YINZ/YIDZ

JTA is reporting on a series of anti-Semitic attacks in Calgary:

Over the weekend, anti-Jewish slogans were spray-painted on several Jewish facilities and a Holocaust monument in the western Canadian city. A Jewish family also was targeted.

Hate messages were painted on the Calgary Jewish Centre, the Holocaust war memorial and at least one synagogue, all in the city's southwest region. The graffiti also were found on fences, bus stops and mailboxes down the street.

The messages included swastikas and epithets such as "Kill Jews" and "6 million more."

This is of interest to Pittsburgh Jews because Calgary is the new home of Rabbi Yisroel Miller. Miller took over at Congregation House of Jacob-Mikveh Israel in Calgary earlier this year after 24 years with Congregation Poale Zedeck in Squirrel Hill.

The ZOA brought Yaakov Kirschen to town Thursday night. Kirschen draws Dry Bones, a long running comic strip about Jewish life and Israeli politics. He gave a "stand-up analysis" at the JCC called "The Latest News and Other Jokes," a humorous look at current events.

Kirschen has an interesting perspective on Jewish issues for two reasons.

First, he's been drawing Dry Bones since January 1973. That gives him a running document of his opinions on Israel and American Jewry more than half as old as Israel itself.

Second, Kirschen recently became the artist-in-residence at the Yale Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Anti-Semitism, an attempt to create an institutional framework for discussing and analyzing anti-Semitism from a variety of different angles.

Kirschen told a series of jokes, showed some of his work, then switched gears to dissect anti-Semitic cartoons from around the world (mostly from newspapers in the Middle East, but also touching on one recent cartoon from the widely-syndicated cartoonist Pat Oliphant).

But Kirschen devoted nearly a third of his 75-minute talk to analyzing the cartoons of Eli Valley, a Jewish cartoonist who frequently publishes his work in the Jewish Forward.

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