Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives: A Critical Guide 9781350301573, 9781350301580, 9781350301610, 9781350301597

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgments
1 Introduction
Jewish Literature
Graphic Novels and Comic Books
Jewish Graphic Narratives
2 Historical Overview
Jewish Comic Books
Jewish Graphic Novels
3 Social and Cultural Impact
Holocaust Graphic Narratives
Israel-Focused Jewish Graphic Narratives
Diaspora Experience
Religious Graphic Narratives
4 Critical Questions
What Is the Place of Graphic Memoir in the Jewish Graphic Narrative Tradition?
Why Are Photographs so Prevalent in Jewish Graphic Narratives?
How Are Gender Constructs Engaged with in Jewish Graphic Narratives?
How Are Jewish Religious Leaders Depicted in Jewish Graphic Narratives?
How Are Educators Employing Jewish Graphic Narratives in Their Classrooms?
5 Key Texts
Holocaust
X-Men: Magneto Testament
Anne Frank’s Diary
Israel
Sipur Varod
The Property
The Jewish Diaspora
Market Day
A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York
Religious Graphic Narratives
Megillat Esther
Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword
Graphic Memoir
Second Generation: Things I Didn’t Tell My Father
How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less
Appendix
Glossary
Notes
Works Cited
Index

Citation preview

Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives

BLOOMSBURY COMICS STUDIES Covering major genres, creators, and themes, the Bloomsbury Comics Studies series are accessible, authoritative and comprehensive introductions to key topics in Comics Studies. Providing historical overviews, guides to key texts, and important critical approaches, books in the series include annotated guides to further reading and online resources, discussion questions, and glossaries of key terms to help students and fans navigate the diverse world of comic books today. Derek Parker Royal previously edited the series from its launch to his passing in 2019. Series Editor: Chris Gavaler Titles in the series Superhero Comics, Christopher Gavaler Autobiographical Comics, Andrew J. Kunka Children and Young Adult Comics, Gwen Tarbox Webcomics, Sean Kleefeld Alan Moore, Jackson Ayres

Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives A Critical Guide

MATT REINGOLD

BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland ­BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2023 Copyright © Matt Reingold, 2023 Matt Reingold has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design and illustration by Tamar Blumenfeld All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Reingold, Matt, author. Title: Jewish comics and graphic novels / Matt Reingold. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. | Series: Bloomsbury comic studies | Includes index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022018615 | ISBN 9781350301573 (hardback) | ISBN 9781350301580 (paperback) | ISBN 9781350301597 (ebook) | ISBN 9781350301603 (epub) | ISBN 9781350301610 Subjects: LCSH: Jews in comics. | Literature, Modern–Jewish authors–History and criticism. | Comic books, strips, etc.–History and criticism. | Graphic novels–History and criticism. | Jewish literature–History and criticism. | Judaism and literature. | LCGFT: Literary criticism. Classification: LCC PN6714 .R44 2023 | DDC 741.5/9–dc23/eng/20220802 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022018615 ISBN: HB: 978-1-3503-0157-3 PB: 978-1-3503-0158-0 ePDF: 978-1-3503-0159-7 eBook: 978-1-3503-0160-3 Series: Bloomsbury Comics Studies Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

­In memory of Derek Parker Royal

vi

Contents List of Figures  ix A ­ cknowledgments 

xiii

­1 Introduction  1 J­ ewish Literature 4 Graphic Novels and Comic Books 6 Jewish Graphic Narratives 9

­2 Historical Overview  17 Jewish Comic Books 17 Jewish Graphic Novels 34

­3 Social and Cultural Impact  47 Holocaust Graphic Narratives 50 Israel-Focused Jewish Graphic Narratives 60 Diaspora Experience 68 Religious Graphic Narratives 77

­4 Critical Questions  85 What Is the Place of Graphic Memoir in the Jewish Graphic Narrative Tradition? 85 Why Are Photographs so Prevalent in Jewish Graphic Narratives? 90 How Are Gender Constructs Engaged with in Jewish Graphic Narratives? 96 How Are Jewish Religious Leaders Depicted in Jewish Graphic Narratives? 98 How Are Educators Employing Jewish Graphic Narratives in Their Classrooms? 100

­5 Key Texts  105 H ­ olocaust 106 X-Men: Magneto Testament 106 Anne Frank’s Diary 113

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CONTENTS

Israel 116 Sipur Varod 116 The Property 120 The Jewish Diaspora 127 Market Day 127 A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York 130 Religious Graphic Narratives 133 Megillat Esther 133 ­Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword 139 G ­ raphic Memoir 144 Second Generation: Things I Didn’t Tell My Father 144 How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less 148 Appendix  154 Glossary  158 Notes  163 W ­ orks Cited  Index  181

168

Figures 2.1

Srulik, Israel’s most famous cartoon character. Yair Talmo  23

2.2

Kitty Pryde describing being a victim of anti-Semitism. Copyright Marvel Comics, All-New X-Men #13, 2013  29

2.3

The Thing getting married under a Jewish wedding canopy. Copyright Marvel Comics, Fantastic Four #5, 2019  33

2.4

Frimme raging at God. From A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories: A Graphic Novel by Will Eisner. Copyright © 1978, 1985, 1989, 1995, 1996 by Will Eisner. Copyright © 2006 by Will Eisner Studios, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc  39

3.1

Amy, Sonya, and Lily having a meal together and talking over each other. Used with permission of Amy Kurzweil  48

3.2

Amy mapping the distance Lily traveled to escape Nazicontrolled Europe. Used with permission of Amy Kurzweil  57

3.3

Charka discussing Passover with Ahmed. A strip from the album Beyond the Line 2 by Shay Charka, Modan Publishing House 2008  62

3.4

Ilana being comforted by her high-school self. Used with permission of Tamar Blumenfeld  64

3.5

Miriam overwhelmed by Israeli news reports. Copyright Miriam Libicki, Jobnik! Vol 1, 2008, 63  67

x

FIGURES

3.6

Graves illustrated to look like Sherlock Holmes. From The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Will Eisner. Copyright © 2005 by Will Eisner Studios, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc  70

3.7

Max Schmeling/Adolf Hitler being knocked out by Max Baer. From the graphic novel Christie Pits by Jamie Michaels and Doug Fedrau  72

3.8

Elisha ben Avuya on a motorcycle (chapter 4, mishnah 25). Copyright © 2017 Jessica Tamar Deutsch. All rights reserved  80

3.9

Nazi flag gradually filling the panels. Copyright Miriam Katin, We Are on Our Own, Drawn & Quarterly  82

4.1

Israel with a bleeding Caesarian wound. Falafel Sauce Piquante © DARGAUD 2018, by Kichka www.dargaud.com. All rights reserved  87

4.2

Glidden assuming all roles in a trial about Israel. Copyright Sarah Glidden. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly  88

4.3

Davis, her friend, and an ultra-Orthodox Jew in a sex shop. Copyright Vanessa Davis. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly  90

4.4

Photograph of Asaf Hanuka’s grandmother’s tombstone. Used with permission of Asaf Hanuka  93

4.5

Blank faces in the family photograph. Page 14 detail from The Wolf of Baghdad by Carol Isaacs/The Surreal McCoy © Myriad 2020 www.MyriadEditions.com  94

FIGURES

xi

4.6

Family members shaded in black in photographs. Page 169 detail from The Wolf of Baghdad by Carol Isaacs/The Surreal McCoy © Myriad 2020 www.MyriadEditions.com  95

5.1

Public humiliation for having sex with a German. Copyright Marvel Comics, X-Men: Magneto Testament  111

5.2

Re-envisioning Independence Hall as a site of LGBTQ independence. Ilana Zeffren, Sipur Varod, MAPA Publishers, 2005  118

5.3

Ben-Gurion declaring the founding of a homophobic state. Ilana Zeffren, Sipur Varod, MAPA Publishers, 2005  119

5.4

Regina seeing historical Warsaw overlaid atop contemporary Warsaw. Copyright Rutu Modan. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly  123

5.5

Regina and Roman hugging. Copyright Rutu Modan. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly  126

5.6

Mendleman looking at the sunset and visualizing a rug. Copyright James Sturm. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly  129

5.7

Liana reading a story with her grandfather. From A Bintel Brief by Liana Finck. Copyright © 2014 by Liana Finck. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers  131

5.8

Women bathing in vats of oil of myrrh. Excerpt of page 47 from Megillat Esther. Image from Megillat Esther. Copyright JT Waldman 2005  135

5.9

The tree’s roots are a compilation of the exegetical sources Waldman used. Excerpt of page 58 from Megillat Esther. Image from Megillat Esther. Copyright JT Waldman 2005  136

xii

FIGURES

5.10 Orthodox Jewish dress styles. Copyright © 2010 Barry

Deutsch  141 5.11 Fruma’s stereotypical Jewish nose. Copyright © 2010 Barry

Deutsch  142 5.12 Kichka illustrating himself as a victim of the Holocaust.

Deuxième Génération—Ce que je n’ai pas dit à mon père © DARGAUD 2012, by Kichka www.dargaud.com. All rights reserved  146 5.13 Kichka relieved at completing his manuscript. Deuxième

génération—Ce que je n’ai pas dit à mon père © DARGAUD 2012, by Kichka www.dargaud.com. All rights reserved  149 5.14 Glidden’s map of Israel. Copyright Sarah Glidden. Used with

permission from Drawn & Quarterly  152

­Acknowledgments W

hen I first approached Chris Gavaler about the idea of authoring a book about Jewish graphic narratives for Bloomsbury’s Critical Guides in Comics Studies, he was supportive from the get-go. More importantly, from my perspective, he was also supportive of my idea to dedicate this volume in memory of Derek Parker Royal. In addition to serving as the series editor before Chris, Derek was one of my earliest supporters as I worked to establish myself in the niche field of Jewish graphic narratives. Even though Derek and I never met in person or even spoke on the phone, I benefited greatly from his mentorship and guidance. Derek provided me with valuable feedback on my chapter that was included in his edited collection Visualizing Jewish Narrative, and he invited me to be one of the book reviewers on his website The Comics Alternative. Sadly, Derek passed away due to coronary disease in 2019, leaving behind his wife and two children. It is my honor to be able to dedicate this volume in Derek’s memory and I hope that he would have enjoyed reading it almost as much as I have enjoyed writing it. I have benefited greatly from the time and patience of Lucy Brown, my editor at Bloomsbury. Lucy has been the consummate professional, answering all my questions and providing helpful feedback on the publishing process. That she is also a twin and I welcomed twins into the world during the writing of this book was a delightful bonus. One of the features of Bloomsbury’s Critical Guides in Comics Studies series is that it presumes a field for each of the topics included in the series exists. I am fortunate to have been able to have read the thoughtful and interesting works of many accomplished scholars of Jewish graphic narratives. Their work has inspired this volume and helped shape its direction and focus. I am grateful to the many authors, illustrators, and publishers who responded to my emails and granted permission for their images to be included in this volume. The work is considerably richer as a result, and it really allows the reader to see and experience what is being written about. This work has been written during a time of difficulty. Much of my writing was completed during the pandemic, a time that has left no one unscathed. I am grateful to my family and extended families for their patience as I tried to write while also teaching remotely and helping my children navigate Zoom school. Absent their love and understanding, this work would not only be less complete, it would also be less meaningful.

xiv

­1 Introduction

W

hen writing the origin story of my academic life as a scholar of Jewish graphic narratives, I cite September 2008 as the starting point. At the time, I was a first-year graduate student in the Faculty of Education at Toronto’s York University enrolled in a course taught by Professor Neita Israelite that was titled “Full Inclusion.” I had spent much of my childhood and young adulthood avidly reading Marvel comic books that I would buy from my local comic book store, but by no means was I interested in critical engagement with those texts and the idea of Googling (or Yahooing!) any secondary literature about SpiderMan never crossed my mind; the books were fun, colorful, adventurous, and they transported me to places far away from Toronto’s blustery winters and hot summers. To be honest, in retrospect, I never even knew that reading comic books for anything other than leisure was a thing that people did. I only learned that people professionally wrote about comic books after I managed to convince Neita to allow me to write about depictions of disability in recent issues of Marvel’s Daredevil for my independent research essay. Neita admittedly knew nothing about comic books or superheroes but with an admonition that “if there’s no scholarly work on comic books, you need to change your topic!,” I was off to the races, and I soon began to think more critically about the superhero issues that I was buying weekly from Darryl Spiers’s north Toronto shop Cyber City Comix. Lo and behold, there was an entire world of literature about all sorts of topics in comic book studies, including material that would be relevant for analyzing constructions of disability in Marvel’s Daredevil, a series featuring a character who was blinded in an accident as a child, but who gained superpowers as a result. The following September, I began to reflect on what I wanted to write about for my culminating project. I recognized that I had really enjoyed writing about Daredevil and his alter-ego Matt Murdock. Neita, too, had come to appreciate my topic, and she welcomed me into one of her undergraduate lectures to present to her students about representations of disability in superhero

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JEWISH COMICS AND GRAPHIC NARRATIVES

narratives. Neita even agreed to be my graduate supervisor, encouraging me to continue studying the intersections between superheroes and disability. This was, however, a futile pursuit because Neita knew very well that my academic and professional interests did not align with Disability Studies. Instead, they loosely coalesced around Jewish Studies and Jewish Education. Still interested in graphic novels and education, I spent September 2009 searching for examples of scholarly literature about Jewish graphic novels, unsure whether a field even existed. While I had read both volumes of Art Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) Maus as a child, I was ignorant to its wider impact and appeal beyond people who were interested in Holocaust remembrance. Since my Amazon search and purchase histories were populated with academic books about Jewish Studies and with books about academic comic studies, Amazon’s algorithm recommended that I look at Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman’s (2008) edited collection The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches. Reading the articles in Baskind and Omer-Sherman’s work was revelatory. Articles about other Holocaust graphic narratives, about Jewish superheroes, about Israeli graphic narratives, and about visualized Jewish experiences writ large introduced me to a world that I did not know existed. This was a world where Jewish texts about the historical and contemporary Jewish experience were being authored and illustrated and also a world where scholars from around the world were engaging in deep and meaningful conversations about what it means to express Jewishness in panels and speech bubbles. It was also a world that I wanted to participate in. While graphic narratives were perhaps not taken as a serious form of literature by some readers in the early years of the twenty-first century, this is certainly no longer the case two decades into it. In addition to local comic shops that would naturally stock graphic narratives, it is expected and even assumed that independent and chain bookstores have sections dedicated exclusively to graphic narratives. Most American and European colleges and universities offer introductory literature courses that provide students with entry points to the medium’s seminal texts and its critical theories, with some also offering specialized upper-level courses about specific types of graphic novels. Doctoral and graduate degree programs exist for students wishing to complete their studies in the field of graphic narratives and thousands of research papers and manuscripts have been published about the medium. It would be disingenuous to say that one “studies graphic narratives,” much in the same way that it would be likewise for a scientist to say that she “studies physics.” It is not that this is untrue; of course she studies physics, much as I study graphic narratives. But any real understanding of the work of scientists necessitates accepting that the field is far too wide and diverse,

INTRODUCTION

3

the universe too expansive, the particles too small, for any one person to truly say that they “study physics.” Instead, the scientist studies a subfield (of a possible subfield). Similarly, where once upon a time the field of comics studies was inchoate, the field is far too advanced today for one to study the entirety of the field. Much like the scientist who specializes, researchers of graphic narratives also specialize. A review of the titles of recent works that have won the prize for best academic/scholarly work at the Eisner Awards, one of the most important annual comics ceremonies, will help illustrate this point. Recognition was given to books that focused on specific cartoonists, like Susan E. Kirtley’s (2012) Lynda Barry: Girlhood through the Looking Glass or Charles Hatfield’s (2011) Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby. Most of the awards, however, were given to manuscripts that considered specific themes or topics. For example, Sheena C. Howard and Ronald L. Jackson II (2013) won for their edited volume Black Comics: The Politics of Race and Representation, and Frederick Luis Aldama (2017) won for Latinx Superheroes in Mainstream Comics. One work, Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews, edited by Sarah Lightman (2014), focused exclusively on the works of Jewish women who published autobiographical comics which, according to the publisher, “capture in intimate, often awkward, but always relatable detail the tribulations and triumphs of life.” This work, about Jewish graphic narratives, much like all of these other works, offers a window into a different area of graphic novel specialization. As a teacher of Jewish history and Jewish literature, I found myself drawn to the graphic medium, interested in exploring the ways that visualized texts offered insights into the historical and cultural Jewish experience. At their best, Jewish graphic narratives offer windows into the souls and lives of Jews throughout the ages, pictorially representing the uniqueness of this minority community. Since completing my graduate studies, I have published over two dozen articles about Jewish graphic narratives, a book about gender in Israeli graphic narratives, and a book about contemporary Israeli political cartoons. My primary areas of interest have become increasingly more focused on graphic narratives and comics and cartoons produced by Israelis about Israeli society. This volume about Jewish graphic narratives as a genre has afforded me the opportunity to take a step back from the trees and to map the forest by examining how, despite possessing unique artistic and authorial voices and offering different representations of Jewishness, the over 100 examples of Jewish graphic narratives work in concert with each other. I see the genre of Jewish graphic narratives as sitting at the junction between the broader fields of Jewish literature and graphic narratives and therefore to understand what is connoted by the phrase Jewish graphic

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narratives, the other two terms must also be understood. These terms are loaded terms without scholarly consensus. In the following paragraphs I will first identify the ways that they have been understood by scholars in the respective fields and then state how they will be used in this volume.

J­ ewish Literature Josh Lambert (2015) has observed that the start of the twenty-first century ushered in a new chapter in the history of American Jewish literature. The publication of Michael Chabon’s (2000) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay was the first to garner an American Jewish author born after 1933 a Pulitzer Prize for best work of fiction. It also marked the starting point in a wave of well-received and critically acclaimed works by other Jewish American writers. This list includes Nathan Englander’s (2000) short story collection For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, Jonathan Safran Foer’s (2003) novel Everything Is Illuminated, and Myla Goldberg’s (2001) novel Bee Season. Lambert (2015) argues that the proliferation of Jewish literature and the concomitant attention the works received emerged as a result of “intensifying institutionalization—the marked increase in support for such work within a range of relevant educational, social, media, and community organizations” (623). These authors benefited from increased communal interest in Jewish literature which coincided with institutional support that funded opportunities to write Jewish literature. Grouped together by Lambert under the broad umbrella-like heading of Jewish literature, the foci of these works are very different. Chabon’s (2000) is a fictionalized story of the Jews who created comic books in 1930s America. Safran Foer’s is set in Ukraine and follows a fictionalized Safran Foer who wants to find the woman who saved his grandfather when the Nazis destroyed his town during the Second World War. Most of Englander’s short stories are about contemporary Orthodox Jews in America while Goldberg’s family story centers on a young girl trying to keep her family together as they experience a series of religious crises. In the conclusion to Who Wants to Be a Jewish Writer?, Adam Kirsch (2019) asks: Is there some quality or essence that unites different forms of literary expression by Jews, across barriers of time and language and culture? To put it more concretely: does a story in German by Franz Kafka, an essay in English by Susan Sontag, and a novel in Hebrew by Amos Oz all belong in

INTRODUCTION

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the same category? What if we add to that category the Hebrew Bible, the Talmud, and the medieval commentaries of Rashi? Is there any meaningful sense in which these are all Jewish works, other than the fact that they were all written by Jews? (185–6) ­ irsch’s questions about the ties that bind together works of Jewish literature K could just as easily be asked about the links between Chabon, Goldberg, Safran Foer, and Englander. Answers to the question “what is Jewish literature?” have been offered by many, but, as Hana Wirth-Nesher (2015) rightly notes, “definitions of Jewish literature are as notoriously slippery and contested as are debates about who qualifies as a Jew” (11). Kirsch (2019) suggests that what makes a work a Jewish one involves a purposeful decision made by the author to meaningfully interact with Jewish cultural and literary traditions, even if by doing so they reject those very same literary traditions to create something wholly new. It requires a poring over of past works in order to convey a new idea about the present. Jewish literature, he writes, “is what happens every time a writer tries to make a place for himself or herself in that ancient lineage” (197). Victoria Aarons (2019b) concurs with Kirsch’s position about the importance of vestiges of Jewish traditions within Jewish literature, but her understanding of the term extends beyond mere engagement with the past. Instead, Jewish literature mediates between the author and the past to create something new; in Aarons’s conceptualization, the author’s own Jewish identities must also be considered as components of Jewish literature. She writes that what is Jewish in literature involves a “richly figured gesture toward refashioning and adjudicating Jewish identities as a measure of historical and personal self-reckoning” (6). An alternative position about what makes a work Jewish was offered by Ruth Wisse (2000), a noted scholar of Jewish culture and literature. She suggests that works of Jewish literature depict “the inner lives of the Jews” (4). This type of phrasing—while ambiguous—moves even further afield from Kirsch (2019) by focusing on the Jewish experience, irrespective of the Jewish literary past. It assumes that Jewish literature can be fashioned without the author having been steeped in some previous, agreed upon, Jewish literary canon. The open-endedness of Wisse’s contention is echoed by Dan Miron (2010) in his masterful work From Continuity to Contiguity: Toward a New Jewish Literary Thinking. In it, he argues that while no single Jewish literature exists today, “a freely floating, imprecisely defined, and widely inclusive Jewish literary complex does exist” (404). In practice, Miron suggests that what this looks like is an awareness that

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there is no one single dominant Jewish literature; there is not even a “choir” of various Jewish literatures, because the basic harmony that sustains a polyphony is simply not there. There is rather a “complex”, a wide, not always clearly defined, Jewish literary space, in which all sorts of literary phenomena, contiguous and non-contiguous, move, meet, separate, and put more and more distance among themselves. (414) Miron’s (2010) rejection of any type of coherent body that can be termed Jewish literature is important because of his recognition of the multifarious ways in which the Jewish experience is captured in literature. As a work that is interested in something called the Jewish graphic narrative, I am aware that the types of graphic novels that have been published are exceptionally diverse in tone, topic, focus, artistic style, and target audience. Like Miron suggests, they at times lack any semblance of coherence as a group and often do not “speak” to each other. And yet I contend that there is a common link between them in the sustained introspection of what it means to visually express Jewishness on the page. While this might seem superficial—and may perhaps be more inclusive than what some might consider “Jewish literature”—or amorphous—by not specifically delineating what it means to be a work of Jewish literature—I contend that the gains outweigh the concerns because it enables more meaningful exploration of text and tradition alongside the ways that authors and artists express Jewishness, as opposed to needlessly allocating time, space, and energy to categorizations and labels whose expiry dates might have already passed before the criteria are even published.

