A United Nations postage stamp depicting a trio of black-coated, bearded thieves with pointy noses, carrying bags of loot away from a burning building, has been assailed by the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith for its resemblance to anti-Semitic caricatures popularized during the Nazi-era.
The stamp, one of a series of six intended to recognize the U.N.’s program of crime prevention, was issued in Geneva last month and is to be issued here on Thursday.
In the last week, an anonymous mailing was apparently sent to thousands of Jews and Jewish organizations in the United States and Europe. The mailing contained a flier urging recipients to “alarm your community” about what was called “a Nazi-like caricature of Jews as thieves.”
The flier portrayed a blowup of the stamp that appeared to give the thieves even pointier noses, darker beards and more sinister eyes than were on the actual stamp.
ADL officials asked for a recall of the stamp last week at a meeting with U.N. Postal Administration chief Anthony Fouracre.
Justin Finger, ADL associate national director, told Fouracre that “we have no evidence that these (thieves) were intended by the artist to be Jews, nor do we impugn the motives of your office. Nevertheless, the troubling resemblance to historic anti-Semitic material has struck a chord throughout the international Jewish community.”
Finger, referring to the stamp’s burning building, added that “there is also a tradition of stereotyping Jews as arsonists.”
FAGIN-LIKE CHARACTERS
Fouracre said that his graphics department did an analysis of the anonymous flier and determined that “it was heavily adulterated to change the integrity and quality of the artwork from a playful, Rousseau-like rendering to something more sinister and foreboding, and that was never the intention of the artist.”
The stamp series, designed by Josef Ryzec of Czechoslovakia, was said by the United Nations to display “a folkloric style that has overtones of slightly sinister humor.”
But a French-language newspaper in Geneva said that the thieves evoked the “Oliver Twist” character of Fagin, a mean-spirited Jew who turns homeless orphans into pickpockets and con artists.
ADL described the thieves as “bearing a disturbing and uncomfortable resemblance to caricatures of religiously garbed Jews.”
Yet others say the stamp’s depiction is considerably different from stereotypes of religious Jews. For example, one of the thieves on the stamp has red hair and a red beard, colors not associated with European Jewish racial images. Because the flier was printed only in black, the color of the red beard was not apparent.
On the actual stamp, the thieves are wearing striped pants, black frock coats and stovepipe top hats, attire that is also not particularly associated with those Hasidic Jews whose attire was caricatured by the Nazis.
All the stamps in the series, not just the one in question, depict pre-20th-century attire, when such pants, hats and coats were the style of the day.
Fouracre, a native of England, said anti-Semitism in any form is “totally repugnant,” and he “seriously considered not releasing the stamp,” as a courtesy to Jewish sensitivities.
But he said that since some 100,000 of the stamps have already been released in Europe, to bar their release in New York would simply make the stamps already in the public domain an instant collector’s item, creating more publicity and value for the stamp than anyone wanted.
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The Archive of the Jewish Telegraphic Agency includes articles published from 1923 to 2008. Archive stories reflect the journalistic standards and practices of the time they were published.
