The Review

A revenant stalked Harvard last week, in the form of an ancient cartoon. The image in question first appeared in the July 1967 newsletter of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) but was reanimated on Instagram by the Harvard Undergraduate Palestine Solidarity Committee and the African and African American Resistance Organization, then reposted by Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine.

The cartoon, which in the SNCC newsletter accompanies a feature decrying Israel’s treatment of Palestinians, depicts Muhammad Ali and Gamal Abdel Nasser, at the time the president of Egypt, facing forward with a rope around their necks. The rope is suspended from a hand — either executioner or puppet master — on the back of which a Star of David with a dollar sign at its center has been imprinted or tattooed. Behind the two men, an arm in a T-shirt wields a curved sword; the words “THIRD WORLD LIBERATION MOVEMENT” appear alongside the arm and across the surface of the blade.

Everything about this piece of moldy agitprop, crudely executed in charcoal on yellowed newspaper, seems archaic. But its atavistic repurposing by three Harvard groups 57 years after its first appearance suggests that the militancy of the sixties continues to offer resources, symbolic and tactical, to campus activists now — for better or for worse.

For worse, in this case, as even the groups involved came quickly to admit. Facing widespread criticism, including from Harvard itself, the groups quickly deleted the image. Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine observed that the cartoon “used offensive antisemitic tropes” and apologized for reposting. The two student groups likewise apologized, and assured their peers that “antisemitism has no place in the movement of Palestinian liberation, and we wholeheartedly disavow it in all its forms.”

The cartoon first appeared during a period of intense transformation for the organizations of the campus left. Students for a Democratic Society was growing ever more militant, hurling toward such decade’s-end paroxysms as their takeover of Harvard’s University Hall in 1969. The SNCC, for its part, having expelled all white members in 1966, was coming increasingly to embrace a racialized third-worldism. “The so-called State of Israel,” Stokely Carmichael said in 1968, “was set up by white people who took it from the Arabs”; for Carmichael, as Michael R. Fischbach explains in his Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color (Stanford, 2018), “the Arabs were black,” while “Israel was part of the white world.”

Fischbach told the LA Times that he was “somewhat stunned” that contemporary activists had repurposed the old SNCC cartoon. (“It doesn’t take a lot of thought to see that, whatever you meant, this is really going to rankle people.”) But perhaps he shouldn’t have been. The application of moralized racial dichotomies to geopolitics is once again a feature of much campus-left rhetoric; its formulas can give rise to a kind of automatic certitude, which helps explain how it is that three different groups, including one comprised in part of faculty members, could have overlooked the cartoon’s antisemitism. Assured of their righteousness, they did not stop to think.

To a skeptic, this activism might seem to unfold in what Steven Kelman, writing in 1970 of the 1969 takeover of University Hall in Push Comes to Shove: The Escalation of Student Protest (Houghton Mifflin), called “a campus atmosphere hermetically sealed from reality.” Although himself a leftist — he spent much of his undergraduate career organizing for the Young People’s Socialist League — Kelman took a dim view of the culture of late-sixties activism; he writes witheringly of his peers “catatonically” partaking in “robot chants and parades.”

The ease and thoughtlessness with which images can be accessed and shared on platforms like Instagram go some way toward literalizing the roboticism Kelman perceived in his own student days. That might help answer Fischbach’s incredulity over the circulation of the old SNCC cartoon by the Harvard groups — one of which, again, included faculty members. “We removed the content,” Harvard Faculty and Staff for Justice in Palestine said, “as soon as it came to our attention.” The formulation suggests that their initial repost was something less than an act of attention. They will perhaps pay more in the future.

Recommended

• “If my options were to quit my job, have an extramarital affair or write a navel-gazing book, my wife and I were glad that I had chosen option three.” In The Point, Kieran Setiya on philosophical self-help, a genre in which he has dabbled.
• “The cops became de facto art critics and historians, able to discern between Morrisseau’s distinct techniques during different periods in his life.” In Smithsonian Magazine, Jordan Michael Smith writes about “the biggest art fraud in history.”
• “A palm or fennel plant was growing from her tongue: a sign of her eloquence in preaching.” That’s from one of the many legends that have grown up around Mary Magdalene, discussed by Marina Warner in the London Review of Books by way of two new books on the subject.

Write to me at len.gutkin@chronicle.com.

Yours,

Len Gutkin