Graphic Novels and Comic Books The release of Will Eisner’s A Contract with God in 1978 is generally considered to be the first graphic novel that was published. Eisner’s work and the term “graphic novel” emerged as an evolution of earlier mainstream comics and underground alternative comix. The term seems to have been in use as early as at least 1964 when fanzine writer Richard Kyle used it. The term was subsequently used by both Richard Corben and George Metzger in 1976 (Cates 2020). Nevertheless, it is Eisner’s A Contract with God, which was built on his earlier experiences within the publishing industry as the lead writer and illustrator on the superhero series The Spirit, and his growing realizations of the limitations of telling stories in single-issue serialized comics, that has come to be identified as the first significant work of the genre. Isaac Cates (2020) locates in Eisner’s work a recognition of the intimacy Eisner

INTRODUCTION

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appreciated at small-scale independent comics conventions, and this afforded him the opportunity to rethink his own approach to writing and illustrating in order to tell a literary work that demonstrated “realism and social critique” (Cates: 84). In the introduction to The Graphic Novel, Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey (2015) observe how in the 1980s, Art Spiegelman and Frank Miller, two of the graphic novel medium’s most important contributors, resisted using the term.1 The two were concerned that popular culture’s newfound appreciation for longform comics would result in a watering-down of the medium, eventually leading to oversaturation of the marketplace with middling work leading the charge. Yet as Baetens and Frey correctly note, despite Spiegelman’s and Miller’s worries, the medium has moved, full steam ahead, into the twentyfirst century. This has happened, I must confess, despite the increased presence of middling works taking up increasing space in bookstores across North America. And while these bookstores might categorize all books that include words and images in the same section in order to facilitate a smoother shopping experience, it behooves us to ask what, exactly, is a “graphic novel”? Does it, for example, require a certain number of pages to cease being a comic book? Must it require a certain type of text or topic to gain the distinction or does the fact that graphic novels can be fictional or nonfictional allow for any topic to be suitable for inclusion in a graphic novel? I concur with Cates (2020) and Baetens and Frey (2015) that these distinctions are highly subjective and unnecessarily quantitative, raising questions about why one number for pagination was chosen as opposed to another instead of discussing the relative merits of a text. What of single-issue comics that are then collected into a larger bound edition like so many of the mainstream presses do today? If the answer to this question is no (and I happen to believe that a volume that collects, for example, Daredevil issues 45–51 together is not a graphic novel), it must be remembered that Maus, Art Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) seminal and archetypal graphic novel, was first published as single issues in the underground alternative comix magazine Raw many years before Pantheon Books published it in two bound volumes, and no one would argue that Maus is not a graphic novel. What, then, is it that separates Maus from a bound collection of superhero stories? In their attempt to demarcate and delineate the boundaries of what makes a text a graphic novel, Baetens and Frey (2015) argue that any definition will automatically encounter not only opposition but examples of works—which are generally recognized to be “graphic novels”—that fail the test of their definition. Therefore, the authors eschew a narrow definition, instead favoring an open understanding of graphic novels that recognizes important distinctions between a graphic novel and its most closely associated comparison, the comic book. First, they highlight differentiations of form, suggesting that graphic novels

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allow for individual expression of style and opportunities to break with comic book conventions. Baetens and Frey contend that graphic novels often involve creative risk-taking through the inclusion of more experimental page layouts, and an increased presence of the narrative voice. Second, graphic novels tend to include stories that are more grounded in reality, and they have more serious and sophisticated content that is geared toward an adult audience and not the juvenile audience that may read comic books. For example, many of the medium’s most famous works like Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s (2007) bildungsroman Persepolis which is set during the 1979 Iranian Revolution, and Alison Bechdel’s (2006) story of hers and her father’s coming-out stories in Fun Home, are autobiographical or journalistic in nature, and thus the turn to the life-altering personal story is an important, if not a core, component of the form. Similarly, journalistic or historical works that depict complex geopolitical topics, like Joe Sacco’s (2014) exploration of Palestinian life in Palestine or Spiegelman’s (2004) visualized treatment of the 9/11 terror attacks in In the Shadow of No Towers, also demonstrate the nature of the serious topics that rest at heart of graphic novels. It is important to acknowledge, like Baetens and Frey do, that fictional graphic novels do exist, but they suggest that these works tend to model sophisticated literary fiction and they list works by Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware as examples of this. While not entirely rejecting Baetens and Frey’s (2015) open-ended definition of the medium, in Reading Graphic Novels: Genre and Narration, Achim Hescher (2016) argues that “graphic novels are a specific type of a book of comics that can be set apart from traditional comic books, quantitatively and qualitatively, according to a number of concrete parameters” (55). Based on seven metrics, Hescher suggests that what distinguishes the two types of media is an emphasis on complexity. Hescher’s seven traits are multilayered plot and narration, multifunctional use of color, complex text–image relation, meaning-enhancing panel design/layout, structural performativity, multiplicity of references to texts/media, and self-referential and metafictional devices. By emphasizing complexity as the criterion for the graphic novel medium, as opposed to other criteria or even the quality of the work, Hescher contends that a more objective way of defining the genre is evidenced, with graphic novels always possessing more degrees of complexity than comic books. In his explanation of graphic novels, Cates (2020) suggests that a more prudent way of understanding the term is to see a graphic novel not as a “particular product or set of story constraints,” but to instead approach it as part of “a movement, a shared aspiration for thematic scope, sophistication, and a readership beyond the niche of superhero comic book fandom” (82–3). Echoing aspects of Baetens and Frey’s (2015) point about challenging established norms, Cates distinguishes the graphic novel from the comic book based on the intentionality of the creator, and not based on any specific

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forms that are used. Framing graphic novels around a movement or a culture, Cates recognizes the ways that authors and artists have “attempted to expand the artistic range of comics, chiefly by opening up their readership to adults interested in other contemporary literature … Therefore, the movement is, at its roots, established in contrast to the formulaic so-called mainstream comics many of the graphic novel cartoonists grew up reading” (90). In Cates’s construction, graphic novels are reactionary, or even revolutionary, in that they respond to the pre-existing norms and functions of the comics medium, and actively work to subvert them. Cates’s approach establishes a continuum that assesses not whether a text is more a graphic novel or a comic book, but instead considers how graphic novels respond or react to the ones that came earlier, in an ever-expanding evolutionary process. Of the three ways of thinking about the nature of graphic novels, I find myself most drawn to Baetens and Frey’s (2015) for the purpose of this volume. This is because its expansiveness reflects the diverse ways that graphic novels will be considered. Furthermore, I worry about the applicability of Cates’s (2020) and Hescher’s (2016) definitions. I appreciate Cates’s model of seeing graphic novels as a movement, and less a type of text, especially with regard to the purposefulness that attributes to authorial intent, but I worry that both authors and readers will struggle to navigate the historical and cultural continuum that is needed in order to truly assess originality and reactiveness. Furthermore, who is to define whether a text is truly reactionary enough? Conversely, the gradient scale that Hescher formulates is instructive when considering elements of graphic narratives, but I find it too limiting, and perhaps even too narrow in its scope of what graphic novels offer because graphic novels are more than just complex texts. While there is no definitive consensus about what each term means, there is a recognized distinction between comic books and graphic novels. As a result, I do not use the terms interchangeably in this volume. When one or the other term is employed, it refers specifically to what is connoted in the passage. My preference throughout this book is to use the more neutral term “graphic narrative” to connote all types of illustrated or visualized narrative as it includes both graphic novels and comic books.

Jewish Graphic Narratives Earlier, I referred to Josh Lambert’s (2015) observation about the publication of significant Jewish literary works around the start of the twenty-first century. A similar trend can be observed with regard to Jewish graphic narratives; while many of the first Jewish graphic narratives appeared as comic books

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throughout the twentieth century, with the exceptions of Art Spiegelman’s Maus that was serialized between 1980 and 1991 and Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, A Life Force, and To the Heart of the Storm which were first released, respectively, in 1978, 1988, and 1991, the remaining graphic novels considered in this volume were all published after the year 2000. Lambert suggested that institutional support played a prominent role in facilitating this burst of creative literary product. Using the same conclusion to explain the rise of the Jewish graphic narrative likely does not carry much weight given the counter-cultural nature of graphic narratives and the lack of support authors and artists receive for producing them. Instead, I contend that the increased turn to producing Jewish graphic narratives in the wake of Maus is a reaction to the “permission” afforded by Maus to tell serious Jewish stories in visualized media, alongside the rise of the graphic novel as a successful commercial medium. With an understanding of the two key literary conventions that shape the field of Jewish graphic narratives, we can now proceed to begin making sense of what it means for a graphic narrative to be a Jewish graphic narrative. It must be noted at the outset that, much like Baetens and Frey’s (2015) concerns that any definition limits inclusion and shifts discourse away from more important analytical conversations, I, too, will avoid postulating a narrow and concise definition. Instead, while I am informed by the writings of others, I am most interested in conversations about texts and topics, and less so about whether a text is Jewish-enough to be considered a Jewish graphic narrative. As a genre, Jewish graphic narratives do not grapple with questions about whether their works are more or less like comic books or graphic novels. While exceptions exist—Maus, some of the Jewish-themed superhero comic books and underground comix—in general, Jewish graphic narratives have not been initially produced as single-issue comic books, nor have there been questions about the seriousness of the works and whether they are better suited for children. To date, the overwhelming majority of Jewish graphic narratives are targeted for mature audiences, presenting narratives about complex topics in contemporary Jewish life like the Holocaust and Israel. While examples of Holocaust-themed graphic works for young readers and child-focused religious texts exist, they are the exceptions within the wider genre of Jewish graphic narratives. To date, there has not yet been a comprehensive definition of what is really meant by the term “Jewish graphic narrative.” Instead, readers have been treated to a number of elisions that avoid making claims like the ones suggested by Baetens and Frey (2015), Cates (2020), or Hescher (2016). In The Quest for Jewish Belief and Identity in the Graphic Novel, Stephen E. Tabachnick (2014) does not offer a justification for why he includes some works in his analysis and omits others beyond personal preference. While

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his focus is on Jewish religious identity, and therefore not the full spectrum of Jewish experience, the absence of criteria for inclusion and exclusion is noteworthy. This is especially evident in his overview of the genre of Jewish graphic novels in The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel which, while providing an excellent and informative summary and analysis of key texts, fails to inform the reader of what actually constitutes a Jewish graphic novel. The late Derek Parker Royal (2016) saw any attempt to define the genre “quixotic at best, ever running the risk of being counterproductive and even critically stifling” (8). He worried that, much like questions about Jewish literature or art in general, readers and scholars will become bogged down in debates about degrees of Jewishness within a text and as a result, not engage in meaningful conversations about the text. Instead, he admires the approach suggested by Danny Fingeroth (2007) who advised that a Jewish graphic novel is one whose Jewish connections, “when looked at directly, almost disappears. One has to look at it from the corner of one’s eye to catch a glimpse of something that, by its nature, evades direction” (155). This approach, suggests Royal, allows for inclusion of a wide range of texts from diverse periods. Fingeroth’s (2007) highly maximalist definition, which seems to include any graphic novel of seemingly any Jewish-related content, contrasts sharply with the one offered by Baskind and Omer-Sherman (2008). In the introduction to their edited collection, while acknowledging that their definition is conservative, they write: “we consider the Jewish graphic novel to be an illustrated narrative produced by a Jew that addresses a Jewish subject or some aspect of the Jewish experience” (xvi). They justify their definition within broader conversations about Jewish art, citing art historians Matthew Baigell and Milly Heyd who advocated for a similar two-pronged definition that required both Jewish religious identity of the artist alongside Jewish-related content in the product. Notably, Baskind and Omer-Sherman qualify their definition, ensuring that the reader is aware that the Jewish graphic narrative is a genre, not a style or proscribed subject, and therefore it is inclusive of the gamut of the Jewish experience from any society and any time period in history. They locate in the Jewish graphic narrative a genre that is “uniquely suited to the quintessential narrative themes of the Jewish imagination: mobility, flight, adaptation, transformation, disguise, metamorphosis” (xvii). I concur with Baskind and Omer-Sherman’s (2008) observation that authorial identification as a Jew does not necessarily confer the status of inclusion in the corpus of Jewish graphic narrative. My rationale is similar to theirs; not every graphic narrative produced by a Jew contains elements of Jewishness and therefore works of this nature by Jews are not considered Jewish graphic narratives. However, where my own definition differs from theirs is based on a recognition that non-Jews can produce Jewish graphic narratives. Comic

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books are frequently produced by teams of creators, some of whom might not be Jewish. To discount a work that makes clear references to the Jewish experience because not all of the artists or writers are Jewish would remove from the conversation of Jewish graphic narratives many seminal Jewish comic books and even some Jewish graphic novels. Therefore, I find myself increasingly more interested in authorial intent than authorial identity and it is this which guides my selection of texts that are included in this volume. By this I mean considerations about to what extent Jewishness plays a central or pivotal role in the graphic narrative and whether it is a primary consideration within the story. For me, the nature of a work’s Jewishness lies at the heart of understanding what a Jewish graphic narrative is. It is therefore for this reason that I have chosen to exclude Jason Lutes’s (2018) masterful Berlin trilogy and Nora Krug’s (2018) graphic memoir Belonging not because of the authors’ non-Jewish identities but because the respective foci of their texts are not on the Jewish experiences during the Nazi era. With Berlin, despite being set during the rise of the Nazi party and including some Jewish characters, Lutes’s focus is on the city of Berlin itself, and Jews and their experiences are one of the many stories told across the work’s almost 600 pages. Conversely, Krug’s interest in Belonging is in exploring her own familial relationship with the Holocaust and to what extent her non-Jewish grandparents were complicit in the Holocaust. Instead, and I appreciate that this might be too amorphous for some, I am focusing this study on works which consider the Jewish experience writ large and where depictions of Jewishness play a primary role in the narrative’s arcs, where Jewishness is woven into the very fabric and essence of the work, irrespective of to what degree an author or artist is Jewish. This definition moves beyond Tabachnick’s (2014) considerations of religious identities in the texts, and instead is interested in recognizing a more complete cultural, political, ethnic, national, religious, and historical Jewish experience. In his attempts to write about Jewish graphic narratives, some of Tabachnick’s analyses over-emphasized the Jewish religious components to texts as opposed to these other, more salient details. For example, in his analysis of Rutu Modan’s (2007a) Exit Wounds, Tabachnick highlights the ways that a character is misconstrued as negative when, in fact, if not for his misogyny, positive developments might not have happened for the main characters. Following this observation, Tabachnick links the misogynistic character’s behavior to God, who “provides even when man does not understand His ultimate purpose” (189). Irrespective of Modan’s secular Jewish identity, locating religious expressions and the hidden hand of God in Exit Wounds obscures the crux of the text as an expression of JewishIsraeli identity and what it means to live in Israeli society at the height of the Second Palestinian Intifada.

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My understanding of Jewish graphic narratives certainly includes the ones that Tabachnick (2014) and Baskind and Omer-Sherman (2008) include, but my criteria are different from theirs. By thinking about texts through multiple lenses, I aim to introduce readers to an alternative way of thinking about what it means to write and illustrate a Jewish graphic narrative. At the same time, I am aware that not every mention of Jews, Judaism, and Jewishness necessarily makes a text actually a Jewish graphic narrative, and Jewish substance (again, defined maximally) must play a prominent role. Unlike Hescher (2016), I am uninterested in creating a quantitative metric wherein readers select, using pre-set criteria, the degrees to which a text is Jewish or not Jewish. Instead, I choose to be intentionally ambiguous in delineating the precise points at which a text is Jewish or not Jewish, preferring to rely on the premise that to be a Jewish graphic narrative, the text must engage, in a meaningful and significant way, with the Jewish experience. Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives: A Critical Guide operates in conversation with many other works about Jewish graphic narratives but approaches the subject in a new way. Some previously published works, like my own (Reingold 2022) Gender and Sexuality in Israeli Graphic Novels or Tahneer Oksman’s (2016) How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses: Women and Jewish Identity in Contemporary Memoirs have considered specific types of Jewish graphic narratives like Israeli ones or ones that are selfstudies by Jewish American women. Others, like Victoria Aaron’s (2019a) Holocaust Graphic Narratives: Generation, Trauma & Memory or Stephen E. Tabachnick’s (2014) The Quest for Jewish Belief and Identity in the Graphic Novel examine a particular type of representation within Jewish graphic novels like how memory or religious identity are expressed. A third type of text, like The Jewish Graphic Novel (Baskind & Omer-Sherman 2008) or Royal’s (2016) collection Visualizing Jewish Narrative: Jewish Comics and Graphic Novels, are edited volumes that include articles about a variety of Jewish graphic novels by different scholars that are then organized thematically in sections. Where this work differs from these other examples is that it is the first to explore the subject of Jewish graphic narratives through an interdisciplinary lens that considers the relationships between texts, authors, artists, readers, educators, and learners. It engages in conversations with theoretical concepts and in considering the borders and boundaries of Jewish graphic narratives. While it is perhaps less developed with regard to original theoretical claims, its contribution to the fields of Jewish studies, Jewish literature, and graphic narratives is in its claims and analyses of the field as a whole, drawing connections across disparate texts, and linking together, in one space, the different ways that Jewish graphic narratives can be understood.

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An important caveat that I want to acknowledge upfront is that I have chosen to focus this work almost exclusively on graphic novels that have been published in English. My rationale is that Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives: A Critical Guide is a critical guide that is written in English and that most Jewish graphic narratives have been published in English (either originally or in translation). The exception that I have made is to also include examples of Hebrew-language graphic novels produced by Israelis.2 I have made this choice in recognition of the rapidly expanding catalogue of Israeli graphic narratives. As of 2022, Israel is the country that has produced the second-most Jewish graphic narratives, trailing only America by quantity. Chapter 2 is structured around the history of the Jewish graphic narrative by first focusing on Jewish comic books and then Jewish graphic novels. Following Jewish comics scholar Arie Kaplan’s (2008) lead, I begin the first section in the 1930s and examine Jewish comic book creators in America and in Israel, the two countries that have produced the greatest number of Jewish graphic narratives and which still possess the most significant communities of writers and artists. I next move into the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s and look at early references to the Holocaust, the creation of Marvel Comics’ character The Golem who is based on the Jewish legend of the golem, and the introduction of Jewish superheroes and villains. The second section of the chapter highlights the development of Jewish graphic novels. I begin by exploring the underground comix movement and how it played a role in the graphic novels published by Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner. The chapter concludes with the history of graphic novels in America and Israel. The third chapter is about social and cultural impacts of Jewish graphic narratives. I identify four main types of Jewish graphic narratives that have been published. Each is topic-based, and they are about the Holocaust, the modern state of Israel, the Diaspora experience, and religious texts. In each section I provide examples of works to demonstrate the variety within each type. Chapter 4 explores four specific critical questions and answers about the nature of Jewish graphic narratives. First, I examine the centrality of memoir and autobiography as one of the main ways that writers and artists have presented graphic narratives. Second, I consider why photographs are so prevalent in Jewish graphic narratives. Third, I question how gender is depicted and in the fourth section, I look at how religious figures are presented. Lastly, in the fifth section, I move beyond the content of Jewish graphic narratives and ask how Jewish graphic narratives are used in classrooms and in the academy. Using the genre scheme that I introduced in Chapter 3 and the literary style of life writing I discussed in Chapter 4, Chapter 5 introduces ten key Jewish graphic narratives, two for each category. Importance can be understood in

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a number of ways, and, to that end, I will offer an explanation of why each is a key text in the corpus of Jewish graphic narratives. In my selections, I have tried to present the reader with a diverse set of texts that show a range of topics and artistic styles. As a text designed for both academics, students, and people curious about Jewish graphic narratives, I have tried to strike a balance between being overly jargony and being too introductory. A glossary is included at the end of the book with detailed definitions for key terms. The nature of this type of work precludes meaningful reference to every Jewish graphic narrative and so, instead, within each chapter and section I have chosen to highlight a few examples that most clearly demonstrate the point that is being made. As an operating principle, I have tried to include examples of both works that have traditionally been considered significant and important and also works that have received less scholarly attention but which also have what to contribute to the conversation about the nature of Jewish graphic narratives. At the back of this book, I have included an Appendix with a comprehensive list of Jewish graphic novels published in English (original and in translation) and Hebrew sorted by genre; this can be used by the interested reader to become better acquainted with the many wonderful Jewish graphic novels that have served as the basis for this study.

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­2 Historical Overview

A

ny history of Jewish graphic narratives would be incomplete without beginning well before Will Eisner published A Contract with God, the first Jewish graphic novel, in 1978. This incompleteness operates on two levels. First, graphic novels (including Jewish ones) did not emerge out of the ether; rather, they are an evolution of the earlier comic book medium, and this process needs to also be considered with regard to Jewish graphic novels because these comic books play a pivotal role in the creative development of many Jewish graphic novelists. Second, many of the creators of these first comic books were Jewish and they found ways—most often implicitly but at times also explicitly—to weave Jewish content and considerations into their works, and therefore this history has value for understanding some of the first ways that Jewish content came to be included in graphic narratives. This chapter is structured around the history of Jewish comic books and Jewish graphic novels. In the first section, I begin with the superhero era, identifying the key Jewish writers and artists along with the texts that they produce. In the second section, I examine the works of Art Spiegelman and Eisner, locating in their early graphic novels the foundation for the subsequent explosion of graphic novels that have been produced thus far in the twentyfirst century, with a particular focus on American and Israeli examples. My rationale is that it is these two countries—despite Israel’s relatively small cartooning community—which have published, quantitatively, the greatest number of Jewish graphic narratives since 2000.

Jewish Comic Books The story of the world’s first comic books begins with the savviness of businessman Maxwell Gaines who recognized comics’ economic potential. Gaines, and his supervisor Harry Wildenberg, worked at Eastern Color Printing

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(ECP) and under their direction, the first comic book to be sold on the market was Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics in 1933 and which would be followed by Famous Funnies, a series which would run for 218 issues (Goulart 2004). Other publishers quickly noticed Famous Funnies’ success and by 1941 there were over thirty different publishers producing over 150 different monthly titles. These works—including Famous Funnies—were collected volumes of previously published newspaper comic strips and they therefore did not contain new and original work. This presented a long-term sustainability problem because eventually, publishers would run out of material to reprint. One of the earliest to recognize the need to create original characters and stories was Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, the publisher of National Allied Publications, the forerunner of today’s DC Comics. Under Wheeler-Nicholson’s guidance, National Allied Publications released New Fun Comics in February 1935. It was in 1936 when Wheeler-Nicholson hit on his first real marketable character in Doctor Occult, a detective who fought supernatural characters like vampires and sorcerers using magical powers. Doctor Occult was created by writer Jerry Siegel and illustrator Joe Shuster, two Jews from Cleveland, whose most famous character, Superman, would make his first appearance in March 1938 in Action Comics #1. As one of DC Comics’ most famous characters, Superman has been a feature of American popular culture for over eighty years, and he is considered emblematic of the superhero genre. In a press release issued in 1975, Siegel explained that Superman emerged as a response to the rising anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany. He wrote: Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed Jews in Nazi Germany … seeing movies depicting the horrors of privation suffered by the downtrodden … reading of gallant, crusading heroes in the pulps, and seeing equally crusading heroes on the screen in feature films and movie serials (often pitted against malevolent, grasping, ruthless madmen) I had the great urge to help … help the despairing masses, somehow. How could I help them, when I could barely help myself? Superman was the answer. And Superman, aiding the downtrodden and oppressed, has caught the imagination of a world. (cited in Best 2012) As the creative product of two young Jews, questions surrounding Superman’s Jewishness have long been considered by many.1 At the outset, it is important to state that nowhere in the series do Siegel and Shuster or any of the character’s subsequent authors or artists who developed or retconned2 his story identify Superman as a Jewish character. Nevertheless, comics scholars and fans have tried to tease out allusions to Jewishness

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in Superman, with Arie Kaplan (2008) suggesting that “there are many Jewish signifiers in evidence” (14). Kaplan sees in Superman’s dual-identity a parallel to the Jewish experience in 1930s and 1940s America, with Jews being fearful of revealing their Jewishness in public and electing to instead hide parts of themselves away from the public, much like a superhero does with their secret identity. Furthermore, he notes similarities between Superman’s origin story and the biblical Moses’s origin story. Moses was a Jewish child born into slavery in Egypt. Fearing that the Jewish people would revolt against him, Pharaoh orders that all male Jewish babies are to be drowned in the Nile River. Moses’s mother saves him by placing him in a basket atop the Nile River whereupon he is rescued by Pharaoh’s daughter and raised in the palace. Like Moses, Superman’s home planet of Krypton experienced a genocide, with most of its population wiped out. To save him, his parents send him in a rocket ship bound for Earth where he would be raised amongst humans. Concluding the similarities is, of course, the fact that both Superman and Moses would be heroes, rescuing people in need, with Moses redeeming the Israelite slaves and Superman saving countless people’s lives. Lastly, Kaplan locates in Superman’s personality a deep commitment to social justice issues. He observes how, in the very first issue of Action Comics, Superman battles capital punishment, spousal abuse, organized crime, and political corruption. Tackling these types of issues, writes Kaplan, are cornerstones of Jewish ethics and he does not see it as accidental that two Jewish creators infused their superhero with Jewish values.3 Siegel and Shuster were not the only Jewish creators in the first sixty years of the twentieth century. The list also includes Harry Hershfield who produced the daily comic strip Abie the Agent from 1914–40, Al Capp who created the character Li’l Abner in 1934, and Bob Kane and Bill Finger who created Batman in 1939. Three of Marvel Comics’ (though not known as Marvel until 1961 having previously been called Timely Comics and then Atlas Comics) most famous creators—Jack Kirby, Joe Simon, and Stan Lee—were also Jewish with Simon and Kirby creating Captain America in 1940, and Lee and Kirby creating the Fantastic Four in 1961, Spider-Man in 1962 and the X-Men in 1963. Additionally, Will Eisner produced the lone issue featuring his costumed character Wonder Man in 1939,4 and the first issue starring The Spirit in 1940. Kaplan (2008) suggests that socioeconomic factors were the primary contributors to this wave of Jewish comic book creators. Citing the cartoonist Al Jaffee’s experiences, he explains that Jewish artists were not granted entry into mainstream venues like newspapers or advertising agencies that could showcase their art due to discrimination and anti-Semitism; instead, the comic book industry was a fertile space for Jewish writers and artists to make names for themselves because of its willingness to hire Jews. It is crucial to

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acknowledge that the dire financial straits of many of these creators ultimately resulted in their being exploited by the companies that employed them. In reference to Marvel Comics, Christopher Pizzino (2018) writes that characters were “corporately owned at a time when creators’ rights were virtually nonexistent” (107), but Marvel’s policies were not exceptions. Most publishers owned the rights to characters and did not pay creators royalties, and many creators, in need of a source of income, accepted these conditions. Over time, some creators managed to negotiate royalties on subsequent contracts but others, like Siegel and Shuster with Superman, were only able to recover limited royalties. Amongst this group of Jewish comics creators, Eisner would be the one who has had the greatest influence on the development of Jewish graphic narratives. Eisner was born in 1917 in the Bronx, New York City, and grew up in a poor family. As a high school student, he illustrated comic strips for his school’s newspaper and made money by selling newspapers to help support his family. When the call for original comics stories went out in the mid-1930s, Eisner partnered with editor Jerry Iger to create a comic-production company to sell stories and characters to publishers (Andelman 2005). The Eisner & Iger Studio served as an early comics incubator, hiring talented writers and artists like Jack Kirby, and helping them gain experience—often in exchange for the rights to their work—before they would go on to work at other companies. One of the studio’s earliest successes, Sheena, Queen of the Jungle, was the first major female comic book character. Eisner’s most famous character was Denny Colt and his alter-ego The Spirit. Created in 1940 for Quality Comics, The Spirit was a comic book supplement for newspapers that Quality contracted with. The premise of The Spirit is that criminologist Colt fakes his own death to assume the mantle of The Spirit, a masked crusader who fights crime in Central City. Because Eisner was placing The Spirit in the pre-superhero era (and therefore the pre-superhero costume era), he was illustrated in the style of 1930s mystery men.5 The Spirit’s costume was noticeably more formal than the costumes worn by either Superman or Batman; he wore a business suit replete with a white shirt, a red tie, a fedora, and gloves alongside a blue domino mask which partially covered his face. Despite the series’ popularity during its twelveyear run, The Spirit’s recognition by IGN as one of the top twenty-five comic book heroes of all time, and the decision to create a Hollywood adaptation featuring Samuel L. Jackson, the series has not retained a prominent place in the superhero canon. This can be at least partially attributed to Eisner’s stereotyping of African Americans in offensive ways (Hayes 2015). In addition to possessing a racially insensitive pun for a name, The Spirit’s sidekick, Ebony White, was illustrated in a way that reflected offensive stereotypes of African Americans by having thick pink lips and large eyes.

