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Sicily’s Jews have their first rabbi in 500 years. Italy’s Jewish establishment won’t accept them.
CATANIA, Italy (JTA) — Rabbi Gilberto Ventura believes his synagogue has the most beautiful view in the world. Located in the tower of a century-old castle on the slopes of Mt. Etna in the eastern Sicilian city of Catania, the synagogue is wedged between a snow-capped volcano and the sun-kissed Mediterranean sea.
The 49-year-old Brazil-born rabbi also thinks his congregation is one of the most unique in the world. It’s made up mainly of Bnei Anusim — descendants of Jews forced to hide their religious practice and convert to Catholicism after the Spanish Inquisition of 1492. Before that infamous decree, Sicily was home to tens of thousands of Jews.
The synagogue, which was first inaugurated last fall, is the result of decades of grassroots efforts by those descendants in Catania to find each other and forge a sense of community that had been lacking for centuries.
Hiring a full-time rabbi was the last piece of the puzzle, and Ventura, who has a long history of working with communities of Bnei Anusim in Brazil, was a natural candidate. He arrived in Catania in January.
“I really believe that the future Judaism in the world, especially in some places like Italy and, of course, Brazil, is connected to the Bnei Anusim, and the need to embrace the Bnei Anusim,” Ventura said.
But in an ongoing point of frustration, the formal organization representing Italian Jewry, the Union of Italian Jewish Communities (UCEI), does not recognize them as Jews.
“In the case of Catania, this strange Jewish community hasn’t passed all the steps the law requires,” said Giulio Di Segni, the vice president of UCEI.
He was referring to the fact that the community did not seek UCEI’s permission before establishing themselves under the name “Jewish community of Catania.” Per Italian law, UCEI has a monopoly on acknowledging and establishing Jewish communal life in Italy — including authority over who can use the term “Jewish community of” in formal ways.
“UCEI can’t accept this because it is too easy,” he added. “We are not against their synagogue or their way of prayer, but they cannot use the name ‘Jewish community of Catania.’”
The rooftop of the Castello Leucatia, where the community meets, has a large menorah and a view of the Mediterranean. (David I. Klein)
Catania’s Jewish community members told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency a variety of stories about their Jewish backgrounds. Some came from families that always outwardly identified as Jewish. Others identified the source of family traditions practiced by parents and grandparents who — as descendants of Jews who faced persecution for practicing Judaism — still felt the need to hide aspects of their Jewishness from the public eye.
In the midst of questions about their ancestry, the majority of the Jewish community members have undergone Orthodox conversions. But that hasn’t led to their acceptance.
Benito Triolo, president of the Catania Jewish community, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he first came to Judaism at the age of 40, thanks to the insight of a Jewish friend in Palermo, Sicily’s capital and most populous city. Working together, they established a Charter of Sicilian Jewry, which aimed to identify and highlight the Jewish heritage of neighborhoods across the island.
While working on that project, Triolo came closer to his own Jewish heritage, and after years of study, he completed an Orthodox conversion through a rabbi in Miami 25 years ago.
Another community member, who was born Alessandro Scuderi but today goes by the name of Yoram Nathan, first felt drawn to Judaism as a child watching news of the Six-Day War in 1967. At first, he was laughed at by other members of his family — except his grandmother, who happened to have a tradition of lighting eight candles in early winter and baking flat unleavened bread around Easter time.
Decades of study later, Scuderi also completed a formal conversion to Judaism before an Orthodox rabbinic court, or beit din.
Others had more straightforward backgrounds.
“I was born in a Jewish family,” said David Scibilia, the community’s secretary. “Frankly speaking, we were not hiding or deep in the shadows in this part of the country.”
Scibilia said that his father explained to him that he was a Jew as early as the age of four. Within their own home, they observed holidays and kept Shabbat — no easy task since Italian schools at the time of his childhood in the 1970s had class on Saturdays. He did not eat meat until he was an adult and was able to acquire kosher meat.
