2015: Stage Fright

Happy New Year
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College Class

Our new character, "the Progressive Professor", in a college classroom.
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the Progressive Professor

Introducing "the Progressive Professor", a new Dry Bones cartoon character.
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Feeling Happy

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My Friend Ali Salem

i'm proud to say that years ago I met, in Cairo (and later in Israel), with a brave and famous Egyptian writer who had been ostracized and had been expelled from the Egyptian Writers association, because of his support for "normalcy" with Israel. It was during Mubarak's Presidency and rabid antisemitism flourished (with President Mubarak's approval) in Egyptian media. That brave (and talented) writer was Ali Salem. We had long talks and met several times. I consider him a friend but I've lost contact with Ali and have long worried about his safety. Ali is suddenly in the news and I could not resist joyfully reporting on his wise words:

Famous Egyptian writer says Hamas is “the real enemy,” not Israel,

Egyptian writer and playwright Ali Salem, who has a record of peaceful statements regarding Israel, said Israel is Egypt’s “friend” and Hamas is “the real enemy.” It is not in Israel’s interest for Egypt to suffer from a lack of security, Salem said on Al-Arabiya TV in an interview Wednesday, the Egyptian El-Watan website reported.
The intellectual said Hamas and Islamic State present the most serious threat to Egypt.
Salem has visited Israel and called for the normalization of relations, drawing strong reactions from critics.
The real enemy is also poverty, ignorance, and disease, he said, adding, “Egypt will defeat terrorism no matter how long it takes.”
There are currently Israeli factories in Egypt and normalization with Israel is necessary, the playwright said.
In 2001, the Union of Egyptian Writers expelled Salem. He had “visited Israel several times and published a book on those visits, in addition to several articles supporting normalization, which contradicts the general bent of union members and the resolutions of the general assembly in several sessions,” said a union statement reported in an article about the writer in The Middle East Quarterly journal in 2002.
Salem has written 25 plays and 15 books, and some of them Egyptian classics, said the article.
In 1994, after the Oslo agreement, Salem drove to Israel and later published a book about it, “A Drive to Israel.”
“Now I was crossing the border, Egypt was behind me, for a long time I wouldn’t use the Egyptian dialect that I love. I set out on the road to Tel Aviv, in my car with its Cairo license plates: white Arabic numbers on a black background,” wrote Salem according to translated excerpts.
“I admit it: when they left me the Egyptian plates, I felt happy. And I began to exploit the chance to proclaim my nationality … With Egyptian plates and a high-pitched jeep engine I was shouting, without opening my mouth: Hey, folks!… Egypt is your neighbor!… I am an Egyptian coming forth from Egypt.”
In an Egyptian TV interview last year on Al-Kahera Wal-Nas TV, reported by MEMRI, Salem said it disturbs him when people call Israel the enemy.
“The Israelis are not an enemy – at least not of the Egyptians.”
Pressed by the interviewer if Iran or Israel is more of threat to Egypt, Salem responded that Iran was, “absolutely.”
“Because [Iran] has an extremist religious regime."-more

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Class of 2014

It's our End of Year Class Photo
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A Christmas Wish

A Christmas Wish for Mideast Christians. Click to check out our indiegogo campaign http://igg.me/at/drybones

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas, to our Christian friends from the Jewish State in the Middle East. Click to check out our indiegogo campaign http://igg.me/at/drybones

The Fall of Christian Europe

Christmas 2014: The fall of Christian Europe! Speak out: Click on http://igg.me/at/drybones

Christmas Carol

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Sony is Backmailed

Nobody seems to be asking the question?!!
Another question is how can we fight the antisemitism and the apathy to the plight of non-muslims in the Middle East!
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jPost: the Dry Bones indiegogo project

The Jerusalem Post has just published my memoir for Hanukka:

Dry Bones: Keeping the Flame Alive
by Yaakov Kirschen

I have just launched a crowd funding campaign at Indiegogo. ( http://igg.me/at/drybones )Its purpose is to “keep the flame alive.”
After doing the Dry Bones cartoons for more than 40 years, I’m ready for the next step. I want to set up a Dry Bones Academy to sponsor and train a new generation of cartoon activists. We need a mechanism to fight the spread of anti-Semitism and the unbelievable apathy to the plight of Mideast Christians.
The Dry Bones Academy will be a virtual campus housing libraries, study and research centers, and will offer scholarships. This ambitious project will require the backing of major donors and foundations, but the very first step will be to turn Dry Bones fans into “members.”
And that is the purpose of the Indiegogo project.

