Author says US publisher nixed Holocaust book after he refused to condemn Israel

Dr. Rafael Medoff says editor at Dark Horse Comics demanded book on Nazi genocide include anti-Israel genocide charges

By Luke Tress

You will receive email alerts from this author.

Manage alert preferences on your profile page

You will no longer receive email alerts from this author.

Manage alert preferences on your profile page

Today, 11:45 pm

Edit

Luke Tress is The Times of Israel's New York correspondent.

A US publisher canceled a book about the Holocaust because the author refused to add text denouncing Israel to the book, the StandWithUS advocacy group said this week.

Dark Horse Comics was scheduled to publish the book, “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust,” by Dr. Rafael Medoff, this summer, but informed the author’s team last month that publication had been canceled.

The book uses 150 editorial cartoons that had been printed in US newspapers in the Nazi era, alongside commentary from Medoff, to show what Americans knew about the Holocaust at the time.

An editor at Dark Horse last year told Medoff that he would add a statement to the book accusing US President Donald Trump of “attempting to create concentration camp-style prisons,” among other offenses, according to correspondence shared by StandWithUs.

The proposed addition also included a paragraph condemning Israel.

Get The Times of Israel's Daily Edition

by email and never miss our top stories

By signing up, you agree to the terms

“A country populated by a [sic.] ethnoreligious group who were immorally and horrifically tortured and killed in the Holocaust for their ethnicity is led by a Prime Minister that the world’s top war crimes court has issued warrants for his alleged acts of war crimes an [sic.] crimes against humanity,” the paragraph said.

In a response emailed to the editor, Medoff pushed back against “politicizing our book” and called the claims “factually inaccurate.”

The email also said that, during a phone conversation, the editor had demanded Medoff accuse Israel of genocide in the book’s introduction to prevent people from getting “mad.”

Medoff said the editor’s proposals amounted to minimizing the Nazi genocide and Holocaust inversion.

“What you are saying, in plain English, is that the Jews were victims of the Holocaust and now the Jews are committing another Holocaust,” Medoff wrote. “I understand it has become fashionable in certain circles today to accuse Israel of mass murder. But being fashionable is not the same as being right.”

Dark Horse had previously published two books by Medoff, both of which came out before the October 7, 2023, Hamas onslaught and the ensuing war in Gaza and across the Middle East.

The editor, Craig Yoe, told The New York Post that there were “a number of errors” in Medoff’s description of the dispute, without providing further details, and Dark Horse declined to comment.

If you’d like to comment, join

The Times of Israel Community.