Thread by @SashLG413

Too many people are not understanding the antisemitism behind Dave Chappelle's "Space Jews" joke, so let's go through it all, shall we?

(A long thread because it includes the transcript of both "Space Jews" jokes).

"I also saw a lot of videos of UFOS. I mean WTF is going on with that sh*t? These UFOs keep coming to earth, and it made me think of an idea for a movie. Sounds dumb, but hear me out. In my movie idea, we find out that these aliens are originally from earth — that they’re from an

ancient civilization that achieved interstellar travel and left the earth thousands of years ago. Some other planet they go to, and things go terrible for them on the other planet, so they come back to earth, and decide that they want to claim the earth for their very own.

It’s a pretty good plot-line, huh? I call it “Space Jews.”
*audience laughter*
Space Jews.
(Man in audience: Free Palestine!)
It's going to get worse than that, hang in there. It's going to get way worse than that.

[The next Space Jews joke comes ~30 min later. Keep reading.]

"There was a Black man who was in South Carolina during slavery who somehow got granted his freedom by his so-called master. And when he master granted him his freedom, he also gave him a plot of land. Now it turns out this brother was brilliant. He had a good eye, good knack for

farming. And he farmed this plot of land very successfully and made a lot of money. And this is where the story gets crazy. When he got all that money... this n**** bought some slaves. Have you ever heard this before? This is a true story. Not only was he a slave owner, he became

a slave breeder, and employed tactics that were so cruel, even white slave owners were like, "Yo, my man!" He was a wild dude, but he did it just because that's what successful people did at the time, and he just wanted to be down. What a f*cking tragedy. How can a person that

went through slavery perpetuate the same evil on a person that looks just like him? It's mind blowing. And, shockingly, they're making a movie about him. Ironically, it's called "Space Jews."
*laughter and cheering*
Space Jews.

[End of transcript]

If I wasn't Jewish, or at least not acutely aware of how antisemitism functions, the Space Jews joke would be gold. I, like many others, would see Jews as this strange, off-putting Other who don't quite belong and want to control the world. The reason the joke works so well is...

because so many people believe that Jews up and left the Land of Israel—their homeland—and then thousands of years later, after facing adversity elsewhere, decided to go back to a populated land to which they no longer had any claim and claim it for themselves. The joke sees Jews

as aliens. Foreigners. People who don't belong. Different in the most negative sense. It also sees Jews as alien to their own land. People with no claim to their homeland and no right to return. Further, it evokes imagery of Nazi propaganda of a Jewish person with his tentacles

around the globe, claiming the world for himself. It upholds the anti-Israel false narrative that Jews have no connection to Israel and/or were not forced out of their land and/or had not been yearning & trying to return since their expulsion through the founding of modern Israel

The "Space Jews" joke takes the I/P Conflict and enlarges its scope, applying a prejudiced perception of the mentality of Jews toward one area of the world to the entire world. It says "This movie plot is just as ludicrous as what Jews have done in Israel." Indeed, it would be

ludicrous if a group of aliens tried to claim the world for themselves after having left thousands of years prior. But the reason the joke works so well is because most people (mistakenly) see it as completely analogous to the founding of the Jewish State; the State of Israel.

The second "Space Jews" joke, a call-back to the first, takes it a step further & almost explicitly commits Holocaust inversion. Chappelle, during a story about an enslaved Black person who is later freed and goes on to enslave other Black people, asks how a person who was victim

to atrocity can "perpetuate the same evil" on another person. He then says that the movie being made about this Black slave-owner is also called "Space Jews." I wish I didn't have to explain this because it seems so obvious, but here we are. The joke works because so many people

believe that the Jews in the I/P Conflict are committing the same atrocities that had been committed against them by the Nazis during the Holocaust against the Palestinians today. Painting Jews as Nazis is a false comparison. It takes our own pain and trauma and uses it against

us. It wildly exaggerates Israel's wrongdoings while simultaneously minimizing the horrific cruelty and inhumanity of the Nazis. It is not only offensive, but it's a distortion of reality and a revision of history. More importantly, it's antisemitic. It demonizes Jews,

casting them as some of the worst villains in history, and uses this specifically to delegitimize their right to liberation and safety in their indigenous homeland. The one most of us were forcibly expelled from, some of us have never left, and many of us have moved back to

throughout the ages (before either Zionism as a political movement began & before the Holocaust).

These jokes work because they're seen as "punching-up" against a powerful group of people — one that abuses others and seeks world domination. They're comedic gold to a population

that is so antisemitic, they wouldn't even know antisemitism if it hit them in the face—which it does during Chappelle's special. The humor works because it's true... only it's not. But because it is the truth Chappelle and much of his audience believes, the jokes land perfectly.