Yaakov Kirschen, Political Analyst, Yale Fellow, Blogger, and Dry Bones Cartoonist.
Kirschen was born in Brooklyn NY in 1938. He studied art at Queens College and became a cartoonist after he graduated in 1961.
In 1971 he moved to Israel, changed his first name from Jerry to Yaakov, and in 1973 began drawing a daily editorial strip called Dry Bones, which has become internationally syndicated and is known as Israel’s Political Comic Strip. Kirschen is a member of both America’s National Cartoonists Society and the Israeli Cartoonists Society.
He has, in parallel with his career as a cartoonist, been an innovative computer game designer and inventor. His company LKP ltd. has done work for major computer and game companies both in Israel and in the U.S.
In 2009, Dry Bones cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen was made a “visiting fellow” and “artist in residence” of Yale University’s Initiative for the Interdisciplinary Study of Antisemitism and Racism (YIISA).
In 2010, Yale published Kirschen’s ground-breaking working paper entitled “Memetics and the Viral Spread of Antisemitism through “Coded Images in Political Cartoons”. The paper identifies antisemitism as a behavioral virus, isolates its three viral strains, and reveals its use by totalitarian movements in their attempts to conquer the West.
In October of 2010 Kirschen presented his revolutionary findings at Yale in a presentation called “Secret Codes, Hidden War”. The “Hidden War” is the war against free and Democratic societies. The “Secret Codes” are the codified and virally spread anti Jewish libels used in that war. The presence of these codes in political cartoons should be seen as symptoms of a deeper sickness.
He writes a Dry Bones Blog which he started in 2005 dedicated to combating the willful rewriting of history and fighting the spread of antisemitism.
