How this ad shrinks antisemitism to hallway bullying, equates it with systemic racism, and ignores state power behind structural anti-Black racism.

Let’s talk about the antisemitism awareness commercial that aired during the Super Bowl, the one staged entirely inside a generic school hallway where a few seconds of interpersonal cruelty were presented as a complete moral universe. What makes this advertisement so absurd is not simply that it is shallow or poorly constructed.

It is that it attempts to place itself in the same moral register as struggles such as anti-Black racism while stripping away every element that makes those struggles real and material. The comparison collapses the moment it is examined for more than a few seconds.

The advertisement does not attempt to be explanatory. It does not clearly define antisemitism beyond what is shown in its brief scenes. It does not ask where antisemitism comes from, how it operates, or how it is materially enforced.

Yet those are precisely the questions that define actual racism. That distinction alone separates shallow accusations of hatred from serious discussions of systemic anti-Black, anti-Brown, or anti-Indigenous racism, which cannot be explained without moving beyond the schoolyard.

Racism Beyond the School Hallway

Real systemic racism cannot be understood without discussing policing, incarceration, housing discrimination, labor exploitation, health disparities, surveillance, wealth extraction, and state violence. Anti-Black racism is not simply a bad atmosphere or unpleasant interpersonal interaction. It is a living material structure that actively produces harm. It impoverishes communities. It determines who is protected by the law and who is disposable to it.

This commercial has no interest in material analysis. It engages instead in perception management. It manages a social situation, public opinion, and social anxiety. Once that function is recognized, its construction becomes clear. The primary way it manages perception is by shrinking the world until nothing material can fit inside it.

The setting of a school hallway is not accidental. The logic of the advertisement works only because the structures that define systemic racism do not exist in its universe. In actual schools, anti-Black racism operates through discipline policies, surveillance, policing, academic tracking, suspension, expulsion, and direct pipelines into incarceration. These structures are measurable and documented. There is no comparable institutional system in American schools that targets Jewish students in a structurally enforced way. In fact, Jewish students are often more likely to receive institutional protection than institutional criminalization.

Because there is no structural apparatus to point to, the commercial relies on abstraction. Interpersonal cruelty becomes a stand-in for systemic harm. That abstraction is then elevated into the same moral category as anti-Black racism. The school hallway setting allows power to disappear. By shrinking the problem to manners and vibes, the advertisement avoids confronting the reality that its comparison collapses once material structures are allowed back into view.

Interpersonal Harm and Structural Violence

In the commercial’s universe, someone says something mean, someone else feels bad, and that is the entirety of what is presented as antisemitism. It is not rooted in political ideology, state power, historical violence, propaganda, or material conditions. It is reduced to personal moral failure and detached from broader social context.

The comparison to anti-Black racism is not merely inaccurate. It is obscene. Anti-Black racism is not primarily about hurt feelings in school hallways. It involves state power. It involves who gets stopped, searched, caged, beaten, evicted, poisoned, or killed. It produces measurable outcomes in life expectancy, wealth accumulation, incarceration rates, and exposure to environmental hazards. The material violence cannot be avoided.

By contrast, the advertisement depends on invisibility and abstraction. It equates interpersonal hostility with systemic racism without demonstrating comparable institutional backing. Once the problem is framed as individual behavior, the solution also becomes individual behavior. No institutions must be examined. No policies must be questioned. No foreign policy must be mentioned. The world disappears, leaving only manners and moral theater.

The Power of a Statistic Without Definition

The commercial then presents a statistic: two in three Jewish teens have experienced antisemitism. The figure sounds definitive and empirical. However, it lacks definition and context. There is no clarification of what counts as antisemitism, no distinction between severity levels, and no differentiation between qualitatively different experiences. Everything is collapsed into a single category and presented as equivalent to systemic racism.

When a Black student is called a slur at school, that insult is backed by a broader institutional reality. It occurs within a system that disciplines Black students more harshly, surveils them more intensely, and routes them disproportionately into punishment and criminalization. The insult is reinforced by material power.

Bullying a Jewish student is harmful and wrong, but it is not supported by a comparable institutional structure. There is no systemic apparatus in American schools that targets Jewish students for heightened surveillance or disposability. The harm remains interpersonal rather than structurally enforced.

Collapsing these experiences into the same statistical category erases the distinction between prejudice and materially enforced racism. The vagueness is not a flaw. It is the mechanism. When terms such as antisemitism or racism become infinitely expandable, they can be applied indiscriminately. The statistic disciplines the audience by discouraging questions about definitions, scope, and context.

Claims about anti-Black racism typically reference observable material patterns such as police budgets, incarceration rates, mortality disparities, redlining maps, and environmental exposure. Those claims invite scrutiny because they are anchored in measurable realities. This commercial does the opposite. It demands moral assent without evidence and replaces explanation with moral authority.

Symbolic Action and Managed Outrage

The proposed solution in the advertisement is symbolic participation. Post the symbol. Share the square. Signal solidarity. No institution is challenged. No policy is confronted. No material power is disrupted. The politics offered are brand politics, where participation is reduced to display.

Symbolic participation absorbs anger without creating leverage. It costs nothing and changes nothing, yet it provides a feeling of involvement. If the anger were directed toward material analysis or institutional critique, it would raise uncomfortable questions about state power and foreign policy. The advertisement refuses to acknowledge that political context.

We exist in a period marked by widespread global protest and intense debate about state violence, particularly concerning the actions of the state of Israel and allegations of mass atrocities. Rather than engage with that reality, the advertisement abstracts everything into moral theater. There are no states, no militaries, no geopolitical alliances, only interpersonal hostility in a hallway.

In that abstraction, accusations of antisemitism function without grounding or definition. They operate as emotional frameworks that discourage dissent by making the terrain unstable. If antisemitism can encompass political criticism, then any critique becomes risky. Dissent is managed through ambiguity and social anxiety.

Depoliticization and Moral Flattening

The most consequential move the advertisement makes is refusing to acknowledge the political moment in which it exists. It presents all claims of antisemitism as individualized, hateful incidents detached from context. It does not acknowledge that some contemporary accusations of antisemitism are entangled with political disputes about state policy and geopolitical conflict.

Bigotry involves dehumanization. Political opposition to state violence involves power and policy. Treating these as interchangeable collapses meaningful distinctions. It allows state actions to be shielded behind identity while recasting dissent as moral failure.

Anti-Black racism remains systemic and materially enforced. In this commercial, antisemitism is reduced to vibes and feelings. The result is that ordinary Jewish people become symbolic stand-ins for state policy, while criticism of institutions is reframed as hatred.

At its core, the advertisement is not about public safety. It is about stabilizing public opinion. It individualizes harm, depoliticizes the moment, and redirects outrage away from institutions toward etiquette and moral performance. It appears to express care and solidarity, but what it ultimately produces is absence. It keeps power out of frame. It prevents scrutiny. It interrupts dissent.

That omission is not accidental. It is the central function of the advertisement.