I grew up on Mad magazine, unaware how Jewish it was – in its writers and sensibility. It just was funny, satirizing daily life, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, the Cold War, and politicians, Left to Right.
Starting in 1973, thanks to The Jerusalem Post, Yaakov Kirschen, the “Mad” Zionist, applied that screwball approach to the greatest adventure in Jewish life, Israel. Through his “Dry Bones” cartoon, Kirschen, who died Monday at age 87, kept resurrecting our spirits by laughing at our enemies – and ourselves.
Writhing in post-October 7 trauma, we forget how fragile, primitive, and unlivable 1970s Israel was. It was the unpromising promised country of endless strikes, abusive taxes, and unbearable bureaucrats.
Moreover, the shock of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 10 months after Kirschen started drawing “Dry Bones,” followed by waves of Palestinian terrorism that made them popular and us unpopular, demoralized us – leaving Jews feeling betrayed worldwide.
True, Prime Minister Golda Meir had a Jewish wit. Her truisms remain devastatingly accurate: that our “secret weapon,” is having nowhere else to go; and that if Arabs holstered their weapons, we’d have peace, but if we holstered our weapons, they’d slaughter us.
Ultimately, however, the pioneers of that founding generation, from Golda to Yitzhak Rabin, were larger-than-life, heavy-handed sourpusses. Today’s reservists are funnier, far more comfortable laughing at life and themselves. That’s why Israelis cannot be politically correct; we can’t survive the dark moments occasionally forced upon us without black humor.
Back then, in Israel’s inspiring yet sobering comedic desert, Kirschen lifted our souls. He, and other snorting Zionists like Efraim Kishon, fostered a devil-may-care, resilient, Israeli sensibility that still resonates, especially after Hamas’s mega-atrocity in Israel on October 7, 2023.
“Methuselah,” Kirschen asked in 1973, “You’re 969 years old. What keeps you going?” The oldest man sighs: “I’m still waiting for them to install my telephone.”
Kirschen marked Israel’s 40th anniversary by noting that most Jews choose to live in “lands of comfort,” while Israelis enjoy “our lives of hardship”… because we’re “the nut cases.”
There you had it, the ultimate altneu, old-new, Zionist cartoonist. Kirschen’s “Dry Bones” reference to Ezekiel’s redemptive vision for the Jewish people rooted him in the Bible, further legitimizing Zionists’ return to the land.
Then, his layered, world-weary, Eastern-European, Yiddishy, Borscht Belt satire sugarcoated Zionist toughness.
It’s fitting that Kirschen died on Passover, because many of his best lines evoked that drama:
• Mocking Diaspora Zionism, his Moses worked “tirelessly” to get “an ungrateful stiff-necked people” to Israel, but “in the end just ‘couldn’t’ move there himself.” That made him… “the father of the Zionist movement.”
• Kirschen characterized the Seder-time warning about enemies “in every generation,” as sounding paranoid, but actually sounding like “I told you so.”
• God promises Jews they’ll be the Chosen People and a light unto the nations. Moses wonders: “Will this win us the love of the other nations?” God exclaims: two out of three ain’t bad.
• In the spirit of Sinai, listing prohibitions against mixing – milk and meat, wool and linen – Kirschen assumes God didn’t ban mixing politics and religion because we should have figured out that one “by ourselves.”
More bitterly, in 2017, he defended the ultra-Orthodox, saying they’re “ready… to fight” – as long as they’re targeting “a lone and outnumbered Israeli soldier.”
Devilishly efficient, Kirschen normalized Israeli craziness in one image or punchline. He helped generations of Diaspora Jews fall in love with Israelis’ faults, not just their heroics.
During the Yom Kippur War, he contrasted Arab radio’s “calls to arms” with Israel radio’s family updates about Yossi’s wife giving birth and Dudu’s wife staying with his parents. That’s “our secret weapon,” he taught: Sound familiar?
Noting everyone’s solidarity in 1973, he exclaimed: “I can’t wait for an end to the war and a return to the normal infighting." Sound familiar, too?
And he wondered just how militaristic Israelis could be when they remembered “their war of independence” by “knocking each other on the head with squeaky plastic hammers.” More naughtily, in 1982, he drew squabbling kids calling each other “liar,” insisting: “We’re not fighting… we’re playing Knesset.”
