On Saturday night, a Temple University student at a sports bar owned by Barstool Sports founder Dave Portnoy uploaded a video of a personalized sign he and his friends allegedly ordered with their drinks. The waitstaff delivered the sign, which read: “F— the Jews.” The video, which quickly went viral, clearly showed the sign and plenty of laughter — and no visible intervention from staff or patrons. The president of Temple University issued a statement condemning antisemitism and suspending one of the students. Portnoy, who is Jewish, took to Instagram to first rage against the perpetrators and to promise to “ruin them,” but later announced he would make this ugly incident a “teaching moment” and pay for the two perpetrators to visit the Auschwitz death camp in an effort to turn the ugly action into a teachable moment.
After more than a year of circular conversations and hand-wringing about whether this or that action is antisemitic — and whether campus antisemitism merits attention, despite its documented rise — the clarity of this chain of events was almost refreshing. A “F— the Jews” sign is obviously antisemitic, and Temple’s response was decisive and ethical. I’m no Barstool Sports fan, but Portnoy acted honorably and honestly: understandably enraged by this act of hatred and ignorance, yet reflective enough to commit to more than vengeance to attempt to make things right.
Portnoy’s offer to send the perpetrators on an educational trip to Auschwitz is a more lavishly funded version of a common educational response to incidents of Jew hatred.
Portnoy’s offer to send the perpetrators on an educational trip to Auschwitz is a more lavishly funded version of a common educational response to incidents of Jew hatred: some type of antisemitism training, which might be the only time students in secular schools discuss Jews or antisemitism, save for a Holocaust unit, which is required in about half of the states. These hard-won initiatives are hugely important, but they are insufficient to avoid, or address, this kind of incident.
This ugly case makes clear that we need a new approach to educating about antisemitism and Jewish identity in the United States. As a Jewish professor working on a campus under federal investigation for antisemitic discrimination and the lead scholar on the New York City Board of Education’s forthcoming Jewish American Hidden Voices curricular initiative, I am observing this Barstool debacle unfold with sadness. But it’s also giving us some sense of what a solution might look like.
The reaction of the Temple University student who uploaded the video, Mohammed Adnan Khan, makes abundantly clear why we must address the antisemitism that festers on both the political left and right. After admitting responsibility and accepting Portnoy’s offer to go to Auschwitz, according to Portnoy, Khan “did a total 180,” Portnoy said. In a separate video posted to social media, Khan said he had nothing to do with the sign or spreading hatred, but was acting as a “citizen journalist” and was documenting anti-Jewish animus based on Israel’s actions. In the video, Khan offered his own explanation of the event and its larger stakes, invoking racialized violence by likening Portnoy’s campaign against him to “a lynching.”
Khan had only admitted responsibility to Portnoy “under duress,” he said, due to an “asymmetrical power dynamic” in which Portnoy, who is older and wealthier, “and well connected to these institutions that are very elite,” intimidated him. The outcry over the sign, Khan asserts, was only a result of his bringing attention to the “unjust things Israel is doing around the world,” referring to Israel’s ongoing retaliatory strikes in Gaza following the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack, in which Israel has killed more than 52,000 Palestinians, according to the Gaza Health Ministry.
These talking points will sound familiar to anyone who has often heard brazen antisemitism dismissed as “just criticizing Israel,” as if such speech operates in a category of its own. Regardless, Khan’s message, shared with a fundraising link for “restitution,” is clear: “… The larger Jewish community is acting like they are the victims … I am the victim.”
Amid this garbled mess of self-righteousness exhibited in Khan’s video is a sentiment that sounds a lot like what we hear in conservative media. The sign was just “an edgy joke,” Khan comments, and well within his right to “free speech.” “Triggered,” hypersensitive scolds were weaponizing “cancel culture” to “sensationalize” these barroom antics, and costing Khan his reputation, a prestigious internship, and even his physical safety.
Khan then appeared to make his case on “The Stew Peters Show,” which Temple University then “condemned in the strongest possible terms.” Peters is an unabashed antisemite and right-wing provocateur: flanked by a mug that reads “Mein Coffee” and a hat emblazoned with “Bad Goy,” he referred to Portnoy as “a disgusting Jew” and presented the case as an example of nefarious “Jewish supremacy” in action as Khan nodded along. While Khan at first hesitated to articulate these words himself, by the end of the conversation, he enthusiastically responded, “Absolutely!” to Peters’ invitation to “humanity” — which implicitly excludes Jews — to “join forces against Jewish supremacy.”
The media angle underscores how unremittingly this antisemitism courses through both left and right. Khan repeatedly invokes the idea that Portnoy’s network of powerful Jews is using their media influence to target him; Peters happily amplifies this age-old trope.
An interview Portnoy did with a local ABC affiliate Philadelphia reporter diminishes the severity of this antisemitic act more subtly. Citing an academic paper, the reporter asks whether a “culture of harassment” perpetrated by Barstool itself helped enable this antisemitic incident. Portnoy flies into a tirade at this “media scumbag” and “liberal college professors” blaming Barstool and “white men” for the incident, which distracts from the fact that it is entirely inappropriate for a journalist to suggest to a member of a group victimized by a hate crime that they might be to blame for this behavior.
Portnoy concedes one point to Khan; that the sign was probably intended as a joke. This only makes the casualness of perpetuating hate even more alarming. “It shows how increasingly normalized antisemitism has become in public spaces,” one museum official commented. Indeed, just a few weeks after the Oct. 7 terror attacks, Tom Nichols in The Atlantic worried about the moral cost of college students defending antisemitism merely as protected speech: “After enough time serving the insidious impulse to defend the indefensible, they will find themselves changed people.”
While educational solutions might seem like Band-Aids on a gaping wound, classrooms can be crucial in combating this ugly environment.
Comedian Daniel Ryan Spaulding made a similar point around the same time, parodying a 2040 college reunion at which alumni bond over memories of ripping down posters of Israeli hostages and cyberbullying Jews. A year and a half after these observations, a college student ordering bottle service with a “F— the Jews” sign on the side, posting it on social media and declaring himself a victim, seems to bear out their predictions.
So what do we do? While educational solutions might seem like Band-Aids on a gaping wound, classrooms can be crucial in combating this ugly environment. Students should learn about Jewish history and identity as an important part of their study of the United States. Social studies curricula should teach about Jews as immigrants, Americans, athletes, artists, entrepreneurs, and as members of a diverse community from many national and ethnic backgrounds who hold a range of views on any given topic, including Israel, and most importantly, as everyday people deserving of respect and full civil rights.
Understanding antisemitism is of paramount importance, but it should not be addressed only in response to incidences of Jew hatred, or uniquely in relation to the Holocaust. Rather, antisemitism should be explained as a centuries-old hatred that shape-shifts depending on the historical moment, to be about religion, biology or culture, and as still very much with us. Teaching about Jewish identities and experiences, both of perseverance and success and of facing persistent discrimination, is important to understanding, and improving, our pluralistic society.
There are many reasons Jewish identity has not been a focus in the teaching of American history. For one, Jewish Americans have largely relied on religious education to impart this knowledge, and have not been as vocal in advocating for inclusion in secular curricula. Furthermore, to the extent that many Jews in the United States benefit from some degree of white privilege, the experience of Jews has not been the main focus in anti-racist lessons that focus more on a Black-white binary, insufficient to encompass the complexity of the Jewish experience.
But this narrow vision, applied to Jews or any identity group, dangerously constrains our ability to understand each other and to fight ignorance and hatred of the sort on display in that barroom, and beyond.