So how did all this start? Back in the late Sixties, I was a normative New York Jewish artist who lived in Manhattan’s Upper West Side and who was upset about America’s involvement with the Vietnam War. And so I took to the streets with handbills that featured cartoon appeals to organize a response within the Democratic Party. My efforts were successful and I soon found myself running an insurgent local branch of the party that went on to become successful in elections for delegates to the fateful 1968 Democratic National Convention.
I was elected to represent our district as part of the New York delegation to the upcoming convention, and because my name and address was published in newspapers, I was deluged with letters from every special interest group imaginable. From Chicano lettuce pickers who sought a boycott to protest their working conditions to Black separatists who wanted a separate school system in Harlem. I had to regularly face a grumbling mailman who trudged in with a bag of mail for me.
At the time, Israel was seeking support for the purchase of 22 warplanes, but strangely, I received no mail from Jewish groups. When I got to Chicago I was one of the leaders of the New York delegation. As part of our activities we held a caucus to interview other delegates who were seeking our backing. And so I wrote a list of 10 questions to present to each. One question was about providing the much-needed aircraft to Israel. The only candidate who supported the idea of backing the Jewish state’s appeal was the one black candidate. Every Jewish candidate was passionate about opposing the sale.

After the convention, when I returned to New York, I grabbed a Manhattan phone book and looked up the word “Zionist.” I discovered that there was something called the Zionist Organization of America, and that it was located at 515 Park Avenue. I went to see the then head of the ZOA and asked why, as a Democratic Party delegate, and as president of a local Democrat Party club. I had not been approached by any Jewish or Zionist groups. His answer was “Because we don’t need people like you, we talk to people at the top, people like Hubert Humphrey.”
It was at that moment that I realized that we were in deep trouble. I left his office and wandered through the hallways of 515 Park Avenue, which back then housed every Jewish and Zionist group imaginable. Strangely, every office was quiet and empty. I then followed the sound of typewriters to discover one office that was a beehive of activity. It was something called Sherut Le Am. They explained that they had programs to send young Jews to Israel. They also explained that most of the other offices were manned by Israelis who were off “buying refrigerators and stuff to ship back to Israel”?! I volunteered to help the Sherut Le Am guys and for several months wrote and designed brochures and posters for them. One day they proudly told me that there was a major job search going on at the American Zionist Youth Foundation and that they had made an appointment for a job interview for me. I was not looking for a job at the time, but I did not want to disappoint the eager folks at Sherut Le Am and so I went to the AZYF interview.

The interview was amazing.
I didn’t have to lie or stretch the truth about anything.
I was clearly perfect for the job at the American Zionist Youth Foundation. It was then that I was asked if I had any plans to move to Israel.
I had never been asked that question and had never even entertained the possibility. I answered that I guessed that Israel might be in my future.
Whereupon I was told that my answer was unfortunate because the AZYF had a policy of not hiring anyone who contemplated moving to Israel.
I was shocked but it was carefully explained to me that “we can’t build a strong Zionist organization in America if our people go running off to live in Israel.” I left the meeting, went back to the Sherut Le Am guys and asked them to find me a shaliach (“emissary”) to facilitate my aliya.
I was a New York Jew who had gone to grade school, high school, and college in New York City. At Queens College I had been an art major, but it wasn’t until after my graduation that I was struck by the curious fact that although there were books on Eskimo Art and African Art there was nothing about Jewish Art.
And so I decided to write one.

