Ewa Stańczyk’s Cartoons and Antisemitism: Visual Politics of Interwar Poland (Jackson, MI: The University Press of Mississippi, 2024) explores visual antisemitism through the biographical approach, focusing on more than fifteen Jewish and non-Jewish artists, editors, and publishers. Stańczyk argues that although antisemitic caricature has been often seen as an expression of germinating fears around modernity, its prominence owed much to the distinct communities that produced it. The book shows that the intensification of both the antisemitic cartoon and the leftist drawings that opposed it coincided with the emergence of a new generation of illustrators, most of them born in the early 1900s, and a professionalization of the satirical print media that provided them with a platform to showcase their individual drawing styles and value systems. As it scrutinizes the motivations that drove the producers of such portrayals and discusses the networks of artists, writers, editors, publishers, and other commentators of the day, this book is one of the first studies to de-anonymize the people behind the antisemitic and anti-antisemitic caricature prior to the Holocaust.

Nina Viršíková’s "Soft" Antisemitism? Cartoons and the Decline of Democracy in Interwar Czechoslovakia (PhD Thesis, in progress) challenges the common assumption that antisemitic cartoons are the sole domain of authoritarian regimes. This research inquiries into how the presumably politically moderate forces used caricature to pursue a political agenda that was essentially discriminatory and anti-democratic. The project posits that while attempting to entertain and divert the society, Czechoslovak illustrators defied the liberal order by normalizing prejudice and condoning anti-Jewish sentiment. The insights from this project provide historical grounding for the topical discussions surrounding the revival of antisemitism in contemporary democratic societies as well as raising wider questions about the visual portrayals of other ethnic and religious groups in Europe’s multicultural states.

This research is funded by the Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange NAWA (Polonista Grant, 2022-2023) and Dutch Research Council NWO (Open Competition M Grant, 2023-2028).