black sheep in my family, when really they are. I’m exactly how I was raised to be until I was 12.”
After her mother, a secular Israeli, and her father, a Conservative Long Islander, divorced, her mother put Brodesser-Akner and her sisters in Jewish school. Some Jewish observance trickled back to her mother, who ended up going the Chabad route.
“My mom had never been inside a synagogue until the day she married my father. Now that is what we call ironic,” Brodesser-Akner said.
Brodesser-Akner’s two sisters followed, and her mother eventually remarried and had another child, the only sibling born into a religious household.
“The thing that made me a journalist was being raised in a home where, at age 12, I was relegated to observer. I had to learn how to understand other people’s points of view. And now that’s what I do,” she said.
Despite their religious differences — Brodesser-Akner attends an Orthodox synagogue but sends her children to an unaffiliated Jewish school and says she wakes up “every morning with new ideas” — the author is very close with her family, and her sisters were at the “Fleishman” premiere.
“They were at the premiere of my perverted sex show,” she joked with a laugh referring to the Hulu series, which features some sexual content as Toby explores the post-divorce New York dating scene. “They show up for me and I show up for them. I have my challenges with it, but I think their challenges must be greater. They never say this to me, but they must think that my life is comparatively…” She looked away thoughtfully, trying to find the right words. “They must think my lifestyle is comparatively less worthwhile. But we really love each other.”
To Brodesser-Akner, the most Jewish show on television is “The Patient,” which she calls “the best show I have seen in 100 years.” And that’s not because it (like “Fleishman”) is on FX. “I’m not that kind of interview!” she said.
Lizzy Caplan plays Toby’s friend Libby. (FX Networks)
“It’s the most Jewish show in all of the Jewish ways. It grapples with a Jewish prisoner; with the difference between a Conservative Jewish female cantor whose son becomes ultra-Orthodox — I’d never seen that on screen. It was kind of the only relatable Jewish matter I’ve ever seen. People ask me if I’ve watched ‘Shtisel.’ And I always say, I’m in the 47th season of an ultra-Orthodox family drama myself and not really interested!” She laughed. “But also I think of the other Jewish matters on television, which are adapted memoirs of people who were ultra-Orthodox and now aren’t. It’s like no one can imagine religious people being happy in their lives. And that’s really shocking to me. My family is very happy.”
Brodesser-Akner wound up with her dream cast: she had a list of five actors — Lizzy Caplan, Jesse Eisenberg, Claire Danes, Josh Radnor and Adam Brody — and no backup plan. She noted the fact that viewers have seen them grow up on screen as one reason they were right for the roles. For many, watching Caplan, Eisenberg and Brody sit across from each other in a diner will feel like a camp reunion, the fulfillment of a Jewish television fantasy they never knew they had.
“One thing that we were trying to get across is ‘how could it be that I am this old when I was once this young?’ And the fact that you have a memory of Claire from ‘My So-Called Life,’ or Jesse from ‘The Squid and the Whale’ — that does so much of the work of the show without writing a word,” Brodesser-Akner said.
Besides Danes (who plays the only main character with a non-Jewish parent, whom the book makes clear she resembles) the lead actors are all Jewish — a notable fact in a time when Jewish representation on screen, and who should be allowed to play Jewish characters, is the subject of continued debate.
Last month, New Yorker TV critic Emily Nussbaum, who is Jewish, tweeted, “There is a simple solution to the question of whether various non-Jewish actors are allowed to play Jews & that is to ask me.” Brodesser-Akner responded to the tweet, writing “[Non-Jew] Oscar Isaac in Scenes from a Marriage is the best ex-ortho I ever saw on screen!”
About casting Jewish actors, Brodesser-Akner noted a legal issue rarely mentioned in the representation debate: one can cast based on looks, but it’s illegal in the United States to cast based on religion. She took this very seriously.
“I spoke to [‘The Plot Against America’ director] David Simon about it and he said, ‘They’re actors. You let them act.’ And I agree with that. The question that I asked myself was who was perfect for it?” she said.
Even if Brodesser-Akner rejects the claim that “Fleishman” is a definitively Jewish story, wasn’t she consciously playing with some Philip Roth-inspired Jewish archetypes? Toby the nice Jewish doctor, the devoted, idealistic dad who’s also self-righteous, horny and insecure.
