Columbia University students accuse BR of antisemitism with Penguin

The meat of the article below. Seems they're really overreaching here.

In their Times article, (available now in an archived version from Gainesville Sun), authors Rebecca Roiphe and Daniel Cooper claim that symbolically, the Penguin "is a Jew, down to his hooked nose, pale face and lust for herring." Further, the character's hostile ambitions feed into the stereotype of the Jew who is "unathletic and seemingly unthreatening but who, in fact, wants to murder every firstborn child of the gentile community." Although Roiphe and Cooper stop short of claiming that the film is overtly anti-Semitic, they argue that these tropes and stereotypes are dangerous nonetheless.

The controversy doesn't end with the Penguin. Roiphe and Cooper point out that the Penguin teams up with corrupt businessman Max Shreck (Christopher Walken), whose "Jewish-sounding name is borrowed from the actor who played the first bat-man of the silver screen, the vampire" from Murnau's classic Nosferatu. Further, the two critics propose that the film carries troubling references to openly anti-Semitic composer Richard Wagner: "The Penguin sails the sewers in a giant wooden duck, a parody of the 'Schwan der Schelde' from Wagner's Lohengrin." These and other criticisms open up a number of troubling questions for Batman Returns.

In an extensive 2014 article, Southern California Public Radio breaks down the movie brick by brick, identifying the Penguin as a "warped Moses" who ruins multiple Christmas tree lighting ceremonies, thus establishing a thematic "war on Christmas" as well as a more fundamental Christian vs. Jew opposition. The article points out that like Die Hard, Batman Returns qualifies as a quasi-Christmas movie, but in its case, Christmas must be saved from a pernicious Jewish stereotype rather than a German terrorist. Although the SCPR article locates some validity in Roiphe and Cooper's claims, it also points out that the Anti-Defamation League investigated their analysis and dismissed it as "nonsense." The Times later published a response from Wesley Strick, the Batman Returns script doctor who dreamed up the Penguin's scheme to eliminate Gotham's firstborn. Strick, who is Jewish himself, expresses dismay in regard to Roiphe and Cooper's article, and likens their argument to a "Rorschach test," implying that the two critics identify anti-Semitic undertones where none actually exist.

https://screenrant.com/batman-returns-controversy-antisemitism-penguin-accusation-explained/