As Nazis in the late 1920s and ’30s were wreaking havoc on (and ultimately genocide of) the German Jewish populace regardless of social, political, cultural or religious class, antisemitism in the United States was also catching fire, stoked by wealthy bigots, sanctimonious religious figures and xenophobic politicians. This was a time when billionaire Henry Ford’s newspaper, The Deaborn Independent, published The Protocols of the Elders of Zion—a rabidly antisemitic fabrication alleging a Jewish plot to take over of the world, which was soon republished by the magazine Social Justice, edited by the influential radio personality and Jew-hater Father Charles Coughlin. U.S. Congressman, Rep. John Raskin, meanwhile, accused “international Jews” of trying to drag the nation into a war in Europe.
The threat of violence against Jews and other persecuted chosen people led to The American Jewish Committee launching an anti-hate campaign … in secret! Strategically, it was important that the campaign not be about Jews alone, but all forms of bigotry. Hispanic, Irish and Asian American hate was lambasted in pamphlets, booklets and editorial cartoons. (Arab Americans had yet to be recognized.) In order to condemn bigotry, the American Jewish Committee enlisted many popular graphic commentators of the day from multiple ethnic and religious backgrounds to work on the project.
The American Jewish Committee’s role in the campaign has been dubbed a “secret war,” and has now been collected in a slim yet powerful volume titled Cartoonists Against Racism: The Secret Jewish War on Bigotry (Yoe Books/Dark Horse) by Rafael Medoff, a founding director of The Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, and artist and comics historian Craig Yoe.