No, she insists she wasn’t. But also Philip Roth is so ingrained in her that who’s to say? And isn’t the question flawed in the first place?
“All I can say is that I am made out of Philip Roth. I’m so formed by his books. I actually would say that you have a bias in the asking of your question, in that you’re Jewish too. And you also are made out of Philip Roth books since you’re a writer. Again, that goes back to the same question as ‘are we American?’ To me, Toby is not ‘a Jewish guy.’ He’s just a guy! He’s the kind of guy I know! I was just trying to be myself.”
“Fleishman is in Trouble” premieres its first two episodes on Hulu on Nov. 17. It will release each of its six remaining episodes weekly on Thursdays.
—
The post ‘Fleishman is in Trouble’ hits FX Thursday. Just don’t call it a Jewish series, says its creator. appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Misguided Super Bowl Ad: Antisemitism Isn’t a Sticky Note — It’s an Institutional Failure
Anti-Israel demonstrators protest outside the main campus of Columbia University during the Columbia commencement ceremony in Manhattan, in New York City, US, May 21, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz
It is an odd sign of the times that one of the clearest statements about antisemitism this year came not from a university president or a political leader, but from a $15 million Super Bowl commercial.
Robert Kraft’s advertisement was earnest, expensive, and plainly intended as a civic intervention. Kraft is not a marginal celebrity. He is one of the most prominent Jewish civic patrons in America. The fact that even he must purchase a national pulpit at Super Bowl rates is itself a measure of institutional retreat.
The ad depicts a Jewish teenager in a school hallway, targeted with a slur. Another student intervenes, covers the insult with a blue square, and offers solidarity. The message is simple: don’t ignore hate.
The impulse is understandable. Antisemitism is rising. Jewish students feel exposed. Institutions equivocate.
And yet the ad landed with a discomfort that is difficult to dismiss. As critics in The Forward, Tablet, and the Jewish Journal all noted, the problem is not the intention. The problem is what the ad reveals.
The ad reflects the only kind of antisemitism that elite America still feels fully comfortable condemning: the obvious kind.
A crude insult. A bullying moment. A hate that is personal, adolescent, and safely detached from politics, ideology, and power.
But that is not the antisemitism American Jews are confronting right now.
The defining feature of antisemitism in the post–October 7 era is not that it is whispered in hallways. It is that it is rationalized in public.
It is not merely cruelty. It is permission.
It is the normalization of harassment as “activism.” The recycling of ancient hatreds in contemporary moral language. The steady refusal of elite institutions — many educational institutions, but colleges and universities most of all — to draw enforceable lines.
The Super Bowl ad is antisemitism for a society that cannot bring itself to talk about faculty, ideologies, and institutions.
The question is no longer whether antisemitism exists. The question is whether the institutions entrusted with moral authority will name it when it is inconvenient, and confront it when it is costly.
On that question, the record is bleak.
At Columbia University last week, police arrested protesters outside campus gates — an incident that included not only students but faculty participation. That detail matters. When professors are arrested alongside students, the story is no longer youthful excess. It is adult legitimization.
The most corrosive feature of the current moment is not simply student radicalism, but the way faculty and institutional actors increasingly supply the moral vocabulary that makes intimidation feel righteous.
Universities issue statements while disruptions become routine. Administrators cite “process” while Jewish students are told, implicitly, to endure it. Students are harassed on Monday; the campus receives an email about “values” on Tuesday; nothing happens on Wednesday.
The problem is not that Americans haven’t heard of antisemitism. The problem is that institutions have stopped punishing it.
This is not a crisis of awareness. It is a crisis of authority.
Which raises the deeper irony of Kraft’s approach: a $15 million advertisement is, in some sense, a substitute for the backbone our institutions no longer display.
It is philanthropy stepping in where leadership has retreated.
Bret Stephens made a version of this argument just days before the Super Bowl, in his State of World Jewry address at the 92nd Street Y, calling the fight against antisemitism “a well-meaning, but mostly wasted effort” and urging the Jewish community to redirect resources from awareness campaigns toward strengthening Jewish life itself. Stephens is right that awareness is not the bottleneck. But the answer is not merely identity-building. It is institutional enforcement. The crisis is not that Jews lack pride. It is that universities lack spine.
That may be the most revealing thing about the ad. It is an attempt to do, through symbolism, what our civic institutions are increasingly unwilling to do through enforcement.
