(Jewish Group) When a Jewish group fought antisemitism with radio shows and comic books
Half a century before the Internet was invented, an American Jewish organization was asking how new media might be harnessed in the fight against antisemitism. Their answer, launched in 1937 as the Nazis rose to power in Germany, was a 15-year effort to spread the message of tolerance through comic books, radio, advertising, newsstands and eventually television spots.
Eric Godal’s 1945 cartoon, included in the New-York Historical Society exhibit “Confronting Hate 1937-1952,” was distributed with the cooperation of the CIO, the federation of industrial unions.
The organization was the American Jewish Committee, and its pioneering effort to combat prejudice through mass media is the subject of an exhibit, “Confronting Hate 1937-1952,” which opens July 29 at the New-York Historical Society. The exhibit represents a deep dive into AJC’s holdings by Charlotte Bonelli, AJC’s archives director, and displays the wide variety of materials — radio scripts, cartoons, film clips, posters and magazine and newspaper articles — generated largely under the direction of Richard Rothschild, the advertising executive recruited by AJC to run the campaign.
The materials’ relentlessly upbeat messages about brotherhood and Americanness might strike modern audiences as naive, but at the time the stakes couldn’t have been higher nor the rhetoric more sincere: Hitler was on the march, American isolationists were a political force to be reckoned with, and demagogues such as Father Charles Coughlin and Gerald L. K. Smith were using the airwaves to broadcast popular versions of America-first antisemitism.
Today the AJC has a director for combating antisemitism and maintains a social media presence as well as a podcast, but the emphasis has shifted from actually producing mass media (radio spots featuring their CEO, David Harris, were last aired in 2015), to training policy-makers, media execs and law enforcement about how to recognize, report and root out antisemitism.
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