Reflection

            The goal of our PSA is to raise awareness of the ways that popular media portrays Jewish people and how it can lead to harmful outcomes. We targeted every age group overall, but if we had to focus on one, it is teens to young adults. This is a good age group to target because they can be very impressionable. The media has also become such a large part of their lives and being able to spot antisemitism in popular media is valuable to their growth and development as people in our society.

We chose to appeal to emotions in our PSA because we thought that would impact people in a deeper way. Sadness and fear were the main emotions we tried to appeal to. We chose some music that would be categorized as sad in order to emphasize the sadness and catch the attention of people watching. We also used fear in our PSA. We showed clips of white supremacists chanting anti-Semitic chants and a news report clip of a shooting that happened at a Synagogue; these are both scary scenes. We wanted to put fear in people so that they would not continue to perpetuate stereotypes and continue to cause harm to those around them. We also used a statistic toward the end as a means of providing credibility to our PSA. Statistics from the Pew Research Center are reliable, so using the stat gives us some credibility.

            In the context of anti-Semitism, we can fight hostility with kindness by making ourselves more aware of the media ourselves and our loved ones consume, especially if they are kids. Many of the messages we see in popular media regarding Jewish people are largely negative. Many of these messages are not even fully obvious to most people, but they are just subtle enough to internalize bad beliefs about Jewish people. We see this in movies like Harry Potter, which many children watch. They see the scenes in that movie and many others and think nothing of it, but then they become an adult, and since they have this internalized hatred for Jewish people, it manifests into full-on disgusting chants, shootings and other hateful acts.

I think it doesn’t take much to show people the consequences of hostility within our communities, especially in the context of anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism has caused so many people hurt and suffering throughout all of history and even now it feels like there is a new report every other week of a synagogue being attacked by a white supremacist. I think that people need to see this stuff more in the form of a well-designed advertisement or PSA. I think that something along those lines will get people more aware and it might have more of an influence if it is designed by professionals who know are informed by social psychology because clearly just seeing news reports clearly has not worked yet.