As football fans gear up for the Super Bowl this weekend, many are eagerly awaiting the high-profile commercials that are often talked about as much as the games, and Jewish billionaire and philanthropist Robert Kraft has chosen to use the event to send a strong message against antisemitism.
Kraft’s Blue Square Alliance Against Hate released a preview of its 2026 Super Bowl commercial before the Seattle Seahawks face off against the New England Patriots at Levi’s Stadium, home of the San Francisco 49ers, on Sunday.
The preview shows a Jewish student walking through a school hallway who is then jostled by two other students, one of whom surreptitiously sticks a Post-it note on his backpack. When the boy arrives at his locker, he notices the note that reads, “Dirty Jew.” An African-American student who saw what happened comes over and covers it with a blue square sticker, saying, “Do not listen to that. I know how it feels.”
The commercial ends with an alarming statistic: “Two in three Jewish teens have experienced antisemitism,” and encourages viewers to “share the blue square and show you care.”
Commercial is part of national campaign to raise awareness of antisemitism
The commercial is one part of a $15 million national campaign designed to raise awareness of antisemitism, especially among young people. The campaign has pointed to research showing that while Gen Z is three times more likely to witness antisemitism than older Americans, young people are nearly twice as likely to view it as a minor problem.
“Our mission is to educate and inspire unengaged Americans to stand up to Jewish hate by recognizing that hate of any kind increases hate of all kinds,” Kraft said in a statement posted on the Blue Square Alliance website.
Founded by Kraft in 2019, the Blue Square Alliance launched its signature blue square campaign in 2023, framing it as a simple public symbol of solidarity. The organization aims to raise awareness of the fact that Jews are disproportionately targeted in religiously motivated hate crimes.
But the commercial has come in for unexpected criticism by some Jews, who don’t feel it addresses the problem correctly.
Writing on X/Twitter, Rabbi Elchanan Poupko predicted that this ad will ignite a backlash that will be “horrible,” saying, “The reason so many Jews are upset with Robert Kraft's upcoming ad against antisemitism is simple: it has no connection to our reality. No one is slamming stickers on the backpacks of Jewish high school students that say: ‘dirty Jew,’ they are screaming at them ‘Free Palestine!,’ drawing swastikas in the bathroom, and calling them ‘genocide enablers’ and ‘zios.’ There is no ally who shows up to help, young Jews are finding themselves on their own. The backlash to this ad is going to be horrible once it airs. 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. The ad is likely to cause more antisemitism than it will prevent.”
In an article in the Forward, P. J. Grisar echoed Poupko’s sentiment that young Jews today are more likely to be harassed because they are Zionists than to be the victims of overt slurs like the one shown in the ad. “This just could not feel more disconnected from how antisemitism now operates in school hallways… 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. If Kraft is committed to throwing money at a very real problem, he should at least get his money’s worth.”
Liel Leibovitz, writing in The Tablet, noted that since Kraft is the owner of the New England Patriots, she could already announce that he has lost the Super Bowl, because, “Even if his New England Patriots win, the team’s owner will go down in history as having created the single most embarrassing, idiotic, abominable, counterproductive, no good, very bad ad in the big game’s history.”
The Free Press’s Peter Savodnik wrote, “It made me think that people who already kind of hate Jews will come away from this—hating them more.”
But not all the responses were this negative. J. D. Free, commenting on The Free Press article, noted, “This is the sort of ad that works in mainstream circles, and this article gets way too deep in the weeds about it.” Many US news outlets have had respectful features about the ad, such as Fox News.