If you watched the Super Bowl on Sunday, congratulations: You were part of history. At 123.4 million people tuning in, Super Bowl LVIII broke the record for the most-watched event in television history, and that would make you a Guinness World Record holder.
You probably also saw a very poignant commercial. Amid the growing tensions towards Jews in this country, an ad entitled “Silence” was run by the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, an organization founded by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft, simply telling people to stop hating Jews. That was the message. While other religions were also present in the ad space Sunday night, Judaism was the only one not recruiting, and merely asking to be left alone.
This is par for the course for Judaism, as we are the only major religion that does not actively recruit members. It is not hard to understand why Jews make up such a small percentage of the world. Orthodox Judaism is not the easiest thing in the world to practice, Jews have historically been persecuted, and oh yeah, we do not want new members. We did not travel the world for centuries forcibly converting people we conquered to our religion.
There are two images in the commercial that must be highlighted. The first is the instance where some volunteers were painting over graffiti that read “NO MUSLIMS!” There was tremendous outcry of objection to this being included in the ad, with many pointing out that if the ad was supposed to be about hatred towards Jews, why was there a Muslim message here? This is a fair point. However, of these same people, very few pointed out that right before that was a burning cross, a symbol historically linked to the KKK and their torment of black people in the South.
Despite objections to the inclusion, we have to realize that it is indeed necessary given today’s state of affairs in America. The message of the commercial was not simply to leave Jews alone. The real message was to treat your Jewish neighbors as you would all of your other neighbors. If you would not consider terrorizing, victimizing, and othering any other group of people, you should not be singling out one group to do so. In fact, the ad may have been better had it included even more images. Asian hate, white hate, violence against women, and hate towards any group that has historically been victimized would have been welcome here to drive the point home. The issue is that there is no symbol that traditionally was used against those groups that is easily recognizable in a split-second, like the burning cross and the swastika, both of which were clearly visible. Plus, they used the graffiti on the Muslim hate, so there was no other image left to be utilized.
Speaking of Nazi imagery, the other part of this commercial that is deserving of a deep dive is the display of the #HitlerWasRight hashtag. The data on this social media hashtag was sent to us by Cyberwell, a tech nonprofit focused on monitoring and combating the spread of anti-Semitism through social media. In its November 2023 report, Cyberwell found that “in the weeks following the October 7 massacre by Hamas, [there was] a 1,600% surge in the hashtag #HitlerWasRight with a potential reach of 25 million users on X (formerly Twitter) alone. In comparison, during the two weeks prior, #HitlerWasRight had a potential reach of ‘just’ 300,000.”
This phrase tends to spike at times of major news about Israel, but it is not exclusive to Israel. For instance, the last spike occurred in 2022 when (Kan)Ye decided to align with Nazis. This time, it obviously started with the events of October 7.
If you use X, you may already understand how vile the world has gotten towards Israel and Jews. The sheer volume of those coming out against Israel can make us wonder, “Are we wrong? Have we been arguing the wrong side this entire time? Look at how many people are against us!” However, this is where we have to remember why there are so many people who are on the Palestinian side. There are almost 2 billion Muslims in the world, and only around 15 million Jews – again, mostly because we did not spend centuries murdering those who would not convert to our religion. But that does not mean we are wrong. How could 1.8 billion people be wrong? Easy. There are over 2 billion Christians in the world, so clearly at least that many could be wrong about something.
That is why it is so important to include the hatred against others in the anti-Semitism ad. That message was not meant for you, the Jewish viewer; it was meant for the other 99.8% of the world whom we need right now. We need their support, and if we have to invoke other groups to get it, so be it.
Am Yisrael Chai.
Izzo Zwiren is the former host of the Jewish Living Podcast. Izzo is a fan of trivia, stand-up comedy, and the New York Giants. Izzo lives on Long Island with his wife and three adorable, hilarious children.