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The outbreak of the Second World War in September 1939 and America’s subsequent decision to join the war effort in 1941 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor ushered in an important narratological development for both Timely Comics and DC Comics. Following in lockstep with the American war narrative that understandably positioned the United States as the heroes of the war and the German Nazis as the villains, several costumed superheroes joined the war effort, fighting alongside fictional troops to defeat Adolf Hitler and his army. Timely Comics’ Simon and Kirby created Captain America in specifically to fight against the Nazis even before the Americans were part of the war effort. When conscript Steve Rogers was rejected from the US Army because of poor conditioning, he was injected with the Super Soldier serum, enabling him to become the military’s most valuable soldier. In his role as Captain America, Rogers fought against Hitler’s own super soldier the Red Skull and served as an inspiration to fellow soldiers in the comic book series. In one of the most famous covers of all time, 1941’s Captain America issue #1 featured the titular character punching Hitler in the jaw. Serving in a similar capacity for DC Comics, Wonder Woman also traveled to Europe to fight against Nazis on behalf of the Allied forces, helping them secure victories, while Superman fought against the Dulkians, a group of pseudo-Nazis who were clear stand-ins for Nazis and who even had a swastika-like logo and a Nazi heil-Hitler salute. These war comic books featuring characters like Captain America and Wonder Woman conveyed a consistent message to readers that America was good, and Germany was bad. Therefore, fighting in the Second World War was justified and that the soldiers who were leaving their families were doing so for a noble purpose. As explained by Markus Streb (2021), “superhero comics were established as a means of propaganda by depicting contemporary enemies and thereby reflecting reality” (106). Furthermore, these comics even drew the attention of Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Propaganda Minister, who lamented that Superman “sows hate, suspicion, evil, laziness, and criminality in [the] young hearts” of American children (cited in Weiner & Fallwell 2011: 465). The Israeli comics tradition begins, much like the American one did, in the 1920s and 1930s in children’s magazines. These comics, also like American ones which helped build pro-war nationalistic sentiments, served as important vehicles for shaping pre-state Zionist identity.6 Within pre-state Israel, the goals of these comic books were to teach Hebrew to children and to reinforce values like independence and love of the land (Amihay 2008). Uri Fink (2013) cites the comic Mickey Mauo and Eliahu by Emannuel Yaffe as the first Israeli comic strip. Appearing in the children’s magazine Itoneynu l’Ktanim [Our Newspaper for Children] in 1935, it starred the cat Mickey Mauo (a thinly veiled reference to Disney’s Mickey Mouse) and Eliahu, his human

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friend. The following year saw the release of the first comic featuring Uri Muri, Israel’s first important character. Uri Muri was created by the illustrator Arieh Navon and writer Leah Goldberg. Their character was included in Davar l’Yeladim [Something for Children], the weekly children’s magazine of Davar, the newspaper of the Labor Party and Israel’s leading political paper at the time. Kevin Haworth (2019) cites Galit Gaon, the founder of the Israeli Comics Museum, who described Uri Muri as “the first native Hebrew-hero-child” (13). Over the course of his thirty-one-year run, Uri Muri participated in many uniquely Israeli pursuits including: “teaching Hebrew to recent immigrants, draining the swamps of the Hula Valley, and devising ways to solve urban overcrowding” (13). Haworth observes traits in Uri Muri that appear in other Israeli creations from the period before the state’s founding and from its formative years. These include “plucky persistence and ingenuity” (13), and Uri Muri’s popularity led Navon and Goldberg to create spin-off characters including Muri Uri, Uri Cadduri, and Ram Keisam. In addition to Uri Muri, Srulik was also one of the country’s most recognizable cartoon characters. Srulik was created in 1956 by Dosh, the pen name of Kariel Gardosh, and Srulik appeared in Maariv, one of the country’s national newspapers. Initially created as a symbol to “contest party politics” in comics intended for adults, within two years of his creation, Srulik was chosen as the symbol for Israel’s tenth Independence Day, transitioning into an unabashedly pro-Zionist and pro-Israel character (Katz 2013). Srulik, writes Anat Helman (2011), was the quintessential Israeli, much like Uncle Sam was for Americans. In addition to his name which is a nickname for people named Israel, Srulik’s physical appearance and sartorial choices—a young man wearing sandals and a tembel hat—position him as the epitome of Israeliness because these markers became synonymous with Israelis (Figure  2.1). Shalom Rosenfeld, Maariv’s editor from 1974 to 1980, explained Srulik’s significance thusly: “Srulik became not only a mark of recognition of [Dosh’s] amazing daily cartoons, but an entity standing on its own, as a symbol of the Land of Israel—beautiful, lively, innocent … and having a little chutzpah, and naturally also of the new Jew” (cited by Braiterman 2016). One further example from Israel’s first decade bears mentioning, and it is Gidi Gezer (Carrot Gidi), Israel’s first example of a superhero. When Gidi would eat carrots, he became powerful, allowing him to fight against Israel’s enemies and to spy on foreign armies. Gidi, writes Haworth (2019), is what all Israelis aspired to be—the New Jew, a “brave Jewish boy who is clever and strong” (16). Illustrated by Elisheva Nadel, Gidi modeled bravery and integrity. In an example cited by Haworth, Gidi uses his powers to enter Gaza during a war to find an Arab that his father owed money to and to repay the man. As well, the series is also noteworthy because, in it, Nadel blended images and photographs, becoming Israel’s first artist to use photomontage in comics.

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FIGURE 2.1  Srulik, Israel’s most famous cartoon character. Yair Talmo.

Amidst all the depictions of fighting against Nazis, neither American nor Israeli authors and artists addressed the worsening political situation affecting European Jewry throughout the 1930s, or the Nazis’ eventual attempt to commit mass-genocide against all of Europe’s Jews beginning in 1941. While Streb (2021) has identified a limited number of comic books that depicted Nazi

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concentration camps, even more rare were examples that made it explicitly clear that it was Jews who were the primary occupants of these camps, with authors and artists hiding the religious and ethnic identity of the prisoners and positioning them instead as political opponents or members of resistance groups. Streb does not locate in this choice ill-intent; instead, he suggests that “wartime comics were hardly able to even fathom what really happened inside the camps” (111) and so the artists instead defaulted to depictions of who they assumed would populate the camps. In the years following the end of the war, depictions of Jewish victims slowly began to emerge. For example, a 1946 story called “The Golem” by Bob Bernstein and Joe Kubert included overt depictions of anti-Semitism and persecution of Jews (Streb 2021) but, as Darren C. Marks (2019) has pointed out, it would not be until the early 1950s that the Holocaust would become more prominent in comic books like Atlas Comics’ series Battlefield. In a 1952 Battlefield story called “Atrocity Story” (Chapman & Reinman), two pages are about the Holocaust but, as Marks notes, “it is striking that there is NO mention of the Jewishness of the survivors or that the Jews of Europe were the targets” of genocide (177). Instead, the mass-murders committed by the Nazis are used to buttress arguments about the imperative of American involvement in the Korean War to avoid future genocides being committed. The Battlefield story “City of Slaves” (Kweskin 1953) is more explicit, featuring a Holocaust survivor narrating the story, but his identity as a Jew is occluded, with no overt references to his religious identity despite numerous contextual clues that allude to his Jewishness. Marks suggests that the decision to omit references to the Jewish tragedy of the Second World War during the war and in the years afterwards reflects a trend amongst Jewish writers and artists who felt the need to obscure the Jewish story within a broader discourse of American identity politics. They felt expected to subsume their Jewishness under Americanness, placing the Holocaust “in a social imaginarium of other larger American concerns such as the war against fascism and then communism” (175). Al Feldstein and Bernie Krigstein’s 1955 short story “Master Race” in the first issue of EC Comics’ series Impact was one of the first to visually document the horrors of Nazi concentration camps. “Master Race” was cited as an early influence by Spiegelman (2002) for his graphic narrative Maus, and in an article about Krigstein for The New Yorker, Spiegelman highlighted that it was Krigstein’s ability as a storyteller that made “Master Race” a “tour de force.” The story is set ten years after the end of the war and takes place on a subway train where Reissman, a former Nazi commandant of Bergen Belsen, is recognized by a Holocaust survivor from the camp. Told as an inner monologue, the anonymous Holocaust survivor recounts the history of the rise of the Nazi Party, remembers Reissman’s role at Bergen Belsen, and wonders whether Reissman even remembers his complicity in the deaths of countless

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Jewish lives. Krigstein illustrates scenes of torture, murder, and mass graves, providing visual testimony to the traumas the Nazis inflicted upon the Jews. Once Reissman realizes that he has been recognized by his former prisoner, he exits the train, running away from the anonymous survivor who chases after him. Reissman trips on the subway platform and tumbles into the path of an oncoming train and is killed, whereupon the survivor denies knowing who Reissman is or what happened that precipitated his death. Robert G. Weiner and Lynne Falwell (2011) have observed that at a time when the Holocaust was not openly depicted in film and literature, Krigstein’s work on the short eightpage story was “revolutionary” (465) for its willingness to directly grapple with the genocide that had been perpetrated in Nazi-controlled Europe and to show what happened to Jews. Despite the publication of “Master Race” in 1955, the Holocaust would only be featured in superhero comics as a Jewish experience in the 1970s. Marks (2019) locates in this shift a reflection of wider Jewish-American political dynamics wherein American Jews no longer felt the need to hide their Jewishness. This newfound confidence emerges in reaction to Israel’s military triumphs in the Six Day War and the concomitant esteemed status the country received from the American government. As a result, the Holocaust became more widely acknowledged in both DC Comics and Marvel Comics storylines. This includes Batman issue #237 (O’Neil & Adams 1971) in which a Jewish survivor helps take care of Batman’s sidekick Robin and Batman wants to arrest a fictional Nazi war criminal named Kurt Schloss, and also in an innumerable number of stories by Kubert that, Marks writes, would be “far too many to list” (182). An even more recent DC Comics story performs two fictional feats that directly address the Holocaust. Not only does Louise Simonson and Jon Bogdanove’s (1998) run on Man of Steel fictionalize the story of 1943’s Warsaw Ghetto Uprising by having Superman help the Jews fight against the Nazis; their storyline also rebuts DC Comics’ own editorial stance from the Second World War that refused to depict Superman actually fighting against Nazis even if he was created, according to Siegel (cited in Best 2012) as a direct response to the Nazis.7 The Holocaust was not the only Jewish motif that found its way into superhero comics in the 1970s. Called the “superhero prototype” (51) by Weiner (2011), the Jewish legend of the golem also featured in both Marvel and DC storylines. The legend of the golem is “one of the most enduring and imaginative tales in modern Jewish folklore and … perhaps the most famous of all modern Jewish literary fantasies” (Dekel & Gantt Gurley 2013: 241–2).8 Weiner (2011) cites issue #134 of The Incredible Hulk by Marvel Comics’ writer Roy Thomas (1970) as one of, if not the, first comic book examples that makes use of the legend of the golem. Titled “In the Shadow of the Golem,” the issue positions The Hulk as a golem-like figure whose existence is debated

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by a group of people in Moravia, an Eastern European region close to where the original golem resided in Prague. When The Hulk makes an appearance, he is chased away by a group of Moravians who reject him for being not human. A young girl challenges this behavior and questions whether The Hulk is a golem; her father then proceeds to teach her the story of the golem’s origins. Skirting the destruction wrought by the original golem, Isaac, the girl’s father, explains that the golem fought for the rights of “their people” until he was no longer needed. In Weiner’s close reading of the text, he notices that nowhere in Thomas’s story is the family identified as Jewish; instead, much like other early examples of Jewish representation in comics, Jewish identity is encoded into the comic without being explicitly identified. For example, Isaac reveals that the golem’s creator was a rabbi, but nowhere does he selfidentify as part of the Jewish community. Weiner suggests that Thomas’s use of the golem narrative demonstrates an interest in positioning “the Hulk story as a metaphor for the struggle for civil rights taking place at the time. The golem story itself is one of basic human rights to liberty and justice” (56). Marvel Comics has also created two different characters that have been called The Golem, both of which draw on Jewish mythology. The first, a very short-lived three-issue story published in 1974 in the series Strange Tales, introduced several changes to the golem legend, most notably shifting the location of the story away from Eastern Europe to the Middle East and changing the persecutors from Christians to Arabs. Written and illustrated by several different individuals including Mike Friedrich (1974) and Len Wein (1974), the Strange Tales’ golem narrative is a retelling of the story, but it frames it as not about Jewish persecution in Eastern Europe but about Israeli persecution at the hands of Arab armies. This sentiment is expressed through a story that revolves around a group of archaeologists in the Middle East who are – surprisingly given his Eastern European origins – searching for the golem in the desert. Just as the group extracts him from the ground, a group of Arabs kidnap the archaeologists, save for their leader Professor Adamson, who is shot and left to die. As his life ebbs, Adamson chants prayers over the golem’s lifeless body and sheds a tear on the golem’s foot, resulting in the golem’s reanimation. Channeling the golem of Prague’s commitment to saving lives, this golem tracks down the kidnapped archaeologists and saves them. The comic ends with one of the archaeologists recognizing Professor Adamson in The Golem’s eye. In the subsequent issues, The Golem continues to help the archaeologists and ensure that they are not harmed. In an explanation to the readers, the creators of the comic explain that their golem should be understood as having human intelligence, and that this intelligence comes from Professor Adamson giving “up his life to instill a life-force in old Stone-face” (Friedrich, DeZuniga, & Austin 1974). Unlike the original versions of the golem story, in

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which creator and created exist within a symbiotic relationship, the Marvel Comics version involves the golem being unable to become human without the death of his creator: only through Adamson’s death can the golem be brought back to life. The second Marvel Comics’ character from the 1970s that was called The Golem was created by Roy Thomas (1976a, 1976b, 1977), and he has also been used by the company as recently as 1993 (Thomas 1993). Thomas’s golem is born because of a freak accident in which a Jew named Jacob Goldstein creates a clay man to protect Jews from Nazis during the Second World War, and in the process, Goldstein’s body becomes unintentionally fused with the golem’s body. This new creature is “part a human and part a holy being, but one with total free will” (Weiner 2011: 67). Unlike Marvel Comics’ first The Golem, the Goldstein Golem can transition at will between being a golem and being Goldstein. While other superheroes want Goldstein to help fight for the Allies in the Second World War, like the original Prague Golem, Goldstein explains that he must remain with the Jews to ensure their safety before he is willing to fight in the war. Even more recently, the DC Comics’ twelve-issue series “The Monolith” that was published between April 2004 and March 2005 featured a golem. Written and illustrated by Justin Gray, Jimmy Palmiotti, and Phil Winslade, the series features a golem created in 1930s New York during the Great Depression. Fashioned to help Lower East Side immigrants, the golem was created by a group that included Rabbi Rava, a Jewish immigrant from Prague named Alice, a Chinese carpenter, and a bootlegger. The story is set in the twenty-first century in the home of Alice Cohen, the granddaughter of Alice the immigrant, and focuses on Alice Cohen’s discovery that the golem has been hidden in her grandmother’s home for many years. This golem follows many of the modern iterations of the golem story in that he can speak, he dresses in contemporary clothing, and he experiences feelings and emotions. Elizabeth R. Baer (2012) writes that “though there are Jewish characters and themes, the golem’s sense of responsibility is to the wider world of oppressed people in New York, a city often depicted as dark, menacing, snowy, and decrepit” (119). The larger issues with which the story engages include drug addiction, racism, sex-slavery rings, and child pornography. Tackling these problems transitions the golem away from serving the uniquely particular Jewish experience and toward solving contemporary universal issues and the protection of all vulnerable and needy people. The 1970s would also usher in the first wave of superhero characters who were openly Jewish.9 Created by Chris Claremont in 1980, when Kitty Pryde was included in Marvel Comics’ X-Men #129, she became the first Jewish superhero (Claremont & Byrne 1980). Kitty Pryde is noticeably Jewish given

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that she is illustrated wearing a necklace with a Star of David, a clear visual signifier for her Jewish identity. The decision to depict Kitty Pryde wearing a Jewish necklace would be a choice replicated by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Bagley in 2007’s Ultimate Spider-Man. In a fascinating analysis of Pryde’s character, Jennifer Caplan (2021) writes that Kitty Pryde is an exception amongst Jewish superhero characters in that she never was required to hide her Jewishness. Unlike Magneto or the Fantastic Four’s The Thing who would be retconned as Jewish in later storylines, Kitty Pryde was Jewish from the very beginning. Caplan argues that Kitty Pryde’s Jewishness plays a prominent role in the series and in her character development (66–7). This is evident in several issues including in X-Men #159 (Claremont & Sienkiewicz 1982) where she uses her Jewish faith, manifested physically by her Star of David necklace, to ward off the vampire Dracula or in the more recent All-New X-Men where she revealed that she was a victim of anti-Semitism in her youth (Bendis and Immonen 2013) (Figure 2.2). Claremont’s more famous inclusion of Jewish content was his decision to retcon Magneto, the X-Men’s enemy, by presenting him as a victim of the Holocaust. Magneto was created by Lee and Kirby in 1963 and throughout the series’ first years, Magneto was the X-Men’s principal villain. Unlike Professor Charles Xavier who believed that mutants and humans could coexist and learn to live peacefully together, Magneto believed that mutants were homosuperior, and, using his powers to control metals and magnets, he set out to try to ensure that mutants would rule over humankind. Scholarship about the Xavier-Magneto dynamic locate parallels between their respective worldviews and those of the American Civil Rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X (Kaplan 2008). For Claremont, however, Magneto’s lack of origin story resulted in a one-dimensional character interested in perpetrating genocide with no rationale. When Claremont took over authorship of the series in 1974, he set out to craft a narrative that justified or explained Magneto’s behavior and as a result, added layers of complexity to Magneto’s character (Kaplan 2008). The layer of nuance that Claremont added to Magneto was to retcon his narrative to include that he is a Holocaust survivor, replete with a tattoo on his wrist that identifies his Auschwitz prisoner number. Having seen what the world—either actively like the Nazis or passively by the bystanders—did, he wants to ensure that mutants will not suffer a similar fate when faced with similar persecution. Claremont explained his choice thusly: It allowed me to turn him into a tragic figure, in that his goals were totally admirable. He wants to save his people! His methodology was defined by all that had happened to him. When I can start from the premise that he was a good and decent man at heart, I then have the opportunity over the

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FIGURE 2.2  Kitty Pryde describing being a victim of anti-Semitism. Copyright Marvel Comics, All-New X-Men #13, 2013.

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course of 200 issues to attempt to redeem him. To take him back within himself to the point where he was that good and decent man and see if he could start over. (Kaplan 2008: 120) As a result of his past, Magneto takes a proactive stance for a different future, fighting for mutant rights and their physical safety, even if this means harming innocent humans in the process. Scott Thompson Smith (2017) writes that it was in 1981 when “the historical Holocaust fully enters Marvel continuity” (15). X-Men #150 (Claremont & Cockrum 1981) has the first explicit reference to Magneto being a survivor of Auschwitz. While fighting against the X-Men, Magneto hurts Kitty Pryde. Cradling her body in his arms, he fears that he has killed her, and he is reminded of the deaths of his own family members. He says: “I remember my own childhood—the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the guards joking as they herded my family to their death. As our lives were nothing to them, as human lives became nothing to me.” Four years later, in X-Men issue #199, Claremont (Claremont & Romita Jr. 1985) had Magneto visit the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, alongside Kitty Pryde with whom he has since reconciled following their earlier fight. At the museum, Magneto and Kitty Pryde meet with Holocaust survivors, with Kitty Pryde sharing her own family’s story of loss from during the war, in a scene that “resonated powerfully” according to Jeremy Dauber (2021). Together, they discuss whether it would be preferable to for mutants and humans to work cooperatively to ensure that neither mutants nor humans are eradicated in the same way that the Nazis tried to do to Jews in the Holocaust. Caplan (2021) correctly points out that attending the museum and meeting with the survivors was of interest to Kitty Pryde, and Magneto only attended to accompany her; she therefore assumed the role of helping Magneto come to terms with his own past and become more comfortable with his own experiences. It was Kitty Pryde’s “Jewish history that pushed Marvel closer to unmasking Magneto” (Caplan: 67). As a writer at one of the two most prominent comic book publishers, Claremont’s willingness to publicly and openly weave topics related to the Jewish experience is of great importance. The ingenuity of what Claremont accomplished was in bringing the Holocaust and Judaism to the forefront of characters’ identities, showing readers that Jews and their experiences should be told. There is disagreement amongst scholars whether Claremont’s (1981, 1985) retconning of Magneto’s story was a positive character development. Cheryl Alexander Malcolm (2008) reads Claremont’s treatment of Magneto as a redemption story. She writes that Claremont’s decision to transform Magneto from would-be perpetrator of genocide to a victim of genocide “releases

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[Magneto] from the racist stereotyping associated with the Final Solution” (150). Smith (2017), however, suggests that Magneto’s story is much more complex. While Magneto’s determination to save mutants is understandable given his experiences in the Holocaust, his willingness to use violence and to even commit a subsequent genocide against humankind raises important questions about whether he has become, likely to his own horror, Nazilike himself. Smith writes: “the recursive formation of Magneto’s identity through the precedent of the Holocaust, in combination with his villainous past in Marvel continuity, creates a character of multivalent and dissonant identity” (23). In the ensuing decades, further details about Magneto’s Holocaust past would be developed by other writers, along with increased allusions to Jewish identity given that Claremont never explicitly identified Magneto as a Jew, merely positioning him as a likely-Jew. Weiner and Falwell (2011) write that initially, there was uncertainty surrounding Magneto’s Jewishness, since it was possible that he could be a Holocaust survivor for reasons other than being a Jew, including being Romani. Magneto’s religious identity as a Jew would eventually be retconned in Greg Pak and Carmine di Giandomenico’s (2009) series X-Men: Magneto Testament which is set in the Nazi era and tells the story of what Magneto experienced as a Jewish child in Auschwitz.10 One final Marvel character worth considering is the previously mentioned The Thing. The Thing’s denouement as a Jew was by far the most surprising since, unlike Magneto whose violent behavior called out for some type of explanation or Kitty Pryde who wore a Star of David necklace from the onset of her creation, there were no hints or allusions to Jewishness in over forty years of Fantastic Four comics featuring The Thing. Before becoming The Thing in an accident in outer space, Ben Grimm was an accomplished student and athlete, eventually becoming a space pilot.11 Grimm was retconned as a Jew in issue #56 of Fantastic Four (Kesel, Immonen, & Koblish 2002). Titled “Remembrance of Things Past,” the issue is initially set in the years before Grimm has become The Thing. The reader sees Grimm as a troubled child, spending time in a gang, breaking storefront windows, and even stealing a Star of David necklace from a storekeeper named Mr. Sheckerberg. In the present, The Thing visits Sheckerberg to offer help and protection against neighborhood gangs but Sheckerberg doesn’t want The Thing’s help. The story then shifts back to the past and Grimm is abandoned by his friends because he has moved out of the area and is living with his wealthy uncle who is a doctor. In her analysis of the issue, Caplan (2021) writes that even though, at this point in the story, there has been no mention of Grimm being Jewish, “the clues are mounting” (60). Grimm lives in a historically Jewish neighborhood, he steals a Star of David, his uncle is wealthy and a physician. Back in the present, a fight breaks out and Sheckerberg is hurt. The Thing is unable to perform CPR

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because he worries that he will crush the man and so instead, he recites the Shma, the most important Jewish prayer, whereupon Sheckerberg wakes up. Sheckerberg questions why Grimm never talks about his Jewishness and whether he is ashamed of it but Grimm demurs, explaining that he worries that people will come to associate Jews with monsters like him. Sheckerberg reminds Grimm of the golem, another Jewish creature, who is noble and not a monster. In more recent years, Marvel Comics has integrated Jewish iconography into storylines featuring The Thing. This includes depicting The Thing reading from the Torah on his bar mitzvah (Slott & Dwyer 2006) and getting married underneath a Jewish wedding canopy (Slott & Kuder 2019) (Figure 2.3). More recently, DC Comics has introduced two Jewish superheroes into its catalogue of characters. Debuting in 2006, Kate Kane fights crime in Gotham City as the newest iteration of Batwoman. She self-identifies as both Jewish and lesbian. Kane is a highly politicized character, with author Greg Rucka and artist J.H. Williams III (2010) using her sexual identity to challenge American military policies forbidding homosexuality in the army by having her attend the United States Military Academy but being unable to matriculate because of her refusal to deny her sexual identity. Within the series, Kane is depicted celebrating Jewish holidays and being intimate with her partner Reneé Montoya. In a powerful reflection on Kane’s significance to her, Jenna Kalishman (2020) writes: It’s difficult to fully articulate how important Kate Kane has been to me as a fictional manifestation of my identity as a Jewish woman and a lesbian. Obviously, she is not a real person, but it is not uncommon to grow attachments to fictional characters, especially those we see as similar or complementary to ourselves. Though I have sought comfort in many fictional landscapes, I have never been quite so fixated on a character as I am with Kate Kane. The second recent character that DC Comics developed is Willow Zimmerman, a Jewish teenager who fights crime as the superhero Whistle in Gotham City. Appearing in 2021’s Whistle: A New Gotham City Superhero, Zimmerman’s story is infused with Jewish references and locations, including a synagogue that Zimmerman visits. Written by E. Lockhart and illustrated by Manuel Preitano, Zimmerman is committed to social justice issues, locating Jewish values alongside her Jewish Studies professor mother as the source for her volunteerism and community activism. As a secular Jew, Zimmerman does not actively perform Jewish rituals but, as Julian Voloj (2021) has aptly noted, with Zimmerman as “a hero whose actions are clearly informed by her Jewish

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FIGURE 2.3  The Thing getting married under a Jewish wedding canopy. Copyright Marvel Comics, Fantastic Four #5, 2019.

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identity and the concept of … repairing the world, Judaism will now be an integral part of Gotham’s mythology.” The twenty-first-century Jewish evolutions of classic superheroes like The Thing and Batwoman and the introduction of new characters like Whistle testify to the willingness on the part of creators to visualize Jewishness on the page in increasingly explicit ways. The presence of a superhero offering a prayer or celebrating a Jewish ritual or citing Jewish texts normalizes the Jewish experience and suggests that the ambiguities or purposeful exclusions made by early creators are no longer necessary. In their place, readers—both Jewish and non-Jewish—can see diversity on the page and come to better understand the Jewish experience in contemporary America.

