The University of Pennsylvania has laid off its communications lecturer—who published a slew of anti-Semitic cartoons—just a year after standing by him, citing the school’s "bedrock commitment to open expression." The dismissal coincided with the Trump administration’s decision to freeze $175 million in federal funding to the school.
The Annenberg School for Communication lecturer, Dwayne Booth, announced his unemployment in a Patreon post on Friday. Booth said "the reason for the termination was budgetary," but accused universities nationwide of being "way too complicit" with a "largely Republican-led effort" to target left-wing voices.
"I was informed that the reason for the termination was budgetary, which I think is the same reason they gave to Jesus just before they crucified him, and Malcolm X just before they shot him, and what they told Eugene Debs, Susan B. Anthony, and Lenny Bruce just before jailing them. I jest, of course," Booth wrote.
"The reality – and something that, unfortunately, is not unique to Penn – is that colleges and universities nationwide have been way too complicit with the largely Republican-led efforts to target students and faculty members engaged in any and all speech rendered in support of trans/black/immigrant, and women’s rights, free speech, the independent press, academic freedom, and medical research – speech that also voices bold criticism of right-wing nationalism, genocide, apartheid, fascism, and specifically the Israeli assault on Palestine."
"The cowardice and complete lack of courage demonstrated by the UPenn administration has ruined the lives of a great number of professors and students whom I know personally, as if the total capitulation to the demands of MAGA thugs and bullies will somehow eventually ameliorate the suffering and deter the collapse of higher education," he added.
The move comes roughly a year after the Washington Free Beacon unearthed anti-Semitic cartoons from Booth, who publishes the images under the pen name "Mr. Fish."
One cartoon depicts Zionists sipping Gazan blood from wine glasses, a version of the ancient blood libel employed in anti-Semitic propaganda. Another shows Jews in a Nazi concentration camp holding signs that read "Stop the Holocaust In Gaza" and "Gaza, The World's Biggest Concentration Camp." A third depicts a Nazi flag with a Star of David drawn in place of a swastika.
While Penn's interim president, Larry Jameson, described the images last February as "reprehensible," he made clear that he would not take action to sanction or remove Booth from the faculty, citing the school's "bedrock commitment to open expression." As such, Booth continued to teach at the university until at least the 2024 fall semester, though in his Friday post, he said he would be "losing 3k a month to the fascist monsters devouring campuses," suggesting he was still on the payroll until at least March.
Booth defended his cartoons last year, saying that those who view the images "by themselves" are missing "necessary context," given that he created the cartoons to accompany columns by former New York Times reporter Chris Hedges. The columns routinely accuse Israel of "genocide" and compare the Jewish state to Nazi Germany.
"The Nazis shipped their victims to death camps. The Israelis will ship their victims to squalid refugee camps in countries outside of Israel," Hedges wrote in one column that includes a Booth cartoon as its featured image. "And if we do not stand in eternal vigilance over evil—our evil—we become, like those carrying out the mass killing in Gaza, monsters."
Booth also informed his Patreon readers on Friday that the American Association of University Professors—whose Penn chapter rallied around Booth last February and threatened to investigate the Ivy League school if he was punished—along with "some attorneys" are "looking into the matter" on his behalf.
"The targeted harassment of Booth was instigated by the Washington Free Beacon, a publication known for political provocation whose activities conform to a well-known pattern," the Penn faculty union wrote last year. "It singled out a faculty member who had criticized the war in Gaza and portrayed him as an antisemite, which predictably generated threats of personal violence against him and calls for the university to discipline him."
Penn, the White House, and the Department of Education did not respond to requests for comment.