He said that his family had maintained their Jewish identity since the days of the Inquisition and married amongst a small group of other similar families.
“I was a Jew, but not part of any community,” Scibilia said. “Just my family was my community.”
An aerial view of the city of Catania shows the Mt. Etna volcano in the background, Jan. 28, 28, 2022. (Fabrizio Villa/Getty Images)
Scibilia explained that once he had a child of his own, he realized he did not want her to have the same lonely Jewish experience. But when he reached out to UCEI, he said he found the proverbial door to organized Jewish life shut. Earning membership in Jewish community organizations across Western Europe involves a strict vetting process, and many groups require applicants to prove their mothers’ Jewishness according to varying standards.
Scibilia’s experience was echoed by Jews outside of the community in Catania and across Italy’s south who talked to JTA — a feeling of neglect or rejection by UCEI for those who fall outside of the norms of Italian Judaism.
UCEI currently recognizes 19 Jewish communities across northern Italy and just one in the south, in Naples, which has jurisdiction over the rest of the southern half of the peninsula and the island of Sicily. The organization recognizes around 28,000 Jews in total across the country.
Scibilia noted that despite his Jewish upbringing, he has multiple certificates of conversion from Orthodox rabbis. The first came from a beit din of American rabbis from who traveled to Syracuse, Sicily, to assess Scibilia and others like him in Sicily. His second comes from the conversion court of the Israeli Chief Rabbinate, which is known for its exacting Orthodox standards.
Both were rejected by Italy’s own Orthodox rabbinate, and he was forced to stand before another rabbinic court in Italy.
“I have at this moment — don’t start to laugh — three documents that prove that I am a Jew, two Ketubah [marriage contracts] for my wedding, and so on, again and again and again,” Scibilia said.
Others’ experiences in the region have been even more fraught, he said.
“The problem in Italy, that if you try to study with any rabbi here, you can study for 20 years, maybe you can die even before you reach the end of the tunnel,” he said. “From my point of view, they are playing with the spirituality of these people.”
In a statement last year, UCEI called the the Catanians “a phantom ‘Jewish community’” and accused them of “misleading the local institutions and deluding believers and sympathizers into adhering to traditional religious rites, never actually recognized or authorized by the Italian rabbinical authority.”
“Between UCEI and the Italian republic is an agreement signed in ‘87,” Di Segni said. “This law means everything about Jewish communities in Italy is through the Union Jewish community in Italy (UCEI).”
Noemi Di Segni, shown in Rome in 2017, is president of the Union of Jewish Communities in Italy. (Stefano Montesi/Corbis via Getty Images)
Triolo said he isn’t too concerned about UCEI’s recognition.
“Ours is a process of refounding old communities that existed as early as 200 and up to 1492,” Triolo said. “Our recognition is already in our history. At that time the UCEI did not exist. We were there and we simply returned!”
No one knows when Jews first arrived in Sicily, but the Talmud tells a story that claims Rabbi Akiva, a well-known early rabbinic sage, visited the island in the early second century and told of a small Jewish community in Syracuse. Some historians believe the Roman writer Caecilius Calactinus — who was born in a town near Messina in the first century B.C.E — to have been of Jewish origin.
All agree that over the course of history, Sicily’s Jews watched as the island was traded between Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Arabs, Normans and half a dozen other empires. The narrative has also long been that Jewish life there ended five centuries ago, under Spanish rule.
The Spanish empire’s Jews suffered the same fate as Jews from the Iberian peninsula, who would become known to the world as Sephardim when they were expelled in 1492.
The descendents of Spain — and Sicily — spread throughout the world, establishing communities in North Africa, throughout the Ottoman empire, in the Netherlands and ultimately the British Isles and North America, as it was believed that Judaism faded away in their homelands.
Catania’s Jews disagree, arguing that many Jews practiced their religion over the centuries, in secret.
Triolo and others in the community formally inaugurated their synagogue in October. It was furnished with Torah scrolls donated by the Ohev Sholom synagogue in Washington, D.C.
