Sydney Sweeney’s ‘Great Jeans’ and America’s Antisemitism

A few weeks ago, America’s attention was on a pair of jeans.

Sydney Sweeney’s new American Eagle campaign, with its playful “great jeans” slogan, was everywhere — on billboards, social media, late-night TV. People argued over whether it was clever marketing or something more insidious. Some saw the wordplay as harmless fun, others as a wink toward racist eugenics. Trump praised it. The brand’s stock price soared. Lizzo slipped it into a lyric. For days, people weighed in on which jeans better reflected “American values,” and, if we’re being honest, which ones made your backside look better.
It was a debate people were happy to have. It was safe, it was entertaining, and it said something — supposedly — about who we are.

But there’s another conversation Americans don’t seem nearly as ready for: the one about antisemitism. Not in Europe. Not in history books. Here. Now.

In the past year, antisemitism in the United States has risen to levels I never thought I would see in my lifetime. The Anti-Defamation League recorded over 8,000 incidents in 2023 alone — assaults, threats, vandalism, harassment. Since October 7, the numbers and the hostility have climbed even higher. On college campuses, Jewish students have been spat on, told to remove symbols of their faith, and followed by crowds chanting slogans with roots in extremist propaganda. Online, the language of the 1930s — about Jewish control of the media, politics, and finance — is back, recycled and repackaged for a new audience.

And yet, when you try to talk about it, you hit a wall. You’re told you’re exaggerating, that you’re trying to shut down debate, that you’re “weaponizing” antisemitism. The conversation turns into an argument over whether something “really counts” as antisemitic, and the actual harm gets lost.

Some of this comes from how Americans think about history. Many still see antisemitism as something foreign — the Holocaust, pogroms, Dreyfus — not something woven into American life. They forget Henry Ford’s antisemitic pamphlets, Father Coughlin’s radio sermons, the lynching of Leo Frank, and the exclusion of Jews from neighborhoods, schools, and clubs.

Some of it is politics. Antisemitism comes from the far right and the far left, and calling it out means confronting your side. That’s uncomfortable. And some of it is a need for simplicity. People want clean moral lines — oppressed and oppressor, good and bad — and antisemitism doesn’t fit neatly. It can live in spaces that also fight other injustices, and that makes it harder for some to acknowledge.

But here’s what too many in America don’t realize: the way this country handles antisemitism doesn’t stay here.

In a world where a protest chant in California can be replayed on a phone in Cairo within hours, America’s words and silences travel. When antisemitic rhetoric is tolerated, excused, or downplayed here, it is noticed elsewhere. In the Arab world, where antisemitic narratives already have deep roots, I’ve seen how incidents from the U.S. are shared — not as warnings, but as proof. Proof that the prejudice is valid. Proof that “even America” sees Jews as a problem.

I’ve been in those conversations. Someone pulls up a video from a U.S. campus protest. The context is gone; the clip is stripped to its most provocative moment. It’s shown as evidence that the West, too, rejects Jews. Sometimes it’s a speech by an American celebrity who trafficked in antisemitic tropes and kept their career. Sometimes it’s a headline about antisemitic graffiti that was cleaned up quietly, without any real outcry. The message received abroad is simple: if the United States can live with this, why shouldn’t we?

This is how prejudice travels in the twenty-first century. It doesn’t need official channels or government propaganda. It needs a clip, a post, and a comment thread. What happens in Brooklyn or Berkeley doesn’t stay there. It ends up in Beirut, Baghdad, and Amman. And it becomes part of someone else’s argument for keeping their hatreds alive.

That’s why the American habit of avoiding the subject — changing it to something safer, like a jeans ad — is not just a domestic failure. It’s an export. It tells the world that antisemitism can be normalized even in a country that calls itself a defender of human rights.

If Americans want credibility when they speak against antisemitism abroad, they have to be willing to face it at home, without excuses and double standards. That means calling it out, whether it comes from your political enemies or your political friends. It means remembering that antisemitism is not just a “Jewish problem” but a societal one — a toxin that corrodes democracy, truth, and safety for everyone.

The Sydney Sweeney ad will fade from memory. The arguments about which brand of jeans better embodies the nation will vanish into the next social-media storm. But antisemitism will still be here, changing its language, adapting to the moment, waiting for silence to make space for it.

And if America keeps avoiding the conversation, the rest of the world will notice. In places where antisemitism is already entrenched, people will keep asking, “If the United States is fine with it, why shouldn’t we be?”

That’s a question no democratic society can afford to leave unanswered.