Fuck that traitor.
The late Theodore Geisel wasn’t born Jewish, but he died as an honorary member of the tribe. In 1969 the mayor of Jerusalem, Teddy Kollek, awarded Dr. Seuss the title of “honorary Jew” for being an ally. Need a refresher? Kveller author Lela Casey writes that Dr. Seuss was public about his support for the Jews, and was possibly the first illustrator to “predict and denounce the fate of the Jewish people under Hitler.” Geisel’s most well-known gesture in this regard was his book, The Sneetches, in which the Star Belly Sneetches were marked with yellow stars to separate themselves from Plain Sneetches — an allusion to the yellow stars Jews were forced to wear during the Holocaust.
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Between 1941 and 1943, a decade before he published The Cat in the Hat, Seuss drew over 400 comics for the left-wing political magazine PM.
Seuss, of Jewish German descent and raised in Springfield, Massachusetts, was devastated by Adolf Hitler’s rise to power and similarly outraged by America’s initial ambivalence to it. “I think he just got mad,” Judith Morgan, coauthor of the book Dr. Seuss and Mr. Geisel, said in an interview with The Atlantic. “He saw the growing threat in Europe and thought the Americans were not paying attention.”
Drawing in his signature style of swooping trees with cloud-like leaves, Seuss lambasted Hitler and everything he stood for. In his cartoons he rendered the fascist dictator as a mad scientist, a trophy hunter, and a bureaucrat giving orders to the devil. Although somewhat childlike in their aesthetic, Seuss’ drawings tackled the most terrifying 20th-century issues plaguing Germany and beyond.
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