A month ago Lisa Jane Spencer, who SBS called “a self-described comedian”, was sacked from her job after posting racist videos online targeting Australia’s First Nations people. Rather than learning from her mistake she stated she would seek legal advice about her dismissal and has leaned into producing further racist content.
Brooke Blurton, an Indigenous Australian media personality, warned that the content should not be dismissed as humour telling SBS:
“It’s about actually recognising the real impact that this has and continues to have on communities, on families, but especially young people who are already facing massive amounts of discrimination and prejudice every day”.
The video was removed for using the SBS logo, but was then reposted with a different logo and remains online.
In another video on April 7 2026 she dressed up as an Indian including the use of brownface and putting on an Indian accent. The video mocks Hindu Gurus.
Attempts like this to get away with racism and hate by pretending it is only “humour” is why the Online Hate Prevention Institute added “Holocaust jokes” as a dedicated category of antisemitism, despite it not explicitly appearing in the IHRA Working Definition of Antisemitism or the IHRA Working Definition of Holocaust Denial and Distortion. As our CEO, Dr Andre Oboler, told the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion, this is the only category we felt compelled to add. It needed specific monitoring as platforms were giving it a free pass.
Lisa Jane Spencer’s latest racist video included Holocaust jokes as well as other explicit antisemitism. In fact, it repeated Holocaust denial content recently used in a videos posted to the official social media channels of Panel House. Those videos led to charges being brought by police. Spencer’s repeated use of social media to spread hate and attack minorities deserves a similar response and Victoria Police should be pressing charges under Section 474.17 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code which makes it a criminal offence to use the internet in a way a reasonable person would regard as “menacing, harassing or offensive”. It carries a maximum penalty of imprisonment for 3 years.
As she is holding herself out as a public figure, and has been in the media over her actions, OHPI has decided to address her by name in this briefing. We also note her use of “Buy me a coffee” for people to donate to support her work. The racism here seems to be at least partly financially motivated.
Breaking down the antisemitic video
The Opening Act
The antisemitic video we are examining was uploaded to Instagram on July 6th 2026, the same day the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion was questioning Meta (who owns Instagram) on their record of addressing online antisemitism.
The first thing to note is that Spencer dresses up as an “Israeli Jew” for this video. She has not only made herself a small Israeli flag, but is also wearing a kippah, a Jewish head covering usually worn by men but also worn by women in some streams of Judaism. In case anyone still misses the point, she adds a sub-title “Lisa Cohen, Israeli Jew”. All of this, in a video in which she mocks Jews and the Holocaust, is an instance of “Jewface”, the antisemitic form equivalent to “blackface” with respect to Black people.
Some have misused the term Jewface recently to complain about non-Jewish actors playing Jewish roles, but as the Dr Brynn Shiovitz noted in the Jewish Journal in 2022 it is more than this:
“Jewface” is an American vaudeville tradition which stems from such a practice of Othering. On the vaudeville stage, Jews and non-Jews would wear prosthetic noses and beards, adopt fake Yiddish accents, and play roles similar to those grotesque literary characters, in order to poke fun at or reinforce pre-existing stereotypes of Jewish immigrants. Within this specific late 19th/early 20th-century performance practice, Jewface was always an intended form of mockery.
The fact the video is tagged as “#satire #parody #aussiehunour” doesn’t diminish the fact that it deliberately engages in racism and is not merely offensive to the Jewish community but also a form of harassment. For a community already under intense threat, the repetition of the Holocaust denial content recently used in conjunction with Nazi symbolism in the Panel House case is also likely to be menacing.
Inciting further antisemitism
The antisemitism this incites can be seen in a comment by another user who writes, “That’s so good. I hope you get 271,000 likes from 109 different countries.” As we explained in relation to the Panel House incident, the number 271,000 comes from a real document created during the Holocaust. As the Arolsen Archives note:
The document is genuine and comes from the Special Registry Office in Bad Arolsen. It lists the numbers of death certificates issued upon application for prisoners from concentration camps, such as Dachau, Buchenwald, and Bergen-Belsen. The figures do not include the millions of Jews murdered in extermination camps like Auschwitz-Birkenau or those who died in mass shootings.
The claim the document shows that “only 271,000 people died in the Holocaust” is therefore false, but repeatedly promoted by Holocaust deniers.
