Update 1/5 12:11 pm PT: Jon Stewart has pushed back against headlines that suggested he was accusing Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling of being antisemitic over the depiction of goblins in the Harry Potter movies. A day after a video clip of Stewart talking about Harry Potter went viral, Stewart issued a video clarification on his podcast, “The Problem.”
Newsweek et al, may eat my ass. pic.twitter.com/eRoYYeNRi1
— Jon Stewart (@jonstewart) January 5, 2022
“There is no reasonable person that could’ve watched it and not seen it as a light-hearted conversation amongst colleagues and chums, having a larf, enjoying ourselves about Harry Potter and about my experience watching it for the first time as a Jewish guy. And how some tropes are so embedded in society that they’re basically invisible, even in a considered process like movie-making.”
Stewart reiterated “I cannot stress this enough. I am not accusing J.K. Rowling of being antisemitic.” You can watch Stewart’s full clarification above as well as the discussion on Harry Potter below.
So @jonstewart recently broke Hollywood’s complete silence on @jk_rowling unapologetically maintaining antisemitic folklore through Harry Potter. pic.twitter.com/ezWrxpzryB
— raf (@rafaelshimunov) January 3, 2022
Original Story: Jon Stewart has accused J.K. Rowling of including anti-Semitic depictions in her books (and subsequent movies), regarding the Goblins which run Gringotts Bank in the Harry Potter universe.
During a recent episode of his podcast, The Problem with Jon Stewart, the host stated that he believes the Goblins presented in Harry Potter’s world amount to Jewish ‘caricatures’.
“It’s a wizarding world,” he said. “The train station has a half a thing, and no one can see it, and we can ride dragons and you’ve got a pet owl… Who should run the bank? Jews.”
Stewart claims that Rowling actively perpetuates Jewish stereotypes by characterising the Goblins as ‘caricatures’ of Jewish people. “Yeah, they look like Jews,” he said. “But what if their teeth were sharper?”
His argument is that the Goblins bear more than a passing similarity to illustrations in the anti-Semitic text, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. “I just want to show you a caricature,” he said. “And they’re like, ‘Oh, look at that, that’s from Harry Potter!’ And you’re like, ‘No, that’s a caricature of a Jew from an anti-Semitic piece of literature.’”
The problem with characterisations such as this is that they perpetuate anti-Semitic stereotypes by making them almost acceptable. And that’s something Stewart believes has already happened here.
“I was expecting the crowd to be like, ‘Holy shit, she did not, in a wizarding world, just throw Jews in there to run the f**king underground bank,’” he said. “And everybody was just like, ‘Wizards.’”
At time of writing J.K. Rowling has not yet responded publicly to Stewart’s comments. The author has come under fire in recent years due to what many see as her anti-transgender views, and did not appear as part of the recent Harry Potter 20th Anniversary special, aside from in-archive footage.
Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.