There’s a lot going on in the premiere of IT: Welcome to Derry on HBO. Taking place in 1962, the prequel to the 2017 and 2019 movie adaptations introduces a new young cast terrorized by Pennywise the Dancing Clown (Bill Skårsgard, who does not appear in the pilot), as well as various other new and old residents of the cursed Maine town. But in the midst of this — and spoilers past this point — is a broadly antisemitic scene that uses the Holocaust for cheap scares. And to speak frankly: it’s gross, and should not have made it to air.
In the episode, we meet Teddy Uris (Mikkal Karim-Fidler), a kid who is not the father of Stanley Uris of The Losers Club, aka the heroes of the original IT. Instead, he’s the Uncle of Stanley — Stan’s father, Donald Uris (Finley Burke), isn’t really part of the main action. Stanley also is dubious of what he hears from his friends, that mysterious, creepy things are happening in the town that may have something to do with the disappearance of Matty (Miles Ekhardt), one of the kids Teddy goes to school with.
That’s the general setup for the scene(s) in question, which finds Teddy at home for what looks like Shabbat (aka Friday night) dinner with his family. The family includes Don, who sits sullenly across the table from Teddy, as well as their parents — Rabbi Uris (Dmitry Chepovetsky) and Mrs. Uris (Eli Katz). I’ll just note for anyone who doesn’t know, Rabbi is not a first name, it’s his job, so this is like naming a character Butcher Johnson or Computer Technician Williams. Mrs. is also not a first name, but you probably knew that. My point in bringing this up, though, is that there isn’t a lot of care spent in fleshing out the Uris family in this show beyond broadly painting them as “Jewish.”
That continues when we see they are sitting down to a nice Friday night meal of matzo ball soup, something that is generally eaten during the holiday of Passover, and not any old time of the year. But it is a “good” visual indicator of them being Jewish — same as with the candles that are lit, the lightning fast Kiddush said over the wine, and the blessing on the Challah. In all fairness, these are things that are done at the Friday night meal, in the (mostly) correct order, with a few excisions — though it is a little bizarre that traditionally Mrs. Uris would be lighting the candles, instead of wandering around serving matzo ball soup, which is what she’s doing in the scene.
In any case, at that point, Rabbi Uris immediately jumps into asking, “My son the Bar Mitzvah boy. How’s the haftarah studying coming?” Stanley, though, is more concerned with the possibility that Matty might be in the sewers, and asks his father about this. Again, not too out of the ordinary, other than the expository language to establish Teddy is of Bar Mitzvah age, and studying for the ceremony. And a large part of Jewish conversation is based on encouraging inquisitiveness, so good on Teddy for asking about sewer clowns.
“Oy gevalt,” says Mrs. Uris, her — I believe — only line in the scene, the most cliché piece of dialogue you can give a Jewish mother.
However, Rabbi — can we call him Rabbi for short? — is incensed. “Your grandparents escaped Buchenwald, their entire families murdered,” he explains. “The skin of Jewish prisoners used for lampshades… We are Jews, Theodore. We know better than anyone the real horrors of this world. Reality is terrifying enough as it is. Cut it out with the fantasy.”
Then he throws a comic book across the room, which is a whole other thing. He also mispronounces “Buchenwald” — it’s BOO-ken-wawld, not Buck-en-wawld — though perhaps that’s the Maine accent coming through. But to the credit of the show, the lampshades, or rather lampshade made at the Nazi camp is a real thing. You can read more about it at the Buchenwald Memorial page, but Jews were indeed killed and skinned, their tanned remains used to make various “trophies” that included at least one lampshade. It’s harrowing, horrifying, completely inhumane, and leads us into the next scene in the episode.
In it, Teddy is upstairs reading Detective Comics when his nightstand lamp starts flickering off. He turns it back on, it turns off again, and this happens several more times until he turns it on… And sure enough, it’s a lampshade made of human skin. Except the Pennywise-powered version is made out of skinned Jewish faces, their mouths sewn shut so they can’t scream.
Teddy does scream though, jumps off the bed and hides in the corner. The lamp falls down, then rolls towards him, the thread holding one of the mouths shut popping open so it can indeed scream at him.
Then, the lights return to normal, and the kicker is Don opening the door, and drily saying, “I can’t believe we’re related.”
Look, there’s a lot that is wrong with this sequence. There’s the hackneyed Jewish dialogue, the fact that the characters are eating “Jewish food,” the lack of character names, and everything else mentioned above. At this point, as a Jew myself who has watched a lot of TV, to be blunt, you get used to these broad sort of characterizations on everything from Nobody Wants This to The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and beyond. It is what it is, and it makes the times shows elevate this sort of thing all the more special. For example, the recent, excellent Netflix animated series, Long Story Short, a surprisingly delicate treatment of a rabbi character on Fear the Walking Dead, and even more bizarrely, Paramount+’s Sonic the Hedgehog spinoff series, Knuckles, which may be the only TV show ever to get Jewish cuisine 100% right.
