11/10/2022 0 Comments Notorious big gifAnd it's this perception, at least among the unshockable channers, that gives the image its modest subversive charge.īut it is actually quite difficult to assign any sort of historical context, or place, to the image itself. From left to right, the below are posted on a far-right Romanian political blog post blaming Jews for global communism on a Russian message board that identifies the caricature as part of a Zionist Occupation Government in control of Russia and on a Polish shock site that jests "the peak of recycling is turning Jews into soap."īecause Jew-bwa-ha-ha.gif depicts such hoary and immediate anti-Semitic stereotypes, it's easy to imagine that it was pulled from the archives of Der Stürmer, the Nazi tabloid that advocated the extermination of European Jewry and frequently published images of this kind. Indeed, the modifications of Jew-bwa-ha-ha.gif are endless. And just like every other unit in this set, from photographs and GIFs we find hilarious and adorable to those we find offensive and disgusting, it exists not just as a single image but as a template, a base model for more ornate iterations. The drawing has become a mainstay not just of the internet presence of political causes that are sometimes or usually anti-Semitic in their rhetoric, but an established unit in the set of images that comprises the visual language of Reddit, and 4chan, and dozens of other internet fora. So where did it come from, and how is it used? It's unquestionably the most popular anti-Semitic image on the internet, and if one pauses to think about the scope and reach of the internet, it's easy to make an argument that "Jew-bwa-ha-ha.gif" is the most widely seen anti-Semitic image in history. A Google reverse image search for "Jew-bwa-ha-ha.gif," as the file is most frequently, but not always, named, returns 1,210 matches. What is most significant about this image isn't the thing itself - there is far more creative, and far more disturbing, anti-Jewish imagery out there - but its sheer ubiquity. All of the tropes established by centuries of anti-Semitic iconography in Europe are here: the grotesquely hooked nose, the scheming hands, the evil smile, the wild beard, the misshapen spine, the bulging eyes. Obviously, it's a derogatory caricature of a Jew, and a fairly rote one at that.
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