A Jewish generation gap, or the only honest voice in the room?
Thursday, October 15, 2009 at 9:43AM 
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.
Jewish humor, ZOA, anti-Semitism