I spent days at the Judaica Library at the New York Public Library Main Branch on 42nd Street with two stacks of index cards. One set of index cards was a collection of Jewish artifacts, i.e. Seder plates, Spice boxes, succot, halla covers, etc.
The other set of index cards was a collection of the graphic symbols that were the communication tools of Jewish Art. i.e.
the shape of the Tablets of the Law, the hands of the Priestly Blessing, the menorah, the Star of David, etc.But my research soon uncovered an image that was forbidden to anyone under 40. Strange. The image was that of the fiery Chariot that Ezekiel saw and described in detail.

I soon fell into reading the book that Ezekiel wrote some 2,600 years ago. Incredibly, he had a vision of a time in the future when the world would think that it had finally destroyed us. It was a vision that described how, from the grave, we would rise again. A vision of dry bones coming together. Living again. Once again in our ancient ancestral home. Ezekiel wrote about the world in which we now lived.
For Ezekiel, what he saw was in that far future, but for me it was the present. Ezekiel wrote about us and the age in which we live. And so when I had schlepped my family to Israel, when I had made aliya and had decided to do a cartoon about the age in which we live, there was only one title that I could give to the cartoons that I would do. I called them Dry Bones. We have achieved the long-predicted ingathering. We have rebuilt our cities. We have planted our trees. We have brought our longdead language back to life. We have become a light unto the nations. But now we need to preserve and to protect that light in a world that prefers to appease the darkness.

The Indegogo crowd funding of the Dry Bones Project is the first step in our ambitious effort to keep the flame alive. It is an attempt to fight anti-Semitism and the rewriting of history, and to combat the apathy to the plight of Mideast Christians. I have no doubt that we will succeed in keeping the flame alive. The first step is to convert “fans” into “members.”

Yaakov Kirschen is the veteran cartoonist behind the popular Dry Bones cartoons that have been part of The Jerusalem Post for more than 40 years, and who has launched a campaign on crowdfunding site Indiegogo, at http://igg.me/at/drybones. The campaign’s goal: to combat the willful rewriting of history, growing global anti-Semitism, and the apathy of the West to the destruction of Middle East Christian communities. The cartoonist may be reached at drybones@drybones.com.

Europe on its Knees

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the Two Strains of Islamism

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European Fear

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No Matter How you Spell It

Happy Holiday! Check out our indiegogo campaign and see our list of gifts and prizes. http://igg.me/at/drybones

Israel is doing it again!!?

Yup. We're doing it again. We're headed for new elections which will be held on March 17, 2015
Meanwhile, you can vote right now for Dry Bones!!!
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Times of Israel

Just In, Times of Israel article about my crowdfunding campaign at indiegogo (http://igg.me/at/drybones)

Dry Bones league vs. the anti-Semites
Yaakov Kirschen wants to share his wealth of experience in ‘cartooning activism’
by Jessica Steinberg
Cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen is at it again. The Dry Bones cartoonist recently launched a new crowdsourcing campaign to raise money to fight anti-Semitism.
“I want to pass on to the next generation of cartoon activists my principles of cartooning activism,” said Kirschen, who is 76.
It isn’t the veteran cartoonist’s first crowdsourcing campaign. His first was in 2012, when he raised $5,000 in two days for a Passover Haggadah project on Kickstarter.
This time, it’s a more political product. But he’s already raised more than $15,000 of his $20,000 goal.
“We are now facing a massive wave of anti-Semitism that is beyond anti-Semitism, it’s against our civilization,” said Kirschen. “So it’s just as much anti-Christianity and it calls for a new kind of organization.” Recalling the past waves of anti-Semitism that brought about the creation of the World Zionist Organization and then the Anti-Defamation League, Kirschen said he wants to “convert Dry Bones fans” into members of his new organization.
He’s worried about the recent rise in anti-Semitism, and the number of Christians being “slaughtered” in Syria.
“It’s the Judeo-Christian civilizations that are under threat,” said the political cartoonist.The Dry Bones project would include scholarships to the virtual academy to bring political cartoonists to Israel, teach how viral anti-Semitism is communicated through images in cartoons, and create a website, among other activities. “It’s a humongous vision,” said Kirschen. “It’s been sort of forming in my mind ever since I received the Bonei Zion award,” given by aliyah organization Nefesh b’Nefesh in 2014. “It was a ‘now relax and go fishing award,’ but I felt something has to be done,” he said. “I have more than 7,000 cartoons in an archive and I’ve got all this knowledge. It’s time to pass this all on.”

