Anti-Semitic polemics of sorts accompanied Jargon theaters from their beginnings. Initially, anti-Semitism had only a marginal effect on the success of these theaters. Such polemics can, in fact, be read as involuntary testimonies to the growing acceptance that Jargon theater found among a broad segment of the population. The theaters would hardly have become the targets of vicious rhymes, for example, if they were not also symbols of German-Jewish confidence in Wilhelmine Germany. This was a very public confidence, not a quiet or private satisfaction from intellectual achievement and advancement. The reaction to Jargon theater from an anti-Semitic subculture was acid and crude, a response that thought of itself as a response in kind. Clearly, Jargon theaters were not only actors in but also the subject of popular culture, a culture that was not per se progressive or tolerant.

Whereas coverage of Jargon theaters in the daily press generally refrained from anti-Semitic commentary, the yellow press did not exercise the same restraint. A particularly revealing example was a poem by A. O. Weber entitled “The Herrnfeld Theater” (1905). It reflects the thrust of anti-Semitic defamations directed against the two directors Anton and Donat Herrnfeld. We are reminded that humor can be ambivalent in nature and can simultaneously foster both the inclusion and the exclusion of minorities from society at large. Weber's poem, despite its spiteful nature, was effectively inconsequential in comparison to the far-reaching campaigns against all things “foreign” that were prompted by the First World War.