‘Putting this brisket back in the oven’: Jew hate is thriving on Facebook

A friend recently sent me a meme he stumbled across on Facebook. He said it made him feel sick. When I saw it, I understood why. It was one of the most openly Jew-hating posts I’ve ever seen on a mainstream social media platform – and Facebook decided it was totally fine.

The meme, which has over 15,000 laugh reactions and more than a thousand shares, shows a sliced brisket with the caption: “Putting this brisket back in the oven.” It’s not subtle. It’s a Holocaust joke — a reference to Jews being burned in crematoria, cloaked in food humor. The image is a variation of the infamous “Happy Merchant,” a Nazi-era caricature of Jews still widely used by white supremacists. And the comments? They’re even more disturbing.

Here are just a few:

• “Kicked out of 109 kitchens” – a play on the conspiracy theory that Jews were expelled from 109 countries for being inherently problematic.

• “No way you can smoke 6 million briskets. Especially if your smoker has no chimney” – mocking the Holocaust death toll.

• “The single reason for everything bad in this world. Everything evil and bad.” – pure, unfiltered hate.

• “The comments are based” – meaning the Jew hatred is admirable and bold.

But perhaps most chilling of all was the reaction from Meta’s own AI system, which proudly summarized the comments like this:

Commenters poke fun at the brisket’s prolonged oven time, joking it was ‘promised’ to the oven 3000 years ago. Others appreciate the humor, noticing a pattern of clever wordplay.

Clever wordplay. That’s how Meta’s artificial intelligence interprets Holocaust denial and genocidal rhetoric.

Of course, I reported the post and many of the comments. Facebook reviewed the reports and officially ruled that they do not violate community standards.

This isn’t an isolated incident. Jew hate has become so normalized online that even blatant references to burning Jews alive are brushed off as “humor.” Now, tech platforms are handing the reins to artificial intelligence systems that can’t recognize hate even when it’s screaming in their face. Just look at what happened this week with Grok, X’s AI chatbot – it went on a Jew-hating tirade that could’ve been written by David Duke himself. AI doesn’t understand history. It can’t detect codewords, dog whistles, sarcasm, or context, especially when it comes to centuries-old tropes about Jews. And when companies rely on it to moderate hate, they’re not solving the problem – they’re letting it spread faster, farther, and with less accountability.

So when you combine the normalization of Jew hatred with the cold blindness of AI, you don’t get safer platforms – you get smarter bigotry, protected by algorithms that don’t know better and policies that don’t care.

What’s happening on Facebook is not just offensive. It’s dangerous. And it sends a clear message: if you’re Jewish, your safety and dignity are optional. Because if posts like this don’t violate Facebook’s standards, then Facebook doesn’t have standards.