Illustrative Anti-Israel protesters in Athens, Greece, on May 21, 2026. Photo: REUTERS/Louisa Gouliamaki.

Dark Horse Comics, the third-largest comic book publisher in the United States behind Marvel and DC, has canceled the publication of a book by a Holocaust scholar after he refused to include an introduction accusing Israel of “genocide,” according to the Jewish advocacy organization StandWithUs, which condemned the move in a statement on Sunday.

Dark Horse had scheduled Dr. Rafael Medoff’s Cartoonists Against the Holocaust — a collection of 150 editorial cartoons from American newspapers of the 1930s and 1940s, accompanied by Medoff’s commentary on what Americans knew about the Holocaust as it unfolded — for publication this summer. According to StandWithUs, then-Dark Horse imprint editor Craig Yoe told Medoff, the founding director of the Washington, DC-based David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, that he would block publication unless the book’s introduction stated that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Yoe later followed up in writing, the group said, demanding that the book include text accusing Israel of “war crimes and crimes against humanity” and claiming that the US operates “concentration camp-style prisons.”

Medoff refused, arguing that the claims are false, and Dark Horse subsequently canceled the project.

“Accusing Israel of genocide is a lie, and requiring a Holocaust scholar to denounce Israel to see his book published is antisemitic bullying,” Medoff said in the statement. “It’s troubling to see McCarthyism rearing its ugly head in 21st century America. Historians should be free to write about history, without being subjected to political litmus tests.”

Dark Horse had previously published two of Medoff’s books, Whistleblowers and Cartoonists Against Racism, without incident. It was only after Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of Israel, StandWithUs said, that Yoe began demanding that Medoff denounce Israel as a condition of publication.

Dark Horse has disputed that account. In a June 3 email to StandWithUs cited by the Israeli news outlet Ynet, the publisher’s legal counsel said the decision was based on the company’s financial needs and repeated scheduling delays, and that Dark Horse “does not plan to publish” the book.

StandWithUs noted on Sunday that a number of institutions have demanded that Jewish public figures, writers, and artists denounce the Jewish state as a condition of being platformed. Earlier this year, former Northwestern University president Morton Schapiro was forced to withdraw as a commencement speaker at Georgetown Law School, and, as previously reported by The Algemeiner, the historic Playhouse Cinema in Hamilton, Ontario, canceled the Hamilton Jewish Film Festival in 2024 after anti-Zionist activists flooded its inboxes with messages demanding the cancellation, some of which contained threats.

In another recent example, Israeli filmmaker Nadav Lapid was forced to withdraw from the FID Marseille film festival, held on July 7-12, where he had been invited to serve on the jury, after roughly a dozen filmmakers threatened to pull their films from the event in protest of his participation.

“When a comic book publisher pressures a Holocaust scholar to denounce the Jewish state before his own book on the Holocaust can see print, the irony is hard to miss,” Carly Gammill, director of legal policy and litigation at StandWithUs Saidoff Law, said in Sunday’s statement. “We are seeing an alarming trend in which Jewish professionals are expected to pass ideological tests before they can fully participate in public life.”