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Protesters will demonstrate outside 30 Rock in Manhattan this Saturday as outrage continues to mount over a “Saturday Night Live” skit about vaccinations in Israel.
Former Brooklyn Assemblyman Dov Hikind said in a new YouTube video the protest will be outside NBC’s West 49th Street headquarters on Saturday at 9 p.m.
“We are going to NBC to educate — not to crucify anybody — we are going there to say this is not funny,” Hikind said in the video out Tuesday. “Antisemitism is never funny. Period.”
He and Sid Rosenberg, co-host of WABC’s “Bernie and Sid in the Morning” radio show, will lead the protest.
“Saturday Night Live” and Weekend Update co-host Michael Che are under fire for joking in a recent episode, “Israel is reporting that they’ve vaccinated half of their population. I’m going to guess it’s the Jewish half.”
The vast majority of Israel’s population — 74 percent — is Jewish, according to the Jewish Virtual Library.
Vaccination rates of Israeli Arabs are much lower than Jews in the country, partially due to distrust of the government within the Arab community, according to a January article in The Christian Science Monitor.
The Anti-Defamation League also panned the skit, which aired over the weekend as part of the show’s “Weekend Update” segment, as “deeply offensive.”
“Saturday Night Live’s ‘Weekend Update’ is known for sharp criticism and public takedowns, but Saturday’s deeply offensive joke about Israel’s COVID-19 vaccination process not only missed the mark, but crossed the line,” the organization’s CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a Monday statement.
He said the show based “the premise of the joke on factual inaccuracies” and played “into an antisemetic trope in the process.”
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