Teaching about anti-Semitism has never been more important and, possibly, more complicated than it is today. The Anti-Defamation League identifies anti-Semitism as on the rise (e.g., in “U.S. Antisemitic Incidents Skyrocketed 360% in Aftermath of Attack in Israel, According to Latest ADL Data”). It has also become more complicated, as a topic for civic life and for our classrooms.
Deborah Lipstadt, for example, recently returned to offer an epistolary-style book, written as an exchange of letters between student and teacher, in Anti-Semitism: Here and Now. It’s a great read, an engaging and careful encounter with perceptions and misperceptions about anti-Semitism, but it begins with curiosity. Not every classroom encounter with anti-Semitism begins with curiosity.
In this essay, I want to take a look at two strategies for introducing (and working against) anti-Semitic thought in the United States in the middle of the last century. One strategy worked explicitly with mass media, while the other worked in classrooms and farmhouses. Both began with the presumption that the best path to working against anti-Semitism is to build a culture of tolerance, more broadly. Reflecting on both may help us reflect on whether and how to address anti-semitism in our own classes.
Cartoonists Against Racism
The latest book by Rafael Medoff and Craig Yoe, Cartoonists Against Racism, is an exciting adventure into some complicated territory around race, equity, and social justice.
Rafael Medoff has been leveraging the power and influence of his position as director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies with the power and excitement of the comics medium for some time. He has deployed the comic book form to share the Holocaust story with a next generation of Americans in books like Whistleblowers: Four Who Fought to Expose the Holocaust to America (with comics artist Dean Motter). In a more sustained way, he has worked with Craig Yoe to collect the artifacts of the Holocaust in American life, in comic book form. Together, they collected Cartoonists Against The Holocaust (2015), We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust (2018), and now Cartoonists Against Racism: The Secret Jewish War on Bigotry (2024).
Medoff and Yoe move, in this most recent book, from wartime works about the Holocaust to tell the story of a richer and more engaged attempt to address anti-Semitism in American life. After World War II, the American Jewish Committee (AJC) moved from prosecuting anti-Semitic hate crimes (which only drew attention to anti-Semitism) toward a more positive messaging campaign. Rather than focusing on the victimization of marginalized peoples, the comics created by the American Jewish Council painted racism and anti-Semitism as inherently un-American values. They hired Richard Rothschild, a public relations professional, who crafted the new AJC message. Rothschild’s theme was that anti-Semitism threatened not only Jews, but the entire American way of life.
Such a strategy, affirming the positive values held by good Americans, was innovative; instead of decrying racism and anti-Semitism, they exhorted Americans to live up to their ideals.
Across hundreds of pages of comics, Medoff and Yoe pull together cartoons like the Mr. Biggott series (developed by Carl Rose, pseudonym of Earl Cros). Mr. Biggott was part of a collaboration between the AJC’s Scientific Research Department and the Bureau of Applied Social Research (BASR) to test whether comics could move the needle on anti-Semitic thought. The answer was “kind of”—the visual cues in the comics that were intended to make Biggott an unsympathetic character were sometimes missed by some audiences, the way that some viewers of All in the Family connected with, rather than condemned, the Archie Bunker character in the 1970s. (For more information about the Mr. Biggott series of comics, see Giner-Monfort, J., (2024) “The Bureau of Applied Social Research and Comics Studies in the 1940s”, The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship 14(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/cg.9900.)
Also collected within Cartoonists Against Racism, Bill Maudlin’s comics approached racism and anti-Semitism from a veteran’s perspective. To be racist on the home front, when so many people from diverse backgrounds fought (and gave their lives) against the Nazis together, Maudlin argued in his comics, was anti-American.
Where Maudlin spoke as a veteran to veterans and their communities, Eric Godal and Bernard Seaman spoke to members of the labor movement, insisting that the values of labor included values of anti-discrimination. Collected in Cartoonists Against Racism, the image “Swat Them All!” shows a working man resisting anti-Catholic thought, anti-Negro thought, anti-Jewish thought, and anti-Union thought. For more on this impressive body of comics (and posters), visit the New York Historical Society collection here.
