'Dry Bones' cartoonist Yaakov Kirschen helped Jews to love our faults, not just heroics - opinion

I grew up on Mad magazine, unaware how Jewish it was – in its writers and sensibility. It just was funny, satirizing daily life, Hollywood, Madison Avenue, the Cold War, and politicians, Left to Right.

Starting in 1973, thanks to The Jerusalem Post, Yaakov Kirschen, the “Mad” Zionist, applied that screwball approach to the greatest adventure in Jewish life, Israel. Through his “Dry Bones” cartoon, Kirschen, who died Monday at age 87, kept resurrecting our spirits by laughing at our enemies – and ourselves.

Writhing in post-October 7 trauma, we forget how fragile, primitive, and unlivable 1970s Israel was. It was the unpromising promised country of endless strikes, abusive taxes, and unbearable bureaucrats.

Moreover, the shock of the 1973 Yom Kippur War, 10 months after Kirschen started drawing “Dry Bones,” followed by waves of Palestinian terrorism that made them popular and us unpopular, demoralized us – leaving Jews feeling betrayed worldwide.

True, Prime Minister Golda Meir had a Jewish wit. Her truisms remain devastatingly accurate: that our “secret weapon,” is having nowhere else to go; and that if Arabs holstered their weapons, we’d have peace, but if we holstered our weapons, they’d slaughter us.