Ivy league school lays off lecturer who drew antisemitic cartoons of Jews drinking Gazan blood

The University of Pennsylvania (UPenn) has laid off a lecturer who produced alleged antisemitic political cartoons, including drawings of Israelis drinking the blood of Gazans. 

Cartoonist Dwayne Booth, who goes by the name Mr. Fish, joined UPenn’s Annenberg School for Communication in 2015. He published numerous cartoons in the wake of the October 7, 2023, Hamas attacks on Israel and subsequent war in Gaza that depicted anti-Israel messages and used Holocaust imagery to accuse Israel of genocide. 

One of Booth's cartoons, which he drew for columns penned by former New York Times journalist Chris Hedges, featured a group of Zionists drinking blood out of wineglasses labeled "Gaza," while another shows Jewish prisoners in a Nazi concentration camp holding up signs displaying "Israel assassins" and "Stop the Holocaust in Gaza." 

Other cartoons show Netanyahu in a butcher’s smock covered in blood, a Nazi flag with a Jewish star in the place of a swastika and a gun with an Israeli flag held up to an incubated baby’s head.

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UPenn’s president, Larry Jameson, condemned Booth’s cartoons as "reprehensible" at the time, but vowed that the university would continue to employ the artist, citing their "bedrock commitment" to free speech. 

The school’s decision to part ways with the controversial political cartoonist came as the Trump administration announced it is freezing $175 million in federal funds to the university over its policies allowing transgender athletes to compete in women's sports. 

Booth told Fox News Digital that his dismissal had nothing to do with his cartoons, and that all part-time adjuncts and lecturers were let go due to budget issues that arose from President Donald Trump's funding freeze. 

"My dismissal… had nothing to do with the false accusations from last year that the artwork I produce as a professional editorial cartoonist outside the classroom were antisemitic merely because they were critical of Israel. All part-time adjuncts and lecturers had their courses canceled for the fall semester due to budgetary issues stemming from the attacks by the Trump administration on higher education," he said.

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"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," Booth said in a statement on his Patreon page. 

Booth, who describes himself as a "political cartoonist, cultural contrarian and mastur-crafter of exquisite d--k jokes," slammed UPenn and other colleges for being "way too complicit" with Republicans who he claims are targeting academics for being critical of Israel. 

"In fact, the University of Pennsylvania has spent the last year and a half willfully handing over the private emails of professors and students to congressional committees tasked with crushing open debate, honest inquiry, and dissent on the campus and then targeting those who refuse to cooperate with these draconian censorship tactics by threatening them with suspension, expulsion, or dismissal," he wrote. 

UPenn did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Fox News Digital.