Super Bowl Ad Highlights the Failure to Confront Antisemitism

In a year marked by escalating hostility toward Jews, one of the most prominent statements against antisemitism didn’t come from a university president or elected official. It came from a $15 million Super Bowl ad.

Funded by Robert Kraft, a respected Jewish philanthropist and public figure, the ad delivered a simple, well-meaning message: don’t ignore hate. It depicted a Jewish teen being targeted with a slur, and another student stepping in with a blue square a gesture of allyship and solidarity.

The campaign’s intentions are not in question. The discomfort lies in what it fails to address.

The commercial confronts antisemitism only in its most obvious, cartoonish form: adolescent name-calling in a hallway. But that’s not the kind of antisemitism Jews in America are facing today. The defining feature of antisemitism in 2026 is not back-alley bullying. It’s institutional silence. It’s harassment disguised as activism. It’s the repackaging of old hatred in the language of social justice. And it is increasingly tolerated if not enabled by elite institutions.

At Columbia University just last week, professors joined students in protests that led to arrests. When faculty provide moral legitimacy to campus intimidation, it’s no longer fringe radicalism. It’s embedded ideology.

The uncomfortable truth is that awareness is not the issue. Everyone knows antisemitism exists. The issue is that many institutions now refuse to confront it with any meaningful consequences. They prefer “values statements” over discipline, and “listening sessions” over leadership. Jewish students are harassed on Monday, campuses send out vague emails on Tuesday, and by Wednesday, nothing has changed.

This is not a crisis of ignorance. It is a crisis of institutional will.

And that is what makes Kraft’s ad so revealing. Not because it misses the mark in tone or message but because its very existence is an indictment of how far America’s civic institutions have retreated. That a major Jewish figure must resort to a Super Bowl ad to say what university presidents and cultural leaders won’t is a sign of moral failure, not moral progress.

Even within its gesture, the ad universalizes the Jewish experience into a broader message of “fighting all hate.” That instinct may seem noble. But Jews are often permitted sympathy only when their suffering is made safe, softened, and shared. This impulse toward vagueness weakens the resolve needed to confront the particular forms antisemitism takes especially when cloaked in academic respectability or political activism.

The ad also frames the Jewish teen as a passive figure, saved by the intervention of a kind bystander. It’s a compelling image but one that unintentionally reflects the current dynamic too well. American Jews today are expected to depend on the empathy of others, not the protection of institutions. But a society that expects its minorities to rely on symbolic gestures rather than enforceable rules is not a society that ensures justice.

What’s needed now is not another campaign of awareness. It’s clarity. It’s enforcement. It’s universities that treat antisemitism the same way they would respond to any other bigotry: with consequences. With courage. With leadership.

Kraft’s blue square is not offensive. But it is insufficient. It points to a vacuum where institutional responsibility should be.

In Israel, institutions do not hesitate to name threats and defend their people. That clarity of purpose is not just admirable it’s essential. And it’s exactly what American Jews deserve in the institutions that claim to serve them.

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