Up Front

Tooning Out Racism

With little more than the belief that they could fight racism, 26 local students recently produced a series of animated public service announcements (PSAs) they hope will chip away at stereotypes and prejudice. Most participants had no previous animation training, just a desire to make a difference. In a marathon six-hour session, the youth developed their concepts, learned basic animation techniques, and made more than 1,200 individual drawings for the 30-second spots.

The result is four animated, non-verbal PSAs with mottos like "Don’t Hate, Communicate," "Dance Out Racism," "We Are One World," and "In a Colorblind World, Race Doesn’t Matter."

The workshop, Tooning Out Racism, was run by youTHink, a program of the Jewish Community Center of Greater Los Angeles’ Zimmer Children’s Museum and the Center for American Studies and Culture. The youTHink Student Organization unites youth around the city in social justice and community involvement activities. Guiding the session were mentor artists from AnimAction, an organization that teaches animation to young people. The free program was largely funded by Los Angeles City Councilman Jack Weiss’ office and efforts are underway to run the PSAs locally.

In a PSA titled "Undermining Hate," a group of different-colored miners "look around and think, ‘I don’t like that person because they’re that color,’" according to one of the PSA’s creators, Fairfax High School 10th-grader Kayl Harrell. "When they come out of the mine [they’re covered in soot] and are all the same color. They don’t know who’s who. So at the end of the day, everybody’s the same."

In "People Are Weird," two dogs are confused when their owners get into a fistfight over racial differences. Christina Menifee, a ninth-grader from City Honors High School in Inglewood explained that dogs are colorblind. "So if you see people fighting for no reason, you think either they’re weird, or they’re missing a couple of screws," she said. "To break down racial barriers and stop tension and animosity, we have to see beneath the surface."

Daphne Ferreiro, a fifth-grader at La Crescenta Elementary School in Glendale, summed it up well: "We’re trying to show that we’re all the same inside, but we might look different." – By Melissa Minkin

Israelis Change Travel Plans

Israelis are avoiding travel to certain countries because of world reaction to events in the Middle East. Around 31 percent of the respondents said they would not travel to Turkey, 27 percent said they would stay away from France, 26 percent ruled out Austria and 22 percent said they would not visit Switzerland, according to a recent survey by the ISSTA Lines travel agency. Some 78 percent of respondents chose the United States as their favored destination. — Jewish Telegraphic Agency