Jewish Graphic Novels Beginning in the second half of the 1960s, a new style of comic books called underground comix began to be published on American college and university campuses in culturally diverse neighborhoods in metropolitan cities like New York and San Francisco before spreading around the world to countries like Israel. These comix challenged prevailing assumptions about the comic book genre, showing that graphic narratives could do more than tell fictional stories featuring superheroes. Counted amongst the earliest practitioners of this genre are Robert Crumb, Jaxon, and Kim Deitch. These artists produced works that were “amusing, sexually explicit, and often satirical … [it] was self-conscious, sometimes quasi-autobiographical, and utterly irreverent” (Baetens & Frey 2015: 55). Readers of underground comix were different than the children who bought superhero comic books. Underground comix were read by “the American baby boomers who rebelled against the political conservatism and consumerist mind-set instilled in them by their parents after 1945” (Gabillet 2018: 155). These readers were interested in experimental, non-traditional, real stories, showing the world as it is. The significance of underground comix in laying the foundation for all graphic narratives cannot be understated. It is not just that new topics were being depicted or that a more mature or different readership was being cultivated. These authors and illustrators were showing that the medium of visualized narrative has the potential to convey story in a way that had hitherto not been done. Underground comix brought the medium more closely toward mainstream forms of expression like prose fiction and journalism (Gabillet 2018). Additionally, the artists’ interest in depicting the contours of their own lives through self-exploration in autobiography and memoir foreshadowed

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some of the dominant tropes of the graphic narrative which would emerge in the late 1970s (Hatfield 2009). Within Israel, despite the commercial and popular successes of Israel’s comic book characters, cartooning was not seen as a viable or respectable artistic endeavor in Israel. It was, writes Haworth (2019), “compartmentalized in audience and in ambition” (13) for the country’s first three decades of existence. Furthermore, cartoonists were relegated to society’s artistic margins by the 1970s when there was a decline in readership of children’s magazines. Into this vacuum emerged Israeli examples of underground comix. Like the American underground comix, Israeli versions challenged accepted conventions, using the graphic medium to tell stories that were adult in nature and not intended for children. In the early 1970s, a group of Tel Aviv cartoonists released Freaky—The Most Stoned Children’s Magazine in Israel. It explicitly mocked Israel’s military accomplishments and questioned the prominence of war in Israeli society. The fact that the artists who collaborated on Freaky were arrested for “agitating for revolution” (Haworth: 20) further contributed to their larger interest in calling attention to what they saw as governmental overreach and deep flaws in Israeli society. The publication of Freaky in the 1970s was important because it inspired a subsequent generation of cartoonists to carry on its legacy in the years between 1975 and 1995 by using cartoons as vehicles for deconstructing Israeli hegemonies. Important members of this community include Dudu Geva, Uri Fink, and Michel Kichka. Their works would be unrecognizable in comparison to Israel’s first comic books because of their willingness to directly call attention to inequalities and flaws in Israel. Both Fink and Kichka remain active in Israeli comics well into the twenty-first century. Fink’s Zbeng!, a series about Israeli teenagers and their social lives, has been running in Maariv l’Noar since 1987, and he is also the editorial cartoonist for the newspaper Maariv. Kichka is a Belgian who immigrated to Israel in 1974. As an accomplished artist who prized the ligne claire style of the Franco-Belgian comics tradition, Kichka taught many of Israel’s most prominent cartoonists in his capacity as an instructor at Israel’s prestigious Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design. Amongst American cartoonists who were operating during the formative years of the underground comix movement, the graphic work of both Art Spiegelman and Will Eisner has had the greatest impact on the growth and development of Jewish graphic novels as a genre. While their respective creative outputs are radically different in topic, narrative voice, and artistic style, by the late 1970s and early 1980s, both were engaged in creative pursuits that interrogated the Jewish experience in the twentieth century through the graphic medium. Whereas Eisner’s initial focus was on telling stories inspired by his own American-Jewish experience in the decades preceding the Holocaust, Spiegelman’s emphasis was on telling an intergenerational story

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set in Europe during the Holocaust and in America in the decades following it. Both authors’ Jewish graphic narratives were heavily influenced, albeit in very different ways, by the underground comix scene that was emerging in the United States in the late 1960s. The two men’s biographies read very differently from one another. Unlike Eisner who, at least until the late 1970s, was most famous for his masked hero The Spirit, Spiegelman never wrote or illustrated superhero comics. Instead, Spiegelman was one of the members of the nascent underground comix scene. He initially self-published his work before being hired to produce comix for The Print Mint, one of the most prominent underground comix publishers in America. Conversely, upon concluding his service as an illustrator in the United States’ military during the Second World War, Eisner remained a fixture of the mainstream comics community, first producing additional stories for The Spirit and then working for the US Army creating instructional training manuals using comic book panels. It is important, at the outset, to recognize that unlike Spiegelman’s work on Maus which clearly evokes many of the artistic and conceptual traits of underground comix, Eisner’s is less demonstrative of these traits and is instead more inspired by the movement and the freedoms it afforded authors to tell the stories that mattered to them. After almost two decades spent in the employ of the military, Eisner was introduced to the diversity and vibrancy of the underground comix community and its texts at the 1971 New York Comic Art Convention. Eisner was impressed with underground comix artists’ willingness to explore their lived experiences and it is this approach to graphic storytelling that led him to return to the medium. Upon leaving the army, Eisner began teaching at New York’s School of Visual Arts in 1972 and writing his own long-form narratives (Andelman 2005). The underground comix artists’ interrogation of the self is most palpably felt in Eisner’s first long-form semi-autobiographical narrative A Contract with God. First published in 1978 by Baronet Press, Eisner’s (2006a) A Contract with God is considered by many to be the first graphic novel. In A Contract with  God, Eisner turned his attention to New York’s Jewish immigrant community, and this exploration of the immigrant experience would become a hallmark of his later publications. Some of these works—like A Contract with God—are fictional but rooted in both autobiographical experiences along with the historical immigrant experience while others—like To the Heart of the Storm—are much more autobiographical. What links Eisner’s works from this period of his life together is an emphasis on grounding the narrative in a realistic setting that authentically reflects the economic and cultural time periods of his stories. In A Contract with God, Eisner (2006a) tells the story of a religious Jew named Frimme Hersh who drafts a contract with God wherein Frimme

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commits to performing good deeds. In exchange, he expects God to look out for his well-being. Like many other Eastern European Jews, Frimme immigrates to New York City because of anti-Semitism and persecution. Upon moving into a tenement building, an infant is left on his doorstep; interpreting this as a sign from God, Frimme adopts the girl, naming her Rachele. When Rachele suddenly dies, Frimme rejects God, believing that He broke the terms of their agreement by allowing Rachele to die. Frimme subsequently abandons religious Jewish life and adopts a lavish and hedonistic lifestyle. Finding this life unsatisfactory, he coerces a group of rabbis to draft a new contract for him with God, but Frimme dies before he can re-enter the Jewish community. A Contract with God contains elements of the autobiographical; Eisner’s own daughter Allice died from leukemia, and in an interview with Michael Schumacher (2010), Eisner explained that Frimme’s “argument with God was [his]. [He] exorcised [his] rage at a deity [he] believed violated [his] faith and deprived [his] lovely 16-year-old child of her life” (197). A Contract with God is also a story about the challenges Jews faced upon arrival to the New World. Frimme’s struggles to live in two worlds—he is either religious or hedonistic—reflect the difficulties of acculturation as Jews felt pulled in competing directions. Unlike in Europe where Frimme lived only as a religious Jew, America offered him the opportunity to become wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, but this integration came at a cost in the form of his Jewish identity and connection to Jewish community. Eisner’s decision to kill Frimme before allowing him to return to the Jewish community is also indicative of the challenge Jews faced if they wanted to return to Jewish life and community once those ties have been cut. Unlike the underground comix which inspired its production, A Contract with God was designed to appeal to all readers. Michael A. Chaney (2018) sees in its production an attempt by Eisner “to make the content and the style of his comics not just original but also accessible to a broad readership” (191). Eisner’s narratological willingness to depict autobiographical details about the Jewish experience would reverberate throughout many of the graphic narratives he would publish in the years to come. Most notably, Eisner’s (2006b) work A Life Force semi-autobiographically depicted his childhood and formative years growing up in the Bronx in an impoverished family. Eisner’s (2006a) artistic style in A Contract with God also bears mentioning. Like other underground comix artists who adopted unconventional panel and page layouts, Eisner similarly rejected some of the established comic book conventions that he once promoted in his earlier work. Notably, Eisner began omitting borders between panels, with panels bleeding into each other, challenging the reader to think about how time is progressing and what it might mean for a work to break with established conventions. Elsewhere,

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he allocates full pages to single panels with large blocks of narration accompanying the singular image. These images, including A Contract with God’s most famous image which depicts Frimme on the ground howling at God through the rain, evoke pathos as a result of Eisner’s use of heavy black lines throughout (Figure  2.4). Eisner’s line work is effective at establishing mood and communicating its own story irrespective of the words on the page, and it highlights the salience of the image, showing that it is not a secondary device that props up the printed word but one that operates in parallel alongside the text. In an article considering the relative importance of Will Eisner in the story of Jewish graphic narratives and his influence on later artists like French cartoonist Joann Sfar (2005, 2006) or American graphic writer-illustrator JT Waldman (2006), Laurence Roth (2007) writes that neither Sfar’s nor Waldman’s work reflects the narrative or artistic styles employed by Eisner. However, Roth attributes their successes to Eisner’s pathbreaking work. He writes: “they exemplify his legacy in that they use the creative potential inherent in the comics medium as analogous to, and a commentary on, the creative potential inherent in contemporary Jewish culture and religiosity. Eisner was the first to show how that could be done” (465). One of the most prominent ways that this is felt, suggests Roth, is Eisner’s willingness to fully abandon the superhero trope in which the hero rushes in to save the day. Instead, characters succeed or fail based on their merits, demerits and, quite often, by luck (fortunately or unfortunately). This approach, while not novel to readers of underground comix, was new for the larger audience that Eisner was hoping to attract. In addition to Will Eisner, Art Spiegelman is also of paramount importance in understanding the history of Jewish graphic narratives. Perhaps ironically given the prominent position that he now holds within the graphic narrative community, Spiegelman did not set out to produce works that reached the masses. As one of the leading underground comix artists, Spiegelman’s graphic literature was not intended for all readers. Despite Maus’s universal acclaim today, it was first serialized in the 1980s and 1990s in the indie comix magazine Raw. It was only subsequently collected into two edited volumes in 1986 and 1991 by Pantheon Press and published in the editions that most of its readers are familiar with. In Maus, Spiegelman tells two simultaneous stories: his father Vladek’s Holocaust story, and his own experiences as the child of a Holocaust survivor. The two stories are interwoven together, with the framework of the narrative a series of interviews conducted between Spiegelman and Vladek. Through these interviews, the reader learns about Vladek’s life in Poland before the Holocaust, his Holocaust story, as well as the ways that the Holocausts impact on Vladek reverberated onto Spiegelman, shaping his son’s life too.

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FIGURE 2.4  Frimme raging at God. From A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories: A Graphic Novel by Will Eisner. Copyright © 1978, 1985, 1989, 1995, 1996 by Will Eisner. Copyright © 2006 by Will Eisner Studios, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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Much like the influence that Eisner’s (2006a) A Contract with God has had upon the publication of Jewish graphic narratives, the same can equally, if not more so, be said about Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) Maus. In The Greatest Comic Book of All Time, Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo (2016) write: If by force or compulsion we were required to erect a single, definitive canon of American comic books and graphic novels, then there is no doubt that Art Spiegelman’s Maus would occupy its top spot. Moreover, its nearest rivals would be cut from the same cloth: serious, long-form comics that depict the turmoiled inner lives of their protagonists. With large quantities of symbolic capital derived roughly equally from cultural and economic sources, Maus and comics like it (by Alison Bechdel, Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Seth, and Chris Ware, to name only a few leading lights) are the “one-percenters” of the comics world. Yet even among this select group, Spiegelman’s Maus stands head and shoulders above its peers in terms of both notoriety and prestige. For many in the field of comics, Maus is the book that changed everything. (2016: 17) Beaty and Woo are not being hyperbolic in their description of Maus’s importance to the medium. Their analysis of Maus highlights the key contributions that Spiegelman has made for influencing the growth of the medium, and while they are writing about Maus as an example of a graphic narrative that has impacted the works by non-Jewish authors and artists, their statement is equally true about its impact on Jewish graphic narratives. Many of the Jewish graphic narratives that followed after Maus’s also considered serious subject matter and involved an extended exploration of nuanced characters who experienced considerable difficulties. Additionally, Spiegelman modeled the value of depicting a world that was familiar to the reader, and in doing so, creating simpatico between author, subject, and reader, where they were operating in a shared, albeit different, space together. In Maus, Spiegelman creates a work that is focused on more than just documenting the Holocaust; it is a work “focused on different kinds of witnessing: being a witness to oneself, a witness to the testimony of others, a witness to the process of witnessing” (Chute 2016: 29). I want to highlight two specific ways that Maus shaped the development of the Jewish graphic novel. With regard to subject matter, Spiegelman has consistently interrogated himself in his graphic memoirs, and while autobiography and memoir are a prominent feature of contemporary Jewish graphic narratives, it is Spiegelman who first brought this line of self-inquiry to the forefront and established it as a normative for the medium. Erin McGlothlin (2018) writes: “Spiegelman’s preferred subject has been the

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autobiographical self at the crossroads of history, culture and discourse, a terrain he surveys again and again, yielding alternative viewpoints and new insights from changing temporal and cultural perspectives” (207). Secondly, Maus opened the door for subsequent artistic exploration by granting license to depict trauma artistically and creatively. In Maus, Spiegelman engages in an extended visual metaphor by grouping the work’s subjects by either religion or nationality and illustrating them as different animal species. For example, Jews are illustrated as mice, Nazis are illustrated as cats, and Americans are illustrated as dogs. By using animal imagery and the animal kingdom, Spiegelman’s visuals reinforce an understanding of the place of the Jew within European society. More importantly, however, is the metastatement that Spiegelman offers in the work about creative and artistic expression in representations of sites of trauma alongside the permission to tell stories about even the most horrific of Jewish experiences. Both Eisner and Spiegelman have received numerous awards and recognition for their oeuvre and their contributions to the medium. They were each awarded the Grand Prix de la ville d’Angoulême, the most prestigious lifetime achievement award in comics that is offered in central Europe. The duo has been similarly celebrated by the Eisner Awards, having been elected to its Hall of Fame in recognition of their contributions to the field. In 1992, Eisner won the Original Work prize at the Harvey Awards and the Best Graphic Novel of the year at the Eisner Awards for his autobiographical bildungsroman To the Heart of the Storm in which he chronicles experiences from his childhood and adolescence growing up in New York City in the years between the two World Wars. Likewise in 1992, Spiegelman’s Maus Volume II was awarded the Previously Published award at both the Harvey and the Eisner Awards given that it had been first released as individual issues before being published by Pantheon. Eisner also won the Best Graphic Album award at the Eisner’s in 2002 for his depiction of intergenerational American Jewish history in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in his original work The Name of the Game. Beyond the recognition that Spiegelman’s Maus received at both the Eisner and Harvey Awards, the work is notable for winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1991. Pulitzers recognize excellence in writing by Americans who work in the newspaper, magazine, journalism, musical composition, and literature industries. Thomas Doherty (1996) locates in the committee’s decision to award Spiegelman a prize in the “Special Award” category—an infrequently used category—as a way of avoiding the need to categorize Spiegelman’s work in any of its traditional categories like biography or history. The adjudicators, Doherty reports, were “befuddled by a project whose merit they could not deny but whose medium they could not quite categorize” (69) and they therefore eschewed placing it in either the biography or editorial

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cartooning categories, opting instead for the “Special Award” category. thirty years later, Maus remains the only graphic narrative to win a Pulitzer in any of its categories. In the decades following the publications of Maus and A Contract with God, Jewish graphic narratives been frequently released, with most of these works being written and illustrated by Americans or Israelis.12 Roth (2008) has observed that the rise of the Jewish graphic narrative in America has paralleled the earlier 1950s and 1960s Jewish fiction boom that was led by authors like Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Grace Paley, and Philip Roth. Much like that earlier wave of literature, the Jewish graphic narrative sits “at the center and the margins of American literature” (3). Its popularity and the prominence of its artists are unquestioned, but the subject matter is about a community that is a minority in America. Authors and artists interested in producing works about the Jewish experience would use Eisner’s and Spiegelman’s works as exemplars, with Marks (2019) even suggesting that what Eisner and Spiegelman facilitated was an opportunity for subsequent writers and artists to engage in the Jewish historical and cultural experience more deeply and meaningfully. In Jewish graphic narratives, these critical reflections on Jewish life led to the publication of increasingly creative texts that introduce novel ways of thinking about the Jewish experience. For example, James Sturm’s (2007) The Golem’s Mighty Swing juxtaposes racism and anti-Semitism in a depressionera story about a predominantly Jewish baseball team called the Stars of David. As the team travels around the United States, they play against non-Jewish teams, often winning and, as a result, being on the receiving end of racism and anti-Semitism. To draw interest to the team, its marketer dresses Black first baseman Henry Bloom as a golem, the legendary Jewish creature that protects Jews from persecution. During one game, a group of non-Jews storm the field and as Bloom holds the violent mob at bay, the team escapes to their bus and leaves town. The work, suggests Roth (2008), “conveys how such public performances of ethnic and racial stereotypes link Blacks and Jews in America” (13). To this day, it remains the only example of a Jewish graphic narrative that conjoins the experiences of Jews and African Americans to equate or comment on shared experiences as outsiders or minorities in America. While highly original and inventive when published in 2002—The Golem’s Mighty Swing won the Eisner for best graphic novel of the year—it has since come to be a text that reflects one of the main types of graphic representation of the Jewish experience in the ensuing decades. Like Eisner (2008, 2006a) did with A Contract with God and To the Heart of the Storm, Sturm’s decision to depict the historical Jewish experience as opposed to the contemporary Jewish experience—irrespective of whether the text is fictional or non-fictional—has become the primary way that Jewish graphic

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narratives produced in the diaspora depict Jewish life. In an article about the Jewish American graphic narrative, Roth (2008) writes: “more than other modes of American writing, comics narratives about abject Jewish pasts … figure Jews as a ghostly presence in American literature and culture” (4). Roth sees in this trend a “Jewish gothic that stands in for American anxieties and fears about acculturation and accommodation to a post-Holocaust world of ideological and moral uncertainty and ambiguity” (4). Examples in support of Roth’s claim abound. Sturm (2010) followed this model with his more recent Market Day, a story set in an Eastern European village at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution. Ben Katchor (1999) did likewise with The Jew of New York as did Leela Corman (2012) with Unterzakhn, with both stories being set in New York City in the early nineteenth and twentieth centuries, respectively. Even Liana Finck’s (2014) A Bintel Brief, which is set in contemporary America, fits the model with Liana, the main character, pining to have lived in the first decades of the 1900s as she is guided through the past by a ghost. It is important to qualify this observation with a caveat that none of Sturm, Finck, Katchor or other writers or artists are being derivative; their works are original, creative, and offer perspectives on topics that had hitherto not been explored. Nevertheless, it is readily apparent that a great many of the most successful and commented-upon American Jewish graphic narratives have followed Eisner’s lead by not only telling Jewish stories in a graphic medium, but also setting stories in the past. This trend should not, however, be read as absolute; notable exceptions do exist. Several memoirs that explore the relationship between author and the Holocaust, or the author and Israel have also been published, with many to critical and scholarly acclaim. These include Sarah Glidden’s (2016) exploration of her evolving relationship with contemporary Israeli politics in How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less and Amy Kurzweil’s (2016) intergenerational memoir Flying Couch wherein she navigates her own connections to the Holocaust as a Jew in the twenty-first century. These works, suggests Tahneer Oksman (2016), are “autobiographical depictions of orientation, disorientation, and reorientation … [of] one’s so-called identity in relation to other people, assorted places, and even differing versions of that self” (3), and as memoirs, they follow Maus’s lead in exploring the present-day Jewish experience In Israel, despite the presence of cartoonists like Dudu Geva, Uri Fink, and Michel Kichka, many of Israel’s twenty-first-century graphic narrative writers and artists speak of the period before the 2000s as being a “comics desert” with a “fragmented comics scene” with limited access to international media and minimal interest amongst readers (Haworth 2019: 23). The artist most often credited with developing the Israeli graphic novel is Rutu Modan, a former student of Kichka’s at Bezalel in the early 1990s.

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Modan is most famous for her graphic novels Exit Wounds and The Property since each won an Eisner Award for best graphic novel, but Haworth (2019) contextualizes Modan’s publications within the broader history of the development of Israeli Jewish graphic narratives.13 He contends that if not for Modan’s work, “there simply would not be a significant Israeli comics scene” (4) to speak of today. This is because Modan is not only a cartoonist. As one of Israel’s earliest graphic novelists, she has also taken on the role of mentoring and educating subsequent generations of Israeli writers and illustrators, of modeling how to build a community of artists, and of helping create a local publishing house that would feature the work of Israel’s next generation of comics artists. In 1995, Actus Tragicus, Israel’s first comics collective, was formed. Founded by Modan, Yirmi Pinkus, Itzik Rennert, and Ephrat Beloosesky (who would later leave and be replaced by Batia Kolton and Mira Friedmann), Actus Tragicus was designed to elevate the medium of graphic storytelling within Israel and to gain international exposure and readership by participating in the yearly Angoulême Comics Festival. To do so, Actus self-published their work, being involved in all stages of design and printing. As well, the five members met regularly, serving as “first readers, editors, and critics” (Haworth 2019: 39), trying to improve not only each other’s work but also the medium of graphic literature within the country. Between 1995 and 2007, the collective published nine English-language anthologies featuring original works and, in the case of 1999’s Jetlag, adaptations of Israeli author Etgar Keret’s (2006) short stories. Coinciding with Actus’s work, Modan released Exit Wounds, her first graphic narrative, in 2007. Published by Drawn & Quarterly and garnering Modan her first Eisner Award, Exit Wounds was set during the Second Palestinian Intifada which lasted from September 2000 and February 2005. The text’s primary characters, Koby and Numi, embark on a mission to discover whether a victim of a recent suicide bombing is Gabriel, Koby’s estranged father. Throughout the Kafkaesque bureaucratic wrangling that the two must endure to uncover the truth, they embark on a romantic relationship together. The protagonists’ own insecurities and difficulties with forming emotional bonds with other people are emblematic of Israeli society in the early twenty-first century, a place where insecurities and fears of the future came to define the lives of many of its citizens. In the years since Exit Wounds’ publication, Israeli artists and writers have become even more expressive in their works, calling greater attention to the everyday realities of living in the country. Examples include Etgar Keret and Asaf Hanuka’s14 (2018) Pizzeria Kamikaze, and Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s (2009) Waltz with Bashir. The former is an adaptation of Keret’s short story “Kneller’s Happy Campers,” which critiques the culture of death that has emerged in Israel in the wake of so many war-related deaths. The latter is set

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in present-day Israel and recounts Folman’s experiences as a soldier in 1982’s First Lebanon War and his inability to remember if he was complicit in the deaths of Palestinian refugees. Actus’s model of publishing in English before—if at all—doing so in Hebrew was done for practical reasons to attract an international readership given the paucity of local graphic narrative readers. Since Exit Wounds’ publication, a community—albeit a small one—of graphic narrative readers exists in Israel, with Israeli graphic narratives and Hebrew translations of foreign ones becoming increasingly available in mainstream bookstores. English, however, became a feature of Modan’s (2013) work, with it also being used in her subsequent work The Property. This Eisner-award winning story is set primarily in Poland and features two women trying to reclaim a property lost during the Holocaust. It was therefore newsworthy when Modan (2021) announced that her graphic narrative Tunnels would be published in Hebrew before being released in English. Like Exit Wounds and The Property, Tunnels features Jewish Israeli characters. Despite this similarity, the tone and subject of the work differ greatly with Tunnels being the first to openly engage with Israel’s geopolitical situation with the Palestinian people and the country’s continued control over the West Bank. As her most overt political work, Modan’s decision to write in Hebrew is reflective of a wider trend amongst contemporary Israeli graphic novelists to publish stories that deeply engage with specific Israeli issues in graphic narratives that are designed first and foremost for the Israeli reader. This approach to producing graphic narratives specifically for Israelis demonstrates an awareness that the more Israel-specific the work is, the less universal it is, and it should therefore be produced in Hebrew, the language of the population that is most likely to read it. In addition to Tunnels, other recent examples include Ilana Zeffren’s (2005) Sipur Varod [Pink Story] and Asaf Hanuka’s (2020) HaYehudi HaAravi [The Jewish Arab]. Sipur Varod is a graphic narrative about Zeffren’s experiences as an out lesbian in Israel and a cultural history of the LGBTQ+ Israeli community, while Hanuka’s is an intergenerational autobiography of his family’s experiences as Judeo-Arabs or Mizrahim in Israel. Both works include moments of levity and happiness, but both are also suffused with deep disappointment, frustration, and anger at the country. With the medium now firmly established in the country, Israeli writers and artists are increasingly comfortable publishing first in Hebrew and gaining local readership and recognition and only then publishing in English like Modan has done with Tunnels, releasing an English translation over a year after the Hebrew version was published.

