Follow Us

Harvard Faculty group posts cartoon featuring wealthy Jewish person hanging black and Arab men

All Harvard groups that shared the image apologized and acknowledged that the cartoon featured "antisemitic tropes."

Published: February 20, 2024 2:20pm

A Harvard faculty group is being criticized after it reposted a cartoon from student groups that featured multiple antisemitic tropes about Jewish wealth and control. 

The Palestine Solidarity Committee and the African and African American Resistance Organization, both Harvard student groups, shared the image Sunday, and Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine shared the image the following day. 

By Monday, all Harvard groups that shared the image apologized and acknowledged that the cartoon featured "antisemitic tropes."

The groups shared the cartoon as part of an infographic comparing the black liberation and Palestinian liberation movements. The cartoon appears to have originally been featured in a 1967 Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee newsletter. The cartoon features a hand marked with a Star of David and a dollar sign holding nooses around the necks of an Arab man and a black man, who appear to be former Egyptian President Gamal Nasser and Muhammad Ali, per the student newspaper, The Harvard Crimson.

The cartoon also features the phrase "third world" next to the arm of a black person holding a sword inscribed with "liberation movement."

The House Education and Workforce Committee, which is already investigating Harvard over antisemitism allegations, criticized the image.

"This repugnant antisemitism should have no place in our society, much less on Harvard's faculty," the committee wrote on X, formerly Twitter. 

"Worth reminding that the only reason this is tolerated vs. right wing displays of Nazism is that the former is a critical component of the Democratic Party's coalition. There is nothing more to it," Washington Free Beacon writer Joe Gabriel Simonson said on X.  

Follow Madeleine Hubbard on X or Instagram.

Just the News Spotlight

Support Just the News