Humor and the Holocaust in Australia

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Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic: Humor and the Holocaust in Australia

David Slucki (College of Charleston)

Until the 1990s, the Holocaust did not feature prominently in Australian life. To be sure, Holocaust commemoration was a pressing concern within Australia’s Jewish communities, which had received a large influx of survivors in the late 1940s and 1950s, but it was largely an internal affair, conducted mainly in the Jewish communities of Melbourne and Sydney. A number of factors brought the Holocaust into the wider public sphere in the 1990s, perhaps most importantly the exposure it received in the wake of Steven Spielberg’s acclaimed film, Schindler’s List (1993). Since then, it has become more salient in public discourse and in popular culture, with television, film, radio, and the popular press taking a keen interest in individual stories of survival. Along with this shift from marginality to center stage is the advent of Holocaust- related humor, ranging from the work of local Jewish comedians and artists to comments by the prime minister in the federal parliament. Since the 1990s, the use of humorous devices in artistic expression related to Holocaust memory has become a part, however minor, of Holocaust representation in the United States, Israel, and Europe. This essay will examine the growing body of Holocaust humor in Australian popular culture in the past1 decade and how it is produced, received, and ultimately regulated in various local media. By looking at case studies including television series, radio broadcasts, videos, and political cartoons, this essay will demonstrate that Holocaust humor and its reception tell us much about how the Holocaust is remembered—and misremembered—in Australian life. What is ultimately at the heart of this discussion is the question of who “owns” memories of the Holocaust and who regulates what is deemed acceptable in its representation. All instances of Holocaust humor cause outrage, some more than others. Such controversies attest to the persistence of a phenomenon that Israeli philosopher Adi Ophir once referred to in a provocative essay titled “On Sanctifying the Holocaust,” in which he criticized the emergence of a series of “commandments” dictating how the Holocaust could be discussed and remembered in public.1 Together, these pre- scribed axioms contributed to what he called the sacralization of the Holocaust, a kind of “religious consciousness” that inscribed the Holocaust as its foundational myth. He complained that Holocaust historians, religious leaders, politicians, and

204 Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic 205 educators—what the survivor and writer Imre Kertész subsequently described as the “choir of Holocaust puritans, Holocaust dogmatists and Holocaust usurpers”—had effectively conspired to make the Holocaust appear to be a transcendent, meta-historical, and uniquely Jewish event.2 This is certainly the case in Australia, where any form of Holocaust humor is apt to be regarded, by Jews and non-Jews alike, as a serious affront to the survivor community. Thus, the genre’s recent emergence in Australia offers a local case study of how Holocaust humor is used to renegotiate the implicit rules of public discourse, particularly but not exclusively within Jewish communities. Of course, public responses to humor are never uniform, as there are no simple rules to dictate just which forms of humor may be acceptable in the context of the Holocaust. Similarly, criticism of such forms of humor also varies considerably. In the Australian context, it seems to be the case that Jewish comedians and artists, although criticized for inserting Holocaust-themed humor in their work, are not excluded from Jewish life. In contrast, when non-Jews have been the source of remarks deemed improper by the community’s gatekeepers, the sharp response by the Jewish community has led to anything from public apologies by the offenders to an ongoing feud between Australian Jewry and one of the nation’s most celebrated cartoonists. This is telling in terms of the question of ownership: Jewish leaders demand reverence and solemnity in all media, and non-Jews are subject to special censure for mixing Holocaust with humor. When considering the boundaries of Holocaust depiction and the (intentionally) transgressive quality of Holocaust humor, this essay will ask the following questions: Is Holocaust humor permissible or tolerable only when it is told by Jews for Jews? Within what ethical parameters can Holocaust jokes form part of the tapestry of Holocaust remembrance? And who is to arbitrate these matters? Of course, none of these questions have definitive answers.T hey are situational and fluid.N onetheless, despite fluctuating opinion on these issues, and despite the participation of non-Jews in public discourse related to the Holocaust, it seems clear that Jews in Australia have maintained a substantial role1 in determining levels of appropriateness. Australian Jewry and the Holocaust

Before attending to the issues of Holocaust humor in the specific context of Australia, a few words on the Australian Jewish community are necessary. Although there have been Jews in Australia since the very beginning of British colonization in the late 18th century, they remain a small minority of the general population, accounting for less than half a percent: in the 2006 census, 106,000 people identified as Jews, out of a total population of somewhat more than twenty million.3 As noted, the Jewish community has a high concentration of Holocaust survivors. In the decade after the war, Australia accepted around 17,600 Jews from Europe, of whom 60 percent (mostly from Poland) settled in Melbourne; the remainder, mostly from Germany, Austria, and Hungary, settled in Sydney. Overall (including net migration and natural increase), Australia’s Jewish population nearly tripled in size between 1933 and 1961, from 23,000 to 60,000.4 With ongoing antisemitism in Central and Eastern Europe through 206 David Slucki

the 1960s and beyond, further waves of refugees would follow through to the end of the 20th century, when a large number of former Soviet Jews, as well as South African Jews, made their way to Australia.5 With a substantial survivor community, and with the composition of the community going through numerous periods of major social, cultural, and demographic change, it is likely that Australian Jewry has put a premium on the need to protect a sense of communal cohesion and consensus. Moreover, the communal institutions are dominated by Orthodoxy, reinforcing this sense of vulnerability. Unlike the United States, where Jews are, despite their relatively limited numbers, a major presence in the public imagination and in the film and television industries in particular, Australian Jews usually go about their business unnoticed on the local popular scene. By and large, they are neither represented nor involved in television or film.T he film critic Don Perlgut has argued that this situation is largely due to the fact that, prior to the mid-20th century, most Jewish immigrants to Australia hailed from Britain, where they had not been as actively involved in the broader cultural life as were East European Jews in the United States.6 According to film historian Freda Freiberg, Australian Jews’ lack of presence in Australian film and television can also be explained by the sensitivity of the local Jewish community to “the politics of representation” (in consequence, non-Jewish artists and studios tread warily with regard to putting Jews on screen); the fragility of the Australian film industry, which inhibits filmmakers from taking risks and portraying the diversity of the Australian population; and the absence of an established literary or dramatic tradition among the Australian Jewish community.7 During the first half of the 20th century, only one Jewish comedian left an indelible mark on Australian popular culture: Roy Rene, a major figure in Australian film and theater history, who influenced Australian comedy with his own brand of Jewish humor.8 Apart from Rene, the only Jewish characters depicted on screen or on Australian television before the 1980s were those appearing in imported films and television programs. Things changed in the mid-1980s with the broadcast of a television miniseries titled The Dunera Boys (1985), starring British actor Bob Hoskins, which reenacted the story of a group of German Jewish refugees who were deported from the UK (under “enemy aliens”1 provisions) in 1940 and sent aboard a British ship for internment in Australia. A bit more than a decade later, the Oscar award-winning Shine (1996), a biopic about the internationally acclaimed pianist David Helfgott, dealt with themes of Holocaust trauma within a refugee family and Jewish identity in postwar Australia. More significantly, Australian popular memory of the Holocaust was shaped by events and cultural productions originating abroad. Along with many other commentators, historian David Ritter has argued that the reporting of the Eichmann trial in 1961 first brought the Holocaust into widespread public consciousness in Australia, as elsewhere.9 In 1978, the American television miniseries Holocaust was the top-rated program of the year, gaining close to half the market share in both Melbourne and Sydney. The program’s popularity demonstrates that, by the late 1970s, the Holocaust was catching the attention of Australian audiences.10 Fifteen years later, the enormous popularity of Schindler’s List11 further confirmed the notion that imported programming was shaping the way in which Australians understood the Second World War. Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic 207

During the 1990s, two local controversies also brought the Holocaust firmly into the public sphere. One was the publication of a novel by a young Australian author, Helen Demidenko, a pseudonym for Helen Darville, who claimed falsely to be the daughter of a Ukrainian migrant. Her novel, The Hand that Signed the Paper, told the story of a Ukrainian family attempting to survive the Soviet-engendered, deadly famine of the 1930s and the Soviet-German war in the 1940s. It initially received major Australian literary prizes, but it was also castigated by many critics as antisemitic, since it highlighted Jews’ roles as prominent Communist officials who took part in perpetrating the Ukrainian famine, implicitly making this seem a justification of Ukrainians’ complicity in Nazi atrocities against Jews.12 Around the same time, the Australian government barred the entry of notorious Holocaust-denier David Irving into the country, sparking a major public debate about the limits of free speech and also furthering discussion of the Holocaust, especially after Irving appeared by video link on national current affair programs across the country, in one instance debating with an Auschwitz survivor.13 T wo further changes in the broader memorial landscape in Australia formed the backdrop to these controversies. First, Australian memorial practices were changing in the 1990s in a manner described by historians Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds as the “militarisation of Australian history,” with war narratives (in particular, those centering around Australia’s participation in the British campaign in Turkey in 1915) assuming a more central place in conflicts and debates over Australian identity.14 And perhaps even more significant, in 1997, the Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission released a report titled Bringing Them Home (1997), which documented decades of government-sponsored removal of Indigenous children from their families. Release of the report sparked major public debates regarding the darker side of Australia’s past—namely, centuries of mistreatment and dispossession of the Indigenous population.15 Some historians went so far as to suggest that Australia was guilty of genocide and that this reevaluation of Australia’s past invited comparisons with the Holocaust. In order to better understand settler-colonial violence against Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, it was argued, Australians might do well to look at the history1 of the Holocaust.16 Jewish Holocaust Humor

Jews have been producing Holocaust- and Nazi-themed humor since the Second World War. During the war, such humor took different forms: both as a coping mech- anism for Jews under Nazi occupation in Europe and, in the United States, as a vehicle for anti-Nazi propaganda, including Charlie Chaplin’s The Great Dictator (1940) and Ernst Lubitsch’s To Be or Not to Be (1942).17 In the postwar period, humor continued to be used as a weapon to lampoon or humiliate the Nazis, most famously in Mel Brooks’ The Producers (1968) and more recently in Quentin Tarantino’s revenge fantasy, Inglourious Basterds (2009). Another form of Holocaust humor focuses on aspects of life and survival inside the ghettos and concentration camps, particularly in Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful (1997) and Jurek Becker’s Jakob the Liar (1975; remade in 1999 starring Robin Williams).18 These different 208 David Slucki

forms of Holocaust humor have mostly been produced by Jews, but occasionally, as with Benigni or Tarantino, non-Jewish filmmakers have been at the helm. At times controversial, at other times celebrated, the genre has become part of how societies, including Australian society, find meaning in remembering the Holocaust. What dis- tinguishes Australia from most other places (with the notable exception of Israel) is that the Holocaust was the formative experience for most of its Jewish population, either directly or indirectly, as the majority of Australian Jews are either survivors or descendants of survivors. Thus, it was perhaps inevitable that an “in-group” experience of cultural filtering—including humor relating to the Holocaust—would become part of the local landscape.

