Jonathan S. Tobin
Robert Kraft’s Foundation to Combat Antisemitism wasted $8 million on something that never mentioned Jews or antisemitism, while also failing to explain the real reason for its rapid spread.
Former NFL player Tom Brady and rapper Snoop Dogg. Photo by Lori Levine/Getty Images.
New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft is an exemplary member of the American Jewish community. Over the years, he has donated a great deal of money to Jewish causes, locally in his hometown of Boston and in the State of Israel, even building a football stadium in Jerusalem. The National Football League magnate’s philanthropy testifies to his own strong sense of Jewish peoplehood, in addition to a decent concern for others less fortunate than himself, as shown by his family’s support of a variety of educational and health-care causes.
Among the efforts he has supported is the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism (FCAS), which he founded with money he pledged as a result of his winning the Genesis Prize in 2019. The idea behind the foundation was to fight the movement to boycott, divest and sanction Israel, as well as other efforts to battle Jew-hatred. The campaign itself was marked by a bright blue square with a moniker called “The Blue Box Campaign” that urges standing up to hate.
But for all of his various efforts on behalf of that important cause, probably none gained as much attention as the FCAS advertisement that appeared during the Super Bowl this past Sunday. It featured two mega-celebrities—rapper and actor Snoop Dogg, and NFL great Tom Brady, who won seven Super Bowls, including six for Kraft’s Patriots. In it, they spout various reasons why people hate each other before concluding that “things are so bad that we have to do a commercial about it,” before the two walk off together in a gesture of amity.
.
A missed opportunity
That’s a colossal mistake, as well as a missed opportunity that Kraft and anyone else who cares about the issue should deeply regret.
While no one should doubt the good intentions of Kraft, the 30-second blurb sums up everything that is wrong with the mindset and the efforts of liberal American Jewish efforts to deal with the problem.
Indeed, if that’s the best that the FCAS can manage, then Kraft would be well advised to close it up and transfer the money he’s currently wasting on it to those interested in fighting antisemitism in a way that will make a difference.
What’s wrong with the ad?
Part of the problem was the employment of Snoop Dogg. While he may be famous and a ubiquitous figure in pop culture and ads for all sorts of products, he’s also a well-known antisemite. As the Americans for Peace and Tolerance group noted in its criticism of the ad, he is an avowed supporter of the antisemitic Nation of Islam group and its 91-year-old leader, Louis Farrakhan, who has done more than anyone to spread Jew-hatred among American blacks and Muslims. Using him in a spot sponsored by a group that cares about antisemitism wasn’t mere negligence but a betrayal of the values Kraft has always exemplified.
There was more that was wrong about it other than Snoop Dogg.
The underlying premise was a decision to try to universalize the problem rather than one that would specifically focus on the issue of antisemitism. That’s based on an assumption that talking about antisemitism and Jews is a turnoff to a broad audience like the one that tunes into the Super Bowl. The NFL championship game is the most watched television program every year—an event that has assumed the status of a secular holiday. This year’s show reportedly attracted an average audience of 126 million viewers throughout the contest with a peak of 135.7 million watching, with the halftime show featuring rapper Kendrick Lamar being a major draw.
The universalizing impulse
With that in mind, the FCAS produced an ad that it supposed would appeal to the widest possible audience and therefore went all-in on universalizing the problem.
This is the same premise of most Holocaust education programs that have been employed in the United States in the past few decades. They are rooted in the belief that the only way anyone can be deterred from hating Jews is to depict the Holocaust and antisemitism as essentially no different than any other form of prejudice. In this way, as the FCAS ad seemed to be telling us, Jew-hatred is no different from disliking any group or people other than the majority. The solution, then, is for everyone to play nicely with each other the way Snoop and Brady—a black celebrity and a white one—appear willing to do.
But if history, as well as the present-day surge in Jew-hatred teaches, it is that antisemitism is not like other varieties of prejudice, be they major or minor. It is a specific virus of hate that targets Jews not merely as a function of bad behavior or a lack of awareness of our common humanity, but as a means of acquiring and holding onto political power.
To antisemites of every variety—be they left-wing, right-wing, Islamists, and yes, blacks—Jews aren’t merely the “other.” They are in the crosshairs to be despised and subjected to singular prejudice and discrimination, no matter their age, background, what they do or where they reside. They are, instead, an almost superhuman force for evil that must be eradicated. They alone are to be denied rights that even other discriminated minorities are given. And in so doing, various groups can wield power and pretend to be forces for good.
Why antisemitism spreads
That is why antisemitism is such a contagious and adaptable virus. It is, as scholar Ruth Wisse has noted, the most successful ideology of modern times since it has attached itself to a variety of movements, including fascism, communism, socialism, Islamists, and in our own day in contemporary America, woke ideologues who pretend to be “anti-racists.” The latter claims to be defending minorities against Jews who are “white” oppressors, as part of a struggle against racism that can never end. And, just as was true of the German Nazis and their collaborators, anything can be justified if it constitutes “resistance” to the Jews or the Jewish state, even the atrocities of Oct. 7, 2023, committed by the Hamas terrorist group and other Palestinian Arabs.
That is why rather than provoking sympathy for the Jewish state and Jews around the world, the Oct. 7 spree of mass murder, torture, rape and kidnapping in southern communities in Israel inspired an unprecedented surge in antisemitism.
In the face of such ideological fanaticism, merely telling people to be nice—as that Super Bowl ad did—does nothing. Such universalization trivializes the Holocaust. The same can be said for efforts that treat the widespread rationalization and even defense of antisemitic acts of intimidation and violence on American college campuses.