Many of the images collected in this small book are available elsewhere, online, but the aggregate, the collection of the set of campaigns, is an achievement—and a useful classroom tool.
Dick Dorgan, in the syndicated American Sidelights series of comics, imitated the very popular Ripley’s Believe It or Not single-panel comics. The panels Dorgan crafted, structurally, looked almost identical to the Ripley’s panels, but each panel in American Sidelights included quotations from great thinkers about the importance of equality and the harmful effects of discrimination. Many of these images would be welcome in classes today.
Two full-length comic book stories are included in this collection, used in classrooms at a time when comics were often treated as literature for delinquents and other problem children. The True Comics publication, They Took the Blame, was immensely popular as a classroom tool. Nearly a half a million copies were requested by schools across the nation. They Took the Blame traced the idea of scapegoating from ancient times through the Nazi party. (Anecdotally, from my perspective, They Took the Blame reads more like a textbook than a comic; it mostly left me craving a “real” comic.) The imagination is better engaged in The Green Lama Smashes a Plot against America. This comic took as its starting point a letter from a comic fan, expressing racist views about the “real Americans” who fought and sacrificed in the war. The editors hand the letter over to the Green Lama character to speak directly to the reader. That metafiction was more fun to read, even if it lacked the educational value of They Took the Blame.
And so on. I’ve covered less than half of the materials that make up this collection—a diverse set of materials, drawn in diverse styles, approaching diverse audiences. This book maps an array of strategies on behalf of equity and inclusion that is enviable and, perhaps, in some cases, emulatable. I teach advertising and public relations strategies to liberal arts majors, and I have a strong desire to encourage them to assign this book and ask the students to “update” it for the 21st century.
What could be preserved, from the AJC campaigns, for today? Certainly, campaigns updated for today might retain the positive mindset, the exhortation to an American value system which includes diversity, equity, and inclusion. Possibly, students could learn from the tailoring of the messages, across the campaigns, to specific audiences.
What could be jettisoned or developed further? The campaigns very much focus on discrimination as a disposition, as a feature of individual psychology rather than systemic or structural forces. Work on DEI has moved into something that calls us to work harder, reach further, than individual consciousness, and an “updated” campaign developed by students would need to reflect that.
Cartoonists Against Racism offers lots of space for students to learn from quality materials, at the same time that it offers lots of space for students to create, invent, and improve on those materials for their own purposes.
It also invites us to consider whether we, as teachers, go far enough in dismantling racist systems by exhorting individuals to live up to their best values. In the middle of the last century, the American Jewish Committee designed the campaigns collected here around moving individual hearts. That may only be a starting point, but it’s an important one.
Midcentury Campaigns against Anti-Semitism in Minnesota
Minnesota has a special story about the place of the Minnesota Jewish Council as a “sponsor of literacy” (Brandt) to inculcate inclusive American values, and I’ll conclude this essay with a brief recounting of that story. It is a story of a nation divided, of Americans divided, in painful ways. Maybe, too, then there is something instructive in this very Minnesotan case study of how literacy education can heal a divided state today, too.
The Minnesota Jewish Committee took a different approach than the national office did. Without, perhaps, the budget for a mass-media campaign, the Minnesota Jewish Committee decided to co-sponsor an annual essay-writing contest. According to Isaiah Terman, who would later serve as national staff director and director of communications for the American Jewish Committee, “the topic chosen for the contest shall be concerned with Human Relations, i.e. the problems of intergroup relations, prejudice and the like.” Instead of pushing a message forward into the public through comics, posters, and other media (the subject and strategy in Cartoonists Against Racism), the Minnesota Jewish Council decided to work directly with kids and teens. The Minnesota Jewish Committee offered prize money, totaling around $2,000 (covering awards to county, district and state winners and for transportation, hotel accommodations and a banquet for all 4-H members participating in the state contest). The winning essays were read by the students, live, statewide on radio.