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­3 Social and Cultural Impact

I

n a scene from the end of Amy Kurzweil’s (2016) Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir, Kurzweil, her mother Sonya and her Bubbe Lily are eating brunch at a restaurant in Naples, Florida. As the three women discuss their various physical ailments, they start talking over each other, making a case for why each suffers the most. Lily begins by saying: “I’m nauseous! I just have to push in de food. But I have to eat something zo de reflux shouldn’t bother me.” Sonya chimes in and says “I have problems if I eat too much or too rich—” but before she can finish, Kurzweil interrupts and says “I get acid reflux if I don’t have enough food in my stomach—” but she, too, is interrupted, this time by Lily who transitions the conversation away from stomachs and instead to teeth, a painful subject that Sonya and Kurzweil are also struggling with, as Kurzweil has a tooth in need of extraction and Lily needs a root canal procedure (263) (Figure 3.1). Kurzweil’s illustration of the three women positioned inside of a circle is reflective of the cyclical banter that is exchanged between her, her mother, and her grandmother throughout the work. The placement of the speech bubbles requires the reader to return to each woman on multiple occasions, reading about their different ailments as the women talk over and to each other, forming a cacophony of voices about their respective medical needs. The nature of the dialogue at the restaurant is repeated throughout Kurzweil’s memoir as she weaves together disparate stories that coalesce into a cohesive narrative about her life. Set in present-day America, Kurzweil’s (2016) graphic narrative is an intergenerational memoir that synthesizes together the stories of three generations of Kurzweil’s family, including lengthy and uninterrupted firsthand accounts of Lily’s time spent fleeing from the Nazis in Europe. The crux of the narrative is Kurzweil’s struggles to assert her independence while remaining connected to her mother and grandmother, the two most important people in her life. As the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, Kurzweil is a third-generation survivor; born in the United States and passionate about social justice concerns in America and in Israel, she has no memories

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FIGURE 3.1  Amy, Sonya, and Lily having a meal together and talking over each other. Used with permission of Amy Kurzweil. of the Holocaust, yet her life is imbued with references to the Holocaust and its discourse, and she lives in the shadow that it casts over her. Dana Mihā ilescu (2018) has noted how Kurzweil’s emphasis on blending the past and the present is “particularly inventive” (102). Only by assuming a degree of ownership over Lily’s experiences, by way of presenting her grandmother’s Holocaust testimony in a way that is meaningful to her, does Kurzweil come to embrace her own role in carrying on the legacy of the Holocaust and

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of her family’s history. She shows the relevance of history by protesting contemporary injustices and by producing an autobiographical memoir. I have chosen to begin this chapter on social and cultural impact as a way of calling attention to my own folly of trying to identify distinct genres or types of Jewish graphic narratives. Certainly, Flying Couch is a memoir—a style of writing that will be explored in greater detail in the next chapter—but it is also much more than an example of life writing. Kurzweil includes almost sixty pages of verbatim testimony (replete with grammatical errors to preserve the original linguistic cadence) from Lily about her harrowing experiences in Europe and her difficulty acculturating to American society. Kurzweil also illustrates her own curiosities with and objections to political decisions made by the state of Israel. In addition to being autobiographical, the work is thus also heavily steeped in the Holocaust and the North American diasporic experiences along with elements of Israeli discourse. Classifying Flying Couch is perhaps thus both a Sisyphean and pointless task. Does it really matter whether it is filed as Holocaust studies or American studies or autobiographical studies since it contains elements of all these types of literature? On one hand, maybe it doesn’t matter whether subfields of Jewish graphic narratives exist, and Kurzweil’s (2016) Flying Couch is comfortably placed within a large heterogeneous corpus of texts called Jewish graphic narratives. I contend, however, that there is value associated with recognizing that some degrees of specialization and subfield do exist. And while some texts like Kurzweil’s eschew easy grouping, others more comfortably do engender classification. Sorting Jewish graphic narratives based on a subset of genres allows for greater degrees of comparison and differentiation and identifying like and unlike texts. It allows readers to more easily find the texts which are of interest and relevance to them and the texts which are not. It also allows for increased opportunities for analysis between similarly themed or focused texts, even if, as I pointed out in the introduction, not all Jewish graphic narratives operate in concert with each other. In this chapter on social and cultural impact, I offer the reader what I have come to see as the four main types of topics that are featured in Jewish graphic narratives. Nearly every Jewish graphic narrative—excluding some examples of superhero comic books—revolves around at least one of the Holocaust, the modern state of Israel, the Jewish Diaspora, or religious texts and experiences. This chapter is not designed as a reading list of every published Jewish graphic narrative along with a justification of why I have sorted each into one category and not another. Instead, it is designed to serve as an analysis of the different subgenres, a mapping of each and an assessment of the key themes and topics that writers and artists have depicted along with relevant scholarly literature about the graphic narratives. I  also include further degrees of classification; for example, in the section about Israeli

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graphic narratives, I draw distinctions between texts produced about Israel by Israelis and texts about Israel by non-Israelis. Readers interested in a list of Jewish graphic narratives sorted by type are reminded that I have included a list of this nature as an appendix at the end of the book. While not every Jewish graphic narrative is as difficult to categorize as Kurzweil’s (2016), I am sensitive to the facts that some could be included in multiple categories and that overlap certainly exists between categories. Where relevant, I do offer explanations or justifications, but in general, I was guided by the principle of trying to keep it simple and to focus on the main topic of the work. It is for this reason that readers will find an analysis of Flying Couch in the section on Holocaust graphic narratives given the central role that the Holocaust has in shaping the three protagonists’ stories.

Holocaust Graphic Narratives Despite containing a common core by revolving around the experiences of Jews in the years before, during, and after the Holocaust, graphic narratives about the Holocaust are exceptionally diverse. And while once it was necessary for articles to introduce readers to Holocaust graphic narratives other than Maus (Gonshak 2009), this is certainly no longer the case. With over forty examples in its subgenre, Holocaust graphic narratives have been written for people of all ages including children, and in many languages including English, French, Hebrew, and Japanese. The grouping of Holocaust graphic narratives contains examples of autobiographical, fictional, historical-fiction, biographical and conceptual Holocaust texts, and have been set in Europe, the Middle East, and North America. Holocaust graphic narratives have been written and illustrated by Jews and non-Jews, by men and women, by survivors, and by people from the second and third generations after the Holocaust. As I noted in Chapter  2, Maus is not the first Holocaust Jewish graphic narrative. It was preceded by important texts including Al Feldstein and Bernie Krigstein’s (1955) comic book “Master Race” which would serve as inspiration for Spiegelman. There are also examples of Holocaust-era texts that powerfully depict the traumas that were inflicted upon European Jewry as they happened. Two of the most significant—for very different reasons—are Charlotte Salomon’s (2017) Life? Or Theatre? and Horst Rosenthal’s “Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp.” ­Salomon’s (2017) monumental Life? Or Theatre? is a series of 769 gouache paintings and prose narratives that were produced while she was hiding from the Nazis in France between 1941 and 1942 before she was murdered in Auschwitz in 1943. The work eschews easy categorization. As Judith C.E.

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Belinfante writes in the introduction to the 2017 edition of the work, “Life? Or Theatre? is a multi-layered work, and its ‘meanings’ may be approached from diverse ways. There is no sharp distinction between reality and fiction. Salomon combines images, music, and apparently simple language to give expression to her own personal and artistic struggle” (4). The work was certainly not composed with the intention of being a comic book or a graphic novel and, as Emma Parker (2020) has beautifully noted, it is “neither a visual autobiography nor an illustrated diary but an elaborately constructed, multimodal artwork that defies formal categorization” (200). However, certain elements of Salomon’s gouaches include aspects of graphic narratives, thus positioning the work as a proto-graphic narrative. The paintings do not operate in isolation from each other; they were envisioned by Salomon as a cohesive story, with each gouache comprising a component of the story of her life as told through fictitious names. The narrative primarily revolves around her love affair with Amadeus Wolfsohn, a music teacher twenty-years her senior who motivates her to hone her craft, and her experiences as a refugee in France during the Nazi occupation. Salomon’s prose pieces operate as a second form of communication device, with both the visual and linguistic operators providing keys to understanding the master narrative. While Life? Or Theatre? does not contain panels that show figures moving across time and space, on individual gouaches, Salomon does show movement by illustrating characters multiple times as they progress from one space to the next. For example, when painting her aunt’s suicide by drowning, Salomon depicts her nine times, tracing her aunt’s physical progression across the gouache from being on land and into the water. Salomon’s Holocaust-era text documents the worsening conditions for European Jews, and therefore Life? Or Theatre? is an important artistic visualization of the rise of anti-Semitism. As a feminist text, it shows how art was able to be used as a vehicle by Salomon to assume ownership over parts of her life when so much had been taken away from her. This ownership allows, writes Belinfante, for an attempt by Salomon to “achieve a balance between that which she wishes to deal with emotionally, that which she is forced to deal with emotionally, and that which she can bear” (4). The second important work produced during the Holocaust was Horst Rosenthal’s fifteen-page “Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp” which was created in 1942 while he was detained in Gurs, a Vichy French concentration camp. The work gained prominence in 2011 when Art Spiegelman (2011) acknowledged it in MetaMaus and it was subsequently published for the first time in 2014 by the Mémorial de la Shoah, the French Holocaust museum. Rosenthal’s story begins with Disney’s Mickey Mouse being arrested because he could not supply the Vichy authorities with his identity papers. A judge sentences Mickey to the Gurs concentration camp

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because he believed Mickey was Jewish. At Gurs, Mickey sees the difficult living conditions and to escape from Gurs, he erases himself from Gurs and illustrates himself going to America, a country that he says is freer than France. Pnina Rosenberg (2002) notes that Rosenthal’s work is a critique of the French government’s willingness to betray the Jews and intern them; she writes: “only a fictional character could even begin to cope with such a bitter reality” (275). It is important to recognize that despite the obvious similarities to Maus with both using a mouse to tell the story, Spiegelman was not inspired by Rosenthal’s work when he composed Maus since he was unfamiliar with it when he began working on it in the early 1980s. Instead, in a telling passage in MetaMaus, Spiegelman writes that “Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp” provided “another validation that [he’d] stumbled onto a way of telling that had deep roots” (138). Alister Wedderburn (2019) sees the significance of Rosenthal’s work as a visualized attempt to reject the debilitating indifference and depression that can set in in the face of powerful oppression. He writes: It is important not because it offers a way to escape or transcend coercive violence, nor because it represents some residual, ethically vital “humanity” left in an otherwise inhuman space. Rather, this work’s refusal to accept “desolation”, its refusal to be “mute, undifferentiated, and depoliticised”, is important because it testifies to the possibility and indeed the necessity of politics, even in the most chastening of contexts. It is important because it is. (189) Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) willingness to use the graphic narrative medium to tell traumatic stories gave a form of license for the creation of subsequent Holocaust graphic narratives. Spiegelman’s Maus is an essential precedent to many of the subsequent noteworthy twenty-first-century Holocaust graphic narratives that similarly engage with the past and present. Victoria Aarons (2019a) suggests that the significance of Holocaust graphic narratives is in their ability to bring the past to life “at an important time in history, a time that will witness the end of direct survivor testimony” (6). It is important to underscore that Maus is more than just a first text that paved the way for later authors and artists to produce their own more important Holocaust-related graphic narratives; rather, Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) creative and aesthetic awareness of the medium remains the gold-standard in Holocaust graphic narratives. This is because of the ways that he modeled a critical engagement with the past and the present that highlighted opportunities for considering the role of the individual in contemporary society who stands in relationship with and in opposition to an overwhelming past. As Aarons (2019a) writes, “Spiegelman’s work envisions

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the intimacies of history, providing midrashic—interpretive, expansive, elastic, and performative—moments of exploration and adjudication, extending the narrative of the past into the present and thus reading history responsively” (2). An additional way that Maus has proved to be of great importance is with how it legitimized representations of the Holocaust and other sites of trauma in graphic narratives. Following the publication of the second volume of Art Spiegelman’s (1991b) duology Maus, the New York Times listed it on its weekly best seller list. In a letter to the paper’s editors, Spiegelman (1991a) wrote that he was happy to see the Times add his book to its list and that its placement exceeded his aspirations for the work. However, he was surprised that the paper elected to categorize Maus as a work of fiction and not one of nonfiction. He pithily acknowledged that the Times’ categorization was likely based on “a problem of taxonomy” given his aesthetic choice to represent humans as animals, but he requested that they reconsider their editorial decision. Spiegelman justified his frustration and subsequent request on two points. First, labeling Maus fiction dismisses the thirteen years he spent trying to craft the work in as accurate a way as possible. More important than this first reason is his second. He writes: The borderland between fiction and nonfiction has been fertile territory for some of the most potent contemporary writing, and it’s not as though my passages on how to build a bunker and repair concentration camp boots got the book onto your advice, how-to and miscellaneous list. It’s just that I shudder to think how David Duke—if he could read—would respond to seeing a carefully researched work based closely on my father’s memories of life in Hitler’s Europe and in the death camps classified as fiction. Spiegelman’s response to the Times is fascinating on many levels in how he relates to Jewish history and memory and for his exploration of the nature of Jewish graphic narratives. Spiegelman engages with broader conversations about how labels—fact and fiction—construct meaning and lead to reader understandings and misunderstandings. How might a noted Holocaust denier like David Duke use the credibility of the New York Times and its placement of Spiegelman’s own work as ammunition to further his antiHolocaust agenda? Caitlin French (2015) nicely sums up the challenge that Spiegelman presents the reader with when she writes: “through the use of cartoon illustrations and occasional mixed media pieces, Spiegelman begs the reader to question what exactly ‘real’ art means. Is this story biographical because it is a true story? Is it a fiction piece because the characters are animals?” In response to Spiegelman (1991a), the New York Times editors acceded to Spiegelman’s request and removed it from the fiction list. Their justification,

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however, was not in relation to either of the arguments that he put forward. Instead, they cite Pantheon’s labeling of Maus as history and memoir on the book’s publication page, and the Library of Congress’s designation of Maus as nonfiction. The editors demonstrated a willingness to adopt the same stance as taken by both Spiegelman’s publisher and America’s national library but their response neither apologizes for the miscategorization nor does it recognize the legitimacy or merits of Spiegelman’s arguments about the nature of graphic narratives. As Thomas Doherty (1996) notes, Maus received much critical and popular attention in the American press. As a result of the attention drawn to Maus by dint of the numerous editorials and awards it received, the work became “a cultural as well as a literary event” (71). The significance of both Maus and the New York Times episode extends beyond the work and incident themselves; rather, Maus and Spiegelman’s arguments cut to the very essence of the latent potential of graphic narratives and the extent to which content and style—and not medium—determine literary merit and classification. While a belief in the medium’s potential to be used to craft serious stories was certainly held by other writers and artists operating in the early 1990s, Spiegelman’s words are prescient in laying the foundation for subsequent practitioners to depict trauma in nonliteral or artistic ways and for readers to be able to parse these types of texts with the respect the subject matter merits and to not remain rooted to a belief that cartoons cannot depict serious topics and themes (French 2015). A central focus of critical scholarship on Holocaust graphic narratives has been the way that traumatic memories have been transmitted and inherited by subsequent generations. Erin McGlothlin (2018) has observed that Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) Maus has been at the forefront of these conversations. As a seminal text of the second generation (i.e., children of Holocaust survivors who were born after the Holocaust), it has played a key role in expanding dialogue about the “possibility and permissibility of Holocaust representation” (204). Maus is the first, but certainly not the only, example of Holocaust graphic narratives that interrogate the construction of identity in the wake of tragedy for both the survivor and the subsequent generation. Writing about Maus, Stephen E. Tabachnick (1993) notes: “Spiegelman” means mirror maker or seller in German, and Maus, an autobiography, holds the mirror up to the lives of Spiegelman’s parents, Vladek and Anja, during the Holocaust, and to his own spinoff problems as their son growing up in placid Rego Park, Queens. By focusing intensely on his family’s past and present, Spiegelman manages to encapsulate the history of the Holocaust as a whole, including its influence on survivor’s children. (154)

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If Maus is “the most compelling representation of [the Holocaust] ever devised in any literary or pictorial genre” (Tabachnick 1993: 155), then the literary construct that has been most associated with Maus and the genre of Holocaust graphic narratives is Marianne Hirsch’s (2008, 2012) concept of postmemory. Hirsch developed the concept based on her readings of Spiegelman’s depictions of his own struggles to cope with his father’s trauma. When Vladek tells Art about his Holocaust experiences as bedtime stories, these parent–child rituals assume the status of “fairy tale, nightmare, and myth … [There is] some of the transactive, transferential processes— cognitive and affective—through which the past is internalized without fully being understood” (Hirsch 2012: 31). Ultimately, suggests Hirsch, the sharing of memories results in “transforming history into memory … enabling memories to be shared across individuals and generations” (31). In Hirsch’s explanation of the concept, the individual does not literally assume ownership of the memories, nor do they have actual memories of the experience; instead, as signified by the prefix “post,” the memories come to be inherited and owned following, or after, the sharing of memories by another. These postmemories “were transmitted so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right” (Hirsch 2008, 106). The transmission creates a vicarious witness, a vicarious survivor, and even a vicarious victim. This is someone who is able to speak to what happened not as history, but as memory, a lived-yet-not-lived experience, a persistent struggle even in the present. Postmemory, suggests Hirsch, “clarifies how the multiple ruptures and radical breaks introduced by trauma and catastrophe inflect intra-, inter-, and transgenerational inheritance” (2012: 33), allowing for the continuation of memory even after the initial witness is no longer living. The uses of postmemory, the interweaving of an unknowable yet deeply known past into the present, allows for the creation of altogether new readings and understandings of the Holocaust. For even as Art Spiegelman (1986, 1991b) was not at Auschwitz, by hearing his father’s testimony, by being his father’s child, and by experiencing unique familial circumstances because of living with his father, he, too, is able to come to understand his father’s experiences and to also be able to fashion his own understandings of the Holocaust as it reaches across space and time to confront subsequent generations. At its most extreme, Art even becomes so subsumed within the memories that he sees himself as if he was there, wearing a Holocaust prisoner’s uniform, even as he knows intellectually that he was never there. Aarons (2019a) sees this reaching across space and time as an opportunity to “reconstruct and reanimate the experience of the Holocaust, giving voice to unrecoverable loss” (3). In addition to Maus which is a second-generation Holocaust memoir, I want to call attention to Kurzweil’s (2016) Flying Couch as a text where postmemory

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plays an important role for the third-generation, children whose grandparents were alive during the Holocaust. Jean-Philippe Marcoux’s (2016) observation that a central challenge facing post-Holocaust second-generation authors is how to “negotiate the integration of their parents’ voice into their narrative and creative voice, in a creative performance of intervocality” (201) is equally applicable to third-generation writers. In the “navigation of narratological gaps between levels of witnessing” (201), Marcoux recognizes a tension that is inherent in the process of making a Holocaust graphic narrative. The creator must determine how to remain authentic to the source material, accurate to history, reflective about one’s role as a second- or third-generation witness, and produce a creative artistic work. The Holocaust graphic memoir’s blending of word and image, writes Aarons (2019a), offers “diverse perspective on inherited and mediated memory and on the role of the narrator in the transmission of memory” (13). What Maus and Flying Couch offer, through the blending together of testimony and reflection, is a continued presence of the  voice of the survivor and the voice of the witness who hears the testimonies of history and memory from the original source. Spiegelman’s and Kurzweil’s uses of unmediated evidence, including testimonies from family members who experienced the trauma alongside artifacts from the 1930s and 1940s, serve as powerful memorials to the past alongside their own reflections of how to best navigate these memories in the present. One of the ways that Kurzweil (2016) navigates honoring Bubbe Lily’s testimony alongside her own struggles to affirm independence of self from the weight of the postmemories is through a creative use of maps. Embedded in Flying Couch are maps showing sites from across Europe where Lily lived and from America where Kurzweil lived. Kurzweil’s detailed maps of where she lived in California and New York contrast sharply with the maps of Poland which are spartan and basic. Kurzweil’s work suggests that she has an inability to construct a narrative for her grandmother that is like her own. Her overly documented life in America, therefore, serves as a foil to the ways that she is unable to fully grasp on to the historical past that preceded her, and her shift in cartographic style reflects this discontinuity in understanding. It is not until the end of the graphic memoir that Kurzweil documents her newfound ability to synthesize the past and present. Illustrated across two full pages are maps that show the walking route and estimated travel time of 209 hours that Lily would have needed to escape from Europe to America by foot and plane. Accompanying each map is a detailed step-by-step guide to help the interested traveler. These details—absent in the original maps of Europe— provide both Kurzweil and the reader with the ability to visualize what it means for Lily to walk from Poland to Germany. Surrounding the maps and directions are illustrations of Kurzweil hunched over her computer imputing the locations while scrutinizing the distances and amount of time that it would

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take to traverse Europe in the way that Lily did at the end of the Second World War. As Kurzweil sits looking at the routes, her facial expressions shift from curiosity to surprise to shock as she comes to realize how great a distance Lily covered, and what physical and psychological toll it would have had upon her (Figure 3.2).

FIGURE 3.2  Amy mapping the distance Lily traveled to escape Nazi-controlled Europe. Used with permission of Amy Kurzweil.

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Kurzweil’s contemporary experience of plugging in two locations into a computer program serves as the catalyst that ultimately leads her to gain a more profound and complex understanding of both her grandmother’s wartime experiences and the Holocaust itself. Immediately following these maps are eight pages of further testimony by Lily about her new life in America. While the inclusion of Lily’s testimony makes the pages appear like the previous inclusions of her experiences, the images differ radically from every preceding example of testimony. This is because unlike every preceding page of testimony, it is not Lily who is illustrated as the primary subject of the panel. Instead, it is images of Kurzweil herself that buttress her grandmother’s words and stories. Kurzweil’s graphic narrative powerfully reflects Aarons’s (2019a) observation about the impact of using witness testimony in Holocaust graphic narratives; she writes that their inclusion “defamiliarizes the discourse of Holocaust testimony by transplanting it into this new medium” (7). Visualizing testimony thus comes to allow for new awareness about the centrality of first-hand documentation and its transformative potential. As a result of her discovery about the nature of her grandmother’s journey to freedom, Lily’s words become part of Kurzweil’s own story, conjoining the two women together through Kurzweil’s new understanding of the past. Illustrating herself within the maps and alongside her grandmother’s narrative begins the process of being able to fill in the metaphorical blank spaces on the earlier maps of Poland, and it leads her to no longer remain unsure of how to construe meaning of the Holocaust. Instead, emboldened by her place alongside Lily in the role of Holocaust chronicler, Kurzweil illustrates herself producing protest signs with the slogan “Never Again!!” and herself arranging—and therefore owning—the pages of her Holocaust graphic narrative in panels that occur toward the end of the graphic narrative. Holocaust graphic novels like Flying Couch reify Hillary Chute’s (2016) observation about Maus, in that they “materialize the physically absent. [They] inscribe and concretize, through the embodied labor of drawing … The desire is to make the absent appear” (27). History and historicity also play a prominent role in Holocaust graphic narratives. The interpretive process that accompanies all artistic renderings is especially evident in two very different graphic narratives about Anne Frank. Born in 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany, Anne and her family fled from Germany to the Netherlands after the Nazi Party was elected to power in Germany. The diary that Anne kept while living in a secret annex in Amsterdam is one of the most important Holocaust-era texts because of Anne’s willingness to openly reflect on her experiences and feelings as her life becomes increasingly restricted. Over fifteen comic books and graphic novels about Anne Frank have been published worldwide (Ribbens 2010) and each offers a different perspective or insight into Anne’s life. The volume of these works raises

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important questions about ownership, interpretation, and to what extent Anne’s story has authentically been told. By way of example, Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s (2010) Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography and Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s (2018) Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation offer very different understandings of Anne, her diary, and her significance for contemporary readers. Folman and Polonsky’s text positions Anne as a rebellious, precocious, and complex teenager replete with the maturity and immaturity of a teenager. She is approachable to readers because of her personality and the ways that she responds to the challenges she faces in the annex. Conversely, Jacobson and Colón’s text glosses over many aspects of Anne Frank’s complexity, and presents her as an entirely likeable, simplified version of the girl who authored the diary. In their work, Anne’s historical significance is her message of hope and peace for the future. By viewing these two texts together (or any of the other graphic adaptations), the reader is confronted with the reality that despite the over seventy years since her death, understanding Anne (or any other victim of the Holocaust) remains elusive, and that despite a preponderance of texts about her, barriers remain in place preventing post-Holocaust readers from ever fully understanding the Holocaust or the experiences of the people who suffered during and after it. Before moving on from this section, I want to draw the reader’s attention to the work of American graphic novelist Emil Ferris (2017). Ferris’s fictional My Favorite Thing Is Monsters is one of the most important graphic novels published in the last decade for its innovative mode of narration and for the ways that Ferris juggles a dizzying array of complex sociopolitical topics. Set in 1960s Chicago, the work is structured as a lined notebook filled with illustrations and narrations by Ferris’s ten-year-old protagonist Karen Reyes. Over the course of the work, Ferris explores the perniciousness of sexual exploitation and the commodification of women’s bodies through depictions of prostitution, sex trafficking of minors, male promiscuity, and attempted rape. One of the central narratives that most directly examines these forms of sexual abuse is Karen’s quest to determine whether her neighbor Anka, a Holocaust survivor, was murdered or whether she committed suicide. While the Chicago Police Department does not even open an investigation into Anka’s death, Karen becomes convinced that a cache of recordings of Anka’s Holocaust testimony hold the clues to understanding Anka’s death. It is in these tapes that Karen learns of how Anka was forced into the sex industry by her mother in the years preceding the Nazi Party’s rise to power and how she needed to leverage her relationship with a high-ranking Nazi sexual predator in order to save herself from being held prisoner at a concentration camp. Ferris’s fictionalized account of the types of very real sexually traumatic experiences women endured in order to save themselves is best exhibited in

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one of the work’s most painful scenes in which Anka breaks a promise to a young child that she would protect him and she instead abandons him in order to try to save herself and other camp inmates by returning to her exploitative relationship and coopting other young women into prostitution alongside her. Mihā ilescu (2021) notes that Ferris’s depictions of women being forced to turn to prostitution counter a long-running historical narrative that has obfuscated the painful Holocaust-era sexual choices made by women in order to tell narratives that evoke pathos from the reader. In place of these types of stories, Ferris “portrays Anka, the victim-turned-rescuer, and the children as part of a grotesque, horror-movie-like environment that corresponds to the overall harrowing historical events of the Holocaust” (373). And while Anka’s testimony is fictional—real testimonies from women like Anka are very rare— by calling attention to the devastating choices that women in Anka’s position needed to make about their bodies during the Holocaust, My Favourite Thing Is Monsters reflects contemporary historians’ increased interest in examining the impossible choices that women faced during the Holocaust and the ways that they were forced to commodify their bodies in ways they did not want to in order to save themselves (Mihā ilescu 2021). Interrogations of the past alongside contemporary concerns is a broader interest of second- and thirdgeneration Holocaust writers and this is equally true for Ferris. Mihā ilescu explains that for these authors, “Holocaust memory figures out as just one aspect of one’s identity alongside other elements” (359). By juxtaposing depictions of Holocaust-era and contemporary violence against women, Ferris calls attention to the silenced voices of women while offering a larger argument about the continued perpetuation of sexual abuses across time and space that women have been forced to endure.

