Send Barstool Jew-haters to Israel, not Auschwitz

(JNS) — An incident involving college students at a bar owned by a celebrity best known for sports betting and reviewing pizza isn’t the sort of thing expected to go down as a pivotal moment in the history of antisemitism and the Jewish world’s responses to the hatred directed at it. But the viral story about a sign that read, “F*** the Jews,” at a Barstool Sports eating and drinking establishment in Philadelphia and the angry reactions to it by owner Dave Portnoy may tell us a great deal about both the way Jew-hatred has become normalized in 2025 and how clueless most responses to it have been.

Observers may take some consolation in the fact that the occurrence didn’t go unnoticed or, as is likely, unpunished. But the idea that a proper response to overt antisemitism is to send the offender(s) to Auschwitz is as illustrative of how lacking in insight most Jews, especially those who claim to be authorities on the subject, are about the reasons for the surge in hate and how best to educate offenders.

The problem isn’t that Americans, especially college students, don’t know enough about how the German Nazis and their collaborators slaughtered Jews more than 80 years ago. It’s that an apparently growing number of allegedly highly educated Americans have been misled into thinking that Jews who are currently alive are perpetrating “genocide.” Therefore, the thinking goes, they deserve the imprecations of those out for a pricey night of public drinking as well as for mobs demonstrating on college campuses.

Alcohol, students and antisemitism

A group of Temple University students had what was probably a typical night out at a Barstool Sports Center City Philadelphia location. While there, members availed themselves of the establishment’s bottle service—a not-inexpensive option that, along with the liquor, gives customers the option of having their own small neon sign that can say anything they like. In this case, the choice was to have it proclaim a vulgar and profane statement about Jews. That students out for a night on the town should choose to have such a sign proclaiming those words is not as surprising as the fact that the bar complied with their request.

What wasn’t surprising was that those involved posted a video of the sign being proudly waved on social media and that it went viral, generating millions of views. That, in turn, generated a wave of attacks against Portnoy, who is Jewish, for letting something like that take place at one of his establishments. He responded with an equally viral post in which he angrily and profanely vowed to get to the bottom of it and to ruin those responsible.

The story then took a number of quick twists and turns that also generated more social-media clicks and media attention.

Some of the bar’s employees were fired, with Portnoy piling in by tearing into the waitresses for their stupidity. One of the Temple students was given a provisional suspension while the school investigated whether or not he had violated their code of conduct.

Perhaps the most interesting element of the tale is how Portnoy decided that the best response was to create “a teaching moment” for those involved. That meant that rather than continuing to roast the offenders, he said that he would send them to Auschwitz to learn about the Holocaust.

When one of those who were involved refused to take responsibility for their actions, Portnoy said the trip to Poland was off.

Whether the students face punishment of some sort or obtain public absolution in the form of Holocaust tourism shouldn’t interest anyone that much. What does matter is how acts of almost casual Jew-hatred like this are becoming commonplace. That has more to do with what is considered acceptable public discourse in respectable publications like The New York Times and other major media, and particularly on American college campuses where woke ideology reigns, than the otherwise toxic combination of alcohol and young people with enough money in their pockets to go to such a watering hole in the first place.

While Portnoy’s anger about it was clearly genuine, that didn’t prevent some in the chattering classes from claiming that the real culprit here wasn’t a student who thinks Jews deserve to be targeted or restaurant employees who thought there was nothing wrong with that. Instead, some of those commenting on the incident were quick to blame Portnoy for it because he’s a Trump supporter. A local news reporter also tried to get him to admit that the situation was enabled by what she said was Barstool Sports’ “culture of harassment.”

Think what you like about Portnoy’s persona or the milieu of sports bars. The willingness, however, to blame the unprecedented uptick in incidents of Jew-hatred, such as the one that happened in this particular venue, on him or the current president of the United States illustrates just how deep the denial about what is happening in this country runs.

What’s causing such vile hatred?

Antisemitism of this sort is never merely routine vulgarity, discourtesy or meanness. Singling out Jews in this matter is the result of a broad cultural movement that, far from involving influencers like Portnoy, is rooted in ideologies that treat Israel and its supporters as uniquely evil. That is especially true since the Hamas-led Palestinian terror assaults on southern Israel that took place on Oct. 7, 2023.

In recent years, students who attend schools like Temple, coupled with more elite institutions like Harvard, Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania in the same city as Temple, are routinely being fed propaganda about Jews being “white” oppressors of “people of color” due to the pervasive influence of toxic left-wing ideas like critical race theory, intersectionality, settler-colonialism, and the woke catechism of diversity, equity and inclusion that pointedly excludes Jews from its protections. This problem has been exacerbated by coverage of the war against Hamas in the Gaza Strip that has falsely depicted Israel as the moral equivalent of the Nazis, even though it is the Palestinians who have embraced an eliminationist ideology aimed at the destruction of the Jewish state and the genocide of its people.

To his credit, Portnoy responded to accusations that he’s responsible for hate by pointing out that the main engine of contemporary antisemitism is the campaign of vilification of Israel and Jews that has been mainstreamed on college campuses and in the mainstream media.

If there’s anything to be learned from the enormous effort that has been expended on Holocaust education in the last generation in the United States, it’s that the focus on Auschwitz and the Nazi murder of 6 million Jews isn’t doing much to stop the backlash of hatred against them.

That’s not just because it emphasizes Jewish powerlessness—something that tends to excite antisemites rather than deter them. It is because the ideas driving antisemitism right now cannot be debunked by talking about the crimes of the past but must instead educate people about why today’s haters are wrong.

If students, waitresses and bar managers think that it’s OK to jovially bash Jews on a typical night out, it’s because they have been indoctrinated in lies about contemporary Israel that aren’t answered by training about tolerance or DEI-style concern about minorities other than Jews.

What is needed in response to all of the incidents of antisemitism is an understanding of the war being waged by Palestinian Arabs on Israel that is cheered on by a red/green alliance of “progressives” and Islamists. It is no different from the one waged against Jews by the Nazis. Honoring the memory of the Holocaust is vital, but young Americans who hate Jews don’t need trips to a concentration camp. What they could use is a visit to Israel’s Gaza Envelope to see the Oct. 7 killing fields at the Nova music festival site and in the attacked Jewish communities near the border, where unspeakable atrocities occurred.

The “bro culture” at Barstool Sports bars may strike many of us as repellent. But the issue here isn’t Portnoy’s influence or his own bad behavior. It is a media and an education system that hasn’t so much increased its tolerance of Jew-hatred as they have mainstreamed it.

Those who want to reverse this trend should stop pointing their fingers at the pizza guy and start blaming the people who continually put out misinformation about Israel and Jews that fuels antisemitism. And those who want to stop this dispiriting trend should understand that Holocaust education isn’t the catch-all answer to Jew-hatred. Individuals with powerful platforms like Portnoy should be focusing more on the battle against intersectionality and DEI and telling the truth about the foundation of the 77-year-old democratic State of Israel.

Jonathan S. Tobin is editor-in-chief of JNS (Jewish News Syndicate). Follow him at: @jonathans_tobin.