John Safran: Race Relations

John Safran grew up in Melbourne between two Jewish worlds. Although he was raised in an ostensibly secular Jewish family, he was sent as a teenager to Melbourne’s Yeshiva College, a high school set up by the local chapter of the Chabad-Lubavitch movement. As a result of this religiously ambivalent upbringing, his work has tended to focus heavily on themes surrounding religion, race, and ethnicity.19 Safran burst onto Australian television screens in 1997 as a contestant on the cult program Race around the World, which encouraged young filmmakers to produce short documentaries set in various foreign locales. His antics included running naked through the streets of Jerusalem (clad only in the scarf of his local football club) and placing a voodoo curse on an ex-girlfriend. In 2002 and 2004, Safran’s two subsequent documentary series, John Safran’s Music Jamboree and John Safran vs God, aired on SBS, Australia’s publicly funded, multicultural broadcasting company.20 In 2009, Safran reached a wider audience with John Safran’s Race Relations, which was broadcast on the ABC (Australian Broadcasting Corporation). Offering a documentary- style look at issues concerned with intermarriage and cross-cultural relationships, it was inspired by Safran’s personal dilemma of being a Jew who is attracted specifically to non-Jewish women while being continually pressured by family, friends, and community to stick with his own “tribe.” (As he explains in the introduction to each episode: “People say that1 love will conquer all, but mother says I must marry a Jew.”)21 Race Relations brought Safran high audience ratings22 and was well received by mainstream reviewers, if not always by Australian Jews. Writing in The Monthly, Alice Pung pronounced the show “one of the most perceptive and funny looks at the delusions of modern-day romance” that she had seen on television.23 Another reviewer, Peter Kirkwood, wrote that although Safran’s stunts were “cringe-making, in-your-face, and potentially creepy,” they nonetheless worked in the “context of a cogent and pithy argument that has serious intent.” In Kirkwood’s view, Safran oper- ated in the tradition of the “holy fool,” someone who could “see through cant, hypocrisy and pomposity, and, using cutting stories, actions or parables, tell uncomfortable home truths.”24 Like Woody Allen, Larry David, and a number of Philip Roth’s fictional characters, Safran’s on-screen persona is that of an outsider within the Jewish community. Apart from being attracted specifically to non-Jewish women, he is socially awkward (albeit opinionated). As with Allen, Safran’s comedy is often grounded in personal Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic 209 neuroses. Like David, Safran feels alienated from the Jewish establishment and identifies with more marginalized groups in Australian society, such as Eurasians.25 He is the classic shlemiel, a luckless character whose own deeds bring about his downfall. The shlemiel, as Ruth Wisse has pointed out, “is a fool, seriously—maybe fatally—out of step with the actual march of events,” although the shlemiel character in Jewish literature has also acted as a conduit to “challenge the political and philo- sophical status quo.”26 Literary scholar David Gillota argues that David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm brought the shlemiel tradition to 21st-century America; in his view, it “critiques reductive attitudes toward race, religion, and other forms of difference, and reflects an uneasiness that many contemporary Americans feel about their own ethnic identity.”27 Similarly, Safran’s series seeks to undermine standard narratives connected with multiculturalism in Australia, highlighting the ambivalence many Australians feel about maintaining their cultural specificity. He does this very firmly in the guise of the shlemiel who seeks cross-cultural love but who, despite his best efforts, cannot find it. For Australian audiences steeped in American popular culture, Safran’s Jewishness is very recognizable. One segment in particular demonstrates the way in which a particularly Jewish brand of humor can be used to criticize both the local Jewish community and the ways in which Holocaust symbols are revered. It begins with Safran recalling a dinner conversation that once took place at his friend Jeremy Weinstein’s house. Weinstein’s father appears in a flashback, warningS afran that by dating a non-Jew he is “finishing Hitler’s work for him.”T his is followed by another flashback from the more distant past in which Safran’s former high school rabbi declares that if Safran ever married a non-Jew, he would be worse than Hitler: whereas Hitler only killed Jewish bodies, marrying outside the faith kills Jewish souls. The scene cuts back to Safran in the present proclaiming: “My God! No wonder I’m so fucked in the head!” He decides that the only way to exorcise these demons is to “make out” with a non- Jewish woman—preferably one with blonde hair and blue eyes—in Anne Frank’s attic, a location clearly representing the Holocaust. This, Safran believes, will help him overcome the fear of non-Jewish women that has been instilled in him. Accordingly, he enlists Katherine Hicks, a blonde-haired “shikse goddess,” and has her fly out to Amsterdam,1 where she will join him in the attic of the Anne Frank House. Inside the house, although seemingly not inside the attic itself, the two kiss awkwardly, finding a quick moment in which there are no visitors filing past them. This segment recalls an episode of Seinfeld in which Jerry is caught kissing his girlfriend during a screening of Schindler’s List, a major transgression against what quickly became a globally celebrated symbol of the Holocaust.28 In both scenes, the characters’ behavior is an act of defiance against the norms and solemnity of Holocaust remembrance, particularly shocking because of its sexual nature. Perhaps more significant in terms of understanding the trajectory of Jewish and Holocaust humor, this segment is an open assault on the Australian Jewish community’s manipulation of the Holocaust as a means of guilt. Safran is clearly aggrieved at the way the Holocaust has been utilized in the construction of a particular, narrow kind of Jewish identity. Equally sharp is his attack on a symbol that has come to be seen as “holy.” It is important to note that Safran is not the first to satirize Anne Frank—that is, Anne Frank as a symbol rather than an individual.29 Nor does he seek 210 David Slucki

deliberately to disrespect the actual story of Anne Frank’s innocence and resilience during the war. Rather, he is concerned with the way such symbols have become sacrosanct yet virtually emptied of substance, consisting mainly of a competition for the mantle of victimhood. If Safran’s communal leaders can use the Holocaust to shame him on issues of dating women outside the fold, what meaning can sites like Anne Frank’s attic really have for him or for anyone else? Safran was excoriated not only for sexualizing a space of innocence but also for desecrating what had become a holy symbol of the Holocaust. Local Jewish studies scholar and newspaper columnist Dvir Abramovich wrote in the Australian Jewish News that he “squirmed in [his] seat as Safran claimed [onscreen] that he was ‘brain- washed, played like a two-dollar chump-machine‚’ by the Jewish community because it has used the Holocaust to make him feel guilty about dating non-Jewish women.”30 In another article in the Melbourne broadsheet The Age, Abramovich wrote that he was “flabbergasted” by the sketch, asS afran “went for broke in trivializing and cheapening the memory of Anne Frank.” Abramovich continued: “Had Anne Frank survived the Holocaust, I’m pretty sure she would not have had a chuckle at Safran’s tasteless skit. Someone told me that he nearly died laughing watching Safran. Well, I said, millions actually did.”31 A number of readers of the Australian Jewish News also expressed their disapproval of the sketch. One writer noted that he “found the kissing scene in Anne Frank’s house both disrespectful and childish.”32 Another wrote that “John Safran is an embarrassment to the Jewish community in Australia and he is not funny, only vulgar.” A third letter claimed that the ABC had “shamed itself with the showing of John Safran’s Race Relations,” and concluded, “no doubt more bad pub- licity has been showered on us Jews.”33 Such responses seemed to confirmS afran’s complaint: when he dared to highlight the Jewish community’s exploitation of the Holocaust—in this case, the repeated invocation of Hitler in an attempt to dissuade him from dating non-Jews—he was firmly taken to task for his own act of exploitation.T hat implied an element of hypocrisy. Moreover, such expressions of outrage betrayed a distinct anxiety within the Jewish community about how Jews appear to non-Jews. Given that Jews are largely absent on Australian television screens, there is a risk that when they do appear, they will be perceived by non-Jews1 as representative of the entire community. In the case of Safran, this possibility gives rise to real concern: he is regarded as airing Australian Jewry’s dirty laundry in public and, in so doing, bringing shame on the community at large. Safran, however, did not come in for universal condemnation. In response to Abramovich’s complaint that Race Relations constituted Safran’s attempt to erase his Jewishness (which also included his exploring the possibility of having his foreskin reconstructed as well as a sketch in which he investigated whether or not his father had had a nose job decades earlier),34 columnist Julie Szego wrote in The Australian Jewish News that “Safran succeeds only in re-affirming its [his Jewishness’] almost mystical power.” Conceding that some may have found the Anne Frank segment offensive, she further maintained that “bad taste is a far lesser crime than trivialising the Holocaust,” arguing that the sketch was not at all about the Holocaust, but rather about Safran’s struggle to “let love (or even lust) conquer all in this post-racial world.”35 A Jewish blogger writing under the name Jewin’ the Fat wrote that “Safran Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic 211 hits the G-spot of satire gold with this one. He is bold, unafraid, and blissfully unpre- tentious in his geek-makes-good style” and “a man who is not afraid to push the limits of good taste, as long as he makes his point.”36 In spite of the loud voices criticizing Safran, the response of Szego and Jewin’ the Fat may have found resonance in the broader Jewish community. Safran never became a persona non grata in Australia’s Jewish community. In the years since the Race Relations controversies, the Australian Jewish News, Australia’s longest-running Jewish weekly newspaper, has continued to interview him and to feature his work favorably, and he has been featured at both the Sydney Jewish Writers’ Festival and the Melbourne Jewish Writers’ Festival.37 This indicates that, despite Safran’s claim to have avoided walking down the main Jewish street in Melbourne in the wake of Race Relations, the reality of his reception was actually rather complex.38 Although he was criticized, it was as an insider. Many Jews may not have liked his work, and may have even thought it was bad for the Jews. But the Jewish establishment, in this case represented by its largest circulating newspaper, did not shun him. This also shows a possible gap between the Jewish leadership and the community at large, certainly not unique to Australia. To date, Safran’s various television series have been the most sustained, popularized, and (arguably) sophisticated expressions of Holocaust humor in Australia, and he may be credited with being the first Australian comic to bring such forms of humor to a mainstream audience.39

