Last year, I took issue with Forward cartoonist Eli Valley’s Halloween graphic in which he explained why Israel was inevitably heading toward absorption into a majority Palestinian state. That was a nasty piece of agitprop combining tastelessness with shameless distortions of history. But in comparison to this year’s edition, I have to admit it seems a bit more reasonable than I thought it was at the time. After all, arguing that Israel’s defenders are harming it may be unreasonable and disconnected from reality, but underneath Valley’s deliberate attempts to outrage Jewish and Zionist sensibilities there is an argument, even if it is a foolish one.
But that’s more than you can say for his disgusting “Scary Science Experiment” in which he depicts a Dr. Frankenstein-style Jewish scientist (“Dr. Lowenstein”) being commissioned in 1957 by David Ben Gurion to clone Anne Frank with some DNA from Judah Maccabee. The result is — get it? — Anne Frankenstein, a monster who escapes in 1967 and then madly spreads havoc and fear around the world and whose latest escapade is to warn about red lines about Iran in a lame spoof of Benjamin Netanyahu’s United Nations speech last month.
There will be those who will argue that this is merely satire–and Halloween-themed satire at that–and should be taken as merely an attempt to provoke thought about Jewish and Israeli sacred cows. No doubt the editors of the Forward who allowed their pages to be polluted by it told themselves that. Maybe they even believe it. Maybe they also think turning a symbol of the Holocaust into a metaphor for Zionism gone mad is clever, even if there’s nothing particularly funny about Valley’s screed. Perhaps it even reflects their own sensibilities about the reality of contemporary Israel in which they think its right-wing/religious majority doesn’t represent their values and is therefore unworthy of support or respect. But that they think Valley’s work is within even the most generous definition of reasonable comment ought to be a sign that it is they who have lost their way. When a Jewish publication begins to publish a cartoon that is firmly within the tradition of Nazi ideologue Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic illustrations, it is time for those associated with the Forward to ponder whether they have lost touch with not just Jewish values but with those of responsible journalism.
Let’s be clear about what Valley has done in this cartoon. This is not just the usual leftist argument about self-destructive right-wingers, but a full-blown attempt to depict Israel as a monster, built on the ashes of the Holocaust but instead replicating its horrors. This is not just hostility to Zionism masquerading as an attempt to save it from the Zionists, but propaganda illustrated in the language of hate. The problem here is not just that using Anne Frank in this manner is tasteless and calculated to offend Holocaust survivors and any Jew who cares about the subject, though it is all those things. It is that by doing so in this manner, Valley has stepped across the divide between fair comment and political satire into the realm of anti-Semitic invective.
To have expected the editors of the Forward to say that this was something that should be considered beyond the pale in their pages is not to try to impose conservative sensibilities on them or to make them conform to a standard by which the Holocaust should be treated as a religious theme never to be offended by sacrilege. One needn’t advocate a rule in which the toes of important Jewish constituencies are never trodden upon to understand that there are some lines that should not be crossed. Even on Halloween, that pagan tradition that is so popular today that it has even begun to challenge Christmas as America’s favorite holiday, depicting Israel as an Anne Frankenstein monster is the sort of thing that should have been seen as vile rather than clever. It is one thing to claim that we shouldn’t take the threats to Israel’s existence from Palestinians and Iran seriously or to depict fears of anti-Semitism as exaggerated. It is quite another to draw modern Israel as a Holocaust-inspired monster.
Valley went too far this time, yet somehow those in charge of the Forward are too much the prisoners of their own prejudices about Israeli politics and their own conceit about their role in Jewish intellectual life to see it. Instead of congratulating them for their capacity to generate outrage, those who fund the Forward need to do some soul-searching about how far the paper has sunk from its mandate to stand up against anti-Semitism and where it is going.
Dear Jonathan, Have you seen what has become of Forward's numbers in recent years? No one reads it anymore. The editors of Forward are part of a (very) old world that has long been buried. Maybe the aging Jewish socialists-of which there are fewer and fewer- still read it. Any publication that is dying gets more and more outrageous- to try to revive its circulation, Today you are witnessing the death rattle of socialist-secular jewry in America and Forwards is it last rampart.
it was difficult for me to read this–my old eyes can't take that R Crumb style very well anymore. but I had no problem making out the psycho-looking Bibi with the cartoon bomb at the UN and hearing the underlying self-hatred. n nwas there ever a people who threw themselves under the bus as much as Jews have? what is it with us? why are we compelled to constantly degrade our traditions and our ancestors? do we think it'll make the nations nicer to us? it never has yet!
