A book about the Holocaust was “canceled” after the author said he refused his editor’s insistence that the introduction include criticisms of Israel for committing “war crimes” in Gaza and the Trump-led US for creating “concentration-style prisons” for migrants.
Rafael Medoff, the author of the book “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust,” said he refused to publish what he believed were falsehoods editor Craig Yoe wanted to put in the book contracted to be published by Dark Horse.
Prior to the current controversy, Dark Horse published two of Dr. Medoff’s other books, “Whistleblowers” and “Cartoonists Against Racism” without incident.
It was only after the October 7, 2023, Hamas invasion of Israel that Yoe began demanding that Dr. Medoff denounce Israel as the price to be paid for publishing his new tome “Cartoonists Against the Holocaust,” said Medoff and the Jewish civil rights group StandWithUs.
“The book was canceled. I was canceled,” Medoff, who has written op-eds for The Post, said.
Yoe sent a Sept. 1, 2025 email to Medoff saying he “thought long and hard” about adding a separate “note” in the book to unload on Israel and the US before its planned publication.
Yoe said Trump is “attempting to create concentration camp-style prisons, is sending American residents to gulag type prisons in other countries without constitution guaranteed trials,” Yoe said.
“At the same time,” he added, ” a country populated by an ethnic religious group who were immorally and horrifically tortured and killed in the Holocaust for their ethnicity is led by a prime minister that the world’s top war crimes court has issued warrants for his alleged acts of war crimes and crimes against humanity.”
Medoff sent a detailed response to Yoe objecting to slamming Israel and the US, saying the claims Yoe wanted to print were “factually inaccurate” and would politicize the book.
“There are no concentration camps in America, and it’s not a Nazi country. …Misusing the term ‘concentration camps’ diminishes the suffering that was experienced by the Jewish victims of the real concentration camps in the 1930s-1940s,” he told Yoe.
He also said Yoe was accusing Israel of “genocide” by saying the Jewish state was committing “crimes against humanity.
Medoff told The Post, “Accusing Israel of genocide is a lie, and requiring a Holocaust scholar to denounce Israel to see his book published is antisemitic bullying.”
Yoe, a former creative director for the Muppets and a longtime cartoonist, was an editor with Dark Horse as he worked on Medoff’s book. He has since severed his relationship with the publishing house.
Philip Simon, the legal counsel for Dark Horse, said the publishing company canceled the book, but made no mention of any political controversy.
“Craig Yoe, of Yoe Books, failed to make our planned schedule for this book as the project’s packager, so Dark Horse stepped away from it and decided not to publish it last year,” Simon told Carly Gammill, legal director of StandWithUs, in a June 3, 2026 email.
“Dark Horse does not plan to publish Cartoonists Against the Holocaust . . . it was a decision based on our company’s financial needs and some scheduling issues that had delayed the project too much already.”
Neither Dark Horse nor Yoe would comment on Medoff’s allegations.
Carly Gammill of StandWithUs said, “When a comic book publisher pressures a Holocaust scholar to denounce the Jewish state before his own book on the Holocaust can see print, the irony is hard to miss.”
The Medoff Holocaust book cancellation is just the latest in a series of punishing Jewish artists and public figures after Hamas invaded Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Other examples include comic book creator Miriam Libicki, who was canceled by the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival in 2024 (and later allowed to return after an outcry) and filmmaker Nadav Lapid, who was pushed out of the FID Marseille film festival that will take place this month, because they are Israeli or pro-Israel.
Medoff is the founding director of The David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, based in Washington, DC.
Nine of the 150 editorial cartoons in the canceled book were published in The Post back in the 1940s, to illustrate what was known in America about the Holocaust as it was taking place.