Jane Korman: Dancing Auschwitz

In late 2009, at about the time that John Safran’s Race Relations premiered, Melbourne- based digital artist Jane Korman posted three short video clips to the video-sharing website YouTube. Together, the videos constituted a project she called Dancing Auschwitz.40 In the first and most controversial segment, “I Will Survive: Dancing Auschwitz Part I,” Korman, together with her father, Adolek (an Auschwitz survivor), and several younger family members, are seen dancing clumsily to a cover version of Gloria Gaynor’s disco classic “I Will Survive” at a number of Holocaust sites around Europe, among them Auschwitz, Birkenau, the Terezin concentration camp, the Lodz Holocaust1 memorial, a preserved, war-era railroad cattle car, and the complex of synagogues that form the Jewish Museum in Prague. In some of the shots, the family members wear yellow Stars of David sewn onto their clothing, reproducing the yellow identification badges that Jews were forced to sew onto their outer garments under the Nazi occupation; other shots feature them in white shirts with either “survivor,” “2nd gen,” or “3rd gen” printed across the front. Part 2 is a silent home movie showing Korman’s parents and friends dancing on a vacation trip decades earlier, overlaid with Leonard Cohen’s iconic “Dance Me to the End of Love,” and Part 3 features discussions between Adolek and his grandchildren as well as Adolek reenacting conversations he had with local Poles as the train on which he was deported during the war stopped on the way to Auschwitz. What is striking in this third video is that Adolek is laughing and smiling as he peers out through the window of the preserved cattle car and as he dances at various sites of destruction. Korman has been displaying her art in Australia and Israel since the 1970s, working in a range of media. After the release of Dancing Auschwitz she gained greater 212 David Slucki

prominence, with the work displayed and screened in galleries and festivals around Melbourne, Adelaide, and Sydney. Korman also won the People’s Choice Award for Best European Short Film at the DocumentART Film Festival in Berlin. The videos continued to be screened into late 2012, more than two years after they were initially released.41 Although they did not initially receive much attention, by the middle of 2010, the main video—in which Korman and her family dance at Auschwitz—had gone viral on YouTube. Major Australian news outlets reported the story, and it was soon picked up by mainstream newspapers in the United Kingdom, the United States, Israel, Germany, and Poland. Subsequently, the first video received around half a million views, according to a reporter from the AOL online news service.42 “My motive in making Dancing Auschwitz was to create a new response and a fresh interpretation of the past and its historical trauma,” Korman explained on her website. “I needed to create artwork that succeeded in awakening and reminding people of the important lessons the Holocaust and all genocides teach us—namely, an awareness of our own prejudices, stereotyping and intolerance.” In addition, she aimed to create “a celebration of life” while also evoking “the feeling of absence, loss, and mourning.”43 Thus, she used humor, in the sense of juxtaposing light-hearted popular culture and very earnest historical spaces, as a call to remember the past and to act to prevent future genocides. Her video was a means of tackling what she perceived as fatigue in reference to Holocaust remembrance. The humor in Korman’s work lies in the discord between a disco song about sur- viving the breakup of a relationship and the iconic settings that have come to be regarded as mythical or holy sites; the juxtaposition between different experiences of “survival” is what encourages laughter. Such employment of humor as a response to the trauma of the Holocaust sits comfortably within the long tradition of Jewish responses to suffering. As the late literary scholar Sarah Blacher Cohen argued, humor acts as a “principal source of salvation. By laughing at their dire circumstances, Jews have been able to liberate themselves from them.” Moreover, humor has “helped the Jewish people to survive, to confront the indifferent, often hostile universe, to endure the painful ambiguities of life and to retain a sense of internal power despite their external impotence.”44 In line with this argument, Korman’s work seeks to re-empower her father,1 to further liberate him from the sites of his trauma, to give him a feeling of ultimate triumph over those who tried to destroy him. In this way, Dancing Auschwitz should be read as specifically Jewish, as a project con- fronting tragedy with a self-deprecating and whimsical Jewish optimism. Producing the video served a therapeutic purpose for Adolek, Korman, and even her children, and its dissemination undoubtedly had therapeutic value for numerous Jews who watched it. In similar fashion, art historian Louis Kaplan has argued that many of the postwar expressions of Holocaust humor carry out this central aim of Jewish humor: “to transmute suffering into liberating laughter.”45 Discussing Mel Brooks’ The Producers, Kaplan writes: “Brooks’ aggressive and anarchic strategy must be seen as a post- Holocaust installment of the old Yiddish maxim that preaches the need to laugh off suffering. The Producers defuses the pain by reducing the Holocaust to bad the- atre.”46 Films such as The Producers demonstrate that the pain of the Holocaust has been absorbed as a cultural keynote by Jews in America and the world over. Many of Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic 213 those who did not suffer directly at the hands of the Nazis have incorporated the Holocaust as their own trauma. Just as all Jewish souls are said to have stood at Sinai, witnessing the handing down of the Torah, so too many Jews imagine themselves to have stood at the gates of Auschwitz.47 For them, the Holocaust is an inherited rather than an actual trauma, and “ownership” of the Holocaust has become more general- ized, no longer resting exclusively with survivors. Korman’s work complicates this further. For the survivor and his descendants, the acts of dancing and laughter (Adolek is seen laughing in a cattle car at one point) ameliorate the pain of the Holocaust. In addition, the clip serves a broader need by enabling others to come to terms with the Jews’ suffering during the war. In its affir- mation of life, it gives audiences permission to laugh and rejoice in spite of the terrible tragedy. The reception to Dancing Auschwitz was mixed. The video was uplifting for many, for others funny, and for some, simply shocking. Danny Katz, a Jewish columnist at The Age, described it as “one of the most unexpectedly impressive Holocaust mas- terpieces ever made.” Watching the video, he “cried because it was the purist [sic], simplest expression of joy and survival.” He added: “This movie shouldn’t work, it should be offensive. But it’s not one bit—it’s the ultimate stuff-you to the Nazis.”48 Similarly, Australia’s most widely syndicated conservative columnist, Andrew Bolt, wrote that he felt “incredibly stirred” watching the video: “What a shout of joyous defiance to those who wanted this man dead. He did survive . . . and he’s dancing, damn them.”49 Members of the Australian Jewish establishment, however, were less approving. For instance, Zvi Civins, education director at Melbourne’s Jewish Holocaust Centre, told the local tabloid newspaper, the Herald Sun, that Korman’s video was “inappropriate.” In his view, “Auschwitz is the site of over a million deaths, and if dance is the best way to express the vitality of the Jewish people, despite the [Holocaust], perhaps a better location could have been chosen.”50 As a spokesperson for Australia’s most important Holocaust remembrance institution, Civins’ statement is significant. He ascribes a certain sanctity to the particular site of memory, a site that must remain uninterrupted and solemn. At the same time, his suggestion that Korman’s father might dance at a different location1 overlooks the whole purpose of the project—that a survivor revisit the sites of his trauma in order to neutralize their horror. Another communal leader voicing skepticism at Korman’s project was Vic Alhadeff, CEO of the New South Wales Jewish Board of Deputies, the umbrella body for Jewish organiza- tions in New South Wales. “As human beings we have a right to celebrate survival,” he told the daily broadsheet The Australian, “but there is a time and place to do so. There is an infinite number of ways to do that, but we need to consider the sensibili- ties of those for whom places such as Auschwitz will always hold terrible pain.”51 Letter writers in the Australian Jewish News were also trenchant in their criticism. When Dancing Auschwitz was first released in late 2009, one Holocaust survivor, Helen Leperere, wrote: “The word ‘humour’ does not even enter this subject, there was nothing humourous about it.” “No-one,” she continued, “has any right to dese- crate the memory of our people; it is as if they were being annihilated anew.”52 When the video went viral in July 2010, Leperere once again expressed her concerns: “I consider the film ugly and insensitive and making a mockery out of Auschwitz‚ the 214 David Slucki

death factory. To affront the memory of our loved ones is like murdering them again.”53 Ingrid Weinberg, a granddaughter of an Auschwitz survivor, also found the video “inappropriate and disrespectful” and felt that it could only cause “hurt for victims and misunderstanding for many others.”54 The newspaper’s editorial line was a little more circumspect, although it clearly sided with those who saw the artwork as inappropriate, noting that, although Korman’s intent was clear, its implementation was “misguided.”55 T o be sure, some readers expressed their support for the project. One letter writer commented that the exhibition “moved [her] to tears.”56 Another, the son of survivors, wrote that he did not “for one moment feel that Mr. Kohn or Ms. Korman are dancing on the graves of Holocaust martyrs.” On the contrary: “If there is any dancing on graves at question here, I take it to be Hitler’s grave and those of his demonic min- ions.” For him, the video was a celebration of the fact that at least some Jews had survived. Defending Korman and her father’s right to celebrate in any way they deemed appropriate, he paraphrased a well-known saying: “They tried to wipe out all Jewry. They failed. Let’s dance!”57 Holocaust historian and educator Avril Alba noted in the Australian Jewish News that the debate over Korman’s videos was “oddly reassuring, indicative of the continuing and passionate engagement of Australian Jewry with the history and meaning of the Holocaust.” Although acknowledging that the work would inevitably offend people, particularly survivors, Alba nonetheless welcomed the questions that it raised among Australia’s Jews.58 Overall, there remains a strong undercurrent among Australian Jewry that the Holocaust and its associated symbols have taken on a certain kind of sanctity. Thus, humor has no part to play in remembering the Holocaust, and any artist who breaches this unwritten code desecrates the memory of the Holocaust, even if survivors themselves take part in the project or performance. Within the Australian Jewish community, deference to survivors is paramount in determining what is acceptable or appropriate in representing and commemorating the Holocaust. It is not surprising, then, that when a family (even one comprising survivors and their descendants) transgresses the etiquette of Holocaust memorialization, controversy erupts. At the same time, the participation of a Holocaust survivor standing (and dancing) at the center of the work 1lends a moral authority to Dancing Auschwitz. Adolek’s presence demonstrates that this work is not only about an artist working through her own Holocaust-related questions, but about a Holocaust survivor affirming the celebration of life. His active endorsement of the project mitigates the shock factor, the sense of desecration that audiences might otherwise be likely to feel, and instead draws them onto the artist’s side. It was his presence that Korman’s supporters—both Jewish and non-Jewish—cited in their defense of the video. The idea that even a minority of survivors might exercise veto power over what constitutes Holocaust memory reflects growing anxiety over survivors’ legacy specifically, and over the future of Holocaust remembrance more generally. In 1998, Imre Kertész reflected on the fact that as survivors age, and as the temporal distance grows, Auschwitz, and by extension memory of the Holocaust, is “slipping out of their hands.” “There is something shockingly ambiguous,” he wrote, “about the jealous way in which survivors insist on their exclusive rights to the Holocaust as intellectual property.” Kertész noted that the pressing question for survivors is: “to Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic 215 whom will it [Auschwitz] belong?”59 This question, although unresolved, comes starkly into view when examining the response to Korman’s work, and it also stands at the heart of any discussion around whether humor has a place in Holocaust remembrance, and whether Jews alone can use humorous devices to this end.

