This is the first year in memory that there don't seem to be any antisemitic Ramadan TV series ~ Elder Of Ziyon

Tuesday, March 18, 2025

This is the first year in memory that there don't seem to be any antisemitic Ramadan TV series

Every Ramadan, there are dozens of TV miniseries vying for Arab attention as the viewership spikes during the month.

And every year, there are always antisemitic themes in some of these series.

Last year, an Egyptian TV series Maliha included an elderly man telling his grandson that Jews kill Arab children as a religious obligation - a blood libel inserted into the entertainment.

There was also a children's Ramadan series produced in Yemen last year called "The Temporary Entity," described in MEMRI this way:

In the series, a group of Yemeni children, guided by a hoopoe bird, go back in time using a magical book and track the history of Zionism, and their grandfather also tells them stories about the Jews. In the first episode, a Yemeni boy tells his grandfather that the Arabs must unite and "annihilate the Jews." In the second episode the children discuss how the Jews are the "most cunning enemy of the Muslims." They travel in time to 19th century Budapest, where the bird tells them that the whole world hated the Jews because of their "evil moral values and because they are treacherous."

This year, however, I cannot find any antisemitic TV series, certainly not in the larger Arab world outside Yemen.

One Iraqi TV series provides a counterexample. It looks at architecture, and it has one episode that specifically discusses buildings previously owned by Jews that have "shanasheels," latticework balconies, and how to preserve them.

(I briefly researched these balconies to see if they were a unique feature of Jewish homes, perhaps to use as sukkot in the fall. It doesn't seem to be the case, though - they are not uniquely Jewish and they have permanent roofs.)

To be sure, in recent years some series have been far more sympathetic towards Jews than in years past, sometimes causing controversy.

This lack of antisemitism seems surprising because one would expect that the Gaza war would prompt producers to pitch such series for Ramadan. I wouldn't be surprised if there are still such series on Houthi TV channels - antisemitism is baked into their way of thinking - but not finding any in Egyptian, Iraqi or Saudi series is definitely unusual.

Perhaps things really are slowly changing.