The original tweet was from a teenager making a joke and doesn't thoroughly bring into focus the context the "Krav Maga" comment takes place in, so I'd like to give a bit more detail since the original post on Twitter is now deleted.
I don't want this situation to be misinterpreted as saying that any reference to Jewish heritage automatically translates to Zionism. You should not conflate the two. I see that this post is being reblogged often without mentioning the FBI agent component.
This conversation involving the mother is taking place over Shabbat dinner (the episode title) with her children, one who is a police officer and the other a FBI agent who constantly wears that outfit and reminds you she's part of the FBI.
(screenshots are from a pirate site)
So that reference to Krav Maga is when the mother is frustrated with her children's bickering and she says "so help me God do not make me use "Krav Maga in my own house."
It's harder to see it as her knowing Krav Maga as an innocuous way of conveying this as a badass, tough mother when this conversation is also taking place with a bunch of cops.
It's not the reference to Jewish traditions that's the problem, nor is it saying that Knuckles is "basically Jewish," but the fact that they intermingle that with the inclusion of a FBI agent and a cop, make reference to Krav Maga and follow it up with Knuckles seeing it as nice and relatable that this woman also trains warriors that's the issue.
It's not explicitly stated in what context she was an instructor, but it's not one people are likely to give a charitable reading to considering the narrative makes the sister's entire character her constantly and loudly referencing her FBI position.
While Jewish Knuckles or Knuckles teaming up with a kickass Jewish mom in a fight would be awesome in a vacuum, it's hard to feel like it's not very directed when there's this constant intermingling of Jewish faith and tradition with imperial powers with the police and FBI.
The Sonic movies were already copaganda in how they rely on the assumption that police as an institution exists to help people and not enforce white supremacist violence.
The cop in the first movie wanted to move to San Francisco to try at being a "real street cop."
There's also the casting choice to include Jim Carrey, who has held the belief that vaccines cause autism.
The fight scene at the end of the episode has the mother ask Knuckles to protect the candles with an orbiting camera shot of the candles while she and Knuckles fight off the intruders as Hava Nagila is playing.
The juxtaposition of Jewish faith and culture with the police, FBI, and a Krav Maga instructor has the effect of using Jewish faith to soften, conflate, and humanize imperialist bodies as if the two are interchangeable. That's the big part being left out of the tweets.
Adam Pally, the actor who portrays the main character Wade also left a heart tweet in support of Bernie Sanders, who has a whole history that goes beyond the scope of this post but communicates Pally's views here too.
The image shown in the now deleted tweet this post is referencing is a tweet made by paramount in October of 2023. I think based on some of the reblogs that some people might have thought this was in the credits of the actual episode, but it's from this tweet.
I'm not Jewish, so I'll leave it to more experienced people to dissect this segment, but I wanted to give attention that it's not just that they called Knuckles Jewish, it's the fact he's having this conversation with a family of feds and the narrative intermingles the two.
There's also a later segment of Native racism. For those that aren't aware, Knuckles and the echidna tribe as a whole historically has been inspired very heavily by Indigenous people. Several members of the Sonic team even traveled to get reference material for research in producing the first Sonic adventure.
Pair that with other design choices and the narrative surrounding Knuckles and the genocide of his people and the constant theft of his land and resources, it leads to a lot of Sonic fans reading Knuckles as Native, usually Afro-Native coded.
In other words, Knuckles' racial coding goes beyond just an aesthetic and ties into his whole characterization.
Him being portrayed as an alien savage warrior already runs into issues, but not the focus of this post.
Knuckles also reinforces the extinct Native trope, which could be an entirely separate post, but there's another segment in episode 4 in which Wade meets up with the ghost of Knuckles father Pachacamac with a joke around Wade mispronouncing his name because it's too hard and them just settling on "Mac."
"Pachacamac" and "Tikal" aren't made up Sonic universe words, they're direct references to the cultures the Echidna were designed after.
And as many people with "foreign" names will tell you, it's really not great to have a segment where someone finds their name too hard and it being played as a joke that it's normal to just not try and get it right, instead just renaming them entirely.
- ACAB
- Don't support Paramount media
- Don't conflate Jewishness with zionism
- Native people aren't extinct nor is their language and culture a silly set of words too hard to say
I wasn't planning on posting anything related to this because I don't want to give Paramount any advertising, but I wanted to give proper context to these issues so that people more experienced than me can comment on them more in depth and to bring attention to the issue the initial tweets being circulated aren't fully contextualizing.
