Cartoonist Al Capp (a Jew) recently was put on the griddle by the president of the Union of American Hebrew Congregations for “dreadful bad taste.” Capp’s “Li’l Abner” series featured a “Boar Mitzvah.”
In the cartoon, Salomey the pig must be quartered at home to protect it from Porknoy the Complainer, who escaped the zoo before being “Boar Mitzvahed.” In the series, playful little boars are sent to Boarkley, California, which specializes in “eddicatin’ swine.”
Rabbi Maurice N. Eisendrath, leader of Reform Judaism, larded his criticism with the observation that the use of the pig “adds insult to injury since a pig in Orthodox Judaism is a forbidden food.”
