In 1989, Gideon Amichai spent a year in New York chasing a dream of getting a cartoon into The New Yorker. Every Wednesday he carried 20 new sketches to the magazine’s 22nd floor, and every Friday he got the envelope back with a generic rejection slip, sometimes with a handwritten note like “sorry,” “keep trying,” or the faint consolation that “one is held.” He told ynet that Fridays were “one big mess,” but the rest of the week became a cycle of recovery, learning and trying again.
During that exchange program year at the School of Visual Arts, through Bezalel, he submitted roughly 1,000 cartoon sketches and none were accepted. He returned to Jerusalem, finished his degree project, and then moved into advertising, becoming a creative director. Decades later, after finding a box of old sketches, notebooks and yellowing pages in his Neve Tzedek home, he turned the material into a self-published book, “Not a Sketch,” which revisits that year as a lesson in motivation, resilience and being rejected by a magazine that receives 1,500 cartoons a week and buys only 22.
Amichai, now 63, says the New Yorker years taught him to avoid imitation and to find an original voice. He describes the experience as a complete reset, because he had to learn American references, visual details and cultural nuances from scratch, using the New York Public Library and photographic references to draw things he had never seen in Israel. He says the work was not just art but a kind of management training, because every day he was judged only by that day’s idea.
He later returned to New York as an advertiser, carrying the same portfolio and, to his surprise, had two cartoons accepted. Looking back, he says the rejection years ultimately pushed him toward advertising, where he realized he loved the field after being exposed to campaigns like Absolut Vodka and high-level American ad work. Today, as founder of the creative company No, No, No, No, No, Yes and a winner at Cannes and The One Show, he says the industry keeps being reshaped by the internet, social media and AI, but experience and taste still matter. He adds that living through constant change, and even the current security situation in Israel, has made him value simply being alive.
