Also, while we’re talking context & antisemitism, there is in fact still a lot of context that would point someone to the reasonable (if, in this case, technically incorrect) assumption that a caricature of a guy with a hook nose and funny hat depicted among a coterie of villains behind a global threat in a transparently nationalistic propaganda cartoon glorifying the USSR might be an antisemitic caricature, not the least of which is the through-line of antisemitism that ran through the USSR, killing and displacing countless Jews for being too Jewish or too critical of the USSR’s persecution of Jews.
Case in point: Boris Yefimov (born Boris Fridlyand). the only way a Jew could get by in the USSR was to be like Boris: sure you can technically have Jewish ancestry, just don’t be religious or too Yiddish, erase any outward marker of your Jewishness, change your name from Fridlyand to something more Russian like Yefimov or Koltsov, continue to exercise slavish nationalistic loyalty to the state that allied with Hitler until it no longer could, continue to exercise slavish nationalistic loyalty even as it persecutes religious Jews, marginalizes Yiddish culture, purges & dissolves countless Jewish communities & organizations, and even murders your own brother (despite him doing all of the above for decades) the moment he criticizes its purges. and as his brother Mikhail Koltsov’s murder proved, even doing all of that often isn’t enough to save you the second you slip and fail to perform your mandated uncritical devotion.
Like, sorry, maybe the specific part of this picture showing a guy with a big nose & funny hat isn’t antisemitic, but the fact that it’s nationalistic propaganda whitewashing the Soviet empire’s long history of antisemitic atrocities & carrying water for a genocidal regime by portraying it as leading the heroic “Forces of Peace” isn’t any less antisemitic or atrocious because the tongue licking that kirza belongs to a dead Jew.
Also there’s something to be said about the antisemitism in this pattern of societies only allowing Jews who aren’t too Jewish, too ethnic or too religious, who are willing to shave off every aspect of Jewish identity that doesn’t serve their assimilation & prove they aren’t dually loyal rootless cosmopolitans with exceptional patriotism… only to suddenly discover their Jewishness the second they’re criticized for something potentially harmful to the Jewish community at large.
