please stop these games

*

*

By Sonya Gugliara

A Cornell University student who applied for a summer internship with a Jewish-owned NYC startup rejected the opportunity with a hateful message: ‘Not interested in working for a Jew,” the shocked CEO posted on X.

Austin Franco put his antisemitism on full display when he passed up an interview with VryfID because its co-founders Gabe and Aiden Einhorn are proudly Jewish. 

Franco, 19, delivered the message to both brothers via job board site Handshake after applying for a summer role at the company, which pairs renters with landlords and verifies their identities to prevent fraud. 

The Einhorns reviewed Franco’s application and he was being considered for an internship with VryfID’s growth team, which is tasked with attracting renters to the company.

“Sad world,” Gabe, 24, wrote on X Monday along with a screenshot of Franco’s jaw-dropping eight-word response to trying to schedule a Zoom call: “Not interested in working for a Jew. Thanks.” 

Gabe Einhorn told The Post he felt obligated to share the message to raise awareness of growing antisemitism. He blacked out Franco’s name out of graciousness, but commenters quickly revealed his identity. 

“I felt bad exposing him because I thought he could have made a mistake and he really doesn’t believe this wholeheartedly,” Gabe said. 

But the Ivy Leaguer soon made it clear that he meant every word of what he wrote. 

beliefs aside…how can you even get to that point? To believe that antisemitism ISNT abt the pain of the Jewish people? Did you receive no holocaust education in school? Have you NEVER heard of (at the least) Anne frank? Do you know that words have meaning? The conversation around Israel, Jews, and antisemitism just gets worse by the day, but I truly cannot fathom how we got to this point where antisemitism is starting to be perceived as not being abt Jews and Judaism.

Perhaps that’s me being naive (especially bc I’m not jewish), but god. It’s horrible. I’ve long since given up with it online (it felt like i never made a difference, and i lost 8 friends which I’m still dealing with to this day) but i still try to be there for the people i know in real life, and support Jewish and Israeli people/businesses. I don’t know if that’s enough. It never feels like it.

sorry for the long vent. I hope you (and anyone reading this) has a good day ❤️

Oh yikes, that is horrific. There are few things more oppressive than actively decentering a marginalised group from the words for their own persecution.

Truly, to get to that point, I think takes incredible historical ignorance, the arrogance of refusing to listen to the voices of the people that are directly affected, propaganda, and just plain old hatred.

As a fellow non Jew, honestly the best thing we can do is be willing to listen, to learn, and to stand up and speak out against antisemitism whenever we see it. It's not easy - like you, I've lost friends, I've had hideous amounts of abuse and threats, I've become disillusioned with people and organisations I used to have a lot respect and admiration for, but it is the right thing to do. Jewish people make up such a vanishingly tiny percentage of the world population and they shouldn't have to fight this alone. Historically, they have been at the forefront of movements fighting for the rights of other minority groups and now, when they need people to fight for them, again, they're mostly standing alone.

while SU presents you with characters who suck, and who want you to look at that and examine "okay, but why do they suck. what happened in their lives that made them that way. can we help them not be that way and heal from that damage, while not simply excusing their behavior." It also takes characters that you love and peels them apart and shows you their most damaged and fucked up parts, and asks you to still love them even through their flaws, because everyone in the world has nastiness inside them that they are trying to get past or hide, and still deserve love and a chance to improve themselves anyways.

both these shows are great and i think they do what they set out to do well. And you would think that the more adult out of these shows would be the more challenging of the two. But nobody goes into breaking bad expecting there to be only love and light, because its an adults show with adult themes

Basically nobody went into SU expecting challenging topics. "Everyone should be given compassion" is a common lesson given to children through cartoons, but its rarely given in conjunction with characters that are as realistically fucked up, traumatized, bigoted, and neglectful as some characters in SU are. And at the end of the day, the very unfortunate reality is that people in this world are much quicker to accept the idea of "there are some people who have been inherently broken by our society, who become assholes and ruin everything around them" than they are willing to accept the idea that those people could be healed and stop being an asshole under the right circumstances, with the right help, and that it might (god forbid) be our responsibility sometimes to be that help.