The other number in the comment is 109, this is a reference to another antisemitic meme, one that actually started in Australia. It began when an antisemitic Australian website compiled what it said was a list of 109 places Jews were expelled from. It is used to suggest that Australia, or another country, should be the 110th country to expel Jews. As we note din our report Social Media and the Normalisation of Hate: October 7 Two Years On (page 17):
This trope claims such expulsions are proof not of antisemitism, but that Jews are a danger to society. The trope originated on an early Australian website, biblebelievers.org.au, where a page listing “109 localities” that expelled Jews has been online since at least 2004.
Money Tropes
The video opens with the words “I’ll be the banker”, the cuts to the shot shown above where Lisa Jane Spencer says “recently I started to transition into being an Israeli Jew”. I then cuts back her at the game saying “I thought there used to be a gun token?” before picking something up and saying, “is this the pot of silver? It is? I’ll just be this one then.”
These scenes promote the trope of rich Jews, and specifically Jewish people being bankers and money lenders. This antisemitic trope is linked to the Middle Ages when the Church law forbid Christians from lend money for profit, and Jews were, in many places, barred from owning land or joining guilds, forcing richer Jews to fill the economic niche as moneylenders and there was no other way for them to invest their wealth. While most money lenders were therefore Jewish, only a small number of Jews were well off enough to be money lenders.
There is a strong link between this trope and antisemitic violence. While complaining about owing money to the bank was normal, some people with influence (often political leaders / nobles) would incite mobs to violence against the Jewish community in the hope that those they owed money to and their families would be killed, making their debt vanish.
Some other notes on this trope:
- A particular flavour of the attack on Jews as bankers was, as Encyclopedia Britannica noted, directed specifically against the Rothschild Family, a Jewish family who were prominent bankers.
- A common antisemitic conspiracy theory claims that Jews are greedy, control the banks, and use this financial control to manipulate society. This idea was promoted in infamous antisemitic text, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It was also one of the forms of antisemitism Dr Oboler discussed as an expert witness and which was noted by the court in Wertheim v Haddad [2025] FCA 720.
- NBC has noted how the antisemitic tropes of Jews and money pervades western culture and can be seen from Shakespeare’s Shylock to Gringotts bank in Harry Potter.
The references in the video to being the “banker” and to wanting the “pot of silver” are direct reference to this antisemitic stereotype of greedy Jews who control banks and finance.
Connection to the land & “get out of jail free” cards
Lisa Jane Spencer continues, “I know people will say that I don’t have the heritage or the DNA connecting me to the land”. At this point it transition back to the scene of the game with Spencer picking up a chance card and saying “Oh! Another get out of jail free (laughs) I know it’s like my fifth one”. It cuts back to the reflective scene where she continues, “but that really doesn’t matter”.
There are two related themes mixed here. The first in an insinuation that the connection of Jewish people to Israel is a fake narrative promoted without any real basis, i.e. that the truth of it doesn’t matter. This denial of Jewish identity is a common form of antisemitism manifests by denying Jewish history, heritage, and even scientific evidence from DNA.
The multiple “get out of jail free” cards references a common antisemitic claim that the Holocaust is used by Jews as the ultimate “get out of jail free” card (see references here, here, and here). This not only abuses the Holocaust, but promotes the idea Jews are getting special treatment and unfair advantage.
Later she states “I know I am an Israeli Jew” suggesting that it is her mere assertion that her supposedly fake identity relies upon, and that the identity of all Jews is just as fake.
270 and 600
Back in game mode, Lisa Jane Spencer continues, “I don’t know why you’ve only got two hundred and seventy, because I gave you six hundred”. This is a reference to the document discussed above under the section “Inciting further antisemitism”. In this scene Spencer “the Jew” claims she gave 600, a stand in for 6 million to make it work in the context of the game, while asserting her opponent in the game claims to have only received 270. In addition to engaging in the same Holocaust denial meme discussed above, this also presents the Jew not only as a banker but as a dishonest one.
I didn’t steal it
Returning to the game Lisa Jane Spencer is seen holding property cards as she says “No, I didn’t steal it, because it was just next to mine, and it was always mine”. This references what has become a common antisemitic meme which OHPI discussed in detail in our report “Online Antisemitism After 7 October 2023” (pages 216-220).
This meme is particularly well known around Melbourne as a result of antisemitic stickers produced by Free Palestine Printing which have regularly been stuck in public places as a form of graffiti. The sticker show an image that merges the Israeli flag with a picture of an identifiably religious looking Jew and features the slogan “If I don’t steal it someone else will”. The person shown is not abstract Jewish character, the image is take from a video taken in 2021, when a Palestinian women instigated a confrontation with her Jewish neighbour.
