For the fourth year in a row, New England Patriots chairman Robert Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance Against Hate will air an ad about antisemitism during this nation’s most-watched sports event, the Super Bowl.
In 2023, the alliance, formerly known as the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, aired a touching ad that featured a neighbor removing antisemitic graffiti from a Jewish mother’s home. In 2024, their ad featured a rousing speech from Martin Luther King Jr.’s speechwriter, Dr. Clarence Jones. Last year, the ad featured Tom Brady and Snoop Dogg talking about hate, though it didn’t mention antisemitism overtly.
This year, their ad is very overtly about antisemitism among a demographic that some say the hatred has been spreading in the most: teens.
The ad opens on a bustling school hallway, where a young teen with curly hair walks up to his locker. As he makes his journey, someone pastes a sticky note to his backpack, and other teens around him begin to giggle, with some girls debating if they should say anything before deciding not to. When the boy, who we later find out is named David, reaches his locker, he realizes the note reads “dirty Jew.”
But then, a hand swoops in to cover the hateful message with a blue sticky note, the same color as the organization’s logo. “Don’t listen to that,” a taller Black fellow student tells David. “Thanks, man,” David replied. “I know how it feels,” his classmate says, and then stops the Jewish teen from confronting the bullies. “They’re not worth it,” he explains.
“You’re right, I was trippin’,” David tells the student, who introduces himself as Bilal as the two march together down the hallway.
The ad then shares an alarming statistic — two out of three Jewish teens, it claims, have experienced antisemitism.
Over at the Forward, PJ Grisar writes that the ad already feels dated — crude sticky notes in crowded hallways feels way more ’90s teen flick than 2020s lived reality. The most fertile ground for antisemitism is, after all, the internet, where gaming streamers and TikTokers share conspiracy theories as if they are fact, and where comments filled with Jew hatred can be found on almost every explicitly Jewish post that gains even a fraction of momentum.
When we asked the Kveller audience for their thoughts about the ad, many shared the same feedback, saying that it is not representative of the way most teens and adults alike experience antisemitism nowadays.
“It’s embarrassing how out of touch it is,” wrote one reader.
Many have also taken umbrage with the way young David is portrayed as weak and in need of protection.
“Since I was a child, it always bothered me how Jews were portrayed as weak in the media. Why does it have to always be some scrawny kid getting bullied or Ross Geller just existing and never my Uncle Eddie in a bar fight with five people after being called a dirty Jew (He won),” Sam Salz, a former Texas A&M football player, wrote on X.
“Stop making Jews feel weak, victimized and in need of protection,” one parent shared with us.
Another parent shared that they wish the money used for the ad — $15 million — would be used for things like funding Jewish day schools and Jewish sleepaway camps.
“American Jews: If you are spending millions to ‘fight antisemitism’ instead of building Jewish life, you are both out of touch with the needs of Gen Z Jews and have not learned the lessons of post-October 7th Jewry,” activist Shabbos Kestenbaum shared on X.
“I promise you this blue square campaign is not only doing nothing to help us young people, but if anything, makes us look [like] weak and useless victims,” he added.
Yet others see an ad fighting antisemitism on such a grand scale as a win.
“Hot take: this Super Bowl ad against antisemitism is a good thing,” Rachel Steinhardt wrote on her social media page YidLitKidLet.
“Jewish kids deal with antisemitism often in public schools. This ad represents that (even if unrealistically) People should know,” Steinhardt wrote, citing that antisemitic incidents at school have risen 434% since 2020.
The words they hear may not be “DIRTY JEW” on a sticky note, but their effect is certainly the same. This ad is targetting a primarily non-Jewish audience, showing a real truth about the American Jewish lived experience, encouraging them to be like Bilal and not the girls giggling in the hallway.
Is this ad schmaltzy? Undoubtedly. Yet it seems to me that some of the complaints and suggestions people have about improving the commercial, like featuring a swastika, wouldn’t pass muster for a Super Bowl commercial, which needs to undergo rigorous vetting.
“The role of social media […] has put many falsehoods out,” Kraft shared in an interview with CNBC, which premiered the ad. “What we see in our data center is young people falling into this trap.”
Will this ad make them think twice before falling into it? We shall see.
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