Israel-Focused Jewish Graphic Narratives The Israeli comics scene is rapidly growing and expanding, no doubt aided by the international recognition that has been afforded to graphic novelist Rutu Modan and cartoonist Asaf Hanuka, both of whom have won Eisner Awards for their works. While the two might be leaders of Israel’s comics culture, they are by no means its sole practitioners. Within Israel there exists a dedicated community of authors and artists who are producing work about Israeli society, critiquing and commenting on its internal and external challenges. These works are nuanced, sophisticated, and deeply human, offering insight into how a country that has spent much of its existence under the shadow of war and conflict has survived and, at times, thrived. And yet, I have chosen to call this section of the chapter ‘Israel-Focused Jewish Graphic Narratives’ and not ‘Israeli Graphic Narratives’ out of a recognition that there are actually two

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main types of graphic narratives that are being published about Israel, and the authors and illustrators of one of these groups are not Israeli by residence or by citizenship. In addition to the corpus of graphic narratives that have been published about Israel by Israelis, there are also a significant number of texts by non-Israelis who have produced graphic narratives about the country and their relationship with it. One of the defining features of many graphic narratives by Israelis is the use of autobiography as the medium for communication. Ellen Rosner Feig (2016) suggests that one rationale for the emphasis on truth-telling lies in the role of the Israeli graphic memoirist, a figure who serves as a “visual and narrative witness to the moral, political, and historical issues” (186) of their country. In their graphic renderings of Israeli society, Israeli authors and artists have often been openly critical of their government and military. Criticism of state and service is woven throughout Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s (2008) Waltz with Bashir. Initially released as an animated film and then subsequently released as a graphic narrative, Waltz with Bashir considers the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps in 1982’s First Lebanon War alongside Folman’s inability to remember or recover his memories from his experiences as an Israeli soldier during the conflict. In Waltz with Bashir, Folman and Polonsky present the Israeli soldier at his most vulnerable, depicting him as a witness of violence committed against Palestinians and as a critic of his own government. Doing so in this public fashion shifts discourse about authors’ moral handwringing and feelings of guilt over their conduct during conflict away from the realm of individual tragedy to an indictment of the nation and its leadership for aspects of its conduct toward Palestinians during the war. Considering the text in light of Israeli society and the obligation for all Jewish citizens to serve in the army, Folman positions Israeli soldiers as victims of their government’s decision to make use of young men and women in high-stakes political maneuverings with little sensitivity to the impact on the soldier’s psyche. Waltz with Bashir testifies to the psychological burden that the prolonged militarization of Israeli society has had on individual Israelis and how the national narratives of honor and dignity in service are not so simple or easy to digest given what Israeli soldiers are sometimes expected to do. Illustrating and showing the performance of violence like Folman and Polonsky do bridges the distance between soldier and Israeli civilian, and it forces the reader to recognize the artistically illustrated world as not a fictional space, but a real space. This is a world that Israelis inhabited and experienced and is one where they witnessed or participated in actions against Palestinians that they have been unable to effectively process and navigate through over the ensuing two decades. The subject of how the Israeli government treats Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank has also been of great interest to Israeli graphic authors and illustrators from across the political spectrum. In both Falafel with Hot

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Sauce by left-wing Israeli Michel Kichka (2019) and Beyond the Line by rightwing Israeli settler Shay Charka (2012), the artists express concern with the relationship that exists between the military and the Palestinian population. Kichka favorably relates how his son David, a commander in the military, rebuked his subordinates for mistreating a Palestinian man who had been arrested. The soldiers were intent on keeping the prisoner blindfolded, forcing him to run behind a jeep since there were no seats available for him inside the vehicle. David ordered his soldiers to remove the blindfold and he ran alongside the prisoner, refusing to sit in the jeep. Despite his orientation as a right-wing Israeli settler, Charka (2010, 2012) forms a friendship with a local Palestinian villager named Ahmed. The two partake in conversations over coffee, wishing each other good tidings on their respective holidays. In “Rabbinical Questions,” Charka (2012) and Ahmed debate whether Ahmed is allowed to acquire Charka’s leavened bread during the holiday of Passover, with Charka arguing that it isn’t really a purchase and Ahmed demurring, concerned that he would be disobeying his community’s ban on buying goods from West Bank Settlements (Figure 3.3). In “Aftershock” (Charka 2010), one of the series’ most thought-provoking comics, the two sit together following a violent confrontation that Charka had with the Israeli army.

FIGURE 3.3  Charka discussing Passover with Ahmed. A strip from the album Beyond the Line 2 by Shay Charka, Modan Publishing House 2008.

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Ahmed struggles to find words that will comfort his friend; he eventually says that the police treated Charka just like they treat the Palestinians. Aesthetically, Charka powerfully commands the reader’s attention throughout the comic by focusing solely on the left side of his face; only after Ahmed equates Jews and Palestinians as victims of Israel’s military is the reader shown the blackened eye on the right side of Charka’s face that had previously been obscured. Considered together, Charka’s and Kichka’s works demonstrate the discomfort that a growing number of Israelis feel with regard to Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians and the need to have genuine interactions with Palestinians. While Charka and Kichka have different solutions to the problem given their differing political orientations, both recognize that the status quo is increasingly untenable. An additional feature of graphic narratives by Israelis irrespective of whether the texts are fictional or non-fictional is concerns with the impact of violence and terror on Israeli citizens. Awareness of this type of inurement is most palpably felt in Rutu Modan’s (2007a) fictional work Exit Wounds. Modan’s text is set during the Second Palestinian Intifada and considers how Israelis who are living under extreme circumstances can endure despite the fear of death that seems to hover over them during that period. In his assessment of the graphic narrative, Armando Celayo (2008) suggests that “Modan is able to portray life in Israel as an ongoing effort to combat terrorism and its potential to paralyze society, with an unrelenting spirit to survive” (65). Notable scenes in the work include morgue attendants discussing what to eat in front of cadavers, shopkeepers keeping their businesses open in the wake of devastating personal tragedies, and even a couple who find love in the aftermath of a deadly terror attack. While a great many of the graphic narratives produced by Israelis focus on the country’s complex political reality and its impacts on Israelis, one notable exception to this trend is the work of Tamar Blumenfeld. Both her 2017 graphic narrative In a Relationship and her 2021 graphic narrative Kinah Tovah [GreenEyed Monster] tell fictional stories that are set in Israel and make use of distinctive Israeli features like geographic markers and holiday celebrations but are of a more universal nature. The former work revolves around marital infidelity and how the female protagonist reconstructs her life after being party to an affair. Blumenfeld’s second work engages with post-traumatic stress disorder and focuses on how a twice-traumatized teenager remains mired in the past well into adulthood. Kinah Tovah is a particularly creative work, in which Eli, the protagonist, is shadowed by a translucent ghost in the guise of her teen-aged self as she struggles to navigate the world after experiencing bullying, witnessing her best friend’s rape, and feeling guilty that she murdered the would-be rapist (Figure 3.4). Blumenfeld’s works are

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FIGURE 3.4  Ilana being comforted by her high-school self. Used with permission of Tamar Blumenfeld. certainly Jewish—characters celebrate Jewish holidays, mention studying Torah, and enlist in the Israeli military—but these are details that contextualize and bring the story to life rather than serve as the basis for the narratives in the way that they do for any of the works previously mentioned in this section, and her works thus introduce an Israeli narrative that moves beyond the country’s political and military milieus.

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Amongst graphic narratives about Israel by non-Israelis, most of the texts focus on the Israeli government’s role in exacerbating or minimizing the conflicts with the Palestinian people. Intimately woven together with this concern is a worry about the nature of the relationship between diaspora Jews and the state of Israel. Harvey Pekar and JT Waldman’s (2012) Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me takes a critical stance toward how different Israeli governments have marginalized the Palestinian people and their rights. Emerging out of a realization that his staunchly pro-Zionist upbringing did not provide him with a balanced understanding of the region, Pekar comes to reject single-sided narratives along with narratives that grant JewishIsraelis legitimacy over land at the expense of Palestinian freedoms. Despite his position as an outspoken critic of Israel, Pekar is insistent on remaining identified as a Jew; he wants it known that he is a Jew who is critical of Israel. This, he believes, introduces a new and an unheard voice in Jewish graphic narratives because he wants to speak as an insider who is critical of Israel and who believes that Israelis are acting in a way that is both “immoral and selfdestructive” (157). Examples of more balanced interrogations of Israeli politics and the types of relationships that exist between non-Israelis and the state are Sarah Glidden’s (2016) How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less and Miriam Libicki’s (2008) Jobnik!. Glidden’s text is framed around her participation on a free trip to Israel under the auspices of Birthright, an international organization that brings Jews to Israel to experience the country. As it is her first time in Israel, Glidden is excited to see the country’s famous sites, but as a progressive liberal American Jew with very limited exposure to Israel, she is also transparent in her concerns with how the trip might obscure or omit evidence of Israeli imperfections and gloss over what she believes to be the perpetual mistreatment of the Palestinian people. What both Pekar and Glidden introduce in their narratives is a stance toward the Palestinian people that is at odds with the Israeli narrative of how it treats the Palestinian people. Both authors believe that Israel is the aggressor in the conflict with Palestinians and that Israel is illegally occupying Palestinian lands in the West Bank. Views of this nature are becoming increasingly prevalent amongst left-wing American Jews, challenging the decades-long relationship that has existed between the American and Israeli Jewish communities and necessitating new understandings of how the two Jewish communities can remain united despite fundamental differences in opinion about the Palestinian people. Where Glidden’s perspective is more nuanced than Pekar’s (2012) is her willingness to simultaneously engage with the perspectives of both Israeli and Palestinian people and to recognize elements of legitimacy in both of their narratives. This new awareness emerges because of her experiences meeting with Jews and non-Jews in Israel and spending time in dialogue with them,

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as opposed to Pekar who admits he has never visited Israel and much of his understanding of the conflict comes from what he has read in books and seen on television. In Jobnik!, Libicki (2008) chronicles her own experiences as a jobnik, a non-combat soldier in the Israeli army during the outbreak of the Second Palestinian Intifada in September 2000. Arriving from the United States as a dual American and Israeli citizen and interested in serving in the military, Libicki is frustrated when she is assigned desk duty and is denied the opportunity to serve the state in a more meaningful capacity. Libicki’s commitment to and interest in the country is evident from her willingness to volunteer to be a soldier when she could have been exempt because she lived in America, but her motivation and relationship with the country are tested when she is relegated to being a jobnik. Throughout the work, Libicki oscillates between being an insider and an outsider in Israeli society. Rosner Feig (2016) locates in Libicki’s quick initial dismissal of Palestinian suffering a reflection of her “transformation to true Israeli citizen” (188), but when the military takes on a more proactive and aggressive stance toward Palestinians to combat terror, she struggles to reconcile the Israel she felt was home and the Israel she has come to see. Artistically, Libicki documents these struggles through the insertions of newspaper clippings that highlight examples of the escalation of violence, the disproportionate numbers of causalities between Israelis and Palestinians, and the failed peace process. In one example from October 2000, Libicki includes an article that summarizes a series of recent instances of violence; illustrated atop the newspaper report are four self-portraits. In each, she depicts herself looking increasingly despondent and sad in reaction to the Second Intifada (Figure  3.5). The tension of being both an insider and an outsider is also palpable in the strained sexual relationships that she forms with some of her fellow soldiers, all of whom are native to Israel. With her partner Shahar, Libicki’s constant worries that he might be a victim of a terror attack led her to obsessively check in with him and his whereabouts. Shahar ultimately chooses to end their relationship, dismissing her as a non-Israeli for her failure to comprehend what it really means to be an Israeli citizen during a prolonged period of terror, explaining that she “wouldn’t be freaking out if [she] were Israeli” (47). And yet, when Libicki is on leave visiting her friends and family in North America and she hears that the violence has continued to escalate, she feels guilty for not being present in Israel to support her fellow soldiers. Libicki’s graphic memoir testifies to the complex interplay that can be present for Jews who feel deeply connected to Israel, opt to enlist in the country’s military, and also feel like an outsider in the country at the same time due to opposition to the state’s political policies and for not being born there.

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FIGURE 3.5  Miriam overwhelmed by Israeli news reports. Copyright Miriam Libicki, Jobnik! Vol 1, 2008, 63.

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Diaspora Experience The word “diaspora” originally used to refer to Jewish communities that were dispersed throughout the Babylonian Empire following the destruction of the First Temple in the sixth century BCE. Today, diaspora has “come to be applied to almost any population or group living outside its homeland” that also “exhibits some sort of sociocultural or political cohesion” in the new places of residence (Story and Walker 2016: 135–6). And while for Jewish communities, being part of a diasporic Jewish community connotes living outside of Israel,1 it entails much more than location of residency. Joanna Story and Ian Walker (2016) explain: Diasporas—like all cultural or ethnic groups—are distinguished by shared claims to identity that both provide for internal cohesion and mark them off from others. These commonalities are varied: they may be cultural, social, or biological; more specifically they may be religious, linguistic, performative, symbolic, genetic, or material in character. Identities so marked may be expressed … through … archaeological artefacts, family or clan names, marriage patterns, residence patterns, economic activity, political practice, dance, dress, and cuisine, the construction of heritage, and the use of vernaculars. In diasporic contexts, these markers of identity often draw attention to a connection with a place that is distant in time or space, and might be curated differently at home and abroad, leading over time to a divergence in expressions of belonging. (137) In this section, I will explore the ways that Jewish graphic narratives set in a diverse mix of countries and time periods express what it means to live in a diasporic Jewish community. As a caveat, even though the Holocaust certainly occurred in the Jewish diaspora, since I have already considered Holocaust graphic narratives at length in the first section of this chapter, I have chosen to focus my analysis in this section primarily on texts not about the Holocaust. A great many of these diasporic works are principally set in the past, depicting events from before the artist’s birth. Three recurring motifs comprise many of the Jewish graphic narratives set in the diaspora. The first involves depictions of anti-Semitism that offer a clear statement that this anti-Jewish hatred has a corrosive and pernicious effect on Jews by destroying communities and leaving tragedy in its wake. In these texts, anti-Semitism is not only a feature, but a central component of the text. A second theme revolves around the migratory experiences of persecuted Jews. Set in the New World, these texts highlight the challenges and opportunities that awaited Jews in the Americas,

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and how new communities were built out of destroyed ones. Lastly, a number of these Jewish graphic narratives show the unique cultural and social features of diasporic Jewish identity, emphasizing the richness of Jewish culture. Many of the Jewish graphic narratives that focus on life in the diaspora actively address antagonistic relationships that often existed between Jews and the host society amongst whom they were living. Often called “the oldest hatred,” Jews have been persecuted throughout history for different reasons. In Medieval Christian Europe, Jews were often the targets of violence and discrimination for religious reasons; their refusal to accept the divinity of Jesus alongside a Christian doctrine that blamed Jews for Jesus’s death led to widespread incidents of persecution. With the rise of nationalism in the late eighteenth century and the concomitant rejection of religion as the framework that guided society, anti-Jewish persecution shifted away from being grounded in religious rationales toward being based on genetic or racial factors. As most clearly evidenced in the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust, Jews were categorized as subhuman because of a belief that they were genetically inferior. One text that explicitly calls out the perniciousness of anti-Semitism while also serving as a powerful autobiographical reflection on the ways that his own thinking about anti-Semitism has evolved is Will Eisner’s (2005) The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Published shortly after his death, The Plot is, according to Jeremy Dauber (2006), “dedicated to polemically combating one of the most infamous pieces of propaganda in the history of antisemitic prejudice” (301). In the text, Eisner invites his readers to join him in learning about the history of the anti-Semitic text The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which was purportedly written in the late 1800s by a cabal of Jewish leaders who outline their plot to take over the world. Despite being proved a forgery by 1921, Eisner shows the ways that it has remained a fixture in spreading hatred of Jews in the ensuing ninety years. Most of The Plot is focused on chronicling the process undertaken by British journalist Philip Graves and Russian monarchist Mikhail Sergeevich Raslovlev to prove that The Protocols were a forgery. In these sections, Eisner meticulously documents the parallels between The Protocols and a French work by Maurice Joly called The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu which served as the basis for the forgery. Throughout, Eisner (2005) shows the reader the similarities between the documents by aligning sections from each work side-by-side to highlight the impossibility of a group of Russian Jews using an obscure French book to serve as the basis for their secret manuscript that outlines their plan to take over the world. Illustrated like Sherlock Holmes with a deerstalker hat and a pipe, Graves leads the reader through sixteen points of comparison between The Protocols and Joly’s work, as he comes to recognize and accept the truth that The Protocols are a fabrication designed to promote anti-Semitism. Dauber (2006) has noted how

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the use of Holmes—a character renowned for his commitment to truth—as a signifier subtly serves as a form of counterpropaganda against those who refuse to accept the evidence of The Protocols as a forgery. Illustrating him in this way also engages the reader, bringing him along with Graves and Raslovlev to uncover the truth of the mystery surrounding The Protocols (Figure 3.6). The concluding fifteen pages of The Plot transitions away from the history of the forgery and The Protocols use in the twentieth century to instead introduce Eisner’s (2005) own exploration of the document’s continued impact. Eisner illustrates himself traveling around America, meeting with researchers and librarians to understand how and why the document is still believed to be genuine despite being debunked decades earlier. In an exchange with a group of protestors in San Diego, the men and women inform Eisner that the Jews control the world, with The Protocols serving as their proof. When Eisner tries to explain to them that The Protocols were not written by Jews, they denounce Eisner and accuse him of being a Jew and therefore possessing a self-interested rationale for trying to discredit The Protocols. Throughout this concluding section, Eisner (2005) explicitly correlates continued attachment to The Protocols to a rise in anti-Semitic incidents across

FIGURE 3.6  Graves illustrated to look like Sherlock Holmes. From The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion by Will Eisner. Copyright © 2005 by Will Eisner Studios, Inc. Used by permission of W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

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America. On the work’s penultimate page, he illustrates three individuals firebombing a synagogue. When the reader reaches the graphic narrative’s last page, a single-panel splash page shows the synagogue smoldering with leaflets raining down to the ground. Ten of the papers are positioned so that the reader can read them, and on each is a different example of violence committed against American Jewish communities in 2002 or 2003. In the afterword to the graphic novel, Stephen Eric Bronner (2005) writes: “[The Protocols] keep returning like a bad dream. The need to wake up is what, I know, inspired Will Eisner to produce The Plot” (131). By reconstructing parts of the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries through the lens of anti-Semitism and persecution, Eisner highlights the ways that Jewish communities in America (and elsewhere in the world) have been the targets of hatred for no justifiable reason. A second example, and one which engages with Nazism in North America, is Jamie Michaels and Doug Fedrau’s (2019) graphic novel Christie Pits. Set in Toronto in 1933, the graphic narrative revolves around the experiences of a fictional cast of characters to depict the race riots that broke out in the city in the summer of 1933. Michaels and Fedrau’s work calls attention to the ways that Nazism was attractive to Canadians who felt threatened by Jewish immigrant populations during the economic recession of the 1930s and their decision to form a swastika club to publicly display their opposition to Jews. The climax of Christie Pits is the titular fight that broke out following the swastika club’s decision to wave a swastika flag at an amateur baseball game at the Christie Pits baseball diamond despite requests for protection by the Jewish community from the city’s police force. Michaels and Fedrau’s (2022) graphic novel verbally and visually depicts many ways that Toronto’s Jews tried to combat the pro-Nazi party’s anti-Semitism. While some of the characters promote political activism and engaging with municipal leadership to protect the Jewish community, Michaels and Fedrau situate the local government’s failure to prevent the outbreak of violence as part of Canada’s Second World War ambivalence to the Jewish community’s plight in Europe. Instead, Michaels and Fedrau call attention to two alternative models of response to anti-Semitism that the Jewish community employed, with both being tied together around the idea that as the largest minority population in Toronto, the Jews would not allow themselves to be intimidated or cowed by pro-Hitler Canadians. The first type of response they identify is a turn to violence. The Jewish characters openly and willingly engage in physical confrontations; they carry weapons, train at boxing clubs, throw punches when attacked, and actively follow international boxing headlines. In one noteworthy example, a group of Jews are shown huddling around a radio listening to a broadcast of the June 8, 1933, heavyweight fight between the Jewish-American boxer Max Baer and the German boxer Max Schmeling.

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As Baer delivers the knockout punch, Fedrau transforms Schmeling into Adolf Hitler, illustrating the Nazi leader being defeated by the Jewish boxer Baer (Figure 3.7). Fedrau’s powerful image calls attention to the ways that diaspora Jews were deeply aware of the threat posed to Europe’s Jews by Hitler’s assumption of power in 1933 and how they read a fight between two boxers as an event of international significance wherein a Jewish champion defeated a Nazi champion. The second way that anti-Semitism is combatted throughout Christie Pits is through allyship with Toronto’s non-Jewish Italians, a minority community that also experienced exclusion in the 1930s. This allyship is shown in a variety of ways and includes examples of the mundane and banal like when a non-Jewish

FIGURE 3.7  Max Schmeling/Adolf Hitler being knocked out by Max Baer. From the graphic novel Christie Pits by Jamie Michaels and Doug Fedrau.

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student shares notes with a Jewish student named Tev who was kicked out of a university lecture for protesting the professor’s decision to only teach literary works that feature Jews as villains. Allyship also exists when Jews and non-Jews collaborate to form a union together under the dual goals of increasing workers’ rights and using the union’s platform to oppose the spread of Nazi ideologies in Toronto. Christie Pits also includes an example of a sexual relationship between Tev and Sofia, an Italian Marxist. Tev’s relationship with Sofia is not without its complications, with Sofia’s brothers demonstrating a similar anti-Semitic ethos to the one shown by the local Nazis. It is Tev’s perseverance in wanting to date her—even when Sofia’s brothers verbally and physically assault him—along with their own realization that their anti-Jewish sentiments were borne out of ignorance and not evidence, that they shift their stance toward the Jewish community and fight alongside them at Christie Pits against the members of the swastika club. It is important to recognize that at no point do Michaels and Fedrau (2019) equivocate the political and social realities of life in Toronto and life in Berlin in the 1930s. Despite the presence of anti-Semitism in both spaces, Christie Pits does not make the claim that allyship alongside a willingness to fight back against anti-Semitism would have changed the reality of what was happening to Jews in Germany given anti-Semitism’s institutional and legal standing in Nazi Germany. Instead, the work necessitates recognizing that diasporic communities and contexts differ, and while Toronto Jews might feel connected to Jews in other spaces, their qualities of life and unique experiences may be very different from each other. In the case of Christie Pits, Michaels and Fedrau document how in a specific diasporic community where anti-Semitism was taking root, one group of Jews responded and managed to gain enough momentum that a local newspaper reported that the city’s mayor planned to ban the swastika. Christie Pits ends ambiguously, with Tev optimistically saying that he’s “never heard of anyone in [Canada] taking a stand against hate like that before” (Michaels & Fedrau 2019, 138) while also recognizing that the riots won’t pry open Canada’s closed doors to any additional persecuted European Jewish refugees. Michaels and Fedrau’s ending is thus a dual allusion to the looming tragedy that will befall European Jewry and to Canada’s political and moral failures during the Holocaust and the years leading up to it when it refused to revise its immigration criteria in order to grant additional entry visas to Jewish refugees. Beyond anti-Semitism and persecution, a repeated motif in Jewish graphic narratives that are set in the diaspora are depictions of the difficulty Jews have had adjusting to life in a new land. Depending on the work, these difficulties are manifested in several different ways. For example, cultural and social difficulties are evident in Liana Finck’s (2014) A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York. Religious struggles play a prominent role in

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many of Eisner’s (2006a, b) works set in New York City’s tenement units. For example, the tensions of being a Jew while living in the modern world are palpably felt in his previously mentioned A Contract with God. Conversely, it is economic struggles that define the challenges faced by Jewish immigrants in Jorge Zentner and Rubén Pellejero’s (2018) The Silence of Malka. Considered together, these works highlight the challenges that Jews faced as they tried to rebuild their lives in a new country in the wake of horrific tragedies. Originally published in Spanish in 1996, The Silence of Malka was translated into English in 2018. The story begins in Bessarabia, Russia, in the late 1800s, and the reader is immediately introduced to the main characters: Malka, a precocious pre-teen, her first cousin David, and her uncle Zelik. The family is preparing to move to Argentina following a pogrom, a violent attack on the Jewish community. The four-panel depiction of the pogrom is devoid of any words, and the reader must therefore fully rely on Pellejero’s graphic renderings of the violence. Throughout the depiction, the panels fade increasingly to red; in the final panel the entire sky is blood-red. Pellejero’s depictions of nonJews who first cavort while destroying sacred objects, then destroy Jewish lives, and finally destroy the entire town itself powerfully convey the fear and devastation of the Jewish community. The family relocates to Argentina, hoping to work as farmers, but after his request for a loan to buy supplies to last the season is rejected by wealthy Jews who help settle impoverished Eastern European Jews in Argentina, Zelik brings a golem2 to life to help solve the family’s economic plight. It is noteworthy that despite the brutality of the pogroms in Europe, they built their golem not in Russia, but in Argentina. For while the anti-Semitism that existed in Russia seems non-existent in Argentina, extreme poverty and famine threaten Malka, David, Zelik, and their families as they struggle to survive as farmers during a drought. The golem that Zelik creates in the new world protects the Jews not against threats of death from external foes, but against the economic and agricultural hardships that affect the family as they struggle to adjust to life in a new country in the diaspora. Farming becomes his most essential task in ensuring his master’s survival. The most surprising aspect of why the golem in The Silence of Malka is created is that the Jews need the golem after they are mistreated by other Jews. Zentner and Pellejero (2018) hold a mirror up to the Jewish community itself, depicting Jews who necessitate the creation of the golem. Dressed as modern figures and depicted devoid of any discernible Jewish caricatures, the wealthy Jewish businessmen thrust Zelik into the role of mystic who calls forth the golem, as it is from Jews that the family needs protection. Unlike traditional golem stories, in which irrational anti-Semitism forces Jews to play the role of God, in The Silence of Malka, the persecutors are Zelik’s modern coreligionists, who are devoid of any sympathy for the

