It's just goofy. Unless your argument is that any depiction of a witch is antisemitic?
That is actually getting closer to my perspective.
The faces of the victims of persecution seem to blend into these archetypes of despicableness in the mind of the persecutor.
I think that I can see this argument. The modern Halloween type witch - big nose, wears a hat, does magic, wants to do bad things to children . . . that fits with many anti-Jewish stereotypes, and I haven't been able to figure out exactly where that depiction came from. Seems entirely plausible that much of it was cribbed from old anti-Jewish propaganda. It ends up being kind of a chicken and egg thing. Did the witch come from the antisemitic tropes, or did the tropes come from the attempt to associate Jewish people with something bad that already existed.
You need to analyze this from the perspective of the persecutors because that is where the issue originates.
The overlapping characteristics of the victims of the witch crazes and antisemitic violence do not overlap because there are actual a priori overlapping characteristics of the different groups of victims.
The apparent overlap of characteristics is due to these characteristics being projections of the persecutors onto the different groups of victims.
For example, witches and Jews were both accused of practicing black magic. Of course, the practice of black magic is not an overlapping characteristic of the victim groups but reflects only the concern/delusion of the persecutors projected on both groups.
And so it is with other overlapping characteristics.
But if the concern is about depiction of witches in general, why does everyone gets upset about Dahl's work and nobody gets upset about the Wizard of Oz? I feel like the outrage stems not from the depiction, but simply from a desire to make the author's works seem worse than they really are.
While it is certainly in bad taste to use witches, who were typically older single women living at the margins of society when they became victims, as props for anything.
But there are differences between the Wizard of Oz and Dahl´s The Witches.
Basically, The Witches is a full blown conspiracy theory and Dahl only uses the witches as placeholders for Jews. And the man did this intentionally, without a doubt.
The Wizard of Oz is a different matter. Again, it is important to realize that any characteristic attributed to witches and shown in the movie is not a quality pertaining to actual witches, of which there weren´t any ever, but a projection of those persecuting those accused of witchcraft.
Maybe people can make fun of witches today because of the fact that there never was a witch to begin with. In a way, those who perished in the witch crazes were posthumously exonerated via the realization that the crime of witchcraft never existed in the first place.
It is kind of a disassociation of the concept "witch" and the actual victims, allowing people to have fun with the new, fully fictional idea of a witch. I find that disrespectful to the victims, however.
In other words, the link between mass murder and the idea of witches has been severed in the mind of many; and even the most disturbing fantasies about witches can become part of popular culture because there aren´t and there never will be any witches in harms way.
The issue with antisemitism is different. Jews were and are persecuted because they are Jews. Of course, modern antisemites do not accuse Jews of practicing black magic, but in contrast to witches who disappeared from the physical world with the end of the belief in black magic (in the West), Jews are still very much around and often in harms way.
