From Srulik in the morning paper to memes in the WhatsApp group: how Israeli cartoons moved onto screens

On Friday mornings decades ago, many Israeli households opened the newspaper at the drawing rather than the main headline. There, in a few lines, someone had already expressed what everyone felt about the week. Today, that same feeling arrives as a notification at a quarter to seven in the morning, in the preschool parents' WhatsApp group. A screenshot has replaced the drawing, an anonymous person has replaced the journalist, and the speed has increased a thousandfold. Yet the question behind both has barely changed: how do you tell the story of reality in one image, and what happens when it is too funny to check?

A boy in a tembel hat who became a national symbol

In 1956, cartoonist Kariel Gardosh, who signed his work Dosh, drew a young man wearing a tembel hat (a traditional Israeli cloth sun hat), biblical sandals and khaki shorts. He called him Srulik, and the character appeared for many years in Maariv, which Dosh joined in 1953. Srulik was more than another cartoon character. He became the figure representing Israel itself, much as Uncle Sam represents the United States and Marianne represents France, and in wartime he put on a uniform.

It is worth pausing over the biography of the man who drew him. Dosh was born in Budapest in 1921, survived forced labor during World War II, and most of his family were murdered at Auschwitz. He immigrated to Israel in 1948 and continued drawing until his death in 2000. There is something powerful about one of the warmest, most cheerful symbols of Israeli identity emerging from the hands of a Holocaust survivor. Some saw Srulik as a direct response to Europe's antisemitic cartoons: a Jew finally drawn from within, young, suntanned and self-assured.

Srulik has not disappeared. In 2018, Maariv asked seven illustrators to imagine what he would look like today, and the results showed how much the character still speaks to people. That is exactly the principle behind a good meme: a familiar template that anyone can fill with new content.

A whole page, one brush and a week's test

If Srulik was the country's face, Ze'ev was its critical eye. Yaakov Farkash, who signed his work Ze'ev, was also born in Budapest. He joined Haaretz in 1962 and published its regular Friday cartoon feature for about forty years. His cartoon was not a small joke in a corner of the page but one large drawing that brought several of the week's events together under a single idea. Each drawing concealed a small self-portrait holding a brush dripping ink. In 1993, he received the Israel Prize for communication and journalism. And another small detail that is hard to forget: a high-school art teacher called him the worst artist in the class, and he was also color-blind.

Newspaper cartoons of those years operated under conditions that sound almost strange today. They passed through an editor. They waited for publication day. They carried a signature and sometimes, as with Ze'ev, even a face. The artist knew that hundreds of thousands of people would read the drawing the next morning and that his name would stand behind every line. That responsibility did not make the cartoons cautious. It made them precise.

What a meme actually is, and why it is more than a funny picture

British biologist Richard Dawkins coined the word meme in his 1976 book "The Selfish Gene." He wanted a term for a unit of culture passed from person to person through imitation: a tune, an expression, a fashion. He took the Greek word meaning something imitated and shortened it to rhyme with the English word gene. Forty years later, the word mainly describes an image with a caption, but its original meaning still best explains what happens online.

Israeli researcher Limor Shifman of the Hebrew University, author of "Memes in Digital Culture," published by MIT Press in 2014, suggests thinking of a meme not as a single image but as a family of items aware of one another: one template, hundreds of versions, with each version responding to the one before. This is the major difference from the Friday cartoon. The cartoon was a self-contained work by one person. The meme is an open conversation in which anyone can add a line.

Take the most common template: a familiar image, a caption at the top and another at the bottom. The top line sets up a situation; the bottom line overturns it. This is precisely the structure of a classic joke, except that the image does half the work. Anyone who knows the template understands the punchline before reading the final word. That is also what made Srulik so effective: readers already knew the hat, the sandals and the smile, so Dosh only needed to change what surrounded him. In that sense, Srulik may have been the first Israeli meme, twenty years before the word was even invented.

What we gained and lost on the journey from paper to screen

The gain is clear. Israel once had a handful of cartoonists in its major newspapers; now anyone with a phone can respond to an event within minutes, in their own language, for their own audience. Humor has become more varied: there are memes about traffic jams on the Ayalon, queues at health clinics and life in the protected room, and entire communities have found a way to talk to one another through them. Israelis abroad and Jewish communities around the world also use this humor to feel connected. Entire collections have emerged, such as pro-Israel memes in Hebrew, combining jokes about life in Israel with satire about what is said about it worldwide.

The loss is quieter, and therefore easier to miss. First, the signature disappeared. Most memes arrive without a name or date, sometimes with no way to know who made them or when. Second, the editor disappeared: nobody pauses to check whether the fact underlying the joke is even true. Third, the context disappeared. A Ze'ev cartoon appeared beside the articles that explained it. A meme arrives alone, after passing through ten groups, and sometimes it is already telling an entirely different story from the one it began with.

Four questions earlier cartoonists would ask before sharing a meme

We can learn a great deal from the generation that drew in ink. There is no need to give up humor, only to restore some newspaper habits to it:

• Where did it come from? If there is no sign of a creator or date, search for the image online before forwarding it. An old meme presented as if it were made today is one of the most common sights in groups.
• What fact does the joke rely on? Almost every meme assumes something about reality: a quote, a number, an event. If the fact is wrong, the joke becomes misinformation with a smiling face.
• Who is laughing, and at whom? Good Israeli cartoons laughed at the powerful and at ourselves. A meme mocking an entire group of people for who they are is no longer satire but a stereotype.
• Would I put my name to it? This is the simplest test. Dosh and Ze'ev signed every drawing. If you would not want your name beneath the meme, perhaps you should not be the next link in the chain.

There is, incidentally, a place to see this entire tradition up close: the Israeli Cartoon Museum in Holon, which moved in early 2026 to new premises in the Mediatheque complex on Golda Meir Street. A visit with children growing up on memes can be an excellent lesson in precisely these questions.

The country's joke is still looking for the right line

Srulik was born on newsprint, and today he also lives in digital versions redrawn by young illustrators. That may be the most accurate way to sum up the story: the tools have changed, the pace has changed and the person holding the pen has changed, but the desire to laugh together about what we find difficult has not changed at all. The only difference is that someone else once guarded the line between sharpness and cruelty, between satire and falsehood. Today, that line runs through each of us whenever we press "Forward."