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
New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America
The new documentary Immigrant Songs: Yiddish Theater and the American Jewish Experience, produced by the Milken Archive of Jewish Music, is fast, entertaining and a good introduction to the topic.
Focusing mainly on the musical side of the story, but covering ‘straight plays’ as well, the film opens with a superb ‘warm-up act’: “Hu Tsa Tsa,” a stock Yiddish vaudeville number performed by the widely mourned Bruce Adler, who died in 2008 at age 63. Bursting with charm and talent, Adler, scion of a top Yiddish vaudeville family, demonstrates that Yiddish theater used to be pretty damned lively.
What follows is the oft-told story of the rise and decline of the American Yiddish theater, beginning with its prehistory in the Purimshpiels — the annual performances that for centuries served as the only secular entertainment in the Ashkenazic world. From there the film takes us to Yiddish theater’s 1876 birth in Romania, courtesy of Avrom Goldfadn, a.k.a. “The Father of Yiddish Theater.”
The film also describes Yiddish theater’s arrival in America, which, thanks to massive Jewish immigration, quickly became its capital. We learn of its influence on American theater’s styles of acting and set design. And the film describes the decline of its audience, due to assimilation and the immigration quotas of the 1920s.
There’s an excellent section on “The Big Four” Yiddish theater composers — Joseph Rumshinsky, Alexander Olshanetsky, Abe Ellstein, and Sholom Secunda. All in all, the documentary does a fine job of teaching the aleph-beyz, the ABCs, of the history of Yiddish theater to the uninitiated.
The most impressive aspect of Immigrant Songs is its well-crafted pace. Though there are a few snippets of vintage Yiddish cinema (Yiddish theater’s “kid brother”), most of the film consists of recent concert footage, some well-selected photographs and ephemera, and a lot of talking heads. Almost every prominent Yiddish theater historian was interviewed for it, along with several musicologists, an archivist, Yiddish actors, directors, producers, etc. (Full disclosure: I am one of them.) Director Jeff Janeczko cuts between the interviewees so smoothly — sometimes in mid-sentence — that it feels like they’re in the same room and feeding off each other’s energy. The movie just flies by.
There are a few errors. Marc Chagall is described as an important designer of Yiddish theater; actually he designed one minor production in Russia in 1921, and never did another. In a bizarre, and biblically illiterate, statement, one interviewee claims that Jews hadn’t developed a theater culture earlier because the Second Commandment’s prohibition of “graven images” forbade the construction of sets. (Actually it’s about idol worship.)
Another interviewee claims that the Yiddish play Der Yeshiva Bokher; oder, Der Yudisher Hamlet — The Yeshiva Student; or, The Jewish Hamlet (Yiddish plays then often had subtitles), is closely patterned on Shakespeare’s tragedy. In truth, the play — written by Isidore Zolotarevski, the prolific writer of shund (“trash”) melodramas — is not only awful, but is as close to Shakespeare as baked ham is to your grandmother’s kreplach.
The film’s biggest fault, however, is its short running time (45 minutes). This is a rich topic, and too much is left by the wayside in the interest of brevity. There’s nothing about what shund melodramas felt like, why they appealed to their audiences, and why they became the only thing a lot of people know about Yiddish theater.
There’s also nothing about the World War I-era wave of shtetl plays, which reflected immigrants’ homesickness without indulging in nostalgia, and provided some of Yiddish theater’s shining moments with plays like Green Fields, The Empty Inn and Tevye. And the most important play in the Yiddish canon, The Dybbuk, is never mentioned.
Perhaps most surprisingly, considering the film’s emphasis on music, there is no examination of Yiddish theater’s influence on Broadway’s music. (Cole Porter — ironically, the only gentile among the major composers of Broadway’s Golden Age — had a pronounced Jewish lilt in a number of his songs, and he actually attended Yiddish theater regularly.)
The film’s last section is about the renewed interest in Yiddish that began in the 1970s and ’80s with the klezmer revival. Much of it focuses on the 2018 Yiddish production of Fiddler on the Roof in Yiddish, whose success was predetermined the moment the production was announced.
For the overwhelming majority of American Jews, from the Orthodox to the unaffiliated, Fiddler is all they know about the lives of their ancestors. And though it’s a world-class piece of musical theater, as a work of social history Fiddler is as phony as a glass eye. Nevertheless, for American Jews it’s a sacred text.
Fiddler was a huge hit, but it was a gimmick, a one-off, whose success does very little for the future of Yiddish theater. Worse, the Yiddish — not the text, but the lines spoken by most of the actors — was often mispronounced and had the wrong intonation. (One elderly gentleman of my acquaintance, a native Yiddish speaker from Czechoslovakia, told me he didn’t understand a word the actors said, and spent the whole evening reading the English supertitles.)
