Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Breaking News

Art Spiegelman Blasts ‘Racist’ Pamela Geller Group

Art Spiegelman, the cartoonist best known for his “Maus” graphic novel about the Holocaust, called the group that sponsored a contest in Texas for cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed a “racist organization.”

Two gunmen attempted to shoot participants at the suburban Dallas cartoon contest Sunday, but police stopped them, killing the assailants in the process. Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has claimed responsibility for the Sunday attack.

In an interview with Time about an award the PEN writers’ group gave France’s Charlie Hebdo magazine in defiance of protests by some PEN members, Spiegelman said the American Freedom Defense Initiative, founded and led by New York-based blogger Pamela Geller, is “exactly the nightmare version that the writers who were protesting the PEN award thought Charlie was.”

In January, two gunmen stormed Charlie Hebdo’s Paris office, killing 11 people and injuring 11 others. The Charlie Hebdo shooting occurred three days before another gunman held shoppers hostage at the Hyper Cacher kosher supermarket, killing four.

Geller, Spiegelman said, “is intentionally trying to start war of culture with Islam by saying that all Muslims are terrorists under the surface, and we’re going to prove it.”

In addition to the cartoon contest, Geller’s group has also put out controversial anti-Muslim ads on public transportation in several U.S. cities.

While noting that Geller and her organization deserve free-speech protection, it does not,unlike Charlie Hebdo, deserve a “courage award.”

Spiegelman’s “Maus” was recently pulled from Russian booksellers because it features a swastika on the cover.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.