Kirschen, who was born in Brooklyn and immigrated to Israel in 1971, started his comic strip in 1973. It ran in The Jerusalem Post for four decades.

* * *
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Lone Wolf Factory

Main Stream Media (and Main Stream Politicians) treat so-called Lone Wolf attacks as the work of deranged individuals rather than the natural result of the system that produces them. Frustrated with this approach, I decided to draw a picture of the assembly line production of these fighters for "the cause". * * * Help us fight antisemitism, appeasement, and apathy to the Plight of Mideast Christians. Click to check out our indiegogo campaign http://igg.me/at/drybones

Quiz

According to PMW (Palestinian Media Watch):

Names of schools in the PA
"The Palestinian Authority transmits ideological messages that appear in its schoolbooks through the names it gives to its schools. The schoolbooks define Palestinian terror against Israel since Israel's founding in 1948 as: "resistance … acts of most glorious heroism." [Arabic Language, Analysis, Literature and Commentary, Grade 12, p. 105]

In the spirit of glorifying terror, numerous schools are named after terrorist murderers.
Israeli cities are presented in Palestinian schoolbooks as if they are Palestinian cities. In this spirit, schools are given name of the cities of Israel. See below.
The most common school name PMW has found is the name Al Khansa – with at least 8 schools given her name. Al Khansa is the honored mother of Islamic tradition because she expressed joy over the Shahada (Martyrdom) deaths of her four children. A PA schoolbook for Grade 8, explains her importance this way:" -more

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Two Turks

Two weeks ago he said that ""You cannot put women and men on an equal footing … it's against nature." Now President Erdogan says he'll introduce the compulsory teaching of "Öttoman Turkish".

"Ottoman Turkish was used as the administrative language of the 600-year-old Ottoman Empire. In 1928, Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the founder of modern Turkey, abolished the Ottoman language and replaced its alphabet with a Latin one.<,br />Erdogan described the abolition of Ottoman language as cutting Turkey’s “jugular veins,” saying, “It is a disaster that this nation, which had superior scientific qualities, has lost its wisdom.”
The Turkish president expressed regret over the fact that Ottoman language can be studied in Germany, while “unfortunately this isn’t the case here (Turkey).”
Critics say the new plan is aimed at rolling back Ataturk’s secular reforms." -more

The West is as silent about the Islamization of its NATO partner Turkey as it is about the slaughter of Middle East Christians.

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Our Lights of Freedom

The darkness of the outside world spreads over a Middle East in which Christians are experiencing a holocaust. Please help us to fight Antisemitism and Apathy to the Plight of Mideast Christians. At this holiday season, if you are safe and sound, we ask you to check out our indiegogo campaign and see our list of gifts and prizes. http://igg.me/at/drybones

ISIS Threatens Europe's Jews

The Story:

Don’t want to come to the Middle East? Stay in Europe and “kill Jews,” says ISIS to aspiring Islamic terrorists
"In an article about a Muslim female teenager from the French town of Bethoncourt who disappeared in October, and was later discovered to have traveled to Syria via Turkey to join IS, the New York Times reported that “another 15-year-old girl, who was intercepted by French intelligence officers as she tried to go to Syria months ago, has since told the authorities that once her recruiters realized that she was unlikely to be able to leave the country anytime soon, they began pressing her to strike at home against Jews. She told them she had begun looking for weapons and targets.”-more

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Gifts and Prizes

Time is running out. If you're going to help, now is the time! Help us fight Antisemitism and Apathy to the Plight of Mideast Christians. Click to check out our indiegogo campaign and see our list of gifts and prizes. http://igg.me/at/drybones

Oh Little Town

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Good News, Bad News

It's not just Europe! It's around the world and in our media and on our campuses! Help us fight the antisemitism, the appeasement, and the Western apathy to the Plight of Mideast Christians Click to check out our indiegogo campaign http://igg.me/at/drybones

"Giving Tuesday"

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"Giving Tuesday"is a new Internet tradition. We hope you will take part in it by "Giving" to Dry Bones. Thank you.