On the Right and on the Left: Hebrew Political Cartoon Book by Yosef Bass, Tel Aviv, 1942

A sharp visual chronicle of Jewish public life in Mandatory Palestine during the first years of World War II. On the Right and on the Left... gathers Yosef Bass’s satirical drawings into a portrait of a society under pressure, where politics, scarcity, war news, migration, and everyday life collide on the printed page.

Bass’s cartoons move between the street and the world stage. Newspapers, cafés, queues, shops, public notices, soldiers, refugees, speeches, and domestic scenes become instruments of political observation. The humor is quick and accessible, but never detached. It shows a Jewish public reading events in real time, arguing over ideology, navigating British authority, watching Europe collapse, and imagining an uncertain future in Palestine.

The title’s “right” and “left” suggests more than party politics. It frames the book as a satire of public argument itself: the divisions, slogans, anxieties, and contradictions of a wartime society trying to understand its place between empire, Zionism, Europe, and local life. Bass’s line is economical but dense, turning small social gestures into evidence of a larger historical mood.

A scarce and serious artifact of Hebrew political cartooning, preserving the immediacy of wartime Jewish thought before the end of World War II and before the language of statehood had settled into certainty.

Artist Note: Yosef Bass was born in Lwów in 1908, immigrated to Eretz-Israel in 1936, studied architecture at the Technion, and became a regular cartoonist for Haaretz for about thirty years. His wartime cartoons covered World War II, the Holocaust, the struggle against the British, and later the War of Independence.

Title: על ימין ועל שמאל... (ʻAl Yamin ṣe-ʻal Śemol, “On the Right and on the Left...”)
English Title: On the Right and on the Left...
Publisher: סכות (Sukot)
Place of Publication: Tel Aviv, Eretz-Israel
Author: יוסף בס (Yosef Bass)
Language: Hebrew
Format: Illustrated hardcover
Pages: 239
Dimensions: Approximately 22 to 23 cm
Subject: Hebrew political cartoons, Jewish satire, World War II, Mandatory Palestine, Yishuv culture, Zionist politics, British Mandate, wartime public life
Dates Covered in Cartoons: 1939 to 1941
Published: 1942
Condition: Original illustrated hardcover with age toning, shelf wear, rubbing to edges and spine, and light handling wear to interior pages. Binding intact. Interior cartoons remain legible.
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