Cartoons and Extremism: Israel and the Jews in Arab and Western Media (review)

The opening of the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in 1993 in Washington, DC gave visitors an educational yet sensory experience where they would not only acquire passports of the Holocaust’s victims and survivors, but could see and smell the ripened leather of abandoned suitcases and surrendered shoes. While the Museum engages its visitors’ senses and minds and pleads for compassion, Joël Kotek, gleaning cartoons from a variety of Arab-Muslim and Israeli websites, the Stephen Roth Institute for the Study of Racism and Anti-Semitism at Tel Aviv University, and the Anti-Defamation League’s bulletins, unveils the power of visual literacy in recognizing stereotypes and their place as propaganda that dehumanizes the Jewish people. Kotek contextualizes the need for this collection of cartoons as coming out of the 2001 World Conference against Racism held in Durban, South Africa, when, ironically, an anti-Jewish pamphlet distributed by the Union of Arab Lawyers linked the anti-Jewish sentiments in the Arab-Muslim world to the propaganda inherited by the Christian West. The illustrations, propaganda, and cartoons of anti-Jewish sentiment, as Kotek posits, effectively communicate racism primarily by dehumanizing Jewish individuals and communities. In the spirit of the Durban agenda to end racism and to memorialize the Holocaust and its victims, Kotek, clear and forthright in his purpose, provides his readers with a collection of images that beseech, “never again.”

Not assuming any knowledge of the history of anti-Jewish sentiment and its visual propaganda on the part of his readers, Kotek provides a fairly comprehensive background on the history of pictorially representing the Jewish people in the Christian West. Supported with reproduced images, the narrative includes images from twelfth-century Europe to World War II wherein the Jewish person is reduced to three main stereotypes: the vampire, the cannibal, and the ritual murderer. All three, in medieval Christendom, share their foundations in rumors and their lack of logic or evidence. For instance, Christians believed Jews sucked the blood of children as part of the ritual murders, and linked their ties to Europe’s sovereigns with money. “[T]he image of the Jew will,” as Kotek posits, “come to be inextricably associated with gold and with blood, and deicide will be considered on par with usury”: the Jew as Christendom’s reviled Judas (p. 1).

Nineteenth-century anti-Jewish vilification begins with the use of Jews as scapegoats of ritual murders in Germany and the region formerly known as Czechoslovakia, and climaxes with the Dreyfus Affaire in France. Versed in European history, Kotek uncovers the absurdity of these myths, or what he calls “antisemyths,” but offers visual evidence of how these Christian myths set the stage for Nazi Germany in the nascent twentieth century. As history’s victims and survivors will attest, Kotek exclaims, “These are myths that kill!” (p. 22). We are reminded—not just by Kotek’s didactic tone—that just because certain myths are commonplace, these recurrences do not make them more accurate or true.

With these early images, Kotek is able to visually narrate the distinctions between cartoon and propaganda. He argues that while cartoons, “[b]y definition . . . display a lack of neutrality or mildness,” propaganda’s purpose serves to cast doubt on an individual or a group so that these persons’ humanity is questioned (p. xix). The potency of visual images reinforces the urgency to continue discussion of the horrific representation of human beings reduced to stock characters. From the perspective of the new millennium, Kotek looks back through history and breaks down the Arab-Muslim world’s Judeophobia into eleven categories for which he provides ample graphic examples. Beginning with the Damascus affair in 1840, nineteenth-century Islam takes up anti-Jewish sentiment and slander of the Jew as a poisoner. With a few exceptions, Kotek finds that the Arab-Muslim world does not—historically—use cartoons for self-criticism, which he...