One incident over a tasteless high school drinking game has demonstrated how a single Snapchat photo can spark controversy in a local community, the Internet and beyond.
The game “Jews vs. Nazis,” an ostensibly racist variation of beer pong, was brought to light by Princeton, N.J. high school student Jamaica Ponder, who wrote about it on her blog. “I know I’m not the only one who saw this Snapchat story. Yet here I am, the only one saying anything about it,” she wrote. “I am unsure as to what’s worse: the static silence from my peers, or the fact that this happened in the first place. Putting the picture on social media means that someone was proud enough of the game to want to show it off.”
“[P]erhaps it is a joke. But then I guess the punchline would be: genocide.”
The game is simple. Beer pong cups are traditionally arranged into triangles, but in this version of the game, the cups are arranged into the shape of a swastika on one side of the table and a Star of David on the other. The “Jewish” team can hide one cup anywhere in the room, which is referred to as the “Anne Frank” cup. And the “Nazis” can “Auschwitz” any one of their opponents, forcing them to sit out of the game.
After the photo made its way from Ponder’s blog to school administrators, Princeton’s superintendent of public schools, Steve Cochrane, released a statement saying he was “deeply upset that some of our students chose to engage in a drinking game with clearly anti-Semitic overtones and to broadcast their behavior over social media.” He went on to assure that the students involved, their families, and students “affected by what happened” are being counseled, and that the high school is “planning for a possible school-wide discussion.”
But perhaps surprisingly, the Jews vs. Nazis game isn’t a novel trend. Several incidents of Florida high schoolers playing the game went viral in 2014 and mentions of the game on the Internet date back as far as 2011. Rabbi Yitzchok Minkowicz of the Chabad Lubavitch in Southwest Florida told Fox 4 that the game “is a wake up call. We are not doing enough of a job educating people to be kinder, nicer, more polite.”
