Last week, a Barstool Sports affiliate posted a short video clip from a bar crawl in Boston that quickly went viral—and for all the wrong reasons. The host, microphone in hand, accosted a Jewish man wearing a Magen David necklace and asked him if he wanted to buy the bar. When the man declined, the host smirked and muttered, “What kind of Jew are you?” Then he uploaded the exchange to Barstool’s social platforms, where it was played for laughs.
In the aftermath, a predictable series of responses followed. The video was removed. Dave Portnoy, Barstool’s founder, condemned the clip and reiterated his personal support for Israel and the Jewish community. Jewish organizations expressed outrage. And a widely shared op-ed in the Jewish News Syndicate urged a dramatic shift in strategy: rather than sending antisemites to Auschwitz, send them to Israel.
At first glance, the argument feels jarring. Auschwitz is shorthand for the worst human behavior imaginable—a place synonymous with evil, and often the go-to destination for confronting antisemitism through horror and guilt. But the op-ed’s author, Jonathan Tobin, argues that while Auschwitz explains why antisemitism is wrong, Israel shows what it means to be Jewish. It’s a provocative idea, but one that deserves serious consideration. Because in our current cultural moment—when antisemitism is simultaneously denied, minimized, and mainstreamed—we need to reevaluate not only how we respond to hate, but what kind of Jewish identity we hope to project to the world.
Let’s be clear: Dave Portnoy is not the problem. He has publicly supported Israel when many others have gone silent. He made clear that he didn’t approve of the Barstool segment and moved quickly to distance the company from it. I take him at his word. But the fact that this video was produced, published, and initially celebrated speaks to something deeper than corporate oversight. It reveals how comfortably antisemitism now cloaks itself in comedy, how easily it masquerades as “just a joke,” and how little many people—even the well-intentioned—actually understand about Jews.
That’s precisely why the Auschwitz reflex is no longer sufficient. For decades, Jewish advocacy has relied on Holocaust memory as our primary educational tool. The logic was simple: show them what they did to us, and they will never let it happen again. March of the Living. Museum tours. Documentaries in public school classrooms. We’ve invested millions of dollars and countless classroom hours into Holocaust education with the hope that if we can just teach people to remember our pain, they will stop perpetuating it.
But that model is failing. Antisemitism is surging in high schools and college campuses, especially among young people who know about the Holocaust but don’t feel connected to it. Auschwitz is a site of mourning and moral horror—but for too many, it has become a relic of the past, not a warning for the present. Worse, it reinforces a tragic narrative of Jews as passive victims, as people primarily known for how they suffered and died. This is not how you build respect. It’s how you get ignored—or mocked.
Israel, for all its complexities and controversies, offers something different. It is a living, breathing Jewish society—not just a memorial, but a mission. It shows that Jews are not only survivors of genocide but creators of culture, builders of cities, and defenders of life. It confronts the caricatures—greedy, weak, scheming, humorless—and replaces them with reality: a people who fight, sing, innovate, argue, and dream. To send someone to Auschwitz is to show them what the world did to the Jews. To send them to Israel is to show them what the Jews did in response.
Of course, Israel is not a panacea. It is not immune to criticism or above reproach. And we must avoid any attempt to substitute one form of propaganda for another. What I am suggesting is not that we turn Israel into a hasbara theme park or package it for moral redemption. Rather, we should invite skeptics, critics, and even antagonists to encounter the full dimensionality of Jewish life—not merely its traumas, but its triumphs. Let them meet Ethiopian Jews dancing at a bar mitzvah. Let them talk to Mizrahi cab drivers in Tel Aviv and secular sabras in Eilat. Let them sit with yeshiva students arguing over Talmud in the morning and LGBTQ activists planning protests in the afternoon. Let them see that Jewish identity is not a museum exhibit or a sad story—it’s a living organism, pulsing with complexity and contradiction and beauty.
This is not just about changing how non-Jews see us. It’s also about how we see ourselves. When Jewish education centers on suffering, we raise generations who feel more fear than pride. We become guardians of memory rather than agents of destiny. We teach our children that their Jewishness is something to be defended, not celebrated. And we leave them unprepared to confront a world that doesn’t always recognize their history or respect their boundaries.
Auschwitz will always matter. It must never be forgotten. But it cannot be the cornerstone of Jewish identity. It is not the reason to be Jewish. It is the warning of what happens when we are not allowed to be. If we want a Jewish future that is resilient and joyful, we must move forward. Not by erasing the past, but by refusing to be defined by it.
I believe Portnoy meant well. I also believe that good intentions are no longer enough. The next time someone asks, “What kind of Jew are you?” the answer shouldn’t require a death camp to explain. It should be obvious from how we live, how we speak, and what we love. Let the world see Jewishness not as a punchline or a pity project, but as a people with history and hope.
So yes—send them to Israel. Not to sanitize or silence their questions, but to complicate them. To make it impossible to reduce Jews to tropes. To give them something to respect. Because the best answer to antisemitism is not guilt—it’s dignity.
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