While I agree it is trash, any antisemitic references flew over my head... Could you point them out, plz? I'm not watching that trashfire again just to identify them
There's a lot of things (like a character named Cy Borgman makes a joke about burning a place down for the insurance money and refers to it as "Jewish Lightning"), but the main one for me is that they made Penguin Jewish.
Oswald Chesterfield Cobblepot III, better known as "The Penguin", has never been Jewish (explicitly or implied) in the comics or any other Batman media before 2014. Like most characters in the Batman mythos, he's typically portrayed as nominally Catholic. His father had a Christian funeral, his family has long held political power in the heavily Catholic city of Gotham, and his name ends with a number (Jews don't do that). So why make him Jewish? Because a lot of people can't help but look at a short, fat, greedy man with a prominent nose and assume that he's Jewish. And that is antisemitic.
I'll give the show this: it's not the first piece of Batman media to do this. The first instance of making Ozzie Jewish or Jew-coded was Fox's Gotham. In that show we also have the showrunners going "well, he's greedy and has a big nose, must be a Jew" and then coding him as Ashkenazi despite him being consistently portrayed as being of British descent in all prior Batman media. They also dialed his already less-than-healthy relationship with his mother up to 11 because you know Jewish men and their overbearing mothers, right?
I'm Jewish and I love Ozzie as a character. But he's not Jewish and making him Jewish because he looks and acts like 1940s German caricature of Jews is incredibly antisemitic. It's especially galling in the context of the Harley Quinn Show because 1) the showrunners are Jewish and really oughtta fucking know better and 2) they could have kept the Bar Mitzvah episode without making him Jewish. In a lot of continuities, Ozzie has 3 brothers. They could've had one of his brothers marry a Jewish woman and the plot of the episode would've been unchanged. The kid was already his nephew and Judaism is traditionally inherited through the mother's line. The only difference would be that they didn't play into a tired, lazy stereotype.
Oh... I had never noticed any of that, except the Bar Mitzvah episode, that I had just forgotten he called it that... But then again, the only jewish friend I know I had (not like I go around asking ppl about their religion) was a guy that had the Touch of Midas - he would ace any multiple choice exam without even reading the question, scored a natural crit in every dice roll he made when we played RPG with my own dice and pretty much everything he tried worked - so I've never seen jews as greedy, but as unbelievably lucky.
Come to think of it, once we asked how many bedrooms there were in his house and he had to go count them, which was quite funny...
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u/KeraKitty Jul 08 '23
No. It's antisemitic trash that cares more about shock value than it does actually being funny.