(JTA) – Officials in Rochester, New York, this week condemned a cartoon depicting the head of the local Jewish federation and the Jewish majority leader of the county legislature in crude antisemitic caricatures that was sent out in a mass mailer.
The cartoon appeared to object to an Israeli flag that has flown outside a county government office since shortly after the Oct. 7 Hamas terror attack. It also came as the Rochester City Council was debating a resolution to endorse a ceasefire in Israel and the Gaza Strip, which it passed late Friday.
“This type of unacceptable and ugly behavior must be called out each and every time it happens,” Michael Yudelson, the Jewish majority leader of the Monroe County legislature and one of the figures depicted in the cartoon, said in a statement signed by 25 out of 27 members of the county legislature.
“We can not normalize actions by those who seek to divide the community rather than find common ground,” added Yudelson, who is also executive director of Temple B’rith Kodesh, a Reform synagogue in the suburb of Brighton. “We all pray for an end to the loss of life in the region. However, this blatant antisemitism cannot be allowed to stand.”
Meredith Dragon, the CEO of the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester and the primary target of the cartoon, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that the cartoon was “really, really problematic.”
Sent to local leaders on March 12 and leaked to social media this week, the cartoon depicts Dragon in a dominatrix outfit adorned with the Israeli flag. Next to her, Yudelson is depicted holding a brand emblazoned with the logo of the Jewish Federations of North America.
The two are depicted as controlling county executive Adam Bello and threatening to “get the ADL involved” if the Israeli flags are removed from the county legislature building. The “ADL” is an apparent reference to the Anti-Defamation League, the Jewish civil rights organization that opposes antisemitic and anti-Israel activity.
The text of the mailer accompanying the cartoon, most of which argued for the Israeli flag’s removal, also included language that appeared to justify the Oct. 7 attack. “The October 7th attack was despicable… but also well-earned thanks to Israel’s decision to solve the ‘Palestinian Question’ with state terror and apartheid,” it reads.
The letter goes on to say that flying the Israeli flag for a week or a month after Oct. 7 was “entirely comprehensible,” but to continue flying it six months later “is simply to engage in propaganda on behalf of our nation’s most conspicuous vassal state.” The letter-writer compared the act to flying a Confederate flag.
The mailers were unsigned, but Jason Yungbluth, a local cartoonist who has drawn for MAD Magazine, later took credit for the cartoon and the text. On his website, Yungbluth said he sent them “to do my small part as an American to help end the Gaza Genocide,” and that he was inspired after attending a rally against the flags hosted by the local Green Party. He described Dragon as a “local flag hag” who heads “a Rochester-based Israeli pressure group who supplies the flags to the county.”
He added logos for the local Green Party and the Party for Socialism & Liberation to the mailer; those party leaders have since said they did not authorize the mailer and condemned it. Rochester’s Green Party has also been vocal about wanting to remove the flag, calling it “genocidal.”
Dragon said she objected not just to the cartoon’s use of antisemitic tropes, but also to its crude nature.
“The antisemitism is bad enough, but the sexualization of it is incredibly degrading,” Dragon said about the cartoon. “As a woman, as a professional, it’s gross.”
Dragon also said that neither she nor the federation ever asked the county executive to fly the Israeli flag. Instead, she said, the executive reached out to her shortly after Oct. 7 to ask if the federation had one they could fly. The county then flew the federation’s flag for the next two months, until local activists ripped it down in December and destroyed it; the county then procured another flag, and then another after the second one was torn down a few weeks ago.
“The county executive flew the flag because they chose to fly the flag,” Dragon said, adding that the cartoon “calls on the trope of Jews having power and control, and it makes me look like I have some sort of power and control over the county executive, which obviously I don’t. And it’s his choice.”
The national federations umbrella group also spoke out against the cartoon’s targeting of Dragon. (The group sent the mailer, including the cartoon, to reporters as part of its advocacy.)
“These appalling images rely on the kinds of antisemitic tropes that were commonplace in cartoons in Nazi Germany,” Evan Bernstein, vice president of community relations for JFNA, said in a statement. “We cannot allow this pernicious antisemitism to become normalized and pervade our civic spaces.”
Monroe County is far from the only local government to have flown the Israeli flag since the Oct. 7 attacks. The length of time it has left the flag up is more unusual, but the county executive’s office also flies flags from other countries.
In his own statement, Bello defended the county legislature flying the flag. “We fly the flag of Israel as a symbol of support for those viciously attacked, murdered and taken hostage on October 7, 2023,” he wrote, saying the cartoon and letter “demonstrate a level of enmity and evil that has no place in our community.”
Dragon and the federation had campaigned against a ceasefire resolution that went before the Rochester City Council this week, writing on Facebook, “The City of Rochester has no place in international matters.”
The federation also called the resolution antisemitic. “We all want the conflict to end – with Hamas defeated and all hostages returned,” the statement reads. “The problem is that this resolution demonizes Israel, and legitimizes support for Hamas – a terrorist organization. A ceasefire would not help Israelis or Palestinians–only terrorists.”
