Daily Briefing: THE POWER OF ANTISEMITIC CARTOONS TO PROVOKE AND TO ALERT (June 2,2020)

Table Of Contents:

No Joking Matter: 1940s Political Cartoons Warned US of Holocaust:  Cathryn J. Prince, The Times of Israel, May 5, 2020

Understanding the Real Origin of that New York Times Cartoon:  Izabella Tabarovsky, Tablet, June 6, 2019

Major Anti-Semitic Motifs in Arab Cartoons:  Dr. Joel Kotek, JCPA, June 1, 2004

The Shifting Boundaries of Antisemitism: Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, BESA, June 1, 2020
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No Joking Matter: 1940s Political Cartoons Warned US of Holocaust
Cathryn J. Prince
The Times of Israel, May 5, 2020

Long before becoming a beloved children’s author, Dr. Theodor Seuss Geisel wielded his pen for more sober reasons: He wanted to alert the American public to the horrors of the Third Reich. In fact, Geisel belonged to a small but determined cadre of American editorial cartoonists who, as early as 1933, sounded the alarm about Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. Now the work of these legendary cartoonists is featured in Dr. Rafael Medoff and Craig Yoe’s new book, “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust.”

But beyond resurrecting these cartoons from history’s margins, the book upends the narrative that Americans were unaware of the mounting barbarism.  “There is a popular misconception that what Hitler was doing was not known to the American public until the camps were liberated,” Dr. Rafael Medoff, founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, told The Times of Israel. “When you look at the newspaper coverage at the time you see a great deal was known long before that. And the number of editorial cartoons further illustrates how widely known Hitler’s atrocities were before the end of the war.”

That cartoonists addressed the threat of Nazi Germany so early fits in with how they view their role in society, said Yoe, an Eisner Award-winning comics historian and the former creative director for Jim Henson’s Muppets and Nickelodeon.  “Cartoonists are often progressive. They give a voice for people who are struggling and they can speak for those who need a voice. They care about social laws and issues,” he said.

Through more than 150 rare political cartoons, historical explanations and commentary, the authors tell how these cartoonists implored American politicians and private citizens alike to act against Nazi Germany and save Jewish lives.

Readers will view Kristallnacht, book burnings, the voyage of the doomed refugee ship St. Louis, the struggle over America’s refugee policy, the gas chambers, the cattle car trains, and the Nuremberg Trials, through the eyes of watchdogs such as Herbert Block of the “Washington Post,” Jay “Ding” Darling of the “New York Herald Tribune”, and Edmund Duffy of “The Baltimore Sun.”

As the authors write in the book’s introduction, successful editorial cartoons poke, prod and provoke. Not only did they command attention in the US, they drew a response from Nazi Germany. “In fact Hitler put out two volumes of cartoons showing what the world was saying about Nazi Germany. They collected cartoons from abroad as a way to say, ‘They’re lying about us and about what is really happening.’ It was their way to refute the accusations being made against Nazi Germany,” said Dr. Steven Luckert, Senior Program Curator at the Levine Institute for Holocaust Education, part of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.

Without choosing a favorite cartoonist, Yoe said he’s long been drawn to the work of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Daniel Fitzpatrick, who worked in charcoal. His 1935 cartoon “Swastika Over Germany” depicts a swastika formed by a bent and chained person. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Understanding the Real Origin of that New York Times Cartoon
Izabella Tabarovsky
Tablet, June 6, 2019

A black-and-white photograph from the 1970s [Fig. 1] shows happy Soviet children at a May Day parade. They are hitching a ride on a parade installation: a giant hook-nosed spider wearing a military cap adorned with the Star of David, its teeth bared in a sinister grin. Massive rods under its legs suggest both the spider’s web and the meridians of the globe it is trampling. The accompanying slogan offers the proper ideological lens: “Zionism is the weapon of imperialism!”

It was this image that popped into my mind the day of the infamous New York Times’s cartoon [Fig. 2] of a short-legged guide dog Jew with the face of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, a Star of David medallion dangling from its collar, dragging a blind kippah-wearing Donald Trump.

The outrage the Times’ cartoon produced was appropriate, but interpretations of what had happened fell short. Was the cartoon truly a lineal descendant of the anti-Semitic propaganda published in Der Stürmer, as some reflexively opined? To stop there was to accept the possibility that the offices of the New York Times’ international edition are packed with white supremacists. Even if a single production editor was responsible for the incident, as the paper asserted, the publisher’s decision to put the entire staff through sensitivity training to address “unconscious biases” would suggest that senior management was worried others in the company might be similarly infected. Yet the idea that the Times is infested with neo-Nazis seems patently silly.

