NEW YORK -- The New Yorker magazine's cover for the Feb. 15 issue, the magazine's 'Valentine card to New York,' made a lot of people see the wrong red Monday including black and Hasidic Jewish leaders who found it offensive.
The cover, by 1992 Pultizer Prize winning artist-author Art Spiegelman, shows a Hasidic man kissing a black woman in what Spiegelman called a 'metaphoric embrace' wishing the city 'the reconciliation of unbridgeable differences.'
He said the cover referred to recent violence that has pitted Hasidics against blacks in the racially mixed Crown Heights neighborhood of Brooklyn.
'Once a year, perhaps, it's permissible, even for just a moment, to close one's eyes, see beyond the tragic complexities of modern life, and imagine that it might really be true that 'All you need is love,'' Spiegelman said in a press release which accompanied an advance copy of the magazine received by the press.
Spiegelman pointedly noted that he would not 'disingenuously attempt to claim' the woman on the cover an Ethiopian Jew and the Hasidic man's wife.
As news of the cover art spread through the Hasidic community, where men are forbidden from embracing a woman outside their sect and kissing any woman in public, Rabbi Joseph Spielman said members of the sect were 'shocked.'
'This is something that runs against the grain of our lifestyle and our religion,' said Spielman, chairman of the Crown Heights Jewish Community Council. 'I find it very unfortunate.
'Rather than healing, this just makes everything ludicrous and increases the animosity on both sides. The New Yorkers should have been more sensitive to what's going on in Crown Heights. This has no relevance. We need to find solutions.'
The Rev. Herbert Daughtry, a black community spokesman in Brooklyn, said the cover would cause 'deep distress in both communities.' He said he considered the cover 'a crude piece of art and it makes it look like the couple are French kissing.'
'There's no doubt that the woman has the air of a woman of ill repute,' he said. 'I think that instead of healing anything, there will be anger emanating because of this.
'If the artist's intentions are as sincere and innocent as he he says they are, I feel sad because the image on the cover is consistent with the historic pattern of projecting the white man in his role of dominance. I don't think the New Yorker would have published a cover showing an African-American man kissing a Hasidic woman.
'It trivializes a very serious struggle in Crown Heights. To say let's kiss and make up does not address the underlying problems.'
Tina Brown, the new New Yorker editor who has tried to shake up the staid publication, noted that the magazine's covers have usually tended toward 'the humorous, the pastoral and the whimsically topical.'
'Art Spiegelman's painting draws partly from that marvelous tradition but even more from a tradition of art as political and social commentary,' she said. 'We are not unaware that the image is, for all its tenderness, a powerful and even disturbing one.
'But in the context for which it was intended and in which it is embedded -- that of Valentine's Day with its momentary suspensions, its sweet hopes and fond wishes -- it seems to us conducive, beyond its surface impact, to profound reflection and discussion.'
Spiegelman won a special Pulitzer Prize for his two-volume comic book,'Maus,' about the Holocaust based on the experiences of his parents in Nazi-occupied Poland. He joined New Yorker three months ago as a contributing editor and artist.
Spiegelman said he was surprised at the reaction to his art.
'Perhaps I was too naive,' he said.
