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What Does the Fox Say? Maybe Something Anti-Semitic

Are Ylvis Doing the quenelle?

by
Liel Leibovitz
January 10, 2014
(YouTube. )
(YouTube. )

Like all memes, the quenelle—the anti-Semitic hand gesture fashioned by the Holocaust-denying French comedian Dieudonné M’bala M’bala—is designed to go viral. Which means that once you see it for the first time, you tend to see it everywhere. Even in the world’s most popular YouTube video, the delightfully absurd “What Does the Fox Say?” by the Norwegian duo Ylvis.

Is the Fox anti-Semitic? Judge for yourselves: around the video’s one-minute mark, the band’s members and their dancers bust a move that looks a lot like the quenelle. Here, for convenience’s sake, is a video clip of the relevant bit, sent in by an eagle-eyed reader.

So is it the quenelle? Or is the Fox innocent? Let us know what you think.

Liel Leibovitz is editor-at-large for Tablet Magazine and the host of its weekly podcast, Rootless, and its daily Talmud podcast Take One.