The collapse of the black-Jewish alliance
What makes this particularly disappointing is that last year’s FCAS Super Bowl ad was not quite so wrongheaded. Their 2024 featured Clarence B. Jones, a former speechwriter for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. speaking against generic hate. The images that appeared on the screen while he spoke were specific in that they showed swastika graffiti on Jewish institutions and signs that spoke of the need to fight antisemitism. Though it bowed to liberal orthodoxy by also including an image that smoke of the largely mythical threat of prejudice against Muslims, it also left no doubt of the particular problem that, only a few months after Oct. 7, as Jew-hatred spread on campuses and in the streets of major U.S. cities, the country was facing.
Interestingly, since then Jones has broken with Kraft and the FCAS over what he depicts as insufferable Jewish “demands for loyalty.” Sadly, like many in the African-American community, he seems to think that a request to support the struggle of the Jewish people against the genocidal Islamists of Hamas is a bridge too far. In a USA TODAY op-ed in which Jones vented his resentment against his former allies, he blamed the refusal of Israelis and their American Jewish supporters for the collapse of the alliance between blacks and Jews that flowered during Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s time. In doing so, he not only embraces classic tropes of antisemitism like dual loyalty but also seems to think that Hamas’s efforts to accomplish the mass murder of Jews and destroy the one Jewish state on the planet is the sort of thing that friends should be willing to agree to disagree over rather than a patently evil cause.
As depressing as it is for a civil-rights-era veteran to write such things, it’s equally true that he—and those who might agree with him—is an ally not worth having.
But we’ve also seen why the timid universalizers of the FACs are dead wrong about the American people.
Libeling the American people
Contrary to the stereotypes spread by the political left, the American people as a whole are not antisemitic. Nor are they irredeemably racist against blacks, Hispanics or other minorities. And, as the election results last November showed, they don’t much appreciate the lectures of sermonizing liberals who talk down to them, and think that their patriotism and most cherished values and beliefs are racist or expressions of prejudice.
The universalizing of the battle against antisemitism plays right into the lies of the most prevalent form of American bigotry against Jews.
It is true that the last 16 months of brazen antisemitism and the mainstreaming of efforts to rationalize and even justify it in the liberal corporate media have presented new and unique challenges for Jews.
But the response of most Americans, which is to say that those who live outside the woke leftist bubble in which much of the press and other cultural elites live, is support for Israel and anger at students and other activists who chant for the genocide of Jews (“from the river to the sea”) and terrorism against them (“globalize the intifada”). President Donald Trump may only have the support of the approximate half of the electorate that voted him into office. But he speaks for the vast majority of the country that supports Israel and believes that foreigners who use their student visas to engage in anti-Israel (and anti-American) protests, encampments and often violent-like behavior should be deported.
Jews and the groups that purport to speak for them as well as to lead the fight against antisemitism like Kraft’s FCAS ought not to buy into the idea that America is full of hate. In this way, the Super Bowl ad was just another version of those ubiquitous lawn signs that say “Hate Has No Home Here,” as if to imply that those who don’t engage in such liberal virtue signaling, are haters. Trump, whose executive orders against antisemitism and full-throated support of Israel aren’t couched in amorphous platitudes like that of the 2025 Super Bowl ad, has had no trouble in identifying the sources of the current surge in antisemitism. Like him, they ought to be exposing the Jew-haters, and countering lies about Israel and the Jewish people that are integral to the left’s toxic myths of critical race theory, intersectionality and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) that are the root of the problem.
If they did, they might find that most Americans don’t need to be shamed into uniting against antisemitism but would, instead, readily support an unapologetic campaign to back Israel and join the fight to roll back the woke tide fueling much of contemporary American antisemitism.
This Super Bowl ad will soon be forgotten. But the decision to run something like it demonstrates just how clueless even well-meaning establishment figures like Kraft are when it comes to the world’s oldest form of prejudice. It’s a reminder that rather than relying on legacy groups and celebrity-driven foundations like that of Kraft, it is long past time to get rid of such organizations and pour Jewish philanthropic dollars into the hands of those able to think clearly about the problem. Jews need to stop their reflexive desire to universalize their tribulations, and even more, to stop blaming all of the American people for the transgressions of leftist elites.
Jonathan S. Tobin – is editor-in-chief of the Jewish News Syndicate, a senior contributor for The Federalist, a columnist for Newsweek and a contributor to many other publications. He covers the American political scene, foreign policy, the U.S.-Israel relationship, Middle East diplomacy, the Jewish world and the arts. He hosts the JNS “Think Twice” podcast, both the weekly video program and the “Jonathan Tobin Daily” program, which are available on all major audio platforms and YouTube. Previously, he was executive editor, then senior online editor and chief political blogger, for Commentary magazine. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of The Jewish Exponent in Philadelphia and editor of the Connecticut Jewish Ledger. He has won more than 60 awards for commentary, art criticism and other writing. He appears regularly on television, commenting on politics and foreign policy. Born in New York City, he studied history at Columbia University.
Trump admin still can’t deport anti-Israel, recent Columbia graduate yet, judge decides
Ramzi Kassem, attorney for Mahmoud Khalil and founding director of Creating Law Enforcement Accountability & Responsibility Project, speaks after a hearing in Manhattan, March 12, 2025. Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images.
Police officers stand in front of a federal courthouse in lower Manhattan after an initial hearing in the case of anti-Israel, recent Columbia University graduate Mahmoud Khalil, March 12, 2025. Photo by Vita Fellig.