The much bigger issue is pairing these sorts of slightly-off, paper thin “Jews!” with the scene that follows, which uses one of the most gruesome parts of the Holocaust for cheap scares. It’s reasonable to think that a child told a horror story about lampshades made of Jewish skin would be haunted by that sort of thing. But there’s no care or nuance there, let alone space between when he hears about this, and the immediately following scene… Where Teddy’s busy not pondering the Holocaust, but rather reading a comic book about Batman before Pennywise so rudely interrupts. He doesn’t seem to even care about what his father said, so why would he be disturbed by the mini-monologue about Buchenwald enough for an otherworldly supernatural creature to glom onto the image?
There’s also no follow up later in the episode, no additional appearance by the Uris family, nor trauma or investigation of the Holocaust or what it means to Teddy and his heritage. And there certainly could have been: IT: Welcome to Derry takes place a relatively short time in history after the liberation of Buchenwald in 1945, and even closer to the dedication of a second memorial placed at the site of the Nazi atrocities in 1958. We don’t know anything regarding the Uris family in regards to the Holocaust, but there is every chance that someone close to the Uris family, relative, or otherwise, was either in the camps themselves or narrowly escaped. This is not 2025; it’s 1962, and the trauma of the Holocaust was still fresh on the minds of Jews. Everyone knew someone. It was not an abstract part of the past, it was living history that continued to pain the community at large.
One could also factor in the Jewishness of the Uris family as a whole, something that was amped up for Stanley Uris (Wyatt Oleff) in the 2017 movie, making his family far more religious than they were in the books. In Stephen King’s original novel, Stanley was introduced in 1957, and was more on the Reform end of Judaism, but still viciously attacked for it by Derry’s bullies. The movie shifted the timeline to 1988, and made the Uris family more in line with Conservative or Orthodox Judaism, giving Stanley a Bar Mitzvah storyline that played with the central theme of kids on the cusp of adulthood. In either case, Stanley’s Jewish heritage was a core part of his character, something that played into his overall arc throughout the running time of the book and movie respectively (though your mileage may vary about how effectively it was handled in either case).
But there’s no time to look into any of this when it comes to IT: Welcome To Derry. Pretty soon after the scenes mentioned above in the episode, Teddy is dead, too, killed not by the lampshade but by a baby-headed bat monster in a movie theater that pops out of a projection of The Music Man.
Whereas the core idea of IT is about facing your fears, this scene is instead about the idea of “isn’t a Jewish skin lampshade horrifying?” and that’s as far as the thought process goes. In case that wasn’t clear, take a look at the fact that the scene ends with what is supposed to be a joke (I say supposed to be because it has a structure of a joke, but is objectively not funny in any sense of the word). If this was meant to be any sort of serious exploration of Jewish genetic trauma, there would have been more there — and certainly not a “tension relieving” jape to end the sequence.
I know it feels big to throw around the word antisemitic in regards to a TV show like this, but to invoke real Jews who were murdered, skinned, and made into Nazi desk ornaments and devaluing them into poorly CGI-ed scares on an HBO show is disgustingly derogatory to the memories of those who died. There are ways of honoring those lives lost, even in a horror show; but the way of doing that is by exploring what it means to the characters, how it impacts them going forward… And certainly not making it equivalent to a man in a Freddy Krueger costume jumping out at you in a carnival’s haunted house.
To blow this out even further, we’re currently living in a world where nearly every day, non-Jews invoke “antisemitism” to coerce major and minor institutions towards monetary ends that do not serve the interests of Jews, do serve their own interests, and rarely if ever are actual antisemitism. Meanwhile, when someone pops a Nazi salute at the Presidential inauguration or has been sporting a Nazi tattoo for 20 years, we’re told it’s not what it is, and we should calm down. We’re in an upside down world where things that we know are unequivocally bad like texting Nazi slogans or owning Nazi memorabilia are just “youthful indiscretions,” when as Jews, we spend our whole upbringing being told “never again,” that there is no quarter given to Nazis, to antisemitism, to those who would once again slaughter Jews and turn us into lampshades and pocket knife cases if given half a chance.
That’s a long explanation of why something like this duo of scenes from IT: Welcome to Derry wouldn’t be acceptable in any era of the world, and certainly is not acceptable in this world, right now. It’s the wrong depiction of Jews and the Holocaust, at absolutely the wrong time… One that minimilizes the monumental and heinous loss of life by whittling it down to “oooh, isn’t that spooky?” Jews deserve better. And frankly, so do non-Jewish viewers, as well. Whether a franchise extension, conversation online, or in the US government: never again. There is no quarter for antisemitism, here, now, and always. Even if it’s “just” in an IT prequel series.
IT: Welcome To Derry Premiere Dates And Episode Guide:
New episodes of IT: Welcome To Derry premiere on Sundays on HBO and HBO Max at 9pm ET.
Here’s the full list of episodes in IT: Welcome to Derry Season 1 with premiere dates:
- Sunday, October 26, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 1
- Sunday, November 2, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 2
- Sunday, November 9, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 3
- Sunday, November 16, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 4
- Sunday, November 23, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 5
- Sunday, November 30, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 6
- Sunday, December 7, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 7
- Sunday, December 14, 2025: IT: Welcome To Derry, Season 1, Episode 8 *Season Finale*
Where To Watch IT: Welcome To Derry
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