What follows the Fiddler section in Immigrant Songs is mostly bromides. But the best current Yiddish theater reflects the kind of fresh thinking that keeps the form alive.
An occasional well-presented museum piece, like the Folksbiene’s 2016 revival of Rumshinsky’s operetta The Golden Bride, is a very worthwhile project (though it, too, suffered from poorly spoken Yiddish). But the most dynamic contemporary Yiddish theater is, in Jeffrey Shandler’s apt phrase, “post vernacular” — i .e., the use of Yiddish is self-conscious, a deliberate choice rather than something that’s done automatically, as it would have been a century ago when there were a lot more Yiddish speakers in the world.
An example of this is the 2017 neo-realist film Menashe, which could far more easily and conventionally have been made in English. Or a well-known piece done in Yiddish translation, like Shane Baker’s stunning Yiddish translation of Waiting for Godot, can become something much more valuable than a mere stunt. The Yiddish version, under Moshe Yassur’s straightforward direction, humanized the play, stripping it of the encrusted pretentiousness that had hidden its soul. (When it was presented in the International Samuel Beckett Festival in Ireland, multiple audience members approached the cast afterwards with the same reaction: “I don’t speak a word of Yiddish. But I’ve seen Godot five or six times, and this is the first time I understood it.”)
There’s a lot to be learned from Immigrant Songs. If you find yourself hungry for more, you couldn’t do better than to seek out YIVO’s online Yiddish theater course “Oh, Mama, I’m in Love!” But by all means, start with Immigrant Songs. It’s a very entertaining and informative appetizer.
The post New documentary captures the lively history of Yiddish theater in America appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
UK PM Starmer Says There Could Be New Powers to Ban Pro-Palestinian Marches
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer gives a media statement at Downing Street in London, Britain, April 30, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Jack Taylor/File photo
British Prime Minister Keir Starmer said the government could ban pro-Palestinian marches in some circumstances because of the “cumulative effect” the demonstrations had on the Jewish community after two Jewish men were stabbed in London on Wednesday.
Starmer told the BBC that he would always defend freedom of expression and peaceful protest, but chants like “Globalize the Intifada” during demonstrations were “completely off limits” and those voicing them should be prosecuted.
Pro-Palestinian marches have become a regular feature in London since the October 2023 attack by Hamas on Israel that triggered the Gaza war. Critics say the demonstrations have generated hostility and become a focus for antisemitism.
Protesters have argued they are exercising their democratic right to spotlight ongoing human rights and political issues related to the situation in Gaza.
Starmer said he was not denying there were “very strong legitimate views about the Middle East, about Gaza,” but many people in the Jewish community had told him they were concerned about the repeat nature of the marches.
Asked if the tougher response should focus on chants and banners, or whether the protests should be stopped altogether, Starmer said: “I think certainly the first, and I think there are instances for the latter.”
“I think it’s time to look across the board at protests and the cumulative effect,” he said, adding that the government needed to look at what further powers it could take.
Britain raised its terrorism threat level to “severe” on Thursday amid mounting security concerns that foreign states were helping fuel violence, including against the Jewish community.
“We are seeing an elevated threat to Jewish and Israeli individuals and institutions in the UK,” the head of counter-terrorism policing, Laurence Taylor, said in a statement, adding that police were also working “against an unpredictable global situation that has consequences closer to home, including physical threats by state-linked actors.”
Uncategorized
War Likely to Resume After Trump’s Rejection of Latest Proposal, Says IRGC General
Iranians carry a model of a missile during a celebration following an IRGC attack on Israel, in Tehran, Iran, April 15, 2024. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
i24 News – A senior Iranian military figure said that fighting with the US was “likely” to resume after President Donald Trump stated he was dissatisfied with Tehran’s latest proposal, regime media reported on Saturday.
The comments of General Mohammad Jafar Asadi, one of the top Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) commanders, were relayed by the Fars news agency, considered as a mouthpiece of the the powerful paramilitary body.
“Evidence has shown that the Americans do not not adhere to any commitments,” Asadi was quoted as saying.
He further added that Washington’s decision-making was “primarily media-driven aimed first at preventing a drop in oil prices and second at extricating themselves from the mess they have created.”
Iranian armed forces are ready “for any new adventures or foolishness from the Americans,” he said, going to assert that the Iran war would prove for the US a tragedy comparable with what was for Israel the October 7 massacre.
“Just as our martyred Leader said that the Zionist regime will never be the same as before the Al‑Aqsa Storm operation [the name chosen by Hamas leadership for the October 7, 2023 massacre in southern Israel], the United States will also never return to what it was before its attack on Iran,” he said. “The world has understood the true nature of America, and no matter how much malice it shows now, it is no longer the America that many once feared.”