Artful Plan

From The Jerusalem Post, November 6, 2015

The establishment of the Dry Bones Academy of Cartoon Advocacy by The Jerusalem Post’s legendary cartoonist Yaacov Kirschen merges his creative ingenuity and artistic imagination with his love of Israel and the Jewish People (“Dry Bones battles against BDS, media bias,” November 4). 

His aim of training an army of cartoon activists on college campuses to fight the anti-Israel media bias and the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions movement by creating an online school is powerful.  It follows in the tradition of Picasso’s Guernica – extended into networked times.

As former art professor at Columbia University and research fellow at MIT Center for Advanced Visual Studies, I appreciate the political power of art being harnessed by Kirschen.  After coming on aliyah in 1969, I was happy to see his Dry Bones cartoons on the pages of The Jerusalem Post when they first appeared in 1973. 

I first saw him drawing his imaginative cartoon characters climbing up the margins of his notebooks as we sat together planning ways to combat anti-Israel propaganda at meetings of the Student Zionist Organization at Queens College in 1957.  Yaacov’s youthful creative energies continue to grow in the service of the amazing Zionist enterprise that has created the State of Israel.

Mel Alexenberg
Ra’anana