What I Learned When I Called Out an Anti-Semitic Cartoonist at Stanford Earlier This Month

It was just another blip in the endless sequence of campus controversies, but for me it was a first. Earlier this month, as the culminating event of Palestine Awareness Week at Stanford University, the Jewish cartoonist Eli Valley was scheduled to give a talk. His work, featuring images depicting in the most obscene way Jews whose politics he despises, and non-Jews like Meghan McCain who support such Jews, had been plastered all over campus.

I didn’t relish spending my last weeks in law school arguing about anti-Semitism and Israel. But I had something to say, so I composed an op-ed for the college newspaper. In it I wrote that Valley’s work was “rude and disgusting, and its ceaseless recourse to Nazi imagery is matched only by its slavish devotion to the age-old tropes of Jewish caricature.” Indeed, so rude and disgusting are Valley’s cartoons that the co-sponsors of his talk, Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and Jewish Voice for Peace (JVP), semi-apologized to Stanford’s Jewish community for having disseminated them “out of context.”