The blue square is unobjectionable. But it also reflects a broader cultural habit: the preference for gesture over boundary, performance over consequence.
A hallway. A slur. A moment of interpersonal cruelty.
That is antisemitism as many Americans prefer to imagine it: isolated, obvious, juvenile — disconnected from the ideological infrastructures that now sustain it.
But the antisemitism American Jews increasingly confront is embedded in systems.
On many campuses, Students for Justice in Palestine chapters function less like protest clubs than like parallel moral ecosystems: separate communications channels, teach-ins, counter-programming designed not to engage speakers but to delegitimize them.
This is not spontaneous dissent. It is infrastructure.
And infrastructure is precisely what awareness campaigns do not touch.
That is why the problem persists. Confronting contemporary antisemitism requires naming not only hatred, but the respectable ideologies that now carry it.
Here we reach another familiar discomfort: the pressure to universalize.
Even Kraft’s campaign folds antisemitism into a broader effort against “all hate.” Again, the instinct is decent. But the move is familiar. Jews are permitted sympathy so long as their experience is immediately generalized.
The particularity of antisemitism is softened, and made safe for consensus consumption. But antisemitism is not merely one prejudice among others. It has a specific history, a specific structure, and a specific contemporary resurgence. Jews know, historically, that when elites insist on vagueness, trouble is already advancing.
There is also something telling in the ad’s narrative posture. The Jewish teen is passive. He does not speak. He does not resist. He is acted upon, rescued by an ally.
Solidarity matters. But Jews cannot rely on symbolic allyship in place of institutional accountability. A society that requires minority groups to depend on the kindness of bystanders rather than the firmness of institutions is not a healthy society.
And that may be the deeper point. Kraft’s ad is not offensive. It is diagnostic.
It reveals a culture that has difficulty naming antisemitism as it actually exists in 2026.
It reveals institutions that prefer statements to discipline, empathy to enforcement, and symbols to boundaries.
It reveals how far moral speech has been outsourced to philanthropy and branding because civic leaders and universities have proven unwilling to speak plainly when the costs are real.
A $15 million ad is, in this sense, an indictment — even if unintentionally — of everything that should not require an ad in the first place.
What American Jews need now is not another awareness campaign. We need institutions that enforce rules. Leaders who name what is happening. Universities that treat intimidation as intimidation and hate, not as “political expression.” Administrators who stop hiding behind process.
The blue square is fine as a gesture. But gestures are not enough.
Antisemitism will decline only when universities treat it the way they treat every other serious violation: with rules, consequences, and clarity — not symbols. A society that can only condemn antisemitism through commercials is a society that has lost the courage to confront it.
Note: According to the ADL’s 2024 Audit of Antisemitic Incidents, there were 9,354 antisemitic incidents in the United States in 2024, including an 84% increase on college campuses and 860 incidents in K-12 schools.
Samuel J. Abrams is a professor of politics at Sarah Lawrence College and a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Uncategorized
Can We Ignore the Antisemitism in the Palestinian National Movement?
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and US President Donald Trump (not pictured) hold a bilateral meeting at Trump Turnberry golf course in Turnberry, Scotland, Britain, July 28, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer recently offered a formulation now familiar across Western democracies: you can support the cause of a Palestinian state without being antisemitic.
Millions do that. He does that. And yet — he acknowledged — the marches claiming to support that cause are saturated with antisemitic banners and rhetoric, leaving the Jewish community in England, in his words, “frightened and intimidated.”
At the level of abstract moral philosophy, the statement is unobjectionable. Of course, one can imagine support for Palestinian Arab self-determination free of antisemitism. But politics does not take place in one’s imagination. It takes place in movements, incentives, slogans, and consequences. And it is precisely here that this formulation collapses, due to multiple failures.
The first failure is treating “support for a Palestinian state” as a free-floating moral posture rather than as a real-world political movement with a long, traceable history.
Politics is not judged by what a cause could look like under ideal conditions. It is judged by how it actually operates over time. Movements reveal their moral character not through mission statements, but through what they tolerate, excuse, and normalize when mobilized in public.
When antisemitic imagery, chants, and conspiratorial claims appear often and predictably — across countries, languages, and decades — the issue is no longer a handful of bad actors. It is structural. At that point, the question is unavoidable: is the antisemitism a bug, or is it a feature?