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economic hardships that are wreaking havoc on a family that has only recently arrived in the New World. A third often-repeated trend in Jewish graphic narratives about life in the diaspora involves highlighting the cultural beauty of different ethnic Jewish communities. This richness is evident in Finck’s (2014) illustrations of old Jewish New York. It is also present in French author-illustrator Joann Sfar’s (2005, 2006) The Rabbi’s Cat and Klezmer: Tales of the Wild East, where Jewish culture plays a prominent role in building an immersive experience for the reader. Both The Rabbi’s Cat and Klezmer are works of fiction, but each pays homage to the Jewish cultural milieus where the stories are set and to Sfar’s own heritage as the child of a marriage between a Ukrainian Ashkenazi woman and an Algerian Sephardic man. The Rabbi’s Cat is set in 1920s Algeria and features a talking cat who wants to convert to Judaism. Under the tutelage of his master Rabbi Abraham, the cat begins studying Jewish texts with the goal of becoming Jewish and celebrating Jewish rituals like the Bar Mitzvah. Sfar’s (2005) work highlights the diversity of religious practices that can be found amongst Sephardic Jews. With an emphasis on shared communal norms and the relationships that exist between its members, Sfar beautifully portrays the interpersonal connections that exist between Algerian Jews. Sfar’s Jews, including the community’s rabbi, show that engagement in Jewish communal life also, at times, takes precedence over rote observance of Jewish rituals. According to Paul Eisenstein (2008), “The more enigmatic or nonsensical—the more imperfect and incomplete—the basis of paternal, rabbinic authority appears, the freer are Jewish individuals and groups to elect to embrace traditional Jewish selfhood, faith, and ritual” (164). The silliness of a rabbi converting a talking cat is emblematic of Rabbi Abraham’s orientation to accepting his congregants as they are and to recognizing that they practice Judaism in different ways. The Jewish-Algerian way of life is sharply contrasted with the behavior of the Parisian Rabbi Jules, a recent arrival to Algeria. When Rabbi Jules arrives in Algeria, he is shocked to discover lax ritual observance. Furthermore, as Fabrice Leroy (2011) notes “the young French rabbi appears to neglect his beautiful wife in favor of reading and studying sacred texts” (43), and within The Rabbi’s Cat it is Rabbi Jules’s approach to Jewish communal life that is dismissed and not Rabbi Abraham’s. Dalia Kandiyoti (2017) has observed that Rabbi Abraham demonstrates a “capacity for doubt and flexibility … [and as a result, he] transgresses when he finds it reasonable to do so” (70). In a conversation with his congregation about accepting nontraditional Jews, one member asks why they should still follow Judaism if these non-observant Jews are content in life; Rabbi Abraham replies by saying, “the truth is, I don’t know” (Sfar: 142). While his congregants then question his sanity and wonder what kind of rabbi he is if he is unable to

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convince them to remain committed Jews, Rabbi Abraham ignores them and begins to recite the blessings that mark the end of prayer services. Rabbi Abraham’s vague answer, coupled with an immediate turn to perform a religious ritual, would be frustrating to someone like Jules, but it is reflective of a worldview that acknowledges religious imperfections in congregants and which models ways to blend sincerity and doubt to fashion a Jewish identity for diaspora Jews living in a culturally diverse country like Algeria. Sfar’s (2006) Klezmer offers a wholly other way for understanding diasporic Jewish life. Set in Eastern Europe, the graphic narrative features a ragtag troupe of traveling klezmer musicians as they perform at venues for Jewish (and non-Jewish) audiences. Looming in both the foreground and background is a constant fear of violence and death; the musicians are wary of being attacked on the roads and there are even Jewish musicians who are murdered by rival Jewish musicians who fear encroachment on their turf. As a group, the musicians have no familial or communal ties to each other; yet, as Marla Harris (2008) has observed, they band together to create a pseudo-family in lieu of a real family (186). This family excels at klezmer, a genre of music that emphasizes originality and improvisation, and Sfar’s work highlights the value of klezmer music as a cultural vestige of Eastern European Jewish life and as a reflection of the community’s very existence and its ability to survive against all odds. Throughout Klezmer, Sfar (2006) fashions a rich world where music is designed to not only be seen, but also be heard, by the reader. Instead of only illustrating musical notations to accompany passages of singing, he also spells out the sounds made by the different instruments, choreographing a rich tapestry of noises for the reader to imagine. These notes capture the authenticity of the musical experience as a way of life for the musicians and for their in-person audiences. While Sfar knows that in the decades to come, his characters will likely experience incidents of great trauma and persecution, by allowing for his characters to coalesce as a family and to experience, together, the vibrancy of Jewish music, he highlights the vibrancy of Ashkenazi Jewish civilization in the diaspora. A more recent American exploration of Jewish rituals comes by the way of Tyler Feder’s (2020) graphic memoir Dancing at the Pity Party. Published ten years after her mother died from cancer, Feder beautifully chronicles her close relationship with her mom and how her death has continued to reverberate in her life. As a liberal American Jew, Feder is not meticulous in her Jewish observance. Despite this, she powerfully delineates the salience of Jewish mourning rituals and how they helped to incubate and shield her from the wider world while she was trying to navigate her grief in the immediate wake of her mother’s death. Feder documents her observances of the ritual aspects from burial through the week-long shiva mourning period. Interspersed throughout

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her descriptions are verbal and visual analyses of her qualitative experience. For example, following a description of the practice of kriah which involves the tearing of a garment or ribbon that is worn on the lapel and which serves as “a visual representation of the pain and anger of loss” (92), Feder writes: “even if we ever tried to mend the tears in our kriah ribbons, they could never truly return to their pre-torn states, just as our hearts could never return to how they were before my mom died” (93). Accompanying this passage is an illustration of three black ribbons. The first is a whole ribbon and is labeled “innocent”; the second ribbon is torn and is labeled “broken.” The third ribbon is sewn back together using a bright pink thread and is labeled “forever changed.” Feder’s illustration of the three panels reflects her own internal progression as a young woman affected by the loss of her mother and the ways that Jewish mourning rituals helped her and her family. Feder also calls attention to the ways that shiva’s can be both powerful family experiences where stories are shared and grief is expressed collectively and also awkward and uncomfortable when visitors are unsure what to say to the mourners. Feder also recognizes that at times, being cooped up for a week can itself be overwhelming and monotonous but when she and her cousins decide to go bowling, she gains a new appreciation for shiva when she realizes that “the visceral difference between the shiva bubble and the outside was INTENSE [because] the world was so bright, so loud, so HAPPY” (123). Illustrated alone atop a stark white background while still wearing her kriah ribbon, Feder’s illustration symbolizes the ways that shiva sheltered her and provided her with a safe space for navigating her emotions and for how unprepared she was for the “real world” by prematurely re-entering it before the mourning period was complete. Dancing at the Pity Party does not make claims that Jewish mourning rituals are the best, that all Jews should follow them in the same ways that Feder did, or even that other mourners will have the same experiences as she did. Nevertheless, Feder’s work provides visualization of her experiences observing Jewish rituals in contemporary Jewish society, demonstrating and modeling how the performance of these practices was meaningful and relevant to her.

Religious Graphic Narratives By far the smallest and most niche category, recent decades have seen the publication of several Jewish graphic narratives that use traditional Jewish texts like the Torah (Bible) and later religious writings like the Mishna and the Talmud as their bases.3 The most notable text in this grouping is JT Waldman’s (2005) rendering of the biblical book of Esther as a graphic narrative. Published

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by the Jewish Publication Society, Waldman’s Megillat Esther trilingual text is breathtakingly beautiful, packed with rich details in every panel. Each page includes the original Hebrew text calligraphed, an English translation, and Waldman’s own illustrations. As Tabachnick (2014) rightly notes, every work of adaptation, irrespective of its faithfulness to the original, also involves an interpretation of the text when rendered in visual format, and Megillat Esther is no exception. Waldman’s (2005) aesthetic and textual choices help craft his textual interpretation of the original source material. Aesthetically, his choice of using black and white for his images, of illustrating figures in particular ways to highlight exaggerated facial features, and even of varying the panel sizes on each page all coalesce to create a purposefully jumbled reading experience, evoking the existential and physical threats that faced the Jewish people when the Persian minister Haman tried to have them all murdered in the original source material. As Ori Z. Soltes (2009) explains, “Waldman’s vision is inebriated, in a manner consonant with his subject.4 He tells his story with a swirling dynamism that encompasses the calligraphed text as part of an abstract pattern of images.” Textually, what makes Megillat Esther a complex text is Waldman’s weaving together of Rabbinic and Middle-Ages Jewish exegetes’ commentaries on Esther directly into the narrative. These interpretations, most notably evident in the artwork, help craft Waldman’s original religious commentary on the text. By including and adding to classical texts, Waldman situates his own Megillat Esther as an informed contemporary commentary on the text. Where Waldman’s text truly shows its originality as a religious Jewish graphic adaptation is with regard to its function. Megillat Esther is not designed solely to be read from the comforts of one’s living room, in a library, or in a classroom. It is also designed to be brought into the synagogue to be read aloud on the Jewish holiday of Purim. Waldman’s decision to include the original source material directly alongside visual commentaries on the text facilitates an opportunity wherein the reader is confronted with a new appreciation of how porous the boundaries between sacred literature and graphic narratives are. As a form of sacred literature, Megillat Esther shows that a graphic narrative has as much sanctity as any other sacred scripture and that they can be used in functional ways. Two more recent Jewish graphic narratives can also comfortably be called religious Jewish graphic adaptations. Jessica Tamar Deutsch’s (2017) The Illustrated Pirkei Avot: A Graphic Novel of Jewish Ethics and Jordan Gorfinkel and Erez Zadok’s (2019) Passover Haggadah Graphic Novel are also intended to be functional in a way that is like Waldman’s (2005) by being read and learned in religious ceremonies and services. Deutsch’s work is a bilingual rendering of the Mishnaic tractate Ethics of the Fathers, with English translations included in the panels and the original Hebrew included at the end of the

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volume. Deutsch also crafts original illustrations for each of the over seventy rabbis whose statements are included in Ethics of the Fathers, and her artistic choices of clothing, hairstyle, and body language reflect her understanding of each individual rabbinic figure. Personalizing the rabbinic figures in this way provides an opportunity for integrating visual commentary into the religious text. Deutsch’s illustrations of the rabbis as unique figures with specific histories offer an illustrative commentary on the text and facilitate thinking about Ethics of the Fathers as not just as a series of ethical statements, but a series of ethical statements made by specific people who were shaped by their own experiences. An example where Deutsch (2017) demonstrates visual exegesis is with her depiction of Elisha the son of Avuyah. Originally known for his erudite scholarship, Elisha would eventually come to renounce Judaism and become a heretic known as acher, other. Deutsch illustrates Elisha wearing a motorcycle helmet with skull and crossbones, flames, and the Hebrew word acher written upon it. His beard is reminiscent of fiery flames, with tufts of hair jutting out in all directions (Figure 3.8). Perhaps because her illustration of Elisha is so unique from every other rabbi included in the book, Deutsch includes a note that explains how he had left Judaism following a traumatic experience. Deutsch’s decision to illustrate Elisha as a stereotypical rebel who has embraced his rebelliousness by writing his heretical nickname on his helmet reflects a broader tension that emerges by including Elisha in the tractate in the first place. On the one hand, Elisha is a heretic who has been ostracized and excommunicated from the community; at the same time, he has been included as a teacher in a book about Jewish ethics. By illustrating him in a way that is totally different from every other figure in the text, Deutsch highlights this discrepancy and calls attention to the ways that outcasts can positively contribute to a community. Like Waldman’s (2005) Megillat Esther which was designed to be used on a Jewish holiday, Gorfinkel and Zadok’s (2019) Passover Haggadah Graphic Novel is also intended for use at festive celebrations. In the Passover Haggadah’s case, Gorfinkel and Zadok hope that readers will use the graphic narrative at the ritual meal, or seder, that begins the holiday of Passover. To ensure that their graphic narrative is accessible to as many readers as possible, it is designed quadrilingually, employing Hebrew, English, English transliterations of Hebrew, and visual images, on all pages. The text embraces the Passover imperative that each person sees him or herself as if they have personally been redeemed by God from Egypt. One of the ways that Gorfinkel and Zadok facilitate this personal experience is by illustrating characters of different ages, genders, ethnicities, and levels of religious observance actively celebrating the holiday in a panel together on one of the first pages of the text. By including so many different types of Jews within the religious literature

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­FIGURE 3.8  Elisha ben Avuya on a motorcycle (chapter 4, mishnah 25). Copyright © 2017 Jessica Tamar Deutsch. All rights reserved. itself, the text models the diversity of the Jewish community and the different groups who recognize the holiday. As well, the inclusion of diversity expands the reader’s ability to see themselves in the Haggadah itself. This leads to a democratization of accessibility that opens the sacred text to all types of Jews, regardless of background and experience. In the next chapter, I will consider graphic memoirs in detail, but Miriam Katin’s (2006) We Are on Our Own and Sarah Lightman’s (2019b) The Book

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of Sarah are both noteworthy for how they employ biblical texts and motifs to frame their graphic memoirs. In both works, the author-artists offer contemporary readings of the biblical texts, bringing them into modernity, and by doing so, they challenge traditional ways that the texts have been understood and used. Their readings necessitate recalibration toward how biblical texts can provide meaning and substance to a graphic narrative, even when the authors’ very usage of these texts subverts the biblical intentions. Their memoirs simultaneously reify the importance of religious texts in the authors’ lives while also demarcating how the authors have also rejected aspects of religious life. Katin’s (2006) graphic memoir chronicles how her mother saved her life during the Holocaust in 1940s Hungary and how she has chosen to raise her own child in America in the 1960s and 1970s. Throughout the work, Katin documents her evolving atheism and how the Holocaust came to shape her identity as a non-believing Jew. The graphic novel begins with Katin quoting directly from the first chapter of Genesis; “In the beginning darkness was upon the face of the deep, and God said: ‘let there be light. And there was light … and it was good’.” On the left-side of the page and accompanying the biblical text, Katin provides five illustrations of the identical scene but presented from increasingly zoomed-out angles. What begins as a large black blob of pencil shading gives way to Hebrew letters to eventually reveal an illustration of Miriam and her mother studying from the Torah at their kitchen table in Hungary. As young Miriam learns about how God created the world, she adds that after God created the light, God then created “mother and me and then the others. And it was good.” As the reader looks at the right-hand side of the page, a reverse process of occlusion occurs in which what begins as a zoomed-out scene of the view from the family’s apartment is illustrated, but this gradually fades as a Nazi flag with a Swastika upon it begins to cover the window, until eventually all that can be seen is a black blob that resembles the one that appeared in the first panel of the adjoining page. Alongside the imagery of the Nazi flag, Katin writes: “And then one day, God replaced the light with the darkness” (Figure 3.9). Andrea Schlosser (2020) identifies these opening pages as a “proem to the actual narrative, thereby anticipating the events to follow” (3). Schlosser sees in Katin’s (2006) images and text a foreshadowing of the traumatic Holocaust experiences Katin and her mother would be forced to endure. Katin’s use of biblical text does more than just lay out the trajectory of the graphic novel with regard to the Holocaust. Linguistically and artistically, Katin also identifies from the very first pages how her Jewish identity plays a prominent role in her life, but hers is an identity that is deeply critical of Jewish religiosity. By the end of the second page, Katin has moved beyond the original text itself and instead uses the biblical text as a springboard to undo creation through the rise of the Nazi party. Visually, this is accomplished by having both the first

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FIGURE 3.9  Nazi flag gradually filling the panels. Copyright Miriam Katin, We Are on Our Own, Drawn & Quarterly.

and last panels be almost fully shaded in black; aesthetically this links together the chaos that existed before light entered the world and the chaos of life in Nazi-controlled Europe. Katin’s (2006) decision to begin her work with sacred scripture but to not use it in a way that reinforces the biblical message shows how religious texts can provide meaning and framework for Jewish authors, albeit in ways that differ from the original authorial intent. This type of inclusion of religious texts is similarly seen in Lightman’s (2019b) The Book of Sarah, in which biblical verses are woven throughout. As a feminist graphic memoir, Lightman interrogates her place within the gender dynamics of religious Jewish communities. Each of the chapters of the graphic narrative makes use of the name of a different biblical book, and she uses biblical passages and references throughout

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to frame her own mental health challenges and to buttress her difficulties synthesizing her Jewish and feminine identities. Like Katin (2006), Lightman (2019b) also includes illustrations of pages from the Torah, but these explicit textual references are supplemented with references to lesser-known religious texts that people unfamiliar with Jewish scriptures might not recognize. Lightman’s appropriation of religious texts often involves regendering the texts by framing the narratives around the feminine experience and not the original masculine one. On two occasions she changes the name of the book Ethics of the Fathers to Ethics of the Mothers, and she provides specific advice that she received from her female relatives. This maneuvering adheres to the style and substance of the original religious work, but Lightman subverts it by reimagining it as a work that speaks directly to her. Elsewhere, she laments her time spent living in New York by rewriting Psalm 137 to not be about Jews mourning the destruction of Jerusalem’s Temple by the rivers of Babylon but instead to be about mourning aspects of her life in America by the Hudson River. Lightman’s use of these religious texts highlights how she can personalize the biblical texts by extracting meaning from them and applying them to her own life. This type of personalization is most acute in Lightman’s (2019b) decision to title her book The Book of Sarah and to connect her life with that of the biblical matriarch Sarah. There are two noticeable ways that Lightman calls attention to her connection with her namesake. First, like the biblical figure, Lightman has her only child later in life, with her fertility being a subject of great concern to the people around her. Second, the biblical Sarah’s identity is directly tied to her husband Abraham’s identity, with the reader learning almost nothing about her. Lightman identifies with Sarah as she, too, feels that her identity is solely dependent upon various boyfriends, her son, her parents, or even her Jewish faith. Lightman struggles without an identity, unhappy being tied to others and craving an independent persona and in this regard, she differs from the biblical Sarah. Lightman (2019a) has written that “the biblical Sarah represents the person I cannot be, but I feel my community and family want me to be—the better, more selfless and devoted and less ambitious, Jewish mother” (257). Like other biblical figures who had works named after them, by naming her work after herself, Lightman is staking claim to a similar honorific as she endeavors to find a place for herself in the world. Much like Katin’s (2006) graphic memoir, Lightman’s (2019b) is similarly infused with biblical awareness, but their works are considerably freer in their interpretations than the ones offered by Waldman (2005), Gorfinkel and Zadok (2018), and Deutsch (2017). This distinction, while perhaps obvious, is reflective of the differing ways that the authors and artists make use of biblical books. Whereas the latter have chosen to operate within the confines of the religious texts themselves, the

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former make use of biblical and religious texts to craft their own narratives in response to them. As a result, entirely different types of religious graphic narratives are formed, with neither type being more or less creative or original than the other. Instead, they suggest the multiple ways that religious works can serve as inspirations for different types of Jewish graphic narratives. In addition to adaptations of religious texts, religious graphic narratives for tweens have also been published. These works, writes Tabachnick (2014), are designed to strengthen and buttress religious beliefs amongst religious Jewish youth. Counted amongst these works are ones which weave Jewish texts and values into offbeat fictional settings. This includes Steve Sheinkin’s (2006) Rabbi Harvey series that features Sheriff Rabbi Harvey and Barry Deutsch’s (2010) Hereville series starring Mirka. Rabbi Harvey uses Jewish wisdom to solve problems in an Old West American frontier city, and Mirka, an Orthodox-Jewish resident of Hereville, blends her Jewish values with street smarts to stand up to bullies and to try to fight dragons. Both Sheinkin’s and Deutsch’s series were sold in Jewish and mainstream bookstores, targeting Jewish and non-Jewish readers. In addition to Rabbi Harvey and Hereville, religious graphic narratives have also been published written specifically for Orthodox Jewish youth and have been sold primarily in Jewish bookstores. These include Leibel Estrin and Dovid Sears’s (1981–5) Mendy and the Golem, Joe Kubert’s (2004) The Adventures of Yaakov and Isaac and Alan Oirich and Ron Randall’s (2003) Jewish Hero Corps. Laurence Roth (2015) helpfully points out that the graphic narratives published by Mahrwood Press creatively blend Jewish history, Jewish values, and the superhero genre. These works, including Eric Mahr’s (2005) Nagdila: A Tale of the Golden Age: Shmuel HaNagid and Berel Wein’s (2006) Rambam: The Story of Maimonides “are significant examples of the inventive combinations of ideology, ethnicity, and form” (Roth 2015: 580) which reinforce religious beliefs amongst Orthodox Jewish youth.

­4 Critical Questions

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ewish graphic narratives have played an important role in contributing to the broader field of graphic narratives and in this chapter, I highlight four specific questions about how Jewish graphic narratives operate as a distinct medium. The first question I examine is the nature of memoir and how it has become a primary mode of communication in Jewish graphic narratives. Second, I assess how the insertion of photographs has become an important aspect of the genre. My third question considers how gender constructs are depicted in different works. Fourth, I ask how religious figures are depicted in Jewish graphic narratives. Fifth, I explore how Jewish graphic narratives have been used in schools and academic institutions.

What Is the Place of Graphic Memoir in the Jewish Graphic Narrative Tradition? As a distinct type of literary endeavor, life-writing projects have assumed a place of importance in Jewish graphic novels,1 and they therefore require special consideration. Popularized by Gillian Whitlock in an essay in 2006, the neologism autographics is a portmanteau of the phrase autobiographical graphic novels. Whitlock is careful to clarify that the word is not merely a kitschy catchphrase; rather, it is designed to acknowledge the uniqueness of visualized memoir as a specific type of life writing. She writes: “By coining the term ‘autographics’ for graphic memoir I mean to draw attention to the specific conjunctions of visual and verbal text in this genre of autobiography, and also to the subject positions that narrators negotiate in and through comics” (966). By way of example, Whitlock locates in Art Spiegelman’s (2004) post-9/11 graphic narrative In the Shadow of No Towers a complex body politics wherein he negotiated his own place in relation to the collapse

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of the Twin Towers, and also in Marjane Satrapi’s (2007) post-Iranian Revolution graphic narrative Persepolis where one can not only read about an author being forced to wear a veil but to see it happening. Seeing the author negotiating responses to their real-life circumstances offers perspectives that are otherwise unavailable in more traditional prose autobiographies. In the most wide-ranging study of Jewish autographies to date, Tahneer Oksman (2016) argues that the autographical work has come to serve as an important vehicle for American Jewish women to express their evolving identities. The genre affords women artistic license to creatively represent “the processes of navigating, over time, one’s so-called identity in relation to other people, assorted places, and even differing versions of that self” (3). The women whose work she considers play with “readers’ expectations of what comics and/or autobiography should look and sound like … in order to reimagine what it means to have, and represent, life as possibility” (17). Michel Kichka’s (2016, 2019) two autographical novels provide an interesting forum for considering how visualization of life narrative can facilitate an alternative reading experience from prose narrative. Published first in French, Second Generation: Things I Didn’t Tell My Father is a black and white depiction of his formative years growing up in Belgium and the subsequent relationship that he maintained with his Holocaust-survivor father after he immigrated to Israel. Falafel with Hot Sauce, also initially released in French, is an introspective of his experiences living as an émigré in Israel, and his complex feelings toward the country. Aesthetically, Kichka’s (2016, 2019) linework is consistent between the two graphic narratives, but his decision to illustrate Second Generation in black and white and Falafel with Hot Sauce in color establishes the tone and tenor for the works even before the reader has had a chance to read the first few pages. Presenting Falafel with Hot Sauce in technicolor and Second Generation in black and white, Kichka’s reader can easily infer the general thrust of his attitude to these different stages of his life, with his time living in Europe a period of sadness and his time in Israel a period of greater optimism. A second feature of the autography is the artist’s ability to use visual metaphors to convey complex ideas. For example, in one scene in In Falafel with Hot Sauce, Kichka expresses contentment with recent antigovernment protests by illustrating a map of the country with an open wound at its midsection (Figure 4.1). Visually evoking a Caesarean-section procedure, Kichka’s illustration powerfully signifies his hope that a new stage in the country’s evolution is being ushered in as the country births a new identity. The metaphor also acknowledges, as evidenced by the blood that is emitted, that births are painful and that segments of Israeli society will oppose political changes, resulting in ensuing conflict.

