The drawings that combine the swastika and the Star of David follow this format with one important difference. Here Komar and Melamid propose them to be the "pictorial equivalent of the opposing values, good and evil." In the catalogue drawing after drawing depicts the interlocked symbols in gold and blue and then, more frighteningly, in black, red, blue and white (respective colors of the Nazi and Israeli flags). According to the catalogue they are intended to epitomize the eternal struggle between good and evil found at creation. The works claim to be totally ahistorical, aiming for cosmic insights. Unfortunately these symbols resist an ahistorical reading with all their might. The swastika is stubbornly embedded with the horrors of Nazi fascism and the Star of David can operate only as a sign for the Jews and Israel. It cannot be avoided. Its use here is in fact a deliberate provocation.

Komar and Melamid's symbolic images are all too easily misinterpreted at a time of vicious antisemitism and anti-Israel views. Jews are vilified daily for the simple practice of their religion and the defense of their land. The Irish poet Tom Paulin, a visiting professor at Columbia and a guest lecturer at Harvard, was recently quoted in the Egyptian newspaper Al Ahram as saying that the Jewish settlers in the West Bank, " should be shot dead…I think they are Nazis, racists; I feel nothing but hatred for them." His vitriolic attacks are defended as an exercise in free speech even as Columbia is besieged with anti-Israel protesters demanding university divestment from Israel. "The aim of divestment is predicated on the idea that Zionism equals racism," commented Richard M. Joel, past president of Hillel International and current President of Yeshiva University. The very legitimacy of the Jewish State is currently under attack.

Holocaust deniers freely publish the canard that the Holocaust never occurred and claim that it is a Jewish fiction to garner world sympathy, grab Arab land and oppress the Palestinians. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the czarist antisemitic forgery, is circulated in the Arab world, Japan and among far right groups depicting Jews as a cabal seeking world domination. A current Egyptian hit television series, "Horseman Without a Horse" treats the Protocols as historical fact. The intertwining of the swastika and the Star of David can only mean one thing in today's hysterical world; the equivalency between Nazism and Zionism.

This symbolic equation is most provocatively displayed on the catalogue cover and depicted in three of the drawings on exhibit. Two of the three essays examine these notions flamboyantly where the artists and their commentators are more than eager to play with the fire of anti-Israel rhetoric in blithe disregard of the consequences.

Neither Komar nor Melamid nor Yeshiva University Museum wish to see the demise of the State of Israel. It would be absurd to consider such attitudes on the part of either. However, what they have done is to use powerful symbols in an idiosyncratically ahistorical context in a public forum. And therein lies the confusion and very real danger, for it is ultimately reckless and irresponsible.

For the most part Komar and Melamid's earlier work is devoid of Jewish content. The Asian Elephant Art and Conservation Project (1990) confirm their credentials as full-fledged conceptual artists with a dash of pranksterism added for good measure. It was touted as "the world's first quadruped occupational retraining program, a network of schools for elephants rendered unemployed" due to the 1990 ban on logging in Thailand. The elephants were taught to paint abstract paintings by Komar and Melamid. The Most Wanted Painting and The Least Wanted Painting Project in the late 1990's saw paintings created by them according to national public opinion surveys and then posted on the Web. Both these projects are nose-thumbing deconstructions of the powerful art world that Komar and Melamid depend upon for their subsistence.

In light of this history, Komar and Melamid can be seen as model postmodern artists. Irony and cultural appropriations are the hallmarks of their productions, therefore, one wonders whether the central premise of Symbols of the Big Bang can be taken at face value. If in fact it is yet another ironic deconstruction, this time of the very nature of symbols and their role in the modern world, the exhibition may have revealed a far darker side to postmodernist deconstruction than a simply mistaken ahistoricism. Lurking just below the surface is an amoral willingness to flaunt just about anything.

Komar and Melamid know the full force of the symbols that they have chosen to play with, even as they may want to " dissolve the very fixity of these symbols." Their willfulness is expressed in a delight of transgression. This too is a technique of deconstruction, to push the conceptual envelope so as to effect the most radical examination of cultural, and here political, norms. I can imagine them exclaim, "Can we suggest the forbidden, dare to challenge the sacrosanct nature of the Israeli state? Dare we suggest that Israel is illegitimate, here in an orthodox Jewish museum in the heart of America's most Jewish city?" It is here, in the contemporary meanings of the swastika and the Star of David artworks, that Komar and Melamid crossover from dissident postmodernists to artists capable of making seriously dangerous art. To engender hatred of Jews and the state of Israel is no laughing matter. It is here that the postmodernist games must end.