The synagogue is situated in the tower of the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. The building was granted to the community by the city’s municipality.
“So they had the people, they had a synagogue, but they needed somebody to teach,” Ventura said.
The community meets in the Castello Luecatia, an early 20th-century structure built by a merchant believed to be of Jewish origin. (David I. Klein)
Ventura, who is Orthodox, may be the island’s first permanent working rabbi in over 500 years, but it’s not his first time working with Bnei Anusim.
Back in his native Brazil, Ventura was the leader of the Synagogue Without Borders, an organization through which he served 15 communities in Brazil’s north that were made up of descendants of Jews who came with the first Portuguese colonists to South America and who ultimately had to hide their identity as the Inquisition spread to the New World.
His work there put him in conflict with Brazil’s Jewish establishment, too. But Ventura is unfazed.
In Brazil, he founded synagogues and summer camps and built mikvahs and yeshivas across the country’s north. Since 2015, he has facilitated the conversion of hundreds of Bnei Anusim, bringing them back into the fold of mainstream Orthodox Judaism.
“I am a teacher since I was 21 years old,” he said. “Now I am 49, along with my wife. It’s one of the things we love to do, and know how to do. To teach Jewish philosophy, to teach Torah, to teach Tanakh, to teach the story of the Jews in Brazil, and now we are starting to teach the story of the Jews in Italy, the story of the Inquisition etcetera.”
In Castello Leucatia, he leads Shabbat services with the energy of a gospel preacher, pausing between prayers to explain a verse, teach a new tune, welcome latecomers, or simply to allow the congregation to talk.
Catania community members are shown at a recent gathering. (David I. Klein)
“This is what’s most important,” he remarked during one such lull on a recent Friday night. “That they get to talk and be a community.”
Ventura had organized a Shabbat event for other Jews across Italy — from Naples to Turin — who shared his belief that the future of Judaism was in communities like the one in Catania.
“Our point of view of Judaism is that we have to be a part of society, we don’t have to insulate ourselves, we believe that Judaism has a lot to contribute to society,” Ventura said. “In Brazil, we have a lot of connections with people from the periphery, in the favela and other communities, immigrants, Indians, etcetera. So that is something we want to establish here, to teach the people a Judaism that brings good things to the wider society.”
Ventura isn’t the only one working with such communities in southern Italy. Across the Strait of Messina, Jewish life has also been on the rise in Calabria — the toe of Italy’s boot — thanks to an American-born rabbi named Barbara Aiello.
Aiello, though raised in Pittsburgh, is of Calabrian descent. She returned to the land of her ancestors in the early 2000s and began working with the Bnei Anusim there, ultimately establishing a synagogue called Ner Tamid del Sud, meaning “eternal light of the south.”
“Until now, nobody took care of Judaism in the south of Italy,” Scibilia said while looking out at the Mediterranean from the terrace of Castello Leucatia.
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Elie Wiesel as an American phenomenon and a family man
How do you tell a story that everyone knows? Oren Rudavsky, in the opening scenes of his recently released documentary Elie Wiesel: Soul on Fire, makes the wise decision to begin his film not through the known facts about Wiesel or the Holocaust, but through a more internal logic of art and dreams.
As Wiesel narrates a dream, we see Joel Orloff’s hand-painted animation of dark figures succumbing to a rising river of blood, leaving the dreamer alone to try to rescue his drowning father. Fingers grasp at bodies as they slip under.
“I don’t know what power aided me,” we hear Wiesel say. “All I know is that I managed to save him all by myself.” As anyone who has read Night knows, Wiesel’s father succumbed to dysentery in Buchenwald. That Elie could not save his father, his wife Marion tells us, was the abiding wound he always carried.
Dreams, in Freud’s view, are wish fulfillments. But this dream-act of (temporary) reanimation also expresses Wiesel’s conviction that the dead are not entirely gone if they are remembered. That may be the redemptive vision that drives Rudavsky, as well. The implicit hope that the dead may be saved opens the film and breaks into full voice at its ending, with Wiesel beautifully singing the messianic anthem “Ani Ma’amin” from the stage of the 92nd Street Y.
