Robert Kraft’s Antisemitism Super Bowl Ad is Pissing Off Everyone
“The ad is likely to cause more antisemitism than it will prevent,” warned Elchanan Poupko, an 11th-generation rabbi.
This article originally appeared on the Daily Caller News Foundation and was republished with permission.
Guest post by Derek VanBuskirk
Jewish leaders sharply criticized an ad by New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance meant to combat antisemitism, calling it out of touch with today’s reality.
The “Sticky Note” commercial, the product of a $15 million campaign by the Blue Square Alliance set to air Feb. 8 as Kraft’s team plays the Seattle Seahawks in California, according to Jewish Insider. The Blue Square Alliance was previously the Foundation for Combating Antisemitism. Multiple Jewish leaders have criticized the new ad’s content as outdated, useless and even counterproductive.
The commercial shows a teen walking down a school hallway of a school where he’s shoved by two students walking in the opposite direction. Students say, “Loser,” “Should we tell him” and “Look at that,” as he walks.
As the boy approaches his locker and takes off his backpack, it’s revealed that the bullies had placed a sticky note on his backpack with the words “Dirty Jew.” The camera moves from the boy’s shocked face to the sticky note, then a black student’s hand moves into the shot and covers the sticky note with a blue square, the symbol of Kraft’s foundation.
“Do not listen to that,” the black student says, adding, “I know how it feels.” He then places another blue square on his own chest.
The commercial then prompts the audience to, “Share the #BlueSquare and show you care.” The ad features the boy being talked down from confronting the bullies by the black student before they introduce themselves. The black student says he’s Bilal, an Arabic Muslim name.
Many Jews criticized Kraft’s commercial because “it has no connection to our reality,” Elchanan Poupko, an 11th-generation rabbi, writer and podcaster, said on X.
“No one is slamming stickers on the backpacks of Jewish high school students that say ‘dirty Jew,’” Poupko said. “They are screaming at them ‘Free Palestine!,’ drawing swastikas in the bathroom, and calling them ‘genocide enablers’ and ‘zios.’”
Poupko said he believes the commercial will receive backlash once it airs Feb. 8. “Many white people will complain the ad portrays them as anti-Semitic, while many black Muslims who are portrayed as the ally that will come save the Jewish student, will complain they have been tokenized,” he wrote.
“The ad is likely to cause more antisemitism than it will prevent,” Poupko concluded.
PJ Grisar, a culture reporter for the Jewish news organization The Forward, said the ad already feels outdated.
“Did a wormhole to the 1950s just open up?” Grisar said. “This just could not feel more disconnected from how antisemitism now operates in school hallways.”
He said high school students who hate Jews are far more subtle and creative in expressing it, citing watchdog organizations. He presented questioning how someone could cook 6 million pizzas in five years, using slurs like “baby killer” and referring to Hitler in code as the “Austrian painter” as examples.
Grisar continued, saying kids will “laugh at how alien and out of touch [the ad] seems. He also claimed Groypers will see this as bait. Groypers are a section of the online right, many of whom have been accused of antisemitism.
“It tells reasonable older people what they already know: Overt, unambiguous antisemitism is bad. It tells kids that adults don’t get what they’re dealing with. It tells people on the cusp, or already fully immersed, in conspiracies of Jewish control that Jews have unlimited resources and a limited understanding of the facts on the ground,” he wrote.
The commercial is set for its Super Bowl airing a week after New York Times columnist and Jewish thought journal Sapir Editor-in-Chief Bret Stephens gave a “State of World Jewry” address Feb. 1 condemning the waste of money in fighting antisemitism.
“What we call the fight against antisemitism, which consumes tens of millions of dollars every year in Jewish philanthropy and has become an organizing principle across Jewish organizations, is a well-meaning, but mostly wasted effort,” Stephens said, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Instead, he suggested major investments in things like cultural institutions, Jewish day schools, philanthropic endeavors, media, publishers and religious affairs.
Jewish political commentator Shabbos Kestenbaum of Prager University addressed American Jews on X. “If you are spending millions to ‘fight antisemitism’ instead of building Jewish life, you are both out of touch with the needs of Gen Z Jews and have not learned the lessons of post-October 7 Jewry,” he wrote.
Kestenbaum added that a few employees of Robert Kraft have told him they felt the way he did.
Kraft rebranded the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism, which he founded in 2019, as the Blue Square Alliance Against Hate in 2025 “to inspire Americans to stand up to Jewish hate and all hate.”
The commercial follows a trend of other criticized ads from the Foundation, including 2025’s “No Reason to Hate” commercial featuring Snoop Dogg and a 2024 commercial with narration from Martin Luther King Jr.’s speechwriter.
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