I agree.
This only demonstrates the persistent nature of the Jewish ant-Zionist Left. It has a long tradition at the Forward and an even longer history in Israel.
The Forward, in its Yiddish incarnation, was not anti-Zionist. I think Seth Lipsky pointed this out in a piece he wrote about his time as editor of the English language Forward. n nAs for the current English paper, it seems to have gotten a lot worse in the last few years. It's become nasty, malicious, and hysterical toward Likud, and, beyond that, very patronizing towards Israel, portraying itself as having a moral compass on the threats Israel faces that Israelis, especially on the right, do not have. nwhat else? Well, the paper is really contemptuous of American Jews who are critical of Obama.
I don’t think it was a clever comic, but I see his point, even though I disagree with it.
Still, I understand his perspective. He is a dyed-in-the-wool leftist. He is very concerned about Israel’s politics. And as a leftist, so would I. Israel is looking at permanent right-wing majorities going forward unless the left drops every last pretense to any non-Likud solution to the peace quagmire.
What irks me is this call for silencing the debate, for censorship and to contact the donors/funders of the Forward.
It is one thing to disagree with something, calling it Nazi-inspired makes you look out of balance and out of touch. And then advocating for censorship, instead of vigorous debate, strikes me as very un-Jewish.
R. Crumb called – he wants his drawing style back. nStormfront called too, and they want their memes back.
It IS The Forward you know. These are the people who openly supported Stalin until not very long ago.
Took a peek. Truly sad and disturbing.
Abe, the response to your comment at Forward is among the saddest part. The commenters at Forward seem to be running 2 – 1 in favor of the cartoonist, and are responding to any criticism with the usual attacks, juvenile ridicule and name calling. n nI'd encourage anyone so inclined to post their own response at Forward, and to vote on the responses already posted.
Ok, you made me look, ahad. Ugh! You mean that chap with the Alinsky pic as his avatar, I guess. The one who claims that Valley's humour is a Jewish thang which, presumably due to some mysterious mix of genetic and cultural forces I might never understand. Yeah, pretty sad if that's one of the ways he defines himself. n nThe way I look at it is that it's extremely hard to maintain an authentic Jewish identity now, as in the past. There is an irrational, inexplicably over-the-top and almost supernatural amount of hatred directed at Jews and that must be very frightening. It seems to me that every Jew who maintains himself as a Jew must be, by default, a hero and deserves a medal. No wonder so many drop off. But those who don't and try to have it both ways and reject their religion and their sense of brotherhood with their own people are only left with a caricature of what a Jew is supposed to be, a caricature usually concocted by those who hate them. That's gotta be hellish.
Ever since Seth Lipsky was forced out as editor of the Forward that newspaper has become another "Freiheit" and this episode confirms it. Soon the few readers it has will be reading it the way the Freiheit was read on the White Plains Road subway by Allerton Coops residents: rolled up so that only one column is showing and NEVER the masthead.
really…hmmm… down at Grand Street folks weren't so fastidious.
My father read the Yiddish press through the Nineteen-Fifties and Sixties when I was growing up. His daily paper was Der Tag (The Day). Like most learned Jews, my father looked down on the Forward, a Yiddish paper in those years. Proste Yidden, (course Jews) he called Forward readers. Ungelerente amhaaratzim (unleducated peasants). n n n n n
you mean he meant "coarse Jews" but that's not what it means–proste yidden means "simple Jews" "everyday Jews" even "of course we're Jews, what else?" and if your father thought he was too damned intelligent and "elegant" to associate with the cobblers and garment workers reading the Forward so much the worse for him. n nI'll take my grandparents and my uncles of blessed memory over "learned Jews" any day of the week. And, by the way, those left-wing self-haters running the Forward are what passes for the "learned" intelligentsia nowadays. The proste yidden just aren't used to all that self-loathing irony.