What makes more sense is the possibility that the cartoon made it into print because the paper’s staff—whether singular or plural—saw it as “a political issue and not religious,” in the words of António Moreira Antunes, the artist who drew it. Like the slogan on the Soviet May Day parade installation, the face of the Israeli prime minister must have signaled to the New York Times staff that the cartoon was about Israel and therefore political—anti-Zionist perhaps, but not anti-Semitic.

Yet the conventional wisdom on the left that anti-Zionism is easily distinguishable from anti-Semitism has run into some obvious practical difficulties in recent months as the Women’s March, the U.K. Labour Party, Congresswomen Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, Marc Lamont Hill, and AJ+ Arabic, Al Jazeera’s popular online platform, have all shown an inability to distinguish between what they consider to be anti-Zionist political positions and overt anti-Semitism.

So if anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism are not the same, why is the left doing such a poor job of distinguishing between the two? How is it that the side of the political spectrum that makes anti-racism one of the central tenets of its platform repeatedly stumbles into espousing such vile hatred?

The left would be less confused if it were able to soften temporarily its ahistorical, ideologically driven focus on the right as the sole source of anti-Semitism and devote some time to studying its own rich history of the same. In particular, it should look at the Cold War-era Soviet Union, which for decades not only practiced politically weaponized anti-Zionism but also exported it abroad. Many of the core tropes that animate the anti-Zionist left today are carbon copies of ideas that the KGB and the Department of Propaganda’s ideologues developed, weaponized, and popularized with particular intensity in the wake of the Six-Day War. It is there, not among the Nazi oeuvre, that the direct precursors to the New York Times cartoon and similar such efforts, in which the European press has been awash for the past two decades, are to be found. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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Major Anti-Semitic Motifs in Arab Cartoons
Dr. Joel Kotek
JCPA, June 1, 2004

Genocide’s Groundwork

“The collective image of the Jews created by Arab cartoons lays the groundwork for a possibility of genocide. My collection of Arab caricatures demonstrates this. One can argue about whether these genocidal ideas are conscious or subconscious. My view is that they are still at the subconscious stage.”

Dr. Joël Kotek, a political scientist at the Free University of Brussels, searched the Internet daily for anti-Semitic cartoons in the Arab media for over two and a half years and found about 2,000. Even an initial superficial analysis revealed that the cartoons not only targeted Israel, but were aimed at all Jews. His subsequent research resulted in a book co-authored with his brother Dan Kotek. Published in French, its title translates as In the name of anti-Semitism: The image of the Jews and Israel in the caricature since the second Intifada.1
In a world where image plays a central role, the cartoon, Kotek stresses, has become a popular and efficient means of communication. A caricature may have as much influence on public opinion as an editorial. The visual impact of these drawings is further strengthened by the fact that many Arab cartoonists are quite gifted illustrators.

Kotek says: “The main recurrent theme in these cartoons is ‘the devilish Jew.’ By extension, this image suggests that the Jewish religion must be diabolic, and the entire Jewish people evil. I even found a Greek Orthodox cartoonist of Lebanese origin, who conveys the message that the Jewish religion has caused the State of Israel to be so ‘evil.’ The cartoons convey the idea that Jews behave like Nazis, leading readers to conclude that the only logical solution is their elimination. As the Arab world is becoming increasingly convinced of these ideas, they have no inhibitions showing them on a multitude of websites.”

Ten Major Themes

Several hundred Arab cartoons from Kotek’s collection are categorized according to ten anti-Semitic themes in his book: “The first theme is based on the oldest anti-Semitic motif, demonization of the Jew. In the Islamic world the Jew’s status – like that of Christians – is that of a dhimmi, a second-class citizen.

“Israel, an entire state of these ‘inferior creatures,’ has won military victories against the Arab world. By their logic, this was only possible, they believe, because Jews are ‘satanic beings.’ In the cartoons I collected, the Jew is depicted as inhuman and an enemy of humanity. This dehumanization is necessary to justify the hoped for elimination.