Sample essay prompts in this included
- 1942 What the Four Freedoms Mean to Me
- 1943 What Being a Good Neighbor Means to Me
- 1945 How Can I Better Serve as a World Citizen
- 1949 Peace of Mind
- 1950 What the American Creed Means to Me
While the topics were not explicitly antiracist, the students were encouraged to put forward a positive vision for American values which would emphasize inclusivity, instead of discrimination. “A Good Neighbor” would be one who does not discriminate; the “Four Freedoms” included, for example, freedom of worship (which would preclude discrimination against Jews, Catholics, and others).
We can see an overlap in mission, if not strategy, between the MJC and the AJC: we will reduce anti-Semitism if we increase tolerance and inclusivity.
The Minnesota Jewish Committee did not have the reach nor the staffing to organize a statewide competition, so they worked with the Minnesota 4-H (an arm of the University of Minnesota Agricultural Extension service). The 4-H handled the mechanics of circulating the prompt and supporting materials, while local 4-H staff worked with students to draft their essays.
The 4-H is a youth development program in the United States, typically operated by the Extension offices of state universities, that focuses on helping young people. The program’s name comes from its four values, represented by the letters “H” in “head, heart, hands, and health.” While the strength and base of the program is in rural communities, working with rural youth, in the last several decades, the 4-H has developed programs that address the needs of urban communities. As a result, according to the 4-H, one in every five Americans has been a member, making them a significant force in the development of our youth, and from there, our culture. Because writing and public speaking have also been components of the work of 4-H, they have also been among the most influential of what Deborah Brandt called “sponsors of literacy” in American history.
Controversy in the 1952 Campaign against Anti-Semitism in Minnesota
The bulk of essay prompts were mild and straightforwardly invited celebrations of a shared American culture. The 1942 prompt, for example, drew from FDR’s “Four Freedoms” speech—a very safe, even inoffensive, topic. However, as the postwar period became increasingly divisive, it became harder for the Minnesota Jewish Committee to put forward a prompt that would “safely” invite students to consider the best American values.
The topic selected by the MJC for 1954 was “What Our Bill of Rights Means to Me.” The materials sent to each county 4-H chapter encouraged discussion of the tension between security and liberty, freedom and loyalty, censorship and free speech—a powerful invitation to consider the best American values at a time when they were threatened, it seemed, on two sides: with McCarthyism and Communism casting a shadow over the competition.
The leadership of the MJC and the 4-H sought to encourage critical thinking and to broadcast the best of these student essays around the state—to use the voices of children to put forth our best ideals at a time when we needed to be reminded of what those ideals were.
Not everyone, though, agreed that there was even a question; in the shadow of Communism, security was paramount. Thus it came to be that the American Legion would, in its newsletter, accuse the Minnesota 4-H and the Minnesota Jewish Council of being un-American. In Firing Line, a publication sharing “Facts for Fighting Communism,” the American Legion asserted that “another attempt to subvert the minds of high school students has been brought to light” – the essay competition cosponsored by the 4-H and the MJC.
The American Legion objected to the competition on several grounds.
- The Legion claimed that the contest was un-American because it led students, in their view, to stake positions that (for example) “denounce the idea of Loyalty Oaths, claiming them to be instruments of enforcement of conformity.” Loyalty oaths (like those, for example created by the Levering Act in California) forced state employees to “solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support the Constitution of the United States” and “that I am not a member of the Communist Party or under any oath or a party to any agreement or under any commitment that is in conflict with my obligations under this oath.” Loyalty Oaths were, for members of the Legion, a key tool in keeping traitors from roles in government.
- The American Legion pushed the 4-H to distance itself from “the ridicule and condemnation of all Internal Security measures our American people have tried to devise to protect themselves from harm by the International World Conspiracy of Communism, which already has eaten its way deep into the hearts and minds of our countrymen.” “Internal Security” measures were being passed with accelerating intensity after 1950, when the McCarran Act (also known as the Internal Security Act of 1950 or the Subversive Activities Control Act of 1950) passed. This Act strengthened laws against espionage, limited free speech for national security reasons, and allowed for the investigation and deportation of immigrants accused of promoting Communism. For the Legion, to question the wisdom of these acts was unthinkable.
