Please Enjoy Jon Stewart Hilariously Taking On The Banking Goblins From ‘Harry Potter’
"Do you know what those folks that run the bank are?" Stewart asks in the clip. "Jews."
It’s Harry Potter season at the moment, thanks to Return To Hogwarts, an HBO special that saw key cast and crew poring back over the film series that made them famous. But that retrospection hasn’t been all positive: a little over a month ago, comedian Jon Stewart drew attention to that moment from the first film that went mysteriously under the radar.
You might remember that at one point in The Philosopher’s Stone, Harry Potter takes a visit to Gringotts bank. There, he comes into contact with piles of money, giant vaults… and some very suspicious looking goblins.
See, the goblins of the franchise are a spitting image for anti-semitic caricatures that have been circulating for decades. They have hooked noses, bulbous foreheads, and genuinely look like the worst and most racist depictions of Jewish people imaginable. The fact that they oversee piles of gold also plays into harmful tropes.
Did anyone point that out at the time? Not really, as Stewart has hilariously — and light-heartedly — addressed.
“Do you know what those folks that run the bank are?” Stewart asks in the clip. “Jews.
“Let me show you this. It’s from The Protocols Of The Elders of Zion [a notorious anti-semitic text.] I just want to show you a caricature.”
Watch the clip 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
Stewart has since expressed his displeasure that the clip has been taken as an actual callout of J.K. Rowling. In a video from his podcast, he explained that he meant the whole thing humorously, and he has responded angrily on Twitter to those publications who have framed the story as him “accusing” Rowling of anti-semitism.
So no, this isn’t a total shutdown. This is just an amusing, diverting reference to a debacle that’s slowly been brewing over the last couple of years.