Non-Jews and Holocaust Humor

Although Jewish artists and performers have sparked controversy through their use of humor in exploring issues around the Holocaust, they have, on the whole, been able to stand by their work. The invective aimed at them pales in contrast with the criticisms leveled at non-Jews who produce Holocaust humor. They are pilloried by Jewish leaders and prominent Jewish writers, and they lack the moral authority— grounded in a direct connection to the Holocaust—to shield their work from criticism. Since the late 1990s, a number of controversies have arisen with regard to the invocation of the Holocaust, Hitler, or Nazism by non-Jewish Australians. Such incidents have stirred up anger and division in the Jewish community and in society more broadly. Jewish communal leaders are generally at the forefront of the public out- cries; in most instances, the controversy revolves around images of or allusions to Hitler and Nazism that appear in comedic or humorous formats, and in the most controversial cases, there is a comparison, made either explicitly or implicitly, between Nazism and the state of Israel.

Michael Leunig and the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict

Michael Leunig is one of Australia’s most celebrated cartoonists. As a regular cartoonist for The Age, Melbourne’s liberal daily newspaper, he has for decades enter- tained Australians with his whimsical, folksy characters, his religious themes and imagery, and his gentle sense of humor. In particular, his character Curly Pajama has become a kind of folk hero in Australia. In 1999, the National Trust of Australia declared Leunig one of Australia’s Living Treasures, cementing his place as a leading voice in Australian art and1 in the local media. At the same time, Leunig has also dis- tinguished himself as a political cartoonist, taking a distinctly antiwar position with regard to the war on Iraq, and especially as an observer of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.T hese political cartoons have to some extent shifted the public perception of Leunig: for many, he has become a polarizing figure either loved (mainly by those on the Left), or despised (mainly by those on the Right).60 It is his cartoons on Israel that have raised the ire of the Australian Jewish community. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has become a highly visible issue in Leunig’s work, and he has used the comic form to great effect in magnifying the despair of Palestinians. Since 2002, he has drawn cartoons that lampoon Ariel Sharon; that highlight the lack of Palestinian voices in reportage of the conflict; and most contro- versially, that invite comparison between the Jews’ suffering during the Holocaust and Palestinian suffering under Israeli occupation. Two cartoons in particular have caused enormous controversy, causing Australian Jewish writers and leaders to castigate Leunig as naive at best, and antisemitic at worst. 216 David Slucki

The first was a two-panel cartoon Leunig penned in 2002, titled “Auschwitz 1942 and Gaza 2002,” which likened Gaza to the notorious death camp. In the first panel, a Jew (in this case, the beloved Curly Pajama with a Star of David on his back) stands at the iconic Auschwitz gates, which here bear the English translation “Work Brings Freedom.” In the second panel, the same Jewish Curly Pajama is carrying a rifle as he stands alongside a gate marked “War Brings Peace.” The gates are now concertinas of barbed wire, resembling a Palestinian refugee camp, with Israeli warplanes flying overhead. Most likely, the planes are a deliberate allusion to the lack of Western intervention during the Second World War—a direct comparison with Western coun- tries’ non-intervention in the present-day conflict.T he cartoonist’s intention is unmis- takable: to show that the same Jews who stood as victims at the gates of Auschwitz are now perpetrators of violence against Palestinians. The cartoon also suggests that Israel is using the same Orwellian language that the Nazis employed, cynically equating security with freedom. When Leunig first drew the cartoon in 2002, his editor at The Age, Michael Gawenda, refused to publish it, telling the ABC’s Media Watch: “Anyone seeing that cartoon would think it inappropriate.”61 Later, on reflection, Gawenda described the cartoon as “intellectually lazy.” “Leunig’s truth . . . was a falsehood,” he wrote, “and I was not in the business of publishing falsehoods.”62 That Gawenda was Jewish made his decision all the more controversial. Was he censoring the cartoon because he was the child of Holocaust survivors and particularly sensitive to the boundaries of representing the Holocaust? Did his Jewishness compromise his objectivity on editorial matters surrounding Israel? Although he argued that was not the case, Gawenda was keenly aware that the issue was problematic. The time of the second intifada, he said later in an interview, “was difficult for all editors . . . but it was particularly difficult for me because I was Jewish . . . Both sides of that conflict saw me through a Jewish prism.”63 He insisted, though, that the fact of his Jewishness did not inform his decision to pull Leunig’s cartoon; rather, the cartoon itself had breached reasonable stan- dards in a highly charged debate. Although it was never published in The Age or in any other publication, the cartoon was aired publicly on the ABC network and would later circulate online. This was not the end of 1the matter. In 2006, Leunig’s cartoon was entered—without his knowledge—in the International Holocaust Cartoon Competition run by an Iranian newspaper, Hamshahri. The contest had been launched in response to a series of cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammed that had been published in the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in September 2005.64 Leunig discovered the hoax after his cartoon made the headlines and insisted that it be removed from competition. Nonetheless, the episode left a lingering sour taste. Given that the cartoon was celebrated in an antisemitic competition, did it not follow that it was inherently antisemitic? Not according to Leunig, who insisted that it was “an anti-war cartoon not an anti-Semitic cartoon.”65 Noting in a radio interview that “cartoons are ambiguous, they have many meanings,” Leunig explained that, at the time he drew the cartoon, “it was a very vicious time in [the Israeli-Palestinian] conflict and it was all getting worse and worse and I thought . . . [i]t’s like there was a new emblem over Israel saying ‘War brings peace,’ and I thought this was as pernicious a lie as that first one, ‘Work brings freedom,’ and I wanted to make that comparison, that Israel was a land Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic 217 surrounded by barbed wire.”66 Although Leunig was correct in arguing that cartoons are ambiguous, it must also be acknowledged that cartoons use symbols and imagery that are instantly recognizable to audiences. In the case of “Auschwitz 1942 and Gaza 2002,” there seemed to be no doubt that the cartoonist was drawing an analogy between Nazi and Israeli policy—an analogy sure to create maximum controversy and to invite contempt on the part of the Jewish community. In November 2012, during the Israeli aerial bombing of the Gaza Strip, Leunig once again raised the ire of Australian Jewry when he published a cartoon in The Age titled “First They Came for the Palestinians.” The text in the cartoon echoed a famous poetic indictment made by German pastor Martin Niemoller against Germans who did not speak out against Nazi persecution. The poem, whose opening lines state “First, they came for the communists, but I was not a communist—so I did nothing,” has become a universal symbol of the consequences of a moral failure to intervene when state violence escalates. Implicit in its lines are the call to take seriously those instances in which a state targets its citizens on the basis of political affiliation, race, or religion.67 In Leunig’s version: First they came for the Palestinians and I did not speak out because I was not a Palestinian. Then they came for more Palestinians and I did not speak out because I feared hostility and trouble. Then they came for even more Palestinians and I did not speak out because if I did, doors would close to me, hateful mail would arrive, bitterness and spiteful condemna- tions would follow. Then they came for more and more Palestinians and I did not speak out because by then I had fallen into silence to reflect upon the appalling, disgraceful and impossible aspects of human nature.68 There are two dimensions to Leunig’s refashioning of Niemoller’s poem. The first is the comparison between Israel and Nazism; implicit in Leunig’s text is the idea that Israel is akin to Nazi Germany in the way it targets Palestinians. In contrast with the original poem, which escalates in terms of the targeted victim group, Leunig’s esca- lation involves increasing numbers of Palestinians; the implicit message is that Israel is carrying out plans for their systematic round-up. The other noteworthy aspect of this cartoon is Leunig’s comment1 that those who might otherwise speak out against Israel refrain from doing so, for fear of a backlash from the (in this case unnamed) Jewish community. By implication, Leunig has been silenced over the years, a claim he made even more strongly in an article he penned defending his cartoon. “I know I am not an anti-Semite, not even vaguely or remotely,” he wrote. The very suggestion, he argued, was “cynical,” “bullying,” and “lazy.” Leunig claimed to be fighting for the powerless, those on the wrong side of the power balance. Thus, in his view, the cartoon was “universal and eternal. It could apply to any oppressed group.”69 Leunig’s “First They Came” was roundly condemned by Jewish community figures, academics, and writers in the Jewish and the mainstream Australian press, as well as by bloggers. The backlash against this cartoon was even greater than that accorded to his previous cartoon on the issue, for two important reasons. First, unlike the earlier cartoon, it was published in The Age. Whereas “Auschwitz 1942 and Gaza 2002” was censored by Michael Gawenda (finding a public platform only when the ABC’s Media Watch program publicized it), his successors at The Age did not have the 218 David Slucki