As he sings, his face gives way to a lush, grassy landscape rushing by as if we’re passengers on a train, while his voice fades into a choral arrangement. In moving past Wiesel’s face and voice, the film embodies and fulfills Wiesel’s belief that the Jewish story will continue, on PBS as in his family line.
For all its focus on European catastrophe and Jewish longings, the documentary casts Elie Wiesel as an “American Master,” the title of the larger PBS series. Wiesel is an American phenomenon, read in classrooms around the country and, for a time, in the White House. Full disclosure: I appear briefly in the film, discussing the reception of Wiesel’s work and the difference between the Yiddish title of his best-known work, Un di velt hot geshvign (And the world kept silent) and the French/English title of its translation, La Nuit (Night).
One of the film’s extended sequences captures a moment that saw Wiesel at the center of American politics and the global stage, when he passionately implored President Reagan to cancel a planned visit to the German military cemetery in Bitburg, once it had become known that Waffen-SS soldiers were buried there. “That place is not your place,” Wiesel says on national TV, with Reagan looking on. “Your place is with the victims of the SS.”
Details less engraved on collective memory emerge from Rudavsky’s film: the shared friendship both men describe, the attempts behind the scenes to ameliorate the clash, Wiesel’s insistence that he was making no claims about German collective guilt. “Only the killers were guilty,” he said.
This episode establishes Wiesel’s courage and role as a preeminent moral voice of his time. Less clear is the trajectory from the solitary writer in postwar Paris to the man who came to represent the Holocaust experience, when his novel/memoir Night became required reading.
One of the brilliant 13-year-old students who discuss the novel in their Newark classroom suggests such an analysis, in distinguishing between the Eliezer of the story and Elie Wiesel, its famous author. In America and elsewhere, Wiesel became so closely associated with Holocaust memory that the Eliezer/Elie distinction, or alternatives to his distinctive voice, are hardly imaginable.
Not one but two stories drive Rudavsky’s documentary: one of unimaginable catastrophe and loss; and another of privilege and success — both Wiesel’s own stature and the broader rise of the American Jewish community in which this story is embedded. How these two narratives are related is a tale that remains to be told.
And yet, alternatives to Wiesel’s powerful voice are heard in the film. Remarkably enough, they emerge from Wiesel’s own family. Marion Wiesel, who married the war-haunted bachelor when he was 40, recounts that her husband had insisted “from the beginning that he didn’t want children.” And then she adds: “I convinced him.”
Photographs of her during those years as a bride and new mother radiate, and we see the hint of a smile on her husband’s mournful visage. As an old woman, she commands attention. Against the widespread veneration of Wiesel’s pronouncements, she shows herself at least occasionally unpersuaded. Describing Wiesel’s growing religiosity, she comments drily, “I was the pagan in the family.” Served a latke at a family Hanukkah celebration that could easily be played for sentimentality (“the Jewish people live!”), she sniffs: “Doesn’t look like a latke.”
Marion Wiesel’s acerbic tone is particularly welcome as commentary on a topic of increasingly pressing concern. Elie Wiesel, in his Nobel Peace Prize lecture, asserts that he is sensitive to the plight of the Palestinians, “but whose methods I deplore when they lead to violence.” Marion comments: “He didn’t want to criticize Israel under any circumstance. He didn’t want to criticize the occupation. He didn’t want to criticize the settlers. He may not have agreed with them, but he didn’t want to criticize them. Ever.”
In contrast with the moral clarity of his words about Bitburg, what the film presents us with on this issue is a muddle, and if I am reading Marion right, a bit of a family dispute. In this way, the Wiesel family was no different from so many others.
So, too, does Rudavsky complicate Wiesel’s devotion to Jewish survival in focusing on the discomfort of Elisha Wiesel, the couple’s only son, in the role of living symbol of Jewish continuity. Cuddled on Jimmy Carter’s lap, called to the stage at Oslo, Elisha remembers chafing at being “just an appendage” to his famous father.
