His art included cartoons for The New York Times, collaborations with Elie Wiesel and images that traced the history of antisemitism. He was also a dermatologist.
Mark Podwal, a dermatologist with a parallel career as an acclaimed artist who drew political cartoons for The New York Times; illustrated books, including several written by the Auschwitz survivor and writer Elie Wiesel; and created a portfolio of Jewish-themed paintings, died on Friday at his home in Harrison, N.Y., in Westchester County. He was 79.
His son Michael said the cause was cancer.
Dr. Powdal, who chose dermatology as his specialty because it would give him time to pursue his art, began contributing to The Times’s opinion page when he was a resident at New York University Hospital (now NYU Langone Health). His first cartoon, published after the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, depicted a faceless Israeli runner, blood pouring from an abdominal wound, as he crosses under an ornate, undersize arch bearing words from the Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer.
In 1982, he drew another evocative cartoon, an Israeli tank equipped with an oversize menorah as its main gun, to illustrate an article about the war in Lebanon. It was rejected by editors for being too inflammatory, but it was resurrected in 1989 for an essay by Abba Eban, Israel’s former foreign minister, about “a false myth of Israeli weakness,” according to “All the Art That’s Fit to Print (And Some That Wasn’t): Inside The New York Times Op-Ed Page” (2012), by Jerelle Kraus.
And after the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks, he drew a hodgepodge of homes, with American flags rising out of nearly every one.
Steven Heller, a former art director of The Times’s Op-Ed page (as the opinion page was then known), said in an email that his cartoons were “in the tradition of the great graphic satirists of the late 19th and 20th centuries: very conceptual, layered with symbolism, but accessible to the audience.” He added: “He did not waste a line. It was as though his style had to be minimal to be able to juggle medicine and art.”
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