“On 28 December 1999 – well before the second Palestinian uprising – Al-Hayat al-Jadida, the official Palestinian Authority journal, published a cartoon expressing this core idea. It depicted an old man in a djellaba, symbolizing the twentieth century, taking leave of a young man wearing a tee-shirt symbolizing the twenty-first century. In between them stood a small Jew with a Star of David on his breast, above which an arrow pointed to him saying, ‘the illness of the century.’2

“A few months later on 22 March 2000, the same journal ran another cartoon showing a large Pope talking to a small Jew with the skin, feet, and tail of an animal, and a big hooked nose, wearing a kippa. The Pope exclaimed ‘Peace on Earth’ while the Satanic-looking Jew calls out ‘Colonies on Earth.’”3 … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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The Shifting Boundaries of Antisemitism
Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld
BESA, June 1, 2020

The world today exhibits a huge number of manifestations of classic antisemitism and anti-Israelism, making the phenomenon difficult to analyze. Tools and shortcuts are needed to navigate the mass of information to understand its dynamics. An important tool can be the identification of key moments when the boundaries of antisemitism shift.

A good example is the Trump Peace Plan, which caused a sudden shift in emphasis in the international debate on the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The question of whether Israel would apply sovereignty over part of the West Bank, and what the reaction to that move would be, took on a dominant place in the discourse. Before that, much of the discussion focused on whether certain actions were good or bad for peace.

That form of “oldspeak” was always an abstract issue because the Palestinian Authority has never shown any interest in peace. That formerly dominant manner of discussion was generally accompanied by support for the so-called “two-state solution,” an approach that most likely would not solve the conflict.

Another case of moving boundaries in recent years was developments in the British Labour Party with respect to antisemitism. Initially there was much denial at the top of the party that antisemitism was a serious problem. Slowly but surely, even senior Corbynites started to admit that it was. John McDonnell, former Shadow Chancellor and a long-time top Corbyn associate, said earlier this year, “I think the truth has got to come out… if that means that the EHRC (Equality Human Rights Commission) comes to a finding saying that the Labour Party is institutionally antisemitic, well, so be it.”

Evidence that not only the boundary had moved but that a turning point had been reached came in a leaked unedited major internal report a few weeks ago. The document was written to defend Corbyn’s leadership. Its main claim was that his policies had been sabotaged by internal opposition. Yet even that report admitted the existence of antisemitism in the party and the poor handling of complaints about it. Somewhere at an unidentified point in the past few years, the boundaries on this issue moved. If an analysis had been conducted that identified attitudes toward antisemitism in the party, a clearer view of the dynamics of its antisemitism and anti-Israelism would have been revealed.

One of the prime examples this century of the shifting boundaries of antisemitism occurred at the UN’s first World Conference against Racism in 2001 in Durban, South Africa. An explosion of anti-Israel hate, unprecedented in scale, occurred at that conference. Had there been an Israeli government body keeping an eye on shifts in global anti-Israelism, this would have flashed a huge warning sign. Serious discussions about what Israel should do to fight this hatred in a systematic way could have taken place but did not.

In 2000, there was another major shift of antisemitism boundaries in Europe. A large upsurge of antisemitic incidents started, mainly in France. This was related to the eruption of Arafat’s so-called “Al-Aqsa intifada” in the Palestinian territories. At first it was difficult to register that this represented a change in a boundary of antisemitism. In preceding decades there had been several waves of antisemitism in Europe, but they did not last.

Sociologist Shmuel Trigano was probably the first to understand that this outburst was different. At the end of 2001, he started a publication that continued for two and half years entitled Observatoire du Monde Juif (Observatory of the Jewish World).  His efforts, together with those of others, were of extreme importance. … [To read the full article, click the following LINK – Ed.]
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For Further Reference:

Yaakov Kirschen – “Antisemitism and the Power of Cartoons”:  Yaakov Kirschen, ISGAP, October 14, 2009

Drawing the Message:  Israel Kasnett, Jerusalem Post, Dec. 6, 2012 — EVER SINCE the Protestant reformation in Germany, when Martin Luther discovered he could reach out to the illiterate classes through simple woodcutting and metal engravings, political cartoons have become a real means of communicating with the public.

Antisemitic Cartoons in the Anti-Israel Media: Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld, BESA, May 24, 2019 — On April 25, 2019, the International Edition of The New York Times published a cartoon depicting Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu as a dog. Animalization is a classic motif of antisemitism.

Portuguese Cartoonist Publishes Antisemitic Political Cartoon:  Hannah Hepner, Jerusalem Post, Feb. 2, 2020 –– Portuguese cartoon artist Vasco Gargalo has been criticized for creating an antisemitic political cartoon that was published in the weekly Portuguese news magazine Sábado.