And yet, as the film ends, he, too, has embraced Judaism anew, laying tefillin on camera. Elisha’s son, Elijah, also takes up the imperative and burden of Holocaust memory, traveling to Sighet to visit his grandfather’s childhood home, now turned into a museum.
In a stirring scene, the Hebrew letters on the gravestone of his namesake — his great-grandfather — appear with growing clarity, illuminated by the trick of scraping shaving cream off the inscription (not recommended by conservators) and the magic of documentary film.
And yet, Elijah Wiesel with the waist-long hair is not the Eliyahu Vizel of the gravestone, just as Eliezer Vizel of Sighet is not quite the same as Elie Wiesel of Oslo and Boston. “Jewish continuity” is a bridge we narrate over the shifting sands of loss and change. The present, past, and future connect for a fleeting moment, only to drift apart like a dream, a film.
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These two anti-Zionist Jews think the Israeli government is so bad, it’s funny
When Matt Lieb started Bad Hasbara, his comedy podcast about so-called Israeli and US propaganda, he had a specific audience in mind: himself.
“A Jewish anti-Zionist podcast that made jokes at the expense of the Israeli government was not something that, as far as I knew, existed,” said Lieb, 41, who in addition to podcasting is a comedian, writer and actor. “I wanted to listen to something like that.”
Lieb also wanted an outlet for his anguish over Israel’s conduct in Gaza after the Oct. 7 Hamas-led attacks — not least because he felt the comedy industry at large had failed to meet the moment. “By December 2023,” he told me, “I realized the mainstream comedic sphere was going to be completely silent about this, and was going to move on to other subjects, because it was too politically charged.”
So Bad Hasbara, which has just released its 176th episode, began as an experiment to see if there were others like Lieb: those who regarded the Israeli and American governments as deceitful and propagandistic, and who, no less importantly, saw Israeli ‘Hasbara’ — loosely defined as the Israeli government’s myriad efforts to advertise its country — as funny and sinister.
As it turned out, there were plenty of adherents to Lieb’s worldview. (The podcast, whose full title is Bad Hasbara: The World’s Most Moral Podcast, first aired in late 2023, and has just surpassed 50,ooo YouTube subscribers.)
“What shocked me was the amount of people who related to the podcast, and who wanted to laugh at the same things I was laughing at.” Lieb said. “And the number one comment that we get from people, other than saying that they like the jokes, is ‘Thank you for keeping us sane.’”
One admirer was 50-year-old Daniel Maté, a Canadian-born, Brooklyn-based lyricist, composer and playwright for musical theater, whose plays included a reimagining of Kafka’s Metamorphosis, entitled The Trouble With Doug, and a sequel to Hansel & Gretl set in modern-day Chicago. Maté also had a fairly sizable social media following, and a disdain for Zionism that rivaled Lieb’s.
After a brief Instagram courtship (more on that later), Maté appeared as a guest on one of Bad Hasbara’s first episodes. Lieb enjoyed the experience so much that he invited Maté to co-host permanently. “People loved our vibe,” Maté told me. “We’re a rare pair, with our combination of experience, sensibility, and our places of overlap. Not to be too self-fluffing,” he added.
And though Bad Hasbara has certainly broadened its focus since Maté came aboard, at its heart it’s about the ways people interact with Zionism — a show about the rhetoric that has accompanied the Israel-Hamas war, rather than an analysis of the war itself.
Early adopters
The podcast’s popularity partly reflects the demand for anti-Zionist perspectives in the media and elsewhere after Oct. 7. It’s hardly the only podcast geared towards Israel’s critics: Medhi Hasan’s left-leaning news outlet Zeteo, for example, recently launched Beyond Israelism, an anti-Israel podcast hosted by If Not Now founder Simone Zimmerman.
