Charlie Hebdo Caricature by Israeli Artist Nixed From Tel Aviv Exhibit

Image by Screen Shot

By JTA January 11, 2016

JERUSALEM — An Israeli artist’s caricature marking the one-year anniversary of the Charlie Hebdo terror attack in Paris was removed from a Tel Aviv exhibit.

Also, another Israeli artist had his caricature censored in the monthlong exhibit titled “Apres Charlie” (“After Charlie”) at the French Institute.

The French Embassy in Tel Aviv expressed concern over how the two works portrayed the Muslim Prophet Muhammad, the Israeli business daily Globes reported Sunday.

A work by Vladik Sandler showing the prophet posing as a nude model for the five cartoonists murdered in the Jan. 7, 2015 attack was removed from the exhibit, according to Globes. A work by Roy Friedler was censored, with a sticker placed over the caricature of Muhammad.

“The conclusions and calculations of winners and losers, people can do for themselves,” Sandler wrote on Facebook about the removal of his piece, according to the Times of Israel. “But I have been left with a feeling of terrible sourness that those people, whose only crime was dark humor, died for naught and that any symbolic heritage that they might have wanted to leave behind — has gone to the trash or is hiding behind red stickers of censorship.”

The attack by Islamists on Charlie Hebdo, a satirical magazine, killed 11 staff members.

The Forward is free to read, but it isn’t free to produce

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward.

Now more than ever, American Jews need independent news they can trust, with reporting driven by truth, not ideology. We serve you, not any ideological agenda.

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. We’ve started our Passover Fundraising Drive, and we need 1,800 readers like you to step up to support the Forward by April 21. Members of the Forward board are even matching the first 1,000 gifts, up to $70,000.

This is a great time to support independent Jewish journalism, because every dollar goes twice as far.

— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO