Jonathan Greenblatt, CEO of the Anti-Defamation League, said he reached out to the producer of “Saturday Night Live” – urging him to act on the show’s “deeply offensive” joke about Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination rollout.
“Saturday Night Live’s ‘Weekend Update’ is known for sharp criticism and public gimmicks, but the intensely derogatory joke about Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination process on Saturday not only missed the mark, but crossed the line,” Greentat A Monday statement said.
Greenblatt said the show is “the basis for jokes on factual inaccuracies” and that it “played a role in an antisemitic trope in the process.”
“I know they can do better. Greenblut said that with this feeling in mind, I reached out to Lorne Michaels on the weekend of Saturday Night Live to both take action to fix the damage that happened and to make sure it doesn’t happen again.
The show has been on fire since Saturday’s episode – with its star Michael Che – a Weekend Update reporter.
“Israel is reporting that they have got half their population vaccinated. I am guessing that this is the Jewish half, “burst during the Che segment.
Many critics called the joke anti-Semitism.
The vast majority of Israel’s population – 74 percent – is Jewish, according to the Jewish Virtual Library.
According to a January article in The Christian Science Monitor, the immunization rate of Israeli Arabs is very low, partly due to mistrust of the government in the Arab community.
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