Jonathan S. Tobin
JNS, May 6, 2025
“What does matter is how acts of almost casual Jew-hatred like this are becoming commonplace.”
An incident involving college students at a bar owned by a celebrity best known for sports betting and reviewing pizza isn’t the sort of thing you’d expect to go down as a pivotal moment in the history of antisemitism and the Jewish world’s responses to the hatred directed at it. But the viral story about a sign that read, “F*** the Jews,” at a Barstool Sports eating and drinking establishment in Philadelphia—and the angry reactions to it by owner Dave Portnoy—may tell us a great deal about both the way Jew-hatred has become normalized in 2025 and how clueless most responses to it have been.
Observers may take some consolation in the fact that the occurrence didn’t go unnoticed or, as is likely, unpunished. But the idea that a proper response to overt antisemitism is to send the offender(s) to Auschwitz is as illustrative of how lacking in insight most Jews, especially those who claim to be authorities on the subject, are about the reasons for the surge in hate and how best to educate offenders.
The problem isn’t that Americans, especially college students, don’t know enough about how the German Nazis and their collaborators slaughtered Jews more than 80 years ago. It’s that an apparently growing number of allegedly highly educated Americans have been misled into thinking that Jews who are currently alive are perpetrating “genocide.” Therefore, the thinking goes, they deserve the imprecations of those out for a pricey night of public drinking as well as for mobs demonstrating on college campuses.
The facts of the story aren’t complicated. …SOURCE