same reservations with regard to the later cartoon. In addition, social media outlets had become much more pervasive by 2012, ensuring that “First They Came” was widely disseminated beyond its initial newspaper-reading audience. In consequence, although far less visually explicit than the earlier cartoon, it gave rise to greater debate. In his new role as chairman of the Australian branch of the Anti-Defamation League, Dvir Abramovich slammed the cartoon as “ugly,” “simplistic,” and “hateful,” charging that it had crossed the line into antisemitism with its lack of nuance and its demoni- zation of Israelis and Jews.70 Particularly galling to Abramovich was the lack of sensitivity in Leunig’s comparison between Israel and the Nazis. “I wonder,” asked Abramovich, “if Leunig paused to consider how a survivor of the Holocaust would react when they came upon his cartoon?”71 Colin Rubenstein, executive director of the Australia/Israel Affairs Council, described the cartoon as “offensive, inflamma- tory, and beyond the pale.”72 Nick Dyrenfurth, an Australian historian and occasional writer on Jewish issues and Israeli politics, said Leunig’s comparison was “intellectually lazy, deliberately cruel, and counter-productive.” “Depicting a genocidal Israeli Goliath pitted against a Palestinian David is laughably obscene,” he wrote in The Age.73 In a more terse response to the cartoon, the Zionist Federation of Australia’s media and advocacy director, Emily Gian, took to Twitter to describe Leunig as “vile” and “anti-Semitic to the core.”74 Jewish bloggers were perhaps even more scathing. Anthony Frosh, editor of the Jewish online forum Galus Australis, suggested, in response to Leunig’s own claim that there was no evidence he was an antisemite, that “the evidence is in his own cartoons.” For Frosh, equating Israeli policy with the Nazis’ extermination ideology was “about as anti-Semitic as it gets.”75 The Blank Pages from the Age, an anony- mous, right-wing website dedicated to seeking out anti-Israel bias in The Age, called the cartoon an “outrageous anti-Semitic daubing” and attacked Leunig as a “horrible, disgustingly sick piece of work,” and a “Jew-hating cartoonist.”76 When the cartoon was republished in 2014 by a local NGO in support of Palestinians during the Israel- Gaza conflict, Rabbi James Kennard, principal of Melbourne’s largest Jewish day school, blasted the cartoon and the NGO in a Facebook post. Comparing the plight of Palestinians with that of Jews during the Holocaust “implies either a nonsensical inflation of their grievances1 or an evil denial of the horrors and the extent of the Holocaust,” he wrote. “This comparison in Leunig’s cartoon was worse than offensive. It was totally and utterly wrong.”77 Other websites and blogs, including The Online Hate Prevention Institute, a Zionist Federation of Australia project to combat online antisemitism, and the right-wing online magazine, Jews Down Under, criticized Leunig’s cartoon specifically, and the artist more generally, as hostile to Jews.78 The episode even received attention internationally. B’nai B’rith International put out a press release congratulating the response of its Australian branch and decrying Leunig’s “anti-Semitic views.”79 The U.S.-based pro-Israel website Honest Reporting took notice of the cartoon, giving Leunig its Poison Pen award in 2012 as part of its “Dishonest Reporting Awards.” “Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is sick enough,” wrote blogger Pesach Benson, “but using Pastor Martin Niemoller’s famous statement is even more warped.”80 The lone exception to the chorus of Jewish condemnation was the response of “tobybee,” a Jewish (woman) blogger in Melbourne, who argued that Leunig’s cartoon Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic 219 was not in fact equating the magnitude of Jewish and Palestinian suffering. “Leunig’s cartoon,” she wrote, “is not about—or not just about—the Holocaust. It is a call to action, a reminder that the Holocaust is one moment when action was lacking. What are others? When do we silence ourselves because of disinterest, or fear of personal repercussions? How can we rethink our responsibilities to others?” Although Leunig’s was an “imperfect” comparison, she added, it still had value if one looked beyond the surface.81 Hers was seemingly a lone voice in the Jewish world, which, at least in the public sphere, was otherwise unanimously hostile toward Leunig. The controversy surrounding Leunig’s cartoons is fundamentally different from those sparked by Safran’s television programs or Korman’s videos. Most obviously, Leunig is not Jewish. He does not inherit the same legacy of the Holocaust as those whose parents and grandparents survived under Nazi occupation. This does not dis- qualify him from commenting on the Holocaust, or using it in his satire, but it does mean that the way he has been regarded is different from the perception of Jewish public figures such asS afran and Korman. There were no suggestions that Safran or Korman were antisemites. They were accused of trivializing the Holocaust, to be sure, but their credentials as Jews meant that although they created controversy, they were spared the same level of opprobrium directed at Leunig. As Jews, they also criticized the Jewish community from within (in the case of Safran, explicitly). They knew the contours of the community, and they remained within that community, even when they divided it. Leunig did not divide the community—for the most part, it united against him. To some extent, this was because of the subject matter he dealt with. Although Safran and Korman have also dealt with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by means of satire, Korman in particular from a left-wing perspective, they do not draw parallels with the Holocaust. As a result, while their Holocaust humor may be regarded by many as being in bad taste, it is not seen as threatening in the same fashion as Holocaust satire that criticizes Israel. There is another difference. Political cartoons are a complex medium, with vary- ing intent and impact. As two scholars of Australian political cartoons, Haydon Manning and Robert Phiddian, have shown, such cartoons can vary from “light relief to prophetic clarification of a major public issue.”S imilarly, they can be received in very different ways: “What1 makes one reader roar with laughter of sympathetic rec- ognition, may merely bemuse another.” Moreover, they are “liminal things, poised somewhere between being ‘the most influential thing in the paper’ and ‘just a joke,’ ” which gives them “special license” to provoke readers.82 By design, then, political cartoonists are provocative. As cartoonist Art Spiegelman has argued, they are “a breed of troublemakers by profession.”83 This is a trait they share with other comics and artists, but perhaps not with their colleagues in the newspapers and magazines in which they publish their work. It is therefore a difficult line to tread between journal- istic responsibility and the cartoonists’ mandate to evoke amusement. Given the constraints of their medium, cartoons use visual clues and stereotypes to get their message across quickly and succinctly. Spiegelman recently argued that “cartoons use a kind of symbolic language. If you don’t understand the symbol, you don’t understand what you’re looking at.”84 Because they use this shorthand, cartoons are often offensive. As Spiegelman noted in the wake of the Danish cartoon controversy, they have a predisposition to insult. Caricature is “by definition a charged or 220 David Slucki

loaded image; its wit lies in the visual concision of using a few deft strokes to make its point. The compression of ideas into memorable icons gives cartoons their ability to burrow deep into the brain.”85 He continues:

Cartoon language is mostly limited to deploying a handful of recognizable visual symbols and clichés. It makes use of the discredited pseudo-scientific principles of physi- ognomy to portray character through a few physical attributes and facial expressions. It takes skill to use such clichés in ways that expand or subvert this impoverished vocabulary.86

Perhaps Leunig did not deploy these skills effectively enough to subvert the “impoverished vocabulary” available to cartoonists, at least in terms of conveying his intended meaning; or perhaps he was being deliberately provocative and sparked the reaction he imagined would follow. What is clear, though, is that, given their constraints, cartoons—particularly political cartoons—must be assessed differently from other forms of humor and comedy. They are ambiguous, invite multiple readings, and cannot by their very nature provide the kind of nuance many critics demand. Leunig’s comparison was clumsy and offensive to many Australian Jews, and his justification did not show the kind of contrition his opponents insisted upon. His cartoons were not drawn to produce laughter—or, at least, not in a pleasurable sense. Rather, they were meant to evoke a wry or sardonic reaction from The Age’s audience, and perhaps to challenge or provoke some soul-searching in the Jewish community. There are, then, two audiences for this work: one that might be seen as sympathetic to the message, embracing it and regarding Leunig’s intended nuance; another, Australian Jews, who see no room for nuance in such instances. In a sense, the cartoons were not even about the Holocaust, but about the Israeli- Palestinian conflict.N otwithstanding, the Holocaust is at the very heart of these controversies, for what is at stake is how we talk about the Holocaust and how the public reacts to images of the Holocaust. By using his iconic Curly Pajama as the Jewish figure in the Auschwitz 1942 cartoon,L eunig was likely trying to evoke the same kind of pathos that Spiegelman did by imagining Jews as mice in his celebrated Maus (1991). As the late Terrence Des Pres wrote in his widely cited essay on literary humor and the Holocaust, 1“the iconography of the mouse is perhaps the perfect sign for this amalgam of lightness and weight.”87 Arguably Leunig does not achieve this amalgam. He made his point with a sledgehammer rather than a scalpel, with cartoons that were designed to shock and provoke audiences. Certainly, this is the pre- rogative of the cartoonist, but it raises the question regarding what responsibilities cartoonists have in being sensitive to their various audiences. The debate over political cartoons, satire, and what is acceptable became particularly pertinent in January 2015, when radical Islamist gunmen slaughtered twelve members of the editorial staff at the satirical French newspaper Charlie Hebdo in retaliation for what they regarded as the newspaper’s disrespect vis-à-vis Islam. Discussions concerning free speech and the limits of satire are now part of a broader global discussion. Although Islam is at the center of this debate, the limits around Holocaust representation are a corollary, particularly in light of the Iranian Holocaust cartoon contest in 2006 and its resurrection in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo mas- sacre.88 Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic 221

Tom and Alex: “Six Degrees of Hitleration”

