Tag: York University

Paint away complexity

“Palestinian Roots” by Ahmad Al Abid. (photo from cjnews.com)

Anyone visiting the student centre at York University in Toronto has been confronted since 2013 with a mural that some say incites violence and makes York a less welcoming place for Jewish students. The piece features a young man, pictured from behind, wearing a keffiyah with a map that includes an undivided Israel and Palestine and holding two rocks. Below him is a bulldozer, presumably Israeli and presumably preparing to overturn a farmer’s tree.

Recently, the mural has led one philanthropist to pull his support for the university and it has been taken up as a cause by Jewish and Zionist organizations.

The mural makes a not very subtle point. Israel is an aggressor, wantonly destroying Palestinian livelihoods for no reason. Palestinians are helpless Davids in the face of this Goliath, reduced to that most primitive of weapons, the stone. Beneath the image are the words “Peace” and “Justice” in several languages.

A picture, they say, is worth a thousand words and this is probably why the mural upsets so many people. With one glance, the viewer understands the anti-Israel narrative in all its simplicity. Israel is powerful; Palestinians are weak. Israel is aggressive; Palestinians are defensive. The map on the keffiyah, which erases Israel, is understood as a statement that the Jews stole this land from indigenous Arabs, whereas the same map, if employed for Zionist ends, would elicit cries of racism and genocide. Even the symbol of violence – the stones – can somehow be perceived as tools for “peace” and “justice,” given the nature of the enemy.

Since the mural was painted, the weapon of choice for the Palestinian lone wolf – if we can call someone incited to murder by their government and official media a lone wolf – has morphed from stones to knives. Videos and infographics teach Palestinians how to stab Jews most effectively.

Never mind all that. The world has an idée fixe, an unshakeable certainty, that Jews are powerful and, therefore, the Palestinians must be victims; they cannot be perpetrators or instigators. A new poll of French people says nearly 60% blame Jews to some extent for antisemitism. Antisemitism is uniquely identified as brought about by its victims, not its perpetrators. We wouldn’t have to be antisemitic, it seems, if only you would be less Jewish. Even the secretary-general of the United Nations is standing by his statement that Palestinians stabbing Jews is simple “human nature” in response to “occupation.”

The same poll also affirmed the view of Jews as powerful – and the attitudes of the French in this regard are probably not substantively different from those of other Europeans and some North Americans, varying more by degrees than by kind perhaps. Today, that power is measured in perceived wealth and access to political and cultural elites. When Jews were historically powerless in those conventional senses, they were attributed with supernatural abilities. Antisemitism adapts magnificently as required.

The perception of Jews as powerful is not only at the root of antisemitism but doubles as an impervious shield against challenging it. Consider: if Jews are powerful, then coming to their aid is an act of siding with the powerful against the oppressed. This belief is, at root, the very essence of the anti-Israel narrative now dominating much of the West, especially on the political left.

As always, this incarnation of antisemitism is a form of scapegoating, the projection of sins onto an empty vessel. As we are now almost congenitally conditioned to do, we acknowledge that Israel is not above criticism. No country is. Yet the proportion of global attention, the level of vitriol and the hyperbolic accusations against Israel are clear to anyone with a sense of proportion that this has limited relation to Israeli policies or anything else rational. The nature of the beast is that there have always been “good” reasons to attack Jews. Today’s reason is Israel.

Israel, of course, is a very powerful state, with a massive military for a population its size. If it wasn’t, its population would be dead or dispersed. Yet this still feeds the narrative of Jewish power and Palestinian weakness. If this is a battle between rocks and bulldozers, well, then, who wouldn’t side with the folks holding the rocks? This, in the end, is what the mural at York is telling its viewers. It is, actually, a magnificent synopsis of the mindlessness of the anti-Israel narrative, which strips all context from the conflict and ignores the fact that the perpetuation of violence is mainly a product of Arab maximalism and refusal to live in peace with a Jewish state. That’s a picture that is a little more complicated to paint.

Commenting with cartoons

Attendees at the opening of the Avrom Yanovsky exhibit in Winnipeg in September. (photo by Stan Carbone)

The Jewish Heritage Centre of Western Canada (JHCWC) and the United Jewish People’s Order (UJPO) are co-hosts of an exhibit in Winnipeg of the political cartoons of Avrom Yanovsky (1911-1979).

photo - Anna Yanovsky, the cartoonist’s widow, speaks at the exhibit opening
Anna Yanovsky, the cartoonist’s widow, speaks at the exhibit opening. (photo by Stan Carbone)

The exhibit opening took place Sept. 17 at the Asper Jewish Community Campus with guest speakers Ester Reiter, associate professor, School of Women’s Studies, York University; and Anna Yanovsky, the artist’s widow. The evening concluded with a performance by the North End Jewish Folk Choir.

