The founder of Barstool Sports, Dave Portnoy, said Monday that he believes that an anti -Semitic sign in his philadelphia bar on Saturday night was probably a joke, but there was nothing fun in the offensive exhibition.
“Maybe I wouldn’t have surprised me so much if I didn’t see it in a bar he had,” Portnoy told NBC News. “But the increase in anti -Semitism has been remarkable.”
He is outraged by him and pressing for responsibility. Two women who served the group and delivered the sign to a table full of people in Barstool Sansom Street in the center of Philadelphia, Philadelphia, he said. The servers have not been identified.
Customers ordered the bottles service together with the custom sign. It is not uncommon for the bars to offer personalized signs with bottles service orders.
A student at the University of Temple, 2 miles north of Portnoy’s Bar, was placed in an interim suspension for alleged participation in the incident. The university said it is investigating.
But, Portnoy said, it is not clear if the servers or customers who ordered the sign really adopt the hateful feeling. He described the reason behind the sign as “only a pure idiocy.”
Portnoy said he spoke with two clients involved in the order, asking: “What are you thinking? I am about to go to nuclear about this.”
Vladislav Khaykin, executive vice president of the Simon Wiesthal Center in California, home of the tolerance museum, said: “What happened in Barstool Samson Street was not a joke; it shows how the increasingly normalized anti -Semitism has become more and more normalized in public spaces.”
Khaykin continued: “This incident emphasizes how acceptable mocking have become mocking.
Portnoy, who is 48 years old and Jewish, said critics have falsely painted him for lacking the appropriate alarm level. He offered two clients involved in incident trips to Poland to see the concentration camp and the monument in Auschwitz and learn about the Holocaust.
Later on Monday, Portnoy ventilated on social networks, publishing a video in which he said that one of the clients involved in the incident had recovered any responsibility for the sign. Portnoy said that that person will no longer be offered the trip to Auschwitz.
“I’m so fed up with this incident, Portnoy said in the video.
Some Jews criticized Portnoy, characterizing Auschwitz’s offer as “paid vacations” for bad behavior. However, he replied that “if you pay attention to this trip, it is difficult not to return and feel different about this problem.”
Portnoy is no stranger to the headlines, but recent attention is perhaps a little more personal. He said that something has changed in the American social atmosphere that has almost normalized the anti -Semitic feeling.
“Feeling that you are hated, for really nothing …” he said, “he is creating an insecure atmosphere for people. You are talking about me, my parents, my family. As, do you know what you are saying?”
Janhvi Bhojwani and Meriam Bouaruj contributed.