Still, neither Lieb nor Maté is a recent convert to the cause. Lieb grew up in a secular, Jewish home in Los Angeles that saw Israel as “an absolute moral good,” but he began to have doubts about Zionism in the mid-2000s, when he was an undergraduate at UC Santa Cruz. “The Marxists and Islamists indoctrinated me into self-hatred,” he joked.
His embrace of anti-Zionism was sealed on his college Birthright trip, he told me, in part thanks to a guest appearance by Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who spoke at an event for Lieb’s and several other Birthright groups.
“It was a very, very hard sell,” Lieb recalled. “And it felt unfair that as someone with, you know, Jewish ancestry, I was being told I had more of a right to this land than someone who was born there, and whose family was born there, who was ethnically cleansed.” (Lieb discussed his Birthright experience at length on Bad Hasbara’s inaugural episode.)
Maté’s opposition to Zionism, by contrast, was more of an inherited condition. His father, the well-known Canadian psychotherapist Dr. Gabor Maté, is a vocal critic of Israel, and in the mid-1980’s, when the younger Maté was coming of age, had become a “pariah in the Canadian Jewish community,” Maté said. He remembers his father being interviewed on Canadian radio, while on a medical trip to the West Bank, and hearing him say that he’d been crying every day since he had arrived because of what he’d seen in the hospitals.
The younger Maté took after his father, politically. Daniel went every summer to the left-leaning Habonim Dror Jewish summer camp, where he says he argued ferociously with his Israeli counselors, some of whom were just out of the army. “I never could get them to see the contradiction between liberalism and Zionism,” he said.
October 7 and beyond
On the evening of Oct. 8, 2023, Maté — who had not yet joined the podcast — went for a walk around his Brooklyn neighborhood. For about an hour, he went live on Instagram with a kind of stream-of-consciousness of despair and frustration, in which he urged his then-20,000 or so followers to properly contextualize the Hamas-led attacks of the previous day; to sympathize no less with Palestinian suffering than Israeli.
“I’d never done an Instagram Live before,” Maté said. “But I had a sense that I needed to un-crazy myself. And I was in a position to help people orient themselves, because I knew what was coming, right? A lot of lies. So I wanted to provide antioxidants.”
Lieb, for his part, had begun uploading sketch videos to Instagram after Oct. 7, in which he played what he saw as a representative liberal Zionist character: that is, someone increasingly unwilling to accept criticism of Israel post Oct. 7. Maté found the character amusing, and told Lieb as much over Instagram. “The videos would always start off with about 45 seconds of decent-sounding politics,” Maté said, “and then would devolve.” Eventually, they set a date for Maté to appear on Lieb’s new podcast. So were the seeds of Bad Hasbara planted.
Both Maté and Lieb agree that the podcast has been buoyed by the procession of news and people coming out of the Middle East. For its first six months, Maté was amazed they never ran out of characters to lampoon. “Hen Mazzig, Eylon Levy, Rabbi Shmuley: It was like the Wu-Tang Clan of propaganda,” he said.
But its blend of levity, righteous indignation and social media fluency has helped Bad Hasbara stand out in an increasingly crowded left-wing media ecosystem. Episodes can be blunt, funny and sarcastic, often quite crude and sometimes willfully provocative. They’re called things like ‘The Greatest Shoahman’ — an episode about Nick Fuentes’ Holocaust denial, naturally — or, on Nov. 8 last year, after Zohran Mamdani was elected mayor of New York City, ‘The Zionist Freakout over Zohran’s win.’ Either host is liable to, in the same breath, give eloquent expression to some important, overlooked morsel of Palestinian history, and then refer to Birthright as an “11-day handjob.”
“I think the combination of moral earnestness and complete lack of decorum is compelling,” said Maté.
And despite its mostly easygoing vibe, they’ve thought carefully about the podcast’s message. “We’ve worked really hard to diversify our guests,” said Maté. “Not for the sake of diversity, but for the sake of completion and for the sake of insight.” The only through line, then, between the academics and musicians and actors and politicians and comics who’ve been guests on the show — Rashid Khalidi, Debra Winger, Peter Beinart, Miko Peled, to name just a few — is that “they all see what’s happening as an unjustifiable moral abomination, and they’re willing, with us, to take apart all of the various ways that it gets justified,” said Maté.