Leunig’s 2012 cartoon certainly indicates the extent to which satirical use of the Holocaust or Holocaust-related issues has become a part of the public discourse in Australia. It was preceded by a number of other incidents, among them a radio pre- senter’s suggestion in 2009 that actor Magda Szubanski—coincidentally, the daughter of a postwar Polish refugee—would lose weight if “you put her in a concentration camp.”89 In 2013, Christopher Pyne, a senior opposition member of Parliament (now Minister for Education), commented that the government was “beginning to resem- ble a scene from the movie Downfall,” which depicts the last days in Hitler’s bun- ker.90 In early 2015, Prime Minister Tony Abbott twice made Holocaust-related references in Parliament, the first time suggesting that the Australian Labor Party had caused a “holocaust of jobs” while in government (referring to the contraction of jobs in the military industrial sector), and then a few weeks later labeling the opposition leader Bill Shorten the “Dr. Goebbels of economic policy.” He retracted both state- ments, but was nonetheless roundly criticized both by Jewish and non-Jewish members of Parliament and by Jewish community leaders.91 While the use of crass insults is a standard feature in the Australian parliament, these jokes, although evoking laughter within the prime minister’s own party, seemed to fall flat in the court of public opinion. Abbott apologized on both occasions. One fairly recent controversy connected with the youth-oriented radio station Triple J is of particular interest. In August 2012, Triple J’s breakfast program hosts, Alex Dyson and Tom Ballard, participated with guest comedian Alan Brough in a game called “Six Degrees of Hitleration,” in which various objects were linked to Hitler in six steps. Asked to link wind farms to Hitler, Ballard responded: “Wind farms, fan-forced ovens, let’s not go there.”92 The response was swift. Within 24 hours, outraged columnists and letter writers had complained in popular online and print media outlets, and the topic quickly became the most hotly debated topic on the program’s online message board.93 Taking to Twitter to censure Ballard, one listener wrote: “Cheap laughs invoking Hitler this morning. Bad form bad taste!! Really scraping the barrell [sic].”94 Ballard, for his part, defended his 1right to make Holocaust jokes, claiming that making fun of Hitler was simply in the tradition of Charlie Chaplin, Mel Brooks, and Monty Python. “Dude,” Ballard responded when pressed to recant, “if you don’t like the show, just don’t listen. It’s profoundly easy.”95 On Triple J’s Facebook page, dozens of commentators expressed their (mock) disapproval by means of additional Holocaust- related puns, while those objecting to the program leveled accusations of antisemitism and Holocaust trivialization at Triple J and its presenters.96 Ultimately, Ballard and Triple J both apologized for the sketch.97 Within the Jewish community, it was once again Dvir Abramovich who led the attack. Writing in the opinion section of The Age two days after the broadcast, he blasted Ballard and Triple J and decried the “dangerous trend” in which “there is no aspect or symbol of the darkest chapter in human history that is not subject to per- verse abuse and cheap trivialization.” Denouncing the sketch as a “hurtful and sickening prank,” Abramovich accused the radio hosts of re-traumatizing survivors and “trampling on their feelings.”98 He added: “Would they have played the same game if 222 David Slucki

their grandparents, parents, siblings or uncles were executed and their naked corpses incinerated in the ovens?”99 In contrast, writer and comedian Ben Pobjie leaped to Ballard’s defense, arguing that Ballard had neither suggested that the Holocaust was funny nor trivialized the suffering of the victims. Moreover, Pobjie maintained, the Holocaust, like all subjects, should not be off-limits for comedians, even if some occasionally overstepped the bounds of good taste.100 T wo bloggers at the online Jewish forum Galus Australis also published scathing commentary. Galus editor Anthony Frosh argued that the episode highlighted the need to re-evaluate Holocaust education in Australia.101 And Malki Rose, a regular contributor, wrote that the “Hitleration” game should have caused widespread outrage among Australians in general, since many Australians are descended from postwar Polish, Ukrainian, Serbian, and Slavic refugees. Noting that the intention of Holocaust humor “was always to mock the persecutor, but NEVER the victim,” she, like Frosh, advocated for a heightened commitment to anti-racist education among young people.102 This insistence that a lack of education was at the heart of the prob- lem suggests that these writers put Ballard’s indiscretion down to naivety, rather than malice, and that the controversy might have been avoided had the radio host been better educated. Perhaps most interesting, though, was Rose’s insistence that the targets of the radio game were not Jews, but all victims of Nazism. “Although Jews,” she wrote, “were systematically executed and tortured as a top priority in Nazi German, we do not ‘own’ the Holocaust. We do not own Auschwitz or Dachau and have no monopoly over being victims of Hitler’s concentration camps, ovens, or gas- chambers.” Jewish journalist Jonno Seidler took the opposite position, arguing that Holocaust humor was an expressly Jewish matter. “As a Jew,” he wrote on the entertainment news website The Vine, “I’d be more than happy to let it blow over if [Ballard would] apologize.” The fact that Ballard wasn’t Jewish was particularly galling, since “if there was ever a rule in the school of comedy, it’s that you don’t make jokes about a tribe you don’t belong to.” It followed that only Jewish artists such as Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, Larry David, and Sarah Silverman could successfully deal with Holocaust humor: “Holocaust jokes aren’t funny 98% of the time, but when they are, it’s those guys who1 are allowed to make them. They’ve rationalized an approach to the tragedy based on the suffering of their ancestors, and it’s usually the other Jews who get it.”103 Like Abramovich, Seidler also addressed the current situation (and sensitivity) of Australian Jews. “The reason Holocaust jokes are a no-go,” he explained, “is because in my grandparents’ lifetime, our families were decimated by the greatest hate crime the world has ever seen.” Ultimately, then, for both Seidler and Abramovich, the trouble with Holocaust humor more broadly is the Jews’ perceived contemporary vulnerability. Without remembering what Jews have endured historically, and the gravity of their suffering, it is too easy to allow Jews to become targets once again. In his study on ethnic jokes, sociologist and leading humor theorist Christie Davies wrote that ethnic humor enforces the “moral boundaries of the group[,] which define what is acceptable and characteristic behavior of the members, and what is unacceptable behavior characteristic of outsiders.”104 In this case, it was a joke made by a non-Jew on a topic particularly sensitive to Jews that contravened the established Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic 223 boundaries. Jews’ response to this particular controversy could be characterized by what folklore scholar Moira Smith has termed “unlaughter”—the absence of laughter in situations where it might be expected.105 Sigmund Freud made a similar point in his classic 1905 treatise, The Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, in which he claimed that Jews are among the most self-deprecating people in their willingness to make fun of their own nature. In his words, “the share the raconteur’s own person has in what is being criticized creates the subjective conditions for the joke-work that are otherwise difficult to set up.” However, jokes made about Jews by outsiders are tendentious and aggressive, as they simply see Jews as “comical figures.”106 The fact that Ballard ultimately felt the need to apologize points to an important distinction between how Jewish and non-Jewish expressions of Holocaust humor are viewed: Jewish artists like Safran and Korman were able to continue to produce or reproduce their works without the need to express their remorse. Indeed, their position as descendants of survivors and inheritors of the Holocaust legacy gave them the assurance to stand by their work, or at least, there was a sense in which even if they transgressed the boundaries of good taste, their status as insiders was never seriously under threat. In the case of Leunig, his use of the Auschwitz-Gaza analogy marked him in the eyes of many Australian Jews as hostile not only toward Israel, but toward Jews more broadly. The Ballard incident was a little less straight- forward. First, he was a young comedian rather than a veteran commentator like Leunig, so there was an extent to which he was labeled naïve rather than malicious, and ignorant rather than antisemitic. In the case of the “Hitleration” game, it was not clear who the butt of the joke was: was it Hitler, Holocaust victims and survivors, or Jews generally? Ballard protested that his joke was simply a part of a longer tradition, invoking comics such as Chaplin and Brooks, but in their work it is clear that the perpetrators are the butt of the humor, not the victims. This goes to the question of how humor and laughter are used to elicit solidarity between joke-teller and audience. In the case of “Hitleration,” many Jews (although not necessarily the target audience) were offended by the joke and were even more irate at Ballard’s initial defensive response. The joke was not premised on shared laughter—it was per- formed between non-Jews for a predominantly non-Jewish audience on a subject that was sensitive to the 1Jewish community—and it therefore had an exclusionary effect. The latest episodes involving Leunig and Ballard highlight ways in which the new media landscape is far less conducive to the regulation of Holocaust humor, in the sense that there are myriad new platforms in which such humor can be displayed and almost instantaneously disseminated. At the same time, such humor is subject to a more informal form of regulation on the part of audiences, who can (and do) respond urgently and immediately to perceived instances of insensitivity or bad taste. Without the outcry on Twitter, it is unlikely that the radio station and its presenters would have felt forced into a public apology (as qualified as Ballard’s apology was). Reactions are instant, and it does not take long—in this case, only a matter of hours—for controversy to materialize. The new landscape also makes it possible to trace the public reaction, through comments on blogs and social media platforms. For researchers, it provides unprecedented opportunities to conduct research on audiences and their responses. 224 David Slucki

Conclusion

When it comes to Holocaust humor in the Australian context, the juxtaposition of comedic tropes and ineffable memory has inevitably prompted public outcry. Moreover, although Jewish purveyors of Holocaust humor are often pilloried for their work, their direct connection (as survivors or descendants of survivors) or indirect connection (as members of the broader Jewish community) lends them the ability to weather criticism and still remain within the fold. Non-Jewish comedians and artists, by contrast, must tread a much finer line.T hey stand to be accused of much more serious misdemeanors than Jewish comedians, such as antisemitism and racism, or even to become pariahs for their trivializing of the Holocaust. Recent controversies over Holocaust humor in Australia have much to tell us about how memories of the Holocaust are culturally diffused and regulated. Jewish responses make it clear, on the one hand, that sensitivities around the subject are still raw. On the other hand, claims made by intellectuals such as Ophir, Kertész, and Des Pres— that the Holocaust has come to be revered in a way that makes it difficult to appreci- ate its universality—remain relevant as well. In many ways, the responses to Holocaust humor in Australia have reinforced the ways in which the Holocaust is imagined as Jewish, to the exclusion of other victim groups. This attitude stems from and rein- forces the perception of the Holocaust as a specifically and uniquely Jewish tragedy. And yet, if the Holocaust is to be seen as a universal tragedy, can we not then sup- pose that Holocaust remembrance in all its forms is available to Jews and non-Jews alike? Holocaust humor may all be in bad taste, yet that is not the pertinent issue. Rather, we must consider whether the incongruity between form and content can be made productive for producers and consumers of humor. The question we must ask is not whether the Holocaust can be the subject of comedy, satire, parody, or black humor, but how and within what ethical framework can it be incorporated into the broader context of representing and remembering the Holocaust. In the Australian setting, as elsewhere, this is a question that is yet to be resolved.

