In February, Harvard University once again found itself in the spotlight when student and faculty groups distributed a poster on social media that included an anti-Semitic cartoon. Sara Yael Hirschhorn notes that the drawing came from a newsletter published in 1967 by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Commission (SNCC), which, under the leadership of Stokely Carmichael, had then decided to ignore the second word of its name and embrace Black Power, Third Worldism, and anti-Semitism:
The unsubtle message of the cartoon was that Israel and the Jews, together with American capitalism, were guilty of subjugating and murdering not only Black and Brown peoples, but Arab nationalism and Islam. It illustrated a feature called “Third World Roundup,” which asked readers to “test their knowledge” of 32 anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic talking points regarding the Israel-Palestinian conflict. . . . For example, apparently thanks to “white European, American, and Australian states . . . Israel was planted at the crossroads of Asia and Africa,” and “the Rothschilds . . . were involved in the original conspiracy with the British to create the ‘state of Israel.’” The text seems to have been drawn from PLO propaganda, itself likely a product of Soviet agitprop.
This conflation of American racial tensions with a toxic mix of old-fashioned anti-Semitism, Arab hatred for Israel, and general anti-Western leftism doesn’t seem very different from what one might encounter at a ceasefire protest today. While the campus groups last month pled “ignorance and inadequate oversight,” and scrubbed the cartoon from the poster, the results weren’t much better:
Then they re-shared the larger post with the offending cartoon swapped out for a photograph of Stokely Carmichael. Interestingly, no one seems to have commented on a graphic on the flyer’s bottom left of Huey P. Newton, the founder of the Black Panther Party, meeting Yasir Arafat in 1980. The photo was taken from The Black Panther, an often virulently anti-Semitic periodical supporting violence. Stokely Carmichael himself would later quip that the “the only good Zionist is a dead Zionist.”
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/american-jewry/15821/harvard-sncc-and-an-antisemitic-cartoon/