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Cartoonists Against the Holocaust. By Rafael Medoff and Craig Yoe. New York: Clizia, 2015. 213 pp.
At its most robust, political cartooning, with its rich and sometimes contentious history, can make a broad public aware of actions, behaviors, and events deemed newsworthy-and even inspire a response. In American politics, for example, Thomas Nast's Harper's Weekly cartoons are known to have had a considerable effect on American culture and politics in the middle-to-late 1800s. Following the widespread use of photography in the late nineteenth century, political cartoons lost some of their stature and force; more recently, the information age, which offers a variety of shorthand political opinion markers, from Tweets to memes, has relegated political cartoons to just one of many popularized forms of curt but potentially forceful commentary. Nonetheless, in the early twenty-first century political cartooning continues to assert itself as a singularly powerful mechanism, a fact evidenced by events such as the 2005 Danish Muhammad cartoons crisis and the 2015 Charlie Hebdo massacre.
Rafael Medoff and Craig Yoe's Cartoonists Against the Holocaust presents a collection of political cartoons published in both popular and lesser known American newspapers and composed in response to a particular cluster of events: the years leading up to and relating to Hitler's rise to power as well as the Holocaust. As the authors point out in their introduction, the cartoons included (150 in all) were "exceptions" to the overarching silence of the popular American media in relation to these events. These cartoons reflect a small minority of...