Boyfriend broke up with you? / Put him on a cross
A Advice Jew post.
The group chat goes quiet after one particular meme lands. Three people have started typing and stopped. The sender adds "it's ironic", which has never once helped. At the family lunch, someone's uncle tells the joke he heard at the pub. He pauses for the laugh. The only sound is a spoon against a bowl, and the gravy boat being passed with great concentration. You scroll back through the comments under an old post and find the thing you laughed at at sixteen. It has not aged. It has gone off, like milk left on a radiator. "Just a joke" is the sentence people reach for when the joke has failed. By then the room has already decided what it thinks of the person who told it. **Why it caught on:** the picture shows a bearded man in a black hat on a blue Star of David background, set in the colourful advice-animal layout that was everywhere in the early 2010s. Its captions were built on antisemitic stereotypes: Jews as greedy, as the people who killed Jesus, as sinister schemers, padded out with crude shock lines. It spread because the format made hateful jokes easy to produce, and it is remembered today as an example of a bigoted caricature.