A movement that repeatedly fails to police its own boundaries — and instead often embraces, recycles, and mainstreams some of the most virulent Jew-hatred in modern history — cannot plausibly claim moral neutrality.
The second flaw is the elevation of professed intent over outcome. Responsibility does not attach only to what one claims to believe. It attaches to what one knowingly enables.
One could reasonably argue that between World Wars I and II, Germany had been stripped of dignity and economic viability by the Treaty of Versailles. Taken alone, that argument was not antisemitic. But once grievance politics in Germany repeatedly trafficked in antisemitic conspiracy theories, racial mythologies, and eliminationist rhetoric, one had to look at what German nationalism actually stood for.
Good intentions did not negate predictable outcomes. They never do.
The Record Cannot Be Wished Away
The antisemitism embedded in the modern anti-Israel/pro-Palestinian movement is not new, marginal, or accidental. Its founding political leadership included figures who openly allied with Nazi Germany during the Second World War, broadcasting antisemitic propaganda and helping recruit Muslim units for the Waffen-SS. Its charter documents and early manifestos drew directly from European antisemitic conspiracy literature.
In later decades, its most influential organizations repeatedly framed the conflict not as a territorial dispute but as a cosmic struggle against Jews — invoking blood libels, tropes about global Jewish control, and Holocaust denial or inversion.
In recent years, these themes have not receded; they have intensified. Claims that Jews harvest organs, fabricate atrocities, control governments and media, or uniquely lack the right to national self-determination are not fringe slogans for the “Pro-Palestinian” movement. They are voiced by prominent activists, academics, and movement leaders — and then laundered through the language of “anti-Zionism” for supposed respectability.
This is not a historical footnote. It is the consistent pattern.
Which brings us to the question formulations like Starmer’s carefully avoid, but which any serious analysis must confront: If the cause is just, why does it so consistently require antisemitic language and behavior to sustain mass mobilization?
No other modern national cause routinely relies on Holocaust inversion, blood-libel-adjacent imagery, or claims of venal global Jewish control to generate energy and cohesion. No other liberation movement so frequently denies the very peoplehood of one particular nation while insisting on universal moral legitimacy for all others.
This is not accidental or incidental. It is diagnostic.
When the same antisemitic tropes surface wherever Israel is discussed — across groups or cultures that share little else — the burden of proof shifts. The problem is no longer a fringe prone to excess or “just some extremists.” It is the movement’s underlying moral architecture.
The appeal of Starmer’s statement lies in its reassurance. It allows leaders to affirm concern for Jewish safety rhetorically while continuing to validate a movement that, in practice, repeatedly produces hate, intimidation, vandalism, exclusion, and violence directed at Jews.
We have seen this pattern before. Elites once spoke warmly of revolutionary justice while dismissing the guillotine as excess. They spoke of class liberation while ignoring gulags. Each time, abstraction functioned as moral anesthesia — allowing respectable people to look away from what was happening in plain sight.
Yes — one can imagine supporting Palestinian statehood without antisemitism. But politics cannot be judged only by what one can imagine. It is judged by what one enables, excuses, and refuses to confront once patterns become unmistakable.
A politics that hides behind abstraction while ignoring outcomes and reality is not principled. It is indulgent. And history has been relentlessly unforgiving to indulgence masquerading as moral seriousness.
Micha Danzig is a current attorney, former IDF soldier & NYPD police officer. He currently writes for numerous publications on matters related to Israel, antisemitism & Jewish identity & is the immediate past President of StandWithUs in San Diego and a national board member of Herut.
Uncategorized
Super Bowl ad combatting antisemitism draws criticism from Jews
Artificial intelligence, Uber Eats, Steven Spielberg’s next film — and antisemitism.
Those were among the topics competing for attention during Sunday’s Super Bowl ads. The antisemitism commercial showed a white Jewish high school student being taunted with the slur “Dirty Jew,” until a taller Black classmate steps in to defend him.
The high-profile spot was funded by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, formerly known as the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism.
For Kraft, 84, the moment was meant to model allyship. Through Blue Square, he has partnered with Hillel International and the United Negro College Fund to host “unity dinners” bringing together Jewish and Black students, and he told CBS News that he hopes Palestinian students attend as well. The ad, Kraft said, was about solidarity.