1Notes

1. Adi Ophir, “On Sanctifying the Holocaust: An Anti-Theological Treatise,” Tikkun 2, no. 1 (January-March 1987), 61–66. 2. Imre Kertész, “Who Owns Auschwitz?” trans. John MacKay, The Yale Journal of Criticism 14, no. 1 (Spring 2001), 270. 3. See Suzanne Rutland and Gary Eckstein, “Australasia: Jews in Australia,” in Encyclopedia of the Jewish Diaspora: Origins, Experiences, and Culture, vol. 1, ed. Mark Avrum Ehrlich (Santa Barbara: 2008), 521. 4. suzanne Rutland, Edge of the Diaspora: Two Centuries of Jewish Settlement in Australia (New York: 1997), 225–256. 5. Judith E. Berman, Holocaust Remembrance in Australian Jewish Communities, 1945– 2000 (Crawley, W.A.: 2001), 5–6. 6. Don Perlgut, “Australian Jews and Film” (June 2010), online at www.jgcinema.com/ single.php?sl= (accessed 4 January 2015). 7. Freda Freiberg, “Lost in Oz? Jews in the Australian Cinema,” Continuum: The Australian Journal of Media & Culture 8, no. 2 (1994), 198–200. Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic 225

8. On Rene, see Kathy Leahy, “Roy Rene Mo: Australian Clown or Monarch of the Mob?” Australian Drama Studies 42 (April 2003), 91–111; Barry York, “In the Company of Chaplin,” National Library of Australia News (September 2006), 7–10; Celestine McDermott, “Rene, Roy (Mo) (1891–1954),” Australian Dictionary of Biography, National Centre of Biography, Australian National University, online at http://adb.anu.edu.au/biography/rene-roy-mo-8181/ text14305 (accessed 4 January 2015). 9. Although the Eichmann trial had significant impact in Australia, it was not the water- shed that Peter Novick claimed it to be for the United States. See David Ritter, “Distant Reverberations: Australian Responses to the Trial of Adolf Eichmann,” in The Memory of the Holocaust in Australia, ed. Tom Lawson and James Jordan (London: 2008), 51–73. 10. See “The Top TV Programs of 1978,” Media Information Australia, no. 13 (August 1979), 28. On the reception and impact of the miniseries Holocaust, see Grant Noble and Craig Osmond, “ ‘Holocaust’ in Australia,” International Journal of Political Education, 4 (1981), 139–150. 11. Schindler’s List was the eleventh-highest grossing film in Australia in 1994.S ee Screen Australia, online at screenaustralia.gov.au/research/statistics/cinematop50films.aspx#Ran79299 (accessed 4 January 2015). 12. see Helen Darville, The Hand that Signed the Paper (St. Leonards, NSW: 1994). On the controversy concerning Darville, see Robert Manne, The Culture of Forgetting: Helen Demidenko and the Holocaust (Melbourne: 1996); Andrew Reimer, The Demidenko Debate (St. Leonard’s, NSW: 1996); Gianna Totaro, Christine Tyshing, and John Jost (eds.), The Demidenko File (Ringwood, Victoria: 1996). 13. On the circumstances surrounding Irving’s visa, see Tzvi Fleischer, “The End—Issues surrounding the Denial of a Visa to David Irving,” Australia/Israel Review 21, no. 19 (December 1996), 18–20; Lawrence W. Maher, “Migration Act Visitor Entry Controls and Free Speech: The Case of David Irving,” Sydney Law Review 16, no. 3 (1994), 358–393. 14. Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, What’s Wrong with Anzac? The Militarisation of Australian History (Sydney: 2010). 15. For an overview, see Stuart MacIntyre and Anna Clark, The History Wars (Melbourne: 2003). 16. the literature on this topic is extensive. See especially A. Dirk Moses, Genocide and Settler Society: Frontier Violence and Stolen Indigenous Children in Australian History (New York: 2005); Tony Barta, “Decent Disposal: Australian Historians and the Recovery of Genocide,” in The Historiography of Genocide, ed. Dan Stone (Basingstoke: 2008), 296–322. 17. steve Lipman, Laughter in Hell: The Use of Humor during the Holocaust (Northvale: 1991). 18. On Holocaust humor in film, seeAaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and1 Experimental Films (New York: 2011), 79–100; Annette Insdorf, Indelible Shadows: Film and the Holocaust (New York: 2009), 59–76. 19. John Safran, interview with Monica Attard, Sunday Profile, Australian Broadcasting Corporation (5 June 2005), transcript available at abc.net.au/sundayprofile/stories/s1383760. htm (accessed 17 April 2015). 20. On Safran’s career, see Dave Hoskin, “Renting Mums and Riling Ray: The Career of John Safran,” Metro Magazine 164 (March 2010), 90–93. 21. By the time the series aired, Safran’s mother was no longer alive. In a memorable episode, Safran and two friends dig a hole alongside the grave of his mother so that, following what he claims to be an obscure medieval Jewish custom, he can ask his mother’s blessing to marry a non-Jew. Historian Jordana Silverstein has argued that part of what is so problematic about Safran’s discourse is that he constructs Jews as a strictly racialized category, taking no account of historical, political, or cultural factors. “Jewish women,” in Safran’s world, “are too known, too intimate, both in scientific and cultural terms. Jewish women are bossy, they are unattract- ive.” This stands in stark contrast to Safran’s essentialized conception of “blond shikses” or Eurasian women, who are seen to be desirable. See Jordana Silverstein, “Dating while Jewish: Historicising Racialised Discourses of Attraction and Desire,” unpublished paper delivered at 226 David Slucki

Australian Women’s and Gender Studies Annual Conference, University of New South Wales, Sydney (December 2012). I thank Dr. Silverstein for sending me a copy of the paper. 22. In its opening episode, Race Relations attracted an audience of more than 700,000, although this figure gradually dipped each week to as low as 322,000 by the final episode in December 2009. For more details, see David Knox, “A Tight Race for Wednesday,” TV Tonight (22 October 2009), online at www.tvtonight.com.au/2009/10/a-tight-race-for-wednesday.html (accessed 11 January 2015). 23. Alice Pung, “Border Crossings: Review of the Television Series John Safran’s Race Relations,” The Monthly (February 2010), 68–69. 24. Peter Kirkwood, “John Safran the Holy Fool,” Eureka Street 19, no. 20 (23 October 2009), 3–4. 25. On Larry David, see David Gillota, “Negotiating Jewishness: Curb Your Enthusiasm and the Schlemiel Tradition,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 38, no. 4 (2010), 152–161. 26. Cited in ibid., 154. 27. Ibid., 153. 28. see David Lavery and Sara Lewis Dunne, Seinfeld, Master of Its Domain: Revisiting Television’s Greatest Sitcom (New York: 2006), 52; Aaron Kerner, Film and the Holocaust: New Perspectives on Dramas, Documentaries, and Experimental Films (New York: 2011), 80–81. 29. In a recently published volume, Edward Portnoy examines how Anne Frank has become a comedic trope. See Portnoy, “Anne Frank on Crank: Comic Anxieties,” in Anne Frank Unbound: Media, Imagination, Memory, ed. Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett and Jeffrey Shandler (Bloomington: 2012). 30. Dvir Abramovich, “No Laughing Matter,” Australian Jewish News (29 November 2009) (citations from the Australian Jewish News also available online). 31. Dvir Abramovich, “Exploiting the Holocaust,” The Age (1 July 2010) (online at theage.com.au). 32. David Kupfer, “Safran Not Funny,” Australian Jewish News (13 November 2009). 33. David Cashrein, “Not Funny, Just Vulgar,” and Noah Levin, “Shameful ABC,” Australian Jewish News (30 October 2009). 34. the foreskin reattachment sketch may have been an allusion to Agneiszka Hollande’s 1990 film, Europa Europa. 35. Julie Szego, “Standing Up for Safran,” Australian Jewish News (18 December 2009). 36. [Jewin’ the Fat], “Safran Pushes the Boundaries,” Galus Australis (online journal) (26 October 2009). 37. For example, in January 2011, Safran headlined a feature in which the newspaper asked prominent Australian Jewish personalities what was on their summer reading list. See “Summer Reading Hits and 1Misses,” Australian Jewish News (11 January 2011). His true crime book also received a positive review in the newspaper: see Timna Jacks, “Safran’s ‘Truman Capote’ Moment,” Australian Jewish News (31 October 2013). 38. Jacks, “Safran’s ‘Truman Capote’ Moment.” 39. In his earlier series, John Safran vs God, Safran made light of the common Jewish practice of boycotting German goods. In Race Relations, he also lampoons the Holocaust denier David Irving, making him look like a buffoon in a radio interview. For the latter, see youtube.com/watch?v=0rBCst4hph0 (accessed 12 January 2015). Apart from Safran, stand-up comic Austen Tayshus (stage name of Sandy Gutman) has used Holocaust jokes as part of his act for decades. See Ross Fitzgerald and Rick Murphy, Austen Tayshus: Merchant of Menace (McMahons Point, N.S.W: 2011). 40. Korman has posted the videos to her website, with an accompanying photo gallery. See Jane Korman, “Dancing Auschwitz,” online at janekormanart.com/janekormanart.com/16. Dancing_Auschwitz/16.Dancing_Auschwitz.html (accessed 4 January 2015). Because of a copyright infringement, Korman was required to remove the soundtrack of the song “I Will Survive.” 41. A list of Korman’s exhibitions and awards can be found online at janekormanart.com/ janekormanart.com/About.html (accessed 4 January 2015). Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic 227

