You’ve probably seen “Jew-bwa-ha-ha.gif.” We found the man who drew it.
Spend any time in the murkier bogs of the social internet — message boards, chans, far-right Eastern European political comment threads, Islam versus the International Zionist Conspiracy LiveJournals — and it won't be long before you come across some version of this image:
Obviously, it's a derogatory caricature of a Jew, and a fairly rote one at that. All of the tropes established by centuries of anti-Semitic iconography in Europe are here: the grotesquely hooked nose, the scheming hands, the evil smile, the wild beard, the misshapen spine, the bulging eyes. It's vile, but familiar.
What is most significant about this image isn't the thing itself — there is far more creative, and far more disturbing, anti-Jewish imagery out there — but its sheer ubiquity. A Google reverse image search for "Jew-bwa-ha-ha.gif," as the file is most frequently, but not always, named, returns 1,210 matches. It's unquestionably the most popular anti-Semitic image on the internet, and if one pauses to think about the scope and reach of the internet, it's easy to make an argument that "Jew-bwa-ha-ha.gif" is the most widely seen anti-Semitic image in history.
So where did it come from, and how is it used?
The drawing has become a mainstay not just of the internet presence of political causes that are sometimes or usually anti-Semitic in their rhetoric, but an established unit in the set of images that comprises the visual language of Reddit, and 4chan, and dozens of other internet fora. And just like every other unit in this set, from photographs and GIFs we find hilarious and adorable to those we find offensive and disgusting, it exists not just as a single image but as a template, a base model for more ornate iterations.
Inded, the modifications of Jew-bwa-ha-ha.gif are endless. From left to right, the below are posted on a far-right Romanian political blog post blaming Jews for global communism; on a Russian message board that identifies the caricature as part of a Zionist Occupation Government in control of Russia; and on a Polish shock site that jests "the peak of recycling is turning Jews into soap."
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