While lovingly taunting Jewish, Israeli, and Zionist foibles, Kirschen mercilessly exposed the world’s Jew-hating hypocrisy. In 1975, when the UN deemed Zionism racism, he redefined its 1947 partition as resulting in: “We own Israel… they own the UN.”
Perhaps his most famous cartoon rejected President Jimmy Carter’s 1977 demand that Israel withdraw from “occupied territory” by charting America’s step-by-step return of its “occupied territories” to Mexicans and Native Americans. “After its final withdrawal to a state smaller than its name,” America could then negotiate “its right to exist.”
Prime Minister Menachem Begin gave Carter the cartoon. “To Dry Bones,” Carter replied. “This would make my job much easier.”
It’s eerie reading Kirschen’s 1996 and 2017 collections. They’re so prescient. Even in 1994, he resisted Oslo delusions, labeling “the Palestinian peace process” a “virtual reality game.”
“Illegal” West Bank settlements are called “towns” if they’re Arab – and “obstacles to peace” if they’re Jewish. Why, he asked: “Because they’re Jewish.”
Kirschen defined “land for peace” as “Israeli land” exchanged for whatever Arabs decided to call “peace.” And years before October 7, he depicted “The Gaza Underworld”: Hamas terrorists tunneling toward Israel.
Always too honest to be politically correct, Kirschen catalogued Palestinians’ rejection of compromise. “You’ve got to feel sorry for the Palestinians,” he admitted. Their “leadership” is “even dumber than ours.”
Journalistic hypocrisy embarrassed Kirschen. In 2009, he skewered reporters for wanting to report Gaza casualties without mentioning “Dead civilians courtesy of Hamas human shield dept.” He wondered what always made Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu “Israel’s Hard Line Leader” while Syria’s “dictator” was “The New Hope for Peace.”
Similarly, Kirschen laughed that “brave BBC cartoonist[s]” drawing “antisemitic images of Jews and the Jewish state,” feared drawing Muhammed cartoons. The Jew-bashing shows they enjoy “being free”; their cowardice shows they enjoy “being alive.”
Ultimately, Kirschen understood that “The Jewish state is maligned and defamed… not because of what it does, but because of what it is… The Jewish state.” He compared claiming “anti-Zionism is not antisemitism,” to dentists saying “your teeth are fine… but your gums” must “come out.”
European appeasers, liberal hypocrites, and Jewish traitors infuriated Kirschen. “When future historians write of European courage in the face of Islamic terror,” he thundered, “it will be a really short book.”
“Islamism is anti-gay, anti-Christian, anti-feminist, and against academic freedom,” he noted 15 years ago. “So it’s no surprise that gays, Christians, feminists, and professors are demonstrating. The surprise,” alas, is that they’re “demonstrating against the State of Israel.”
And years before today’s smarmy anti-Zionist Jews demonized Israel, he scoffed: Today’s boycott “to crush the Jewish state is not like the Nazi boycotts to crush the Jews.” Why? Because Nazis didn’t “recruit Jewish participants.”
Like many Zionists, Kirschen could have allowed our enemies to embitter him. Instead, our kookiness and success reassured him. He lived long enough to see Israel evolve into a more functional society, even as most Palestinians and much of the world remained cemented in their hostility and hypocrisy.
“Yes, the ancient promises are ridiculous,” Kirschen had “Joe Zionist” assure “everyone at a community meeting in ancient Egypt,” which the Jewish News Syndicate republished days before he died. But Israel “has no natural resources, so nobody will attack us. We will live in peace and anonymity for eons.” This unapologetic Zionist softie titled the cartoon: “He didn’t get it right… but his heart was in the right place.”
That’s precisely where Ya’akov Kirschen’s heart was too – which is how he taught generations to laugh, squirm, and love as good Zionists, all at the same time.
The writer, a senior fellow in Zionist thought at the Jewish People Policy Institute, is an American presidential historian. His latest books, To Resist the Academic Intifada: Letters to My Students on Defending the Zionist Dream and The Essential Guide to October 7th and its Aftermath, were just published.