42. Hugh Collins, “Dancing Holocaust Survivor at Auschwitz Sparks Debate,” AOL News (17 July 2010) [link no longer available]. 43. Jane Korman, “The Controversy,” Jane Korman ART, janekormanart.com/janekormanart .com/The_Controversy.html (accessed 4 January 2015). 44. Sarah Blacher Cohen, “Introduction: The Varieties of Jewish Humor,” in idem (ed.), Jewish Wry: Essays on Jewish Humor (Detroit: 1990), 4, 13. 45. Louis Kaplan, “ ‘It Will Get a TerrificL augh’: On the Problematic Pleasures and Politics of Holocaust Humor,” in Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture, ed. Henry Jenkins, Tara McPherson, and Jane Shattuc (Durham: 2002), 353. 46. Ibid., 352. 47. This outlook is criticized by Jacob Rosenberg, a Holocaust survivor who is also an acclaimed memoirist. See his Sunrise West (Blackheath, NSW: 2007), 153. 48. Danny Katz, “The Shortest Sweetest Holocaust Movie,” The Age (22 July 2010). 49. Andrew Bolt, “Dance, and Damn Them,” Herald Sun (14 July 2010). 50. Wayne Flower, “Dance Video Fury: Holocaust Survivor’s Bizarre YouTube Act,” Herald Sun (14 July 2010). 51. “Outrage at Melbourne Artist Jane Korman’s ‘I Will Survive’ Dance at Polish Death Camp,” The Australian, 14 July 2010, online at theaustralian.com.au/archive/news/outrage- over-melbourne-artist-jane-kormans-i-will-survive-dance-at-polish-death-camp/story- e6frg6of-1225891392172 (accessed 18 April 2015). 52. Helen Leperere, “Dancing on the Graves of Our Martyrs,” Australian Jewish News, (4 December 2009). 53. Helen Leperere, “Dancing on the Graves of Holocaust Victims,” Australian Jewish News (22 July 2010). 54. Ingrid Weinberg, “Nothing Glorious about Gloria at Auschwitz,” Australian Jewish News (4 December 2009). 55. “Dirty Dancing,” Australian Jewish News (16 July 2010). 56. Debbie Masel, “Don’t Condemn Jane Korman’s Auschwitz Art,” Australian Jewish News (11 December 2009). 57. sam Laser, “Dancing on the Graves of Nazis,” Australian Jewish News (29 July 2010). (According to the popular joke: “They tried to kill us. We survived. Let’s eat!”). 58. Avril Alba, “Desecration or Celebration,” Australian Jewish News (23 July 2010). I thank the author for sharing a copy of the article. 59. Kertész, “Who Owns Auschwitz?” 267. 60. For background on Leunig, see Roman Rosenbaum, “Australia and Symbolic Rep resentation in the ‘Cartoon Controversy,’ ” International Journal of Comic Art 9, no. 1 (2007), 468–471. 61. “Lost Leunig,” Media1 Watch (6 May 2002), transcript available at abc.net.au/medi- awatch/transcripts/060502_s5.htm (accessed 24 April 2015). 62. Michael Gawenda, American Notebook: A Personal and Political Journey (Carlton, VIC: 2007), 160. 63. ra, “Anti-Semitism and the Media—An Interview with Michael Gawenda,” Galus Australis (4 November 2009). 64. Cartoonist Art Spiegelman provides valuable commentary on the Danish contest and the cartoons that were entered. See his article “Drawing Blood: Outrageous Cartoons and the Art of Outrage,” Harper’s Magazine (June 2006), 43–52. 65. Justin Norrie, “Chaser Behind Leunig Stunt,” The Age (16 February 2006). 66. Michael Leunig, interviewed by Andrew Denton, “Enough Rope” (television broadcast), Australian Broadcasting Corporation (8 May 2006), transcript available at abc.net.au/tv/ enoughrope/transcripts/s1632918.htm (accessed 27 April 2015). 67. There are several reported versions of Niemoller’s poem; the text quoted above is reportedly from the version officially approved by Niemoller’s wife for publication. See Trudy Gold, Rudy Kennedy, Trude Levi, and Frank Reiss, “The Survivors’ Right to Reply,” in The Holocaust and the Moving Image: Representations in Film and Television since 1933, ed. Toby Haggith and Joanna Newman (London: 2005), 254. 228 David Slucki

68. Michael Leunig, “First They Came . . . ,” Leunig (21 November 2012); the cartoon can be seen online at leunig.com.au/cartoons/recent-cartoons (accessed 8 April 2015). 69. Michael Leunig, “Just a Cartoonist with a Moral Duty to Speak,” The Age (11 December 2012). 70. “The ADC Slams Leunig Cartoon,” J-Wire (21 November 2012), jwire.com.au/30003/ (accessed 25 April 2015). 71. Dvir Abramovich, “Comparing Nazis to Israel is Unacceptable,” The Australian (12 December 2012). 72. Colin Rubenstein, “Analogy Is Offensive,” Sydney Morning Herald (3 December 2012). 73. nick Dyrenfurth, “Leunig, Your Provocative Use of Nazi Analogies Is So Tiresome,” The Age (14 December 2012). 74. emily Gian, Twitter post (22 November 2012, 9:49 p.m.), online at twitter.com/emily- gian/status/271626366330482688 (accessed 27 April 2015). 75. Anthony Frosh, “Michael Leunig Hangs Himself,” Galus Australis (11 December 2012). 76. Wilbur, “Leunig Comes for the Jews” (21 November 2012), online at theblankpagesoftheage .blogspot.com/2012/11/leunig-comes-for-jews.html; idem, “Comparing Nazis to Israelis is Unacceptable (except at Fairfax Media and in anti-Semitic circles)” (12 December 2012), online at theblankpagesoftheage.blogspot.com/2012/12/comparing-nazis-to-israelis-is.html (accessed 27 April 2015); idem, “A Cartoonist’s Immoral Duty to Fire Missiles at the Jews” (11 December 2012), online at theblankpagesoftheage.blogspot.com/2012/12/a-cartoonists- immoral-duty-to-fire.html (all articles accessed 27April 2015). 77. James Kennard, Facebook post (30 July 2014), online at facebook.com/RabbiJamesKennard/ posts/581978871919895 (accessed 27 April 2015). 78. See “An Anti-Semitic Response to the Israel-Hamas War” (22 July 2014), online at ohpi.org.au/an-antisemitic-response-to-the-hamas-israel-war (accessed 27 April 2015); Pam Hopf, “Leunig Slams Jews—and Lycra!” (15 September 2013), online at jewsdownunder. com/2013/09/15/leunig-slams-jews-and-lycra-3 (accessed 27 April 2015). 79. “B’nai B’rith Praises Anti-Defamation Commission’s Response to Anti-Semitic Cartoon,” B’nai B’rith International (12 December 2012). 80. Pesach Benson, “2012 Dishonest Reporting Awards” (17 December 2012), online at honestreporting.com/2012-dishonest-reporting-awards/#Leunig (accessed 27 April 2015). 81. Tobybee, “Comparisons” (14 December 2012), online at jewonthis.wordpress.com/ 2012/12/14/comparisons/ (accessed 25 April 2015). 82. Haydon Manning and Robert Phiddian, “The Political Cartoonist and the Editor,” Pacific Journalism Review 11, no. 2 (2005), 127–128. 83. Art Spiegelman, “Drawing Blood,” 46. 84. Democracy Now, “ ‘Cartoonist Lives Matter’: Art Spiegelman Responds to Charlie Hebdo Attack, Power of Cartoons,”1 Democracy Now: A Daily Independent Global News Hour (8 January 2015), online at democracynow.org/blog/2015/1/8/cartoonists_lives_matter_art_ spiegelman_responds (accessed 28 April 2015). 85. spiegelman, “Drawing Blood,” 45. 86. Ibid., 45. 87. Des Pres, “Holocaust Laughter?” in Writing and the Holocaust, ed. Berel Lang (New York: 1988), 231. 88. Matt Schiavenza, “The Hypocrisy of Iran’s Holocaust Cartoon Contest,” The Atlantic (31 January 2015). 89. Emily Dunn and Ellie Harvey, “Kyle’s Big Mouth in Nasty Relapse,” The Sydney Morning Herald (9 September 2009), 3. 90. rachel Baxendale, “Pyne’s Hitler Crack ‘Offensive’—Election 2013,” The Australian (4 February 2013). 91. see Latika Bourke, “Tony Abbott Accuses Labor of Causing a ‘Holocaust of Jobs,’ ” Sydney Morning Herald (12 February 2015); Lisa Cox, “Tony Abbott calls Bill Shorten the ‘Dr. Goebbels of Economic Policy,’ ” Sydney Morning Herald (20 March 2015). 92. triple J has not posted the podcast of that segment, but reports about it are available in the Australian Jewish News and on the music news website Faster Louder. See Gareth Making Out in Anne Frank’s Attic 229

Narunsky, “Triple J Host Forced to Apologise,” Australian Jewish News (16 August 2012); Darren Levin, “Tom Ballard ‘Sorry’ for Hitler Gag,” Faster Louder (10 August 2013), online at fasterlouder.com.au/news/local/33402/Tom-Ballard-sorry-for-Hitler-gag (accessed 15 February 2015). 93. A total of 41 comments were recorded. Generally speaking, threads on the message board tend to get one or two comments and very rarely a few more than that. See “Discussion: Triple J Holocaust Joke Sickening,” online at www2b.abc.net.au/tmb/Client/Message.aspx?b=3& m=556337&ps=50&dm=1&pd=3 (accessed 6 January 2015). 94. Jeremy, Twitter post (8 August 2012, 3.43 p.m.), online at https://twitter.com/jeremyengy (accessed 12 January 2015). 95. Tom Ballard, Twitter posts (8 August 2012, 6.10 p.m.), online at twitter.com/ TomCBallard/status/233380176493424641 and 233415043268616192. 96. the Facebook page was not accessible as of January 2015. 97. Ballard apologized as follows: “I’m very sorry that on my breakfast radio program, I offended and upset a lot of people. That’s not what I like doing; I like making people laugh and I like making people happy. I never set out to vindictively offend or belittle anyone or any group with my comedy, that’s not what I’m about. See “Triple J Apologises for Breakfast Comments,” online at abc.net.au/triplej/musicnews/s3565105.htm#.UQto1h1lmDp (accessed 8 February 2016). 98. Dvir Abramovich, “Triple J Holocaust Joke Sickening,” The Age (10 August 2012). 99. Abramovich’s article was circulated around Twitter—mostly by those supporting his view—and ironically gave the segment a great deal more exposure than it would otherwise have received. For instances of the article being sent around Twitter, see topsy.com/www.theage .com.au/opinion/society-and-culture/triplej-holocaust-joke-sickening-20120810-23yem.html (accessed 13 January 2015). 100. Ben Pobjie, “Defending Holocaust Humour: My Fool’s Errand,” The Sydney Morning Herald (10 August 2012). 101. Anthony Frosh, “Triple J Incident Unearths Need for Holocaust Education Revamp,” Galus Australis (15 August 2012). 102. Malki Rose, “Educating the Dumb, Drunk, and Racist,” Galus Australis (24 August 2012). 103. Jonno Seidler, “You’re No Larry David: Why Tom and Alex’s Holocaust Joke Really Isn’t Funny,” The Vine (10 August 2012). 104. Christie Davies, “Ethnic Jokes, Moral Values, and Social Boundaries,” The British Journal of Sociology 33, no. 3 (September 1982), 384. 105. Moira Smith, “Humor, Unlaughter, and Boundary Maintenance,” The Journal of American Folklore 122, no. 484 (2009), 151. 106. Sigmund Freud, The1 Joke and Its Relation to the Unconscious, trans. Joyce Crick (London: 2002 [1905]), 108–111.