This is not Kraft’s first Super Bowl ad. In 2024, he paid for an ad featuring Martin Luther King Jr.’s speechwriter in a spot that leaned on similar themes of Black-Jewish collaboration and a shared history of Civil Rights activism. And he began running ads about antisemitism several years before that during Patriots games.
But instead of unifying viewers, the commercial quickly became one of the night’s most divisive spots. Critics — including many Jews — derided it as “dated” and “disconnected” from the way antisemitism actually shows up in 2025, especially on college campuses and online. To some, the ad seemed stuck in a moral universe where antisemitism is an interpersonal problem solved by a well-timed intervention, rather than a systemic one fueled by ideology, institutions and, increasingly, online indoctrination.
Online, the backlash was swift. Many Jewish commenters argued that the estimated $15 million Kraft spent on the campaign, which is also slated to air during the Winter Olympics, would have been better spent elsewhere.
A sharp backlash has emerged against the brand of advocacy that Kraft has undertaken, with some Jewish leaders decrying efforts to combat antisemitism as ineffective and misguided.
“What we call the fight against antisemitism, which consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish philanthropy and has become an organizing principle across Jewish organizations, is a well-meaning, but mostly wasted effort,” the center-right New York Times columnist Bret Stephens said in a “State of World Jewry” address last week in New York. Instead, he called for large-scale investment in Jewish day schools, cultural institutions, philanthropy, media, publishing and religious leadership.
Others simply found the ad tone-deaf and potentially even harmful.
In an open letter addressed to Kraft, Shabbos Kestenbaum, a Harvard graduate who sued the university over alleged antisemitism, put it bluntly. “You’re a smart guy,” he wrote, “but the people you have hired either are morons or are taking advantage of the money you pay them.”
Emily Tamkin, a contributing columnist at the Forward, posted on social media: “I know in my heart that somewhere in this country of ours a Jewish kid is getting bullied with a Post-it today because of that ad.”
“This Super Bowl ad was clearly well intentioned, but it missed the mark,” posted Margot Touitou, a Tel Aviv-based content creator. “If legacy orgs want to understand what antisemitism looks like for young Jews today, they need to actually be online and tapped into internet culture. Without that, campaigns like this won’t ever land, and that hallway scene especially felt stuck in a ‘90s movie, which just isn’t how Gen Z moves or experiences this stuff.”
The team behind the ad pushed back, insisting the criticism misunderstands its intent — and its data. In a letter to the Forward, Adam Katz, president of Blue Square Alliance Against Hate, said online use of the slur “Dirty Jew” has increased 174% over the past three years, arguing that the ad reflects real trends affecting younger Jews in particular. “We test all of our ads,” Katz wrote, adding that early results have been “promising.” He said the decision to set the ad in a high school was deliberate: “That is where we have seen the most concerning trends in antisemitism data.”
The Anti-Defamation League, whose independent research found the ad resonated with audiences, echoed that defense. ADL CEO Jonathan Greenblatt called the spot “powerful” and praised it as “a simple yet moving depiction of resilience in the face of discrimination.”
In response to the criticism, several groups released their own versions of the ad.
On Sunday, the Israel Defense Forces posted its own stark, 11-second video to social media. “This is our Super Bowl commercial,” the IDF wrote, over footage of soldiers carrying machine guns to a soundtrack from Bad Bunny, who performed during halftime. Eylon Levy, who served as an Israeli government spokesperson in the early months of the Gaza war, shared the clip and added a pointed rejoinder: “Much more inspiring for an American Jewish kid who’s getting called a ‘dirty Jew’ than hoping a taller, cooler Black kid will save him.”
Daniel Lubetzky, a Jewish philanthropist and founder of Kind Snacks, released his own version of Kraft’s ad, reimagining the bullied Jewish teen not as a victim in need of rescue, but as a future doctor: accomplished and confident. The video went viral almost immediately, drawing praise from viewers who found it more empowering, and scorn from others who felt it simply swapped one trope for another.
Together, the competing ads — and the arguments around them — revealed a deeper divide: not just over tactics, but over what kind of story American Jews want to tell about themselves at a moment when antisemitism feels both newly visible and painfully unresolved.
JTA contributed to this report.
The post Super Bowl ad combatting antisemitism draws criticism from Jews appeared first on The Forward.