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July 16, 2004
Anti-effective
Gee, somebody besides me thinks these posters are inane. What Julia doesn't bring up, is why is this ad campaign being rolled out on the streets of Manhattan, which has the largest Jewish population of any city in the US? I mean, we're not exactly threatened here. Half the New Yorkers who aren't Jews are married to Jews. There's an incident every once in a while, but in general New Yorkers are not the ones who need the message (whatever it is; as Julia points out, it's not clear).Besides, these posters are very straightforward, and the only way to reach Manhattanites is through irony and enough layers of meaning to keep us guessing. We don't like things to be too easy.
So now I had a black woman, an Asian child and a gender-vague minister being offended by anti-Semitism. Perhaps the point of the campaign was really to equate anti-Semitism with discrimination against minorities that are more visibly minorities--to remind people that anti-Semitism is no different from racism.See, that's how NYers think.Could that really be it? Could the message really be that shallow? A friend suggested that, to counteract the accusation that Zionism is racism and that Judaism is a racist religion, the ADL was trying to show that, in some sense, anyone could be Jewish. Perhaps the ADL was trying to appeal to the simplistic idiocy of some on the left by using their own language, showing them the error of their ways by offering superficial images of diversity.
Judith | 07/16/04 at 12:42 AM | Categories: NYC
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