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. 

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.

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.

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