With the event, Stan Carbone, director of programs and exhibits at JHCWC, said, “we attempted to provide a composite picture of Avrom Yanovsky placed within an historical and cultural milieu in which his Winnipeg years were critical in shaping and defining his intellectual development and his passion and commitment for social justice.”

According to a 2006 article by David Abramowitz in Outlook Magazine, Yanovsky was born in Ukraine “and came to Canada at the age of 2 with his widowed mother, her parents and his infant brother. They settled in Winnipeg, where Avrom attended the I.L. Peretz Shule. His 1925 graduating class included the late Nechama Gemeril, who later became his wife. The school provided an excellent grounding in the Yiddish classics and revolutionary politics, which stayed with Avrom throughout his life. His mother, a seamstress, and an active Bundist in the Old Country, became a labor Zionist and emigrated to Palestine with Avrom’s brother in 1931.”

Yanovsky was part of a generation of Jews arriving in Canada in the first decades of this century. He was old enough to remember the 1919 Winnipeg General Strike. He lived through and saw the suffering during the Depression, he witnessed the repressive government of the day in Canada, the rise of Hitler and rampant antisemitism.

Reiter said, “Those who knew him commented that had he just a bit of the capitalist in him, his enormous talents would have made him a very rich man … [he was] a rich man, but not in dollars.”

For a time, Yanovsky served as art director for a Yiddish children’s magazine, called Yungvarg (Youngsters), published in New York; for each issue, he did a cartoon story of one of the many Yiddish writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. In the late 1930s, Yanovsky began exhibiting with the Canadian Society of Graphic Artists, at the Art Gallery of Toronto, and was president of that organization for a number of years. His editorial cartoons appeared in many English and Yiddish publications, including the Vokhnblat, Canadian Tribune and Outlook.

“One of the cartoons you’ll see is that of the premier of Quebec, [Maurice] Duplessis [1890-1959], with a big padlock representing the padlock law,” said Reiter. “That enabled any person or organization deemed subversive [undefined] to have their house or building padlocked for a year.”

At one point, she said, Yanovsky was hired by a pest-control factory to create a mural. Even this, Yanovsky managed to politicize, using the theme to apply not just to the animal but to the human pests.

“He commented through his art on all aspects of the world, from labor to Canada’s increasing subservience to the United States, the struggle to make ends meet, and the concern for peace and human rights,” said Reiter.

“He targeted not only fat capitalists, but the CIA, the Mounties, antisemites, racists, fascists, fascist sympathizers, and most of Canada’s prime ministers.”

Reiter said, “Avrom was known to be a man of integrity and principle. He lived his politics, sharing his talents for not very much monetary gain. His art was tied to the life and daily experience of working Canadians. He made us laugh in his drawings and in real life.”

The exhibit now on display in Winnipeg was first shown at York University and originally curated by Dr. Anna Hudson of York with the title Free Discussion is the Key to Peace – The Political Cartoons of Avrom Yanovksy. It was remounted at Toronto’s Ashkenaz Festival and then at the Varley Art Gallery in Markham, Ont., together with his mural honoring Dr. Norman Bethune (1890-1939). It was hosted in Vancouver by the local UJPO in 2013.

“The exhibit is of his later cartoons, from 1950 to 1972,” explained Reiter. “And you can see … for him, his art and his politics were really one in the same. He used his art to express his politics. The cartoons that you’ll see, those particular cartoons, don’t give a sense of his profound commitment to Yiddish stuff, which he was profoundly committed to. His stuff was related to labor, to politics, to peace, stuff like that.”

photo - The opening concluded with music from the North End Jewish Folk Choir
The opening concluded with music from the North End Jewish Folk Choir. (photo by Stan Carbone)

Reiter was asked to speak at the event, as she is writing a book on the history of the Jewish left in Canada, which should be out in the spring. She wanted to be involved in the showings of his art because of her interest in history and the left. “He was so famous, certainly among the left,” she said. “People spoke adoringly of his work.”

While Hudson went through some of Yanovsky’s work with Anna Yanovsky for the exhibits, Reiter provided the context.

“The ink drawings on display here, with their collaged and corrected compositions, are just to give an idea of the range of Avrom’s work,” said Reiter. Quoting from Hudson’s notes from a previous exhibit, she pointed out, “You will recognize ‘a cast of easily recognizable characters: the moneybag, the banker, the capitalist and the politician,’ with his sidekick, the police or military. ‘We can laugh at the tragedy of economic inequity because Avrom speaks to us personally to remind us of our humanity, our common ground, and our collective strength.’”

Said Reiter, “He was a communist and he was a Jew with a deep love and respect for Yiddish language and culture.”

Rebeca Kuropatwa is a Winnipeg freelance writer.