In its Firing Line newsletter, then, the American Legion accused the 4H of being “part of a scheme to ‘BRAIN-Wash’ our rural youth with… clearly subversive ideas.” This group of veterans believed that the security they had fought for in World War II was in danger and needed protection.
I want to pause here for just a second and imagine the American Legion (the oldest association of veterans in the United States), calling the 4-H (perhaps the most wholesome youth education program in American history) subversive. We lived in divisive times.
We still do.
The tensions between the 4-H, the MJC, and the American Legion could not be resolved between the organizations alone; the resolution required bringing other stakeholders to the table. A meeting between the Minnesota Jewish Council, the American Legion and its Anti- Subversive Committee, the Jewish Labor Committee, the Minnesota branch of the American Civil Liberties Union, the regional business community and the 4-H (University Extension) was held on the St. Paul campus, the Agriculture campus of the university, to seek resolution. It was in everyone’s best interests, it seemed, to show unity. As reported afterwards by the University Relations office, “Legion officials expressed satisfaction that the motivation and purpose of the sponsors of the Minnesota 4-H Club Radio Public Speaking Contest is of the highest patriotic order.”
Whew.
I share this story for two reasons. First, to celebrate Minnesota’s unique place in the larger narrative of Jewish antiracist activities created by Medoff and Yoe. The MJC tried a different approach, one that deployed the wisdom of children in writing contests. The MJC and 4-H believed that these contests were opportunities for children to articulate our ideals for adults, challenging the adult beliefs that may have drifted from the principles that should guide us. Children could articulate the positive vision, in the radio broadcast of the essays, that the AJC was articulating through comics.
Both programs struggled, a bit, because they threw their emphasis on the individual psychology of racism and discrimination, without acknowledging the structural issues at play. Those very structural dimensions, especially in the legislation that the American Legion believed was necessary to protect our freedoms, were used to drop a hammer on the MJC/4-H collaboration.
Exhortations
It’s easy to look back on the best efforts of 75 years ago and articulate their limitations. We are better prepared, now, to see racism and anti-Semitism as hard-wired into housing policy, employment decisions, and other structural dimensions of life; we no longer believe that simply asking people to live up to their ideals will make discrimination or anti-semitism go away.
But reading these midcentury documents, both the comics and the essay competitions, reminds me that we survived the factionalism, the fear, and the violence of the McCarthy movement; we are wiser for having survived it. Perhaps, if we find the right people to bring together for a meeting, the way the 4-H did in St. Paul, we can rediscover the unity that comes from our shared interests in a very divided society today.
And perhaps the MJC was right: moreso than a mass media campaign, perhaps the voices of our children can point us to the ideals that should guide us. Our classrooms can be the crucible where we both talk about the values and ideals that constitute our “best selves” as Americans, as well as the real and concrete actions we can take to remake ours into a society whose systems are defined by equity and inclusion.
Works Cited
Anti-Defamation League. “US Antisemitic Incidents Skyrocketed 360% in Aftermath of Attack in Israel, According to Latest ADL Data.” (2024). Available online at https://www.adl.org/resources/press-release/us-anti-semitic-incidents-skyrocketed-360-aftermath-attack-israel-according.
Brandt, Deborah. “Sponsors of Literacy.” CCC 49.2 (1998): 165-185.
Lipstadt, Deborah E. Anti-Semitism: Here and Now. Schocken, 2019.
Medof, Rafael and Craig Yoe. Cartoonists Against Racism: The Secret Jewish War on Bigotry. Penguin Random House, 2024.
The story of the MJC, the 4-H, and the American Legion can be traced in two boxes in the University of Minnesota Archives and Special Collections:
4H Club, 1916-1952, Box: 1. Theodore August Erickson papers, ua00712. University Archives. Finding aid available online at https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/14/archival_objects/275255 Accessed July 16, 2024.
4-H Speaking Contest – “The Firing Line”, 1954, Box: 106. University Relations records, ua00875. University Archives. Finding aid available online at https://archives.lib.umn.edu/repositories/14/archival_objects/335667 Accessed July 16, 2024.
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MEJ 