This specific entry requirement means the podcast has hosted some not-uncontroversial guests. Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters, who has frequently compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and in Nov. 2023 suggested the Oct. 7 attacks could have been a “false flag operation”, talked to Lieb and Maté in Feb. 2025. Three months later, so did Mohammed El-Kurd, a Palestinian poet, writer and activist whom several mainstream Jewish groups have accused of demonizing Zionism and Jewish Israelis. (El-Kurd is a regular on the college campus circuit; in March 2025, more than 200 Harvard College affiliates and alumni published an open letter arguing that El-Kurd’s appearance at Harvard violated the university’s policies against antisemitism.)
Yet Maté doubts the podcast has reached those who might find such conversations troubling: more passionate defenders of Israel, say, or anyone especially worried that the line between antisemitism and anti-Zionism can sometimes be blurry. “I don’t know how many Zionists listen to our show long enough to stay pissed off,” he said. “It tends to have a certain kind of repellent to it.” It’s also not entirely clear who Maté means by “Zionists.” When asked, he defined Zionism, a little enigmatically, as “the refusal to heal Jewish trauma.”
Much clearer is the podcast’s particular irritation with the idea that Zionism is compatible with liberal values. After all, it’s the doctrine each was raised on, Lieb at home and Maté in his Jewish community more broadly. So if Bad Hasbara has an overarching aim, beyond ridiculing government officials, it’s probably to emphasize what they see as the impossibility of left-wing Zionism. “You can’t be a liberal and Zionist forever,” Maté told me. “You’re fighting yourself.”
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A Super Bowl Ad Against Antisemitism with No Consequence Misses the Mark
Robert Kraft. Photo: New England Patriots/Wikimedia Commons
I greatly respect Patriots owner Robert Kraft and his efforts to warn about the dangers of antisemitism. The Jewish community has largely failed in fighting this disease, for which there is no cure.
Some will also say that no ad will stop antisemitism, and argue that it’s a waste of money to run advertisements at all. But I strongly disagree.
There are a range of people in America, including some who have hatred in their hearts but have not yet acted on it, or some who don’t even know Jews personally. In a world where millions are listening to Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens, and laughing at Kanye West’s “Heil Hitler,” it would be useful to have some persuasive media strategy against antisemitism.
I’m not sure how many Americans watch Douglas Murray, Ben Shapiro, or follow Hillel Fuld online, but more than 100 million watch the Super Bowl annually.
It is a fantastic decision to spend money on an ad against antisemitism if it can get people’s attention, be emotionally impactful, show consequences for a perpetrator of hate, and make people think for a second.
Many tools must be used in the fight against antisemitism, and there is no reason why ads can’t be one of them. While they won’t likely change the mind of people planning to assault Jews, they might change the minds of others. I have a friend whose son was called a dirty Jew in school. The student likely called him that because he figured there would be no consequence.
This year’s ad — which follows ads in 2024 and 2025 — featured a Jewish boy who is pushed. We see a post-it calling him a “Dirty Jew.” An African-American student puts a blue square on it, and notes that Black people have experienced similar hatred.
The ad is a failure because it doesn’t grab your attention, shows no perpetrator, and more importantly — shows no consequences.
It is a slight improvement over last year’s ad with Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg, as that had zero authenticity. This ad has some authenticity, but by showing no perpetrator, it actually normalizes antisemitism — as if we should expect students to write “Dirty Jew” on the backpacks and lockers of students. We should have seen the student writing it, and seen some repercussions — be it a suspension, students looking at them as losers, or something of that sort.
There should be funds allocated to making meaningful ads about Jew-hatred both on regular TV and online. It is inexplicable that this is not being done, and there are so many Jewish celebrities that could be involved. I just wished Kraft’s ad had done a much better job.
The author is a writer based in New York.