This cartoon from the University of Arizona’s student paper caused a big stir out there last month. In case you can’t read it, the “No Relation” sketch by staffer Joseph Topmiller depicted a restaurant credit card slip with a 7 percent tip from a Mark Goldfarb and this note beneath:
“Attention all crappy-tipping Jews!!! Just because youâre âscrewingâ the server … does not mean that itâs a mitzvah.”
The paper eventually apologized for the cartoon, but the response from the student body was mixed—many felt it was anti-Semitic; others that Topmiller had the First Amendment right to be a bigot; and some thought he was right.
Topmiller, who was soon fired and then rehired over the cartoon he thought was clever, emerged in the Tucson Weekly this month playing the victim.
“I was called so many names,” Topmiller says. It was ironic to Topmiller when people started calling him homophobic, considering he is gay—with a nice Jewish boyfriend, no less.
“But that’s the one thing I haven’t done: I haven’t called anyone names in my comic. I take certain stereotypes and certain situations and bring up something completely unrelated to (them). That’s what the title was based on. And I thought it made people think.”
To be fair, Topmiller’s previous cartoons “took shots at Mormons, the LBGT community and even quadriplegics,” which got him fired from the Daily Wildcat once before. But regardless of whether Topmiller meant to perpetuate an anti-Semitic stereotype or is just really naive, that is one crappy cartoon.
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