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No big deal, just the second-largest newspaper in French Canada caricaturing Jews as vampires. lapresse.ca/actualites/car…
The Jew as vampire is one of the deepest myths of western culture. The 1922 film Nosferatu that inspired the La Presse cartoon also inspired Nazi cartoonists of the Third Reich anumuseum.org.il/blog/myth-vamp…
La Presse has removed the image, here's a screen shot. It substitutes Benjamin Netanyahu's face in an iconic still from the 1922 movie, Nosferatu. That film was riddled with antisemitic images and themes and directly inspired antisemitic cartoons in the Nazi press of the 1920s and 1930s.
Did the cartoonist at La Presse know any of this history? Perhaps not. He wanted to draw a nasty caricature of Netanyahu. He might have invented a device of his own. Instead, he recycled the powerful image already present in his mind, waiting for him: the Jew as bloodsucker.
That's how antisemitism often works. A rich inventory of anti-Jewish images and themes pre-exists: the Jew as bloodsucker, the Jew as child-killer, the Jew as alien enemy. When a user wants to vent rage or dislike ... the resource accumulated over centuries is waiting for him.
The user of antisemitic images may not acknowledge anti-Jewish feelings in himself. He may exempt the Jews he personally knows. He unthinkingly uses a weapon prepared for his hand, unaware of - or indifferent to - who prepared it for him, and how, and why.
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