Jewish journalist’s nose possibly ‘doctored’ on Swedish ID card

“As a Jew in Europe you get used to much of this stuff happening that you brush a lot of it aside because... you know the cost of complaining,” Annika Hernroth-Rothstein said.

By ILANIT CHERNICK
A picture of Annika Hernroth-Rothstein's National ID that shows her nose to be totally distorted (photo credit: ANNIKA HENROTH-ROTHSTEIN)
A picture of Annika Hernroth-Rothstein's National ID that shows her nose to be totally distorted
(photo credit: ANNIKA HENROTH-ROTHSTEIN)
Swedish-Jewish journalist Annika Hernroth-Rothstein took to Twitter this weekend to reveal a picture of her national ID that shows her nose having possibly been doctored.
In the picture, Rothstein’s nose is distorted – it looks like a stereotypical Jewish caricature nose used in antisemitic cartoons – while the rest of her face appears untouched.
Speaking to The Jerusalem Post on Monday, Rothstein said she can’t say with total certainty that it was an antisemitic incident, “but what I do know is that no other part of my face has been changed, and it’s only my nose and it’s been changed in a very specific and stereotypical way.”
She said the police also have a digital copy of her ID “and it looks nothing like the ID I’m holding in my hand, which also seems puzzling and it bothers me.”
Asked how this all started, Rothstein said that a couple of years ago, when she was applying for her ID, as well as an extra passport for work reasons, her boss at the time had written her letter – as is the protocol when applying for an extra passport – “and it had my legal name on it, which is my Hebrew name, Chana.
She had a digital photo taken when she applied for the extra passport, which was at the same she applied for her national ID, picking up the ID two weeks later at the police station.
“It was doctored in the way that I posted on Twitter – it was changed, I had a gigantic, very stereotypical... cartoonish nose.
“What I did at the time, was unfortunately nothing, I was really really embarrassed, shocked and humiliated, and I was also taken aback,” she said, adding that she brought it home feeling sad and put it in a drawer.
One day, she was looking for camera equipment and came across it while she was rummaging through the drawer. She was spurred to finally post the picture of the ID.
“I had a non-Jewish friend over and I said to my friend off-hand, ‘oh do you want to see something sick?’ And I showed him the ID and he got really upset and said that ‘this is horrendous and it can’t be a mistake... It’s so upsetting because it happened at a government agency, why haven’t you done anything?’” she said. “And because he got so upset about it and his reaction was so strong, my reaction was probably not strong enough.”
Rothstein explained that “as a Jew in Europe you get used to so much of this stuff happening that you brush a lot of it aside because... you know the cost of complaining, so you try to forget about these incidents.”
As a result of her friend’s reaction, she decided to post it on Twitter.
After posting the picture and tweeting about it, Rothstein received a huge amount of offensive and antisemitic responses, which deeply upset her.
“It’s been incredibly difficult and hurtful, it made me remember why I stopped talking about antisemitism that happens to me personally,” she stressed. “I guess I sort of blocked out how terrible and dark and vile Twitter is to you as a Jew when you talk about these issues.
“A lot of them are antisemitic, horrible cesspools of hate,” she said, adding that most Jewish tweeters have to put up with a lot of antisemitism.
Rothstein said that after she saw the responses, she questioned whether it’s worth it to even publish these incidents on social media.
“I don’t know if it is, it’s just too much and too dark... and threads get started about your face and that you’re ‘an ugly Jew’ – it’s a lot to deal with.”
Following the Twitter post, Magnus Roglert, who works at the Law Department of the Swedish Police Authority, said over the weekend that they “will, of course, take a closer look at the matter and we therefore ask the person to contact us as soon as possible.
“We are back tracking the matter to see if a manipulation has happened or if the image is just distorted by shadows and/or bad resolution,” Roglert said. “It’s all digitalized, but there is always a risk that digital systems are manipulated, so we take this seriously.”
Following Roglert’s statement, Rothstein told the Post she filed an official complaint on Sunday with the police.
Rothstein added that she hopes “that this is a digital glitch - and nothing else, and that my gut feeling was completely off.”


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