Dragon told JTA that, because the federation never advocated for the Israeli flag to be flown locally, she viewed its stance on the ceasefire resolution as compatible. “Had we gone to Monroe County and said, ‘Please fly the flag,’ and then we turned around to the city council to say, ‘Don’t sign a ceasefire resolution,’ that’s hypocritical,” she said.
After appearing to vote down the ceasefire resolution earlier in the week, the city council president signed onto two different “memorializing resolutions” Friday with similar wording, both calling for a permanent ceasefire. One references “Hamas’ brutal attack and capture of hostages on October 7th,” while the other refers in more general terms to “the October 7th attack by Hamas and the subsequent incursion by Israel into Gaza.”
Both also state, “The United States has spent billions of dollars on Israel’s military operations in Gaza for which there is no plausible military solution, and the continuation of military action will only make the humanitarian crisis in Gaza more dire, and further harm the Palestinian people.”
The council president, Miguel A. Meléndez Jr., said in a statement that he signed both resolutions because “I decided it was important to allow all councilmembers with a voice on the matter to move forward and to memorialize the language they prefer.” Together, the signatories on the two resolutions represent all nine city council members — a change from what Dragon said her conversations with the council had been on Tuesday, when some of them pledged not to sign onto any ceasefire resolution at all.
The author of the revised resolution that describes the Hamas attack as “brutal” is Mitch Gruber, the only Jewish member of the city council. Earlier in the week, Gruber had defended the first resolution — authored by Councilmember Stanley Martin — from charges of antisemitism.
“I think it’s very important to be clear, as the lone Jewish person on council, that I do not think what council member Martin put forward is in a bit, if there’s a shred of antisemitism in there,” Gruber said at the time. “And I don’t think there was ever an intent of there to be antisemitism.”
Speaking to JTA Monday, Gruber sought to clarify his comments.
After initially working with Martin on the first ceasefire resolution, he said, he abandoned the effort because he felt his colleague’s resolution “wasn’t tight or ideal language.” Among Gruber’s objections: the resolution did not specifically describe Hamas’ Oct. 7 attack as “brutal,” nor did it demarcate Israeli hostages being held by Hamas in Gaza from Palestinian political prisoners being held in Israel.
Even though Gruber felt he couldn’t support the resolution due to its language, he did not believe the language in question was antisemitic — and resented the fact that the local federation, led by Dragon, was distributing talking points labeling it as such in an effort to defeat the measure.
“Could there have been language that was more balanced, more thoughtful? Sure,” he told JTA. “But does that mean that people should come up and say this is a blatantly antisemitic document, because they got that from JFNA talking points? That, to me, is the point.”
So on Tuesday, even as Gruber decided not to support the resolution, he lashed out at the federation and the ADL for calling it antisemitic. “I want to be incredibly clear that I think the individuals who are arguing that it is antisemitic are taking talking points from the Anti-Defamation League, and the Jewish federation — not actually reading the language itself,” he told local outlets at the time.
As to why Gruber felt the need to criticize the Jewish organizations for their objections to a resolution that he also objected to, he told JTA, “I think that this is an incredibly important moment to call antisemitism what it is, and to not call antisemitism what it isn’t.”
Gruber said that, at the time, he didn’t know about the cartoon targeting Dragon, which he called “grotesque” and “deeply antisemitic and problematic.” Yungbluth initially sent the cartoon to county legislators, not city council members, and it was only just appearing on social media that day; it also dealt with the Israeli flag at the county office and did not mention the Rochester ceasefire resolution.
Both Gruber and the cartoonist, on the same day, accused both the federation and the ADL of maliciously labeling their opponents as antisemitic. But Gruber said their intentions were completely different.
Meanwhile, the first ceasefire resolution only mustered four of the council’s nine members as co-signers. Yet as the federation was declaring victory over defeating it, Gruber was working on his own resolution. This one was largely the same as the first, but inserted language he felt was more “specific” — which also happened to be more sympathetic to the Israeli and American Jewish narrative about Oct. 7, although he said this wasn’t his intention.
This second resolution garnered the other five members’ support. Yet in a last-minute twist that stunned both Gruber and the federation, the city council president, Miguel A. Meléndez, Jr., announced late Friday that he had signed both. The move caught the federation off guard: A Shabbat message Dragon sent out that day, recapping recent community events, didn’t mention the resolutions passing at all.
“We’re deeply disappointed that the city council reversed its position on the ceasefire resolutions,” Dragon told JTA Monday. “Passing both of these resolutions, on the heels of the cartoon and the letter that came out, really felt like a slap in the face.”
In a statement, Meléndez said he wanted to endorse language that would reflect the views of all nine council members.
Gruber wouldn’t comment on his feelings about Meléndez’s decision to sign both resolutions. But, he said, “It’s not the easiest thing to be on a deliberative body with eight other people.” He added, “I don’t think that the work that I did there was for naught.”
He added that he hoped to engage the federation in the future “to continue this dialogue.”
Update (3/25/24): This story has been updated with comment from Councilmember Mitch Gruber.
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