The Online Hate Prevention Institute (OHPI) has called on Victoria Police to consider charges against Lisa Jane Spencer, a self-described comedian.
OHPI alleges Spencer has used Instagram to target Australia’s Jewish, First Nations and Indian communities with racist content, some of it funded through donations from followers. No charges have yet been laid.
OHPI’s briefing focuses on a video uploaded to Instagram on July 6, the same day the Royal Commission into Antisemitism and Social Cohesion was questioning Meta, which owns Instagram, over its handling of online antisemitism.
In the video, Spencer dresses as an “Israeli Jew”, wearing a kippah and a small Israeli flag, and captions herself “Lisa Cohen, Israeli Jew”. OHPI says: “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.”
Despite hashtags including “satire” and “aussiehumour”, OHPI says: “The fact the video is tagged as ‘#satire #parody #aussiehumour’ doesn’t diminish its racist and offensive basis. It is also a form of harassment.”
Spencer plays “the banker” in Monopoly and refers to a “pot of silver”, invoking centuries-old stereotypes linking Jews to greed and financial control. OHPI traces those tropes to mediaeval restrictions that pushed Jewish communities into moneylending and later fed conspiracy theories, including the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.
A commenter on the video wrote that they hoped Spencer would get “271,000 likes from 109 different countries”, combining two antisemitic memes.
The 271,000 figure is drawn from Holocaust denial material. The Arolsen Archives says the genuine underlying document lists only death certificates from a single registry office and does not include the millions killed at extermination camps or in mass shootings.
The 109 figure refers to a list OHPI says originated on an Australian antisemitic website, purporting to show 109 places Jews were expelled from and implying Australia should become the 110th.
Spencer’s video echoes this theme, with a Monopoly exchange in which she says she gave “six hundred” but received only “two hundred and seventy”. OHPI reads this as a reference to six million Holocaust victims and the same denial figure.
Elsewhere, Spencer says she knows people will claim she lacks the “heritage or DNA” connecting her to the land, a line OHPI links to a pattern of denying Jewish identity and history.
She then repeatedly draws “get out of jail free” cards, which OHPI says references a claim that Jewish people weaponise the Holocaust to their advantage.
Later, Spencer says of property she is holding that she “didn’t steal it” because “it was always mine”. OHPI links the line to stickers circulated in Melbourne and Sydney by Free Palestine Printing, pairing an Israeli flag with an image of a religious-looking Jewish man and a similar phrase drawn from a 2021 video of a Jerusalem property dispute.
OHPI says the sticker and online meme draw on “traditional anti-Jewish stereotypes of Jews as greedy and thieving” and show “the blurring that is occurring among Palestinian activists between criticism of Israeli policy and an antisemitic targeting of Jews”.
OHPI says the dispute behind the original quote is more complex than the sticker suggests, involving property legally owned by Jews during the British Mandate, later occupied by Jordan and contested through the courts. It argues the sticker stripped a real quote of context to demonise Israeli settlers, Israelis and Jews.
The video closes with Spencer accusing another player of stealing money and trying to “sabotage” her before asking why she is being “kicked out”, which OHPI reads as a further nod to the expulsion trope.
OHPI says the Holocaust denial content mirrors material allegedly used in a separate case involving Queensland business Panel House, which led to a Brisbane business owner being charged by police, and argues Spencer’s conduct warrants a similar response.
It wants Victoria Police to consider charges under section 474.17 of the Commonwealth Criminal Code, covering use of a carriage service in a way a reasonable person would regard as menacing, harassing or offensive. The offence carries a maximum penalty of three years’ imprisonment.
The July 6 video follows earlier objections to Spencer’s content targeting First Nations and Indian communities. SBS reported last month that Spencer had been sacked from her job after videos targeting First Nations people drew criticism, while OHPI also cited a separate April video it says mocked Hindu gurus.
OHPI says it has named Spencer because she holds herself out as a public figure and has courted media attention, and because she solicits donations through a “Buy Me a Coffee” link.
“The racism here seems to be at least partly financially motivated,” OHPI said.
OHPI chief executive Dr Andre Oboler told the Royal Commission that Holocaust jokes were the only antisemitism category the organisation felt compelled to add as a dedicated monitoring category, because platforms were otherwise giving such content a free pass.
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