In our report we described this sticker / online meme saying:
The image draws on traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes of Jews as greedy and thieving, as seen, for example, in the character of Fagin in Oliver Twist. The prominent use of the Israeli flag alongside the stereotypical looking Jew, demonstrates the blurring that is occurring among Palestinian activists between criticism of Israeli policy and an antisemitic targeting of Jews. The Jewish person is also “wearing” a Star of David, which brings flashbacks of yellow stars Jews had to wear under Nazi persecution. This has been added to the picture and was not part of the original photograph.
The allegation in the image, and what Lisa Jane Spencer presents with the property cards comment, is that Jews have stolen land that doesn’t belong to them. This claim is made both at the micro-level about particular properties, in the case of the stickers the house the person is living in, and at the macro level to argue that Israel itself is built on stolen Palestinian land.
This claim has a particular Australian nexus as a major issue in reconciliation between First Nations peoples and the Australia state is the claim that Australia was built on land stolen from First Nations peoples. There are efforts to recognise Indigenous connection to the land in public gatherings through a welcome to country or acknowledgment of country, civil society campaigns such as “pay the rent” which urges non-Indigenous Australians to make a payment to an Indigenous controlled fund, and formal treaty negotiations. The concept of stolen land is promoted though chants such as, “always was, always will be, Aboriginal land”.
The effort to translate the Australian experience to the Israel-Palestine situation is based on a high degree of ignorance. This is firstly because Jewish people are themselves, like Australia’s First Nations people, one of the world’s still surviving ancient peoples. The land in question is the traditional land of the Jewish people. Just as with Australia’s First Nations peoples, the connection to the specific land is embedded in customs, religious / spiritual practices, and the people’s traditional knowledge about their own identity. In both cases it is also supported by archaeological evidence. In the case of Israel, it is also supported by contemporary writings by other ancient nations it came into contact with. Finally there is the bible itself which documents this connection in writing, with the oldest records, the Dead Sea Scrolls, ranging in age from 2500 to 1800 years old.
If the logic of “Always was, always will be” was applied to Israel, then it was and should always be Jewish with no room for a Palestinian state – a position Israel itself rejected when it decided to commit to the land for peace deal in the Camp David Accords. The “it was always mine” comment made by Lisa Jane Spencer mocks the existence Jewish claim based on history and indigenous rights.
As to the stickers, the story there is perverse. The house is one that was quite legally owned by Jews during the British mandate. During the 1948 War of Independence, Jordan captured part of the territory that has belonged to the British Mandate and occupied it. This illegal occupation continued until 1967. During that time the Jewish owned property was occupied by a Palestinian family. After Israel captured the territory in 1967 and annexed Jerusalem (making it part of Israel proper, not part of the Occupied Territories) the Palestinian family continued to live there. In Israel the courts regular adjudicate on property disputes from both Jews and Palestinian-Israelis to reclaim property they were displaced from. In this case, a claim was made by a Jewish charity to reclaim the property. We note what happened next in the report (p. 220):
In 2009 an Israeli court ordered that half of a residential property in the Sheikh Jarrah neighbourhood in East Jerusalem, occupied by the al-Kurd family, was to be given to Jewish claimants. A wall was built down the middle of the property. Jewish settlers have since moved into the property. In 2021, with attention focused on the on-going legal dispute, Muna
al-Kurd told her Jewish neighbour, “You know that this is not your house…. You are stealing my house.” He replied, “If I don’t steal it, someone else is going to steal it.” Referring to the fact that if he wasn’t occupying the half the court designed to the Jewish claimants, then someone else from the settler group would be there.
Despite the facts of the case, the disinformation campaign promoted by the Internet mean and the stickers has completely inverted people’s understanding of the situation. While the quote on the stickers is real, it has been stripped of its context and used to demonise the individual who said it (who is pictured in the stickers), and in general: Israeli settlers, all Israelis, and all Jews.
You’re kicking me out?
The stereotype of greed Jews stealing money is emphases by Lisa Jane Spencer ending the video with a “Shabbat Shalom”, immediately followed by a cut back to the game where she reaches over and picks up some money saying “You stole my hundred dollars, ok, this is mine”. Then she makes a false allegation saying, “You’re trying to sabotage me”. Can presenting Jews as dishonest and playing the victim. The she throws her hands back and says, “You’re kicking me out? What did I do?” The video end on this note.
This final comment is a return to references of Jews being expelled (the 109 countries trope, see above), and the claim it is that it is not because of antisemitism, but because of the way Jews behave, or the inherent harmful nature attributed to Jews.