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FIGURE 4.1  Israel with a bleeding Caesarian wound. Falafel Sauce Piquante © DARGAUD 2018, by Kichka www.dargaud.com. All rights reserved. Like Kichka, Sarah Glidden (2016) also employs visual metaphor in her graphic memoir How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less. As she becomes less certain in her conviction that only Israel is at fault for the conflict with the Palestinian people, she begins to interrogate her previous assumptions about the country. To do this, Glidden illustrates an imaginary courtroom in which four Sarahs are drawn—Sarah the prosecutor, Sarah the defendant, Sarah the bailiff, and Sarah the judge (Figure  4.2). These Sarahs debate whether her Israeli tour guide has been sufficiently critical of Israel and whether enough balanced content has been presented to her on the trip. These mini-Sarahs act as both conscience and devil’s advocate; they judge, they accuse, they defend, and they enforce. Their metaphoric elements call attention to the complicated feelings that Glidden has about her trip. What Glidden’s (2016) and Kichka’s (2016, 2019) visual works offer, much like the other autographical examples presented in this chapter, is an opportunity to consider more carefully the relationship between author and text. How the authors position and present themselves and their feelings on the page is an important component of the narratives they have crafted. As well, artistic techniques, like coloring and visual metaphors, provide enhanced ways for authors and illustrators to express aspects of their identities and to offer, in new ways, commentaries on their lived experiences while allowing space for the reader to decipher meaning and intent from the imagery. An additional feature of some feminist Jewish autographies is the presence of humor as a narrative device. Neither Roz Chast’s (2016) nor Vanessa Davis’s (2010) graphic narratives are works of comedy, and yet both creators make use of humor to depict their lived experiences. In Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? Chast, a long-time cartoonist for The New Yorker, grapples with complex interfamilial dynamics alongside her nonagenarian parents’ unwillingness to confront their own mortality. Chast’s pages are busy, with many small panels per page that are filled with exaggerated and cartoony

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FIGURE 4.2  Glidden assuming all roles in a trial about Israel. Copyright Sarah Glidden. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly. facial features and bolded and enlarged fonts for emphasis. The graphic narrative centers around Chast’s relationships with each of her parents and how she tried to escape her domineering and judgmental mother’s presence in her life, only to ultimately be thrust into the role of managing her parents’ end-of-life plans. Chast’s use of humor in Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant? shows how humor functions as a coping mechanism for handling difficult interpersonal interactions. Chast’s mother is overbearing, and her father is anxious and timid. One conversation in the memoir involves Chast bringing her father a cheese Danish. He offers to share some with his wife, but she begins to argue with him that he will ruin his appetite for dinner. Chast says: “I don’t get why you’re the boss of dad’s Danish ingestion” but instead of her mother responding, her dad says: “Actually, your mother’s right. She’s a brilliant woman. Thank you Elizabeth!” (132). Chast does not negate how these conversations strip her father of his independence and an ability to make his own choices as beads of sweat are illustrated popping off his forehead. But within a conversation over something as banal as cheese Danish, the effect of showing her father in this vulnerable way is amusing and endears the reader to him and to his anxieties. A similarly amusing and honest scene

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is illustrated at the end of the memoir when her mother needs to sleep over at Chast’s house. She experiences incontinence, leaving fecal matter all over Chast’s home, and she requires Chast’s help to clean herself. Chast spares her mother the indignity of illustrating the scene, choosing instead to document it in written prose. She concludes her description by sharing that a year later and with no prompting, her mother said: “I know why you don’t have me over to your house. It’s because you’re afraid I’ll shit it all up” (163). The scene that Chast describes is mortifying and humiliating for both her and her mother; each has been placed in a situation that is uncomfortable. While her mother’s comment does acknowledge this discomfort, it also subverts it by injecting a wry and self-deprecating assessment of what her life has come to as an incontinent and dependent nonagenarian. Humor also plays a vital role in Vanessa Davis’s (2010) graphic memoir Make Me a Woman. The autography is a series of short vignettes of Davis’s post-college experiences living in New York City and in California. Davis’s humor is much more context-driven and irreverent than Chast’s, with Davis able to depict the humor in many of her everyday occurrences. For example, Davis takes great pleasure revealing that when she and her friend Karen were discussing vibrators with a saleswoman at Toys in Babeland, a “Hasidic (ultraOrthodox Jew) guy was really obviously eavesdropping on the questions.” The scene is illustrated in vibrant colors, with vibrators, condoms, and BDSM paraphernalia strewn around the store, with the lone Hasidic man illustrated reading a sex book but staring at Vanessa and Karen as the saleslady has her hands wrapped around a vibrator. The scene itself is funny, but what adds to the richness is that Davis ends it by writing: “I wanted to tell my mom about seeing him there, but I didn’t want to tell her about me being there” (Figure 4.3). What makes the scene funny is not just that there is a religious man in the shop, but that it is a man from her own religion, and she knows that sex is a relatively taboo subject in religious Jewish communities. Furthermore, the humor is effective because Davis herself also acknowledges that it is a funny story alongside the awkward discomfort of only being able to share the story if she is willing to share that she was shopping for sex toys. Much like Chast (2016), Davis (2010) is also willing to use self-deprecating humor to tell her memoir. In Davis’s work, it often revolves around sex and infatuations with men. For example, after realizing that the man she keeps seeing on the subway is reading comic books, Davis illustrates herself thinking “I basically LOVE YOU” followed by “I am a total weirdo.” Scenes of this nature are reflective of what Oksman (2013) has observed as Davis’s ability to “portray the self as a textured, patchworked entity that changes from moment to moment, depending on framing and context … [which] collectively and often humorously visualize the animated and inexhaustible project of claiming and representing the self” (142).

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FIGURE 4.3  Davis, her friend, and an ultra-Orthodox Jew in a sex shop. Copyright Vanessa Davis. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly.

Why Are Photographs so Prevalent in Jewish Graphic Narratives? In Chapter 2, I referred to Israeli artist Elisheva Nadel and her use of mixed media in early Israeli comics. In 1964’s The Kidnappers, Nadel used photographs alongside illustrations to tell writer Pinhas Sadeh’s story. The Hebrew-language story is about an atomic scientist who is kidnapped by foreign spies but is ultimately saved by his son. Kevin Haworth (2019) suggests that this story

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is “likely the first use of mixed media in Israeli children’s literature” (17). It is also a precursor—most probably unbeknownst to him—to Art Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) far more well-known use of mixed media in Maus. In Maus, Spiegelman makes use of photographs—either by illustrating them or inserting the actual images—in several places in the text. In the decades since Maus’s publication, the weaving of photographs and other types of mixed media into texts has become a feature in other Jewish graphic novels. In The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust, Marianne Hirsch (2012) explains the importance of photographs as carriers of authenticity. She writes: more than oral or written narratives, photographic images that survive massive devastation and outlive their subjects and owners function as ghostly revenants from an irretrievably lost past world. They enable us, in the present, not only to see and to touch that past, but also to try to reanimate it by undoing the finality of the photographic “take.” (36) ­Photographs thus come to allow the reader to also see the past as a real space even when it is mediated through filters and lenses offered by authors and artists. Amongst a religious and ethnic community that has experienced as much persecution as the Jewish one has, the photograph testifies to the veracity of the past traumas and to the ability—or necessity—to preserve those narratives, legacies, memories, and histories through the retelling of the stories. In Maus, Spiegelman (1986, 1991b) includes one photo of each of the members of his immediate family. In Volume One, the reader sees Art as a young boy in a photograph with his mother Anja at Trojan Lake, in New York state. A photo of Art’s father Vladek wearing his prisoner’s uniform after the war is included at the end of the second volume. And lastly, Volume Two begins with a photograph and dedication to Richieu, Art’s brother who died in the Holocaust before Art was even born. These photographs, writes Hirsch, reconstruct a family broken apart by war and trauma. As a distinctive form of visual media, and one that appears totally different from all the other illustrations in Maus, these three images form a triptych that “symbolizes the sense of family, safety, and continuity that has been hopelessly severed” (Hirsch 2012, 37) because of the traumas of the Holocaust. Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) integration of physical artifacts into Maus will be replicated in a number of Jewish graphic narratives from recent years.2 For example, Asaf Hanuka (2020) uses a photograph of his grandmother’s tombstone in his Hebrew-language graphic memoir HaYehudi HaAravi [The Jewish Arab]. The work simultaneously tells two interwoven stories—one set

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in the 1930s in British Mandatory Palestine and one set in the early twentyfirst century in Israel and in it, Hanuka juxtaposes the unsolved murder of his great-grandfather Avraham and how his interest in the story helps him gain independence by providing him with meaning and purpose. The entire series is illustrated save for one image of a tombstone. On that page of the graphic narrative, Hanuka and his father are trying to locate Hanuka’s grandmother’s gravesite so that the two men can visit her and pay their respects. In the page’s penultimate panel, Hanuka illustrates them standing by the grave. Hanuka is holding his cellphone aloft, readying to take a photograph, while his father asks why he is taking a photo. The final panel is a closeup photograph of the tombstone, and its Hebrew inscription. In the very bottom of the image is a shadow cast by Hanuka as he took the photo. Accompanying the image is Hanuka’s response to his father: “in order to not forget” (Figure 4.4). Much like Spiegelman did with his three photographs, Hanuka’s use of photography testifies to the authenticity of the experience. As well, it shows the personal familial identification between subject and past and of the desire to grab a hold of what is real in as unmediated a way as possible, and it is the photograph, and not the illustration, which most allows for this. Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) use of actual photographs is not the only way he integrates photos into Maus. In Volume Two, photographs become keys that help Spiegelman and Vladek unlock the past by serving as tools that are used to understand what happened before Spiegelman was born and as ways for Vladek to help let his son see that world. However, unlike the photographs of his immediate family, these photos are illustrations that stylistically replicate Spiegelman’s use of the animal imagery that is found throughout the work, with family members illustrated as mice. Spiegelman’s interpretive lens builds layers of distance between himself and his relatives with whom he has no direct familiarity. As he and Vladek look at the pictures together, the photos, however, appear to take on a life of their own, spilling out across panels, cutting into the gutters and boundaries that separate the units of time. As the memories begin to overflow, the photos first butt into the speech bubbles—overlapping them and appearing under them—until they eventually cascade to the ground, forming a pile of photos that becomes increasingly occluded, and whose subjects are unidentifiable as they are layered on top of each other. The cumulative effect of seeing all the illustrated photos is overwhelming for the reader, much like it also is for Vladek, whose stories about the subjects proceed nonlinearly and out of chronological order. Unlike the remainder of the work wherein Vladek tells his story in sequence, here, the memories pore out as he examines photo after photo, until eventually, exhausted from the photos which lay sprawled at his feet, he shares with Art that the photographs are “all what is left.” These mediated photos—unlike the ones of his actual family—symbolize a world that Art can never fully be

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­FIGURE 4.4  Photograph of Asaf Hanuka’s grandmother’s tombstone. Used with permission of Asaf Hanuka. a part of, yet neither is he entirely separated from it. The people are a part of him, even if he is unable to truly know them. Illustrating them in this way allows Spiegelman to take on semblances of ownership of his past as he tries to form his own understanding of what came before his birth. Illustrations of photographs appear in several Jewish graphic narratives including Rutu Modan’s (2007a) Exit Wounds, Ari Folman and David

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Polonsky’s (2009) Waltz with Bashir and both of Michel Kichka’s (2016, 2019) memoirs, Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father and Falafel with Hot Sauce. The most sustained use of this motif, however, can be found in Carol Isaacs’s (2020) The Wolf of Baghdad. As a text of memory exploration about the Farhud, a violent attack against Baghdad’s Jews in 1941, Isaacs employs illustrated photographs to conjoin past and present so that she can better understand a history that she lives with, but one that she was not actually a part of. Illustrated photographs appear on the graphic narrative’s first pages; Isaacs illustrates herself holding a photograph of a musical band. While little is known about the musicians, their instruments, including an oud, are distinctive for being Middle Eastern in origin. Most prominently, the musicians’ faces are illustrated without any facial features (Figure 4.5). The absence of identifying facial markers in photographs recurs throughout the graphic narrative, including in pictures of Isaacs’s own family. The removal of eyes, noses, and mouths hints at an inability to fully grasp the identities of the people present, even though she can appreciate the cultural markers that they display through their clothing. As Isaacs begins to better understand Baghdad’s Jewry and her past, her memory gradually becomes more complete as she becomes more a part of this lost world. No longer devoid of detail, her relatives’ eyes, noses, and mouths are now filled and they serve as visual signifiers for Isaacs’s increased familiarity with her family’s history and experiences. Isaacs’s (2020) creative use of photographs to offer commentary on how the past is interwoven with the present takes one final and tragic turn. In the immediate aftermath of the violent Farhud, photographs of her family members are now illustrated devoid of personality and features, with the identities of the subjects fully cast as black shadows (Figure  4.6). With

FIGURE 4.5  Blank faces in the family photograph. Page 14 detail from The Wolf of Baghdad by Carol Isaacs/The Surreal McCoy © Myriad 2020 www. MyriadEditions.com.

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FIGURE 4.6  Family members shaded in black in photographs. Page 169 detail from The Wolf of Baghdad by Carol Isaacs/The Surreal McCoy © Myriad 2020 www.MyriadEditions.com.

their bodies obscured in darkness, Isaacs visually alludes to the trauma they have experienced and her own inability to fully comprehend the past. Furthermore, as Isaacs comes to see what has happened to the photographs which had once served as metonyms for her own evolving understanding and connection to the community, tears stream down her face, and she tumbles to the floor. She is alone in her suffering and in her witnessing of the trauma. Absent her family members and even their likenesses in images, Isaacs is now totally cut off from the places and people wherein she found community and identity. Like Hirsch (2012) suggested, the photograph provides a conduit to the past, but also an opportunity; by creatively playing with the image, Isaacs can interrogate the past and arrive at new understandings of it.

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How Are Gender Constructs Engaged with in Jewish Graphic Narratives? In 2013, Sarah Lightman’s Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews won an Eisner Award for being the best scholarly/academic work of the year. Lightman’s edited collection includes essays about women’s comics and original comics by practitioners in the field. Andrea Greenbaum (2015) has remarked that the “collection succeeds because it subverts the male gaze … and while the artists are diverse in sexuality, age, region, and religious affiliation, the shared commonality of grappling with Jewish identity, simultaneously disavowing and embracing Jewish culture, adds immeasurably to the complex web of Jewish comics and graphic novels.” Greenbaum’s observation about the work’s importance for how it challenges hegemonic masculinity is exceedingly important. This is because an important feature of Jewish graphic narratives published in the twenty-first century is an emphasis on deconstructing gender norms within the Jewish community. Examples of Jewish graphic narratives that address issues of gender inequality abound in texts from both North America and Israel. Two books have been published—one about North America and one about Israel—that analyze how Jewish graphic narratives are progressive with regard to gender by deconstructing hegemonies that the authors and artists see as retrograde and unsuitable for contemporary Jewish society. The first work to be published was Tahneer Oksman’s (2016) “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs. In it, she explores the ways that the graphic medium provides opportunities for women to visualize aspects of their gendered identities that had hitherto been hidden. She writes that the rationale for many of these cartoonists—including Aline Kominsky Crumb, Vanessa Davis, Miss Lasko-Gross, Lauren Weinstein, Sarah Glidden, Miriam Libicki, and Liana Finck—is “partly to project their own anxieties about what it means to be an outsider within one’s assigned community or in relation to communal identities that the cartoonists, and many contemporary Jewish women more broadly, often reject” (18). The graphic narrative’s medium of visualization therefore allows for these women to not only be heard, but to also be seen, as they illustrate explorations of Jewish femininity on to the page. For example, in her section about Aline Kominsky Crumb’s (2007) comic “Moo Goo Gaipan” from the graphic memoir Need More Love, Oksman analyzes the ways that Kominsky Crumb deconstructs stereotypes of Jewish women as passive by first calling attention to these stereotypes, and then subverting them by illustrating them. In the four-page cartoon, Kominsky Crumb illustrates herself and a female relative ravenously devouring Chinese noodles, commenting that “the women in [her family]

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really know how to eat … but they hate to cook.” As Oksman rightly observes, Kominsky Crumb is acknowledging stereotypes of Jewish women as passive and demanding, taking without giving. And yet, Kominsky Crumb’s very act of actively engaging with these supposed features of Jewish femininity rejects them. Oksman writes: “if to be seen as a Jew and/or woman is, in some ways, to be misread, then part of Kominsky Crumb’s project is figuring out how, as an artist, she can seek out ways of somehow controlling or manipulating these misreadings, particularly by, in turn, assuming and rejecting them for herself and others” (59). The creative act of illustrating herself on the page and framing the narrative however she likes inverts the stereotype of Jewish women as passive, and as a result, Kominsky Crumb asserts control, demonstrating her own independence from these gendered stereotypes. My own book (Reingold 2022) Gender and Sexuality in Israeli Graphic Novels considers how male and female Israeli graphic novelists have used the medium to subvert assumptions about what it means to perform gender in Israeli society. As a society that has deeply encoded gender norms for men and women, hegemonic masculinity typically involves overt bravura and expectations of manliness while hegemonic femininity assumes that women play a docile or subservient role within society. I have argued that a prominent feature of Israeli comics and graphic novels is a deconstruction of hegemonic gender constructs and an establishment of alternative gendered identities for men and women. Through the visualization of a different Israel, comics and graphic novels by Israelis depict an Israel that is similar to the one that currently exists but is different in a significant way. These texts shift the dominant portrayal of gender away from hypermasculinity and docile femininity and towards a new gendered construct. Illustrations serve as a powerful tool, facilitating the envisioning of this new society, leading the reader not only to think about a new society, but to actually see this society. (13) This type of approach to gender can be found in Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) autobiographical work Waltz with Bashir. First released as a stopmotion animation film before being published as a graphic narrative shortly thereafter, the work documents Folman’s attempts to recapture his lost memories from the time he spent serving in the Israeli military during 1982’s First Lebanon War. He is specifically worried about whether he participated in or facilitated the murders of Palestinians in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps. To untangle his memories, Folman discusses the traumatic past with his former troopmates, engaging in painful and revelatory conversation with them. In the graphic narrative, the reader witnesses many ways that Israeli

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gender norms are deconstructed, especially with regards to how soldiers perform masculinity. Film studies scholar Yael Munk (2012) has called Waltz with Bashir “unprecedented” in Israeli society for its willingness to “come to terms with a terrible, repressed traumatic past … and the atrocities carried out in the name of his country, the country that he as a soldier represented” (312). Rachel S. Harris (2017), a noted scholar of Israeli culture and literature, situates Waltz with Bashir within a corpus of texts by Israeli artists that challenge the nation’s foundational myths. In Israel, the military is the main way that socialization occurs for men in Israeli society; it therefore also creates the dominant construct of masculinity for the country. This masculinity is one that is aggressive and confident, and that valorizes young men for their willingness to sacrifice their lives for the greater good of the nation. Philip Hollander (2012) identifies in the ways that Folman speaks to his friends, listens to their words, and builds a community around empathy and vulnerability, a challenge to how masculinity has been historically constructed in the state (348). Over the course of the work, what emerges is that each of the characters is afraid of being outed by the others for being a coward or for being different, but their inability to express this during their time in uniform rendered them crippled by their own anxieties. It is only once Folman begins interviewing his former troopmates that he discovers this about each of them and through this realization, he not only recovers his own traumatic memories, but through the graphic medium, he challenges the military establishment’s culture that leads young men to feel ashamed of their feelings.

How Are Jewish Religious Leaders Depicted in Jewish Graphic Narratives? The title “rabbi” literally translates to “my master” and is the term most often used in the Jewish community to refer to a religious leader. Etymologically, the word comes from the Hebrew noun “rav,” which means “great.” Historically, the role of the rabbi was to serve the Jewish community through “scholarship, judgeship, social-spiritual leadership, and example” (Bornstein-Makovetsky, Carlebach, Kelman, Baskin, & Rabinowitz 2007: 11) and to oversee marriages and divorces and deliver orations to the people prior to holidays. In the twentyfirst century, the rabbi also became responsible for pastoral work, including visiting the sick, comforting mourners, and establishing a relationship with congregants. Given the rabbi’s prominence in the Jewish community, it is not surprising that rabbis feature in many Jewish graphic narratives. However, much like Wendy Zierler’s (2006) observation of rabbis in modern literary works of prose, the most prominent rabbinical trope is of a rabbi who misses

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the spiritual mark by also missing the social mark. The depictions of rabbis in Jewish graphic narratives indicate a strong opposition to rabbinical figures, with nearly every rabbi depicted in a negative way. In Joann Sfar’s (2006) Klezmer, he tells the story of a group of early twentiethcentury Eastern European Jews who form a musical band together despite coming from very different religious and ideological backgrounds. Within the band of misfits is Yaacov, a young student who had been learning at a religious seminary before being expelled for stealing a coat from his rabbi for reasons unknown to even himself. In her analysis of Sfar’s artistic style in Klezmer, Marla Harris (2008) writes that “the sketchy style of Klezmer, with the extensive use of white space, captures the fundamental rootlessness of persons who are still finding out who they are and how they relate to each other” (192). One of the characters whose depiction rarely includes white space or even a sketchy and rough artistic depiction is the rabbi of Yaacov’s seminary. Throughout the exchange between Yaakov and the rabbi about the stolen coat, Sfar illustrates the rabbi occluded in shadows, and he is colored using dark reds and blacks. The combination of shadows and darkness hints at the objective passion the rabbi has for his studies and strict adherence to Jewish law, and not passion for subjective feelings like the sensitivity and compassion Yaacov might need after his momentary lapse of judgment. Adopting a zero-tolerance policy for infractions and banishing Yaacov from the school for one incident reflects an ideological attitude that prizes truth over compassion. Yaacov’s own confusion about the incident indicates a troubled soul and suggests he needs religious counsel. While the rabbi does give Yaakov the coat and a hug and asks Yaacov whether he will be returning home, when Sfar (2006) illustrates the two in conversation together, they are already separated from each other. The physical distance between them is compounded by Yaacov’s vague response of “no.” The rabbi, who serves as Yaacov’s parental figure, allows him to leave and makes no further appearances in the text. Transferring ownership of the coat provides Yaacov with physical support but allowing him to leave with no destination in mind demonstrates an absence of kindness and an inability to provide emotional and spiritual support. Negative depictions of rabbis are not limited solely to Jewish communities in Eastern Europe in the early 1900s. In Harvey Pekar and JT Waldman’s (2012) autobiographical graphic novel Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, readers learn about Pekar’s evolving relationship with Israel. In one scene, he relates how he chose to publish an editorial in Cleveland’s Plain Dealer that criticized Israel. The following week, Rabbi Murray Stadtmauer, Pekar’s cousin, published a rebuke criticizing Pekar and his position on Israel. Pekar is surprised that his cousin, who does not even acknowledge their relationship in his letter, has chosen to respond to him in this very public way. Stadtmauer, Pekar seems to suggest, could have written to him directly and discussed their different

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politics; instead, the public nature of the confrontation and the lack of personal recognition was a rejection of Harvey because of his political stance on Israel. In his reflection on his experience with Rabbi Staudtmauer, Pekar opines how “it is a sad state of affairs in the Jewish community when a rabbi, supposedly a moral leader, vilifies Jews opposed to Israel’s commission of atrocities” (148).3 The common thread running through these two examples is an indictment of the rabbis for their moral failings. The concern raised in these texts, of which Klezmer and Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me are but two examples, is with how rabbis fail to demonstrate compassion and understanding toward the very people they are supposed to be shepherding. As religious leaders, rabbis are held to lofty standards and in exchange, they receive respect and honor. By highlighting instances with absences of moral conduct, Sfar and Pekar critique overemphasizing ritual observances when it is done at the expense of proper ethical conduct. There is one notable outlier to the trend of negative depictions of rabbis and he can be found in Sfar’s (2005) graphic narrative The Rabbi’s Cat. The titular Rabbi Abraham Sfar is the spiritual leader of an Algerian Jewish community. In this capacity, he delivers weekly sermons, ritually slaughters animals to ensure they are kosher, and teaches and guides the local Jews, including students who learn at the local Jewish school. Despite his rabbinical status, Rabbi Sfar emphasizes interpersonal relationships, sometimes even choosing to break Jewish law to ensure he does not cause emotional or psychological harm to those around him. In this way, he is the antithesis of the rabbis in Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me and Klezmer. For example, upon meeting his son-in-law Jules’s irreligious family, Rabbi Sfar warmly encourages Jules’s father to speak with him about his disdain for organized religion. Moreover, to make Jules’s father comfortable, he even joins him in rolling cigarettes together, although doing this on the Sabbath is prohibited. While observance of Jewish law is important to Rabbi Abraham, what Sfar features in his depiction of the rabbi is an emphasis on ethical conduct in interpersonal relationships. Rabbi Abraham’s importance as a foil is in how he shows that practicing kindness becomes a component of his religious identity.

How Are Educators Employing Jewish Graphic Narratives in Their Classrooms? One of the most important ways that texts have social and cultural impact is through their inclusion on syllabi as required readings in college and university courses because this increases reader access to texts and expands the

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nature of discourse about a text. As an already-established literary medium, graphic narratives are well-integrated into university and college syllabi, and Jewish graphic narratives are no exception. Reviewing the reading lists of every course to include a Jewish graphic narrative on its reading list is well beyond the scope of this work, but Art Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) Maus is overwhelmingly the most represented example of a Jewish graphic narrative that is taught. Maus has been taught in general graphic narrative courses and also ones centered on autobiography, history, memoir, and the Holocaust.4 Will Eisner’s (2006a) A Contract with God has also been included as required reading.5 In addition to the inclusion of select Jewish graphic narratives in non-Jewish Studies courses, some American colleges and universities have offered upper-level courses entirely about Jewish graphic narratives.6 The selection of texts that are included in the courses varies widely given the vastness of the topic and the easy access to many different texts. Despite these differences, commonalities of genre, however, exist across sections of courses about Jewish graphic narratives. The courses tend to include examples of Jewish graphic narratives that address the Holocaust, Israel, traditional Jewish texts, and the Diasporic Jewish experience. The diversity of programs and courses that have included Maus testifies to the text’s continued relevance despite it having been published over thirty years ago. Many articles have been written about the merits of using Maus in the classroom. For instance, Maryanne Rhett (2007) has observed that complex graphic narratives like Maus encourage students to fully grapple with the magnitude of the historical event; in Maus this can be facilitated through an analysis of Spiegelman’s multimodal blending of word, image, metaphor, and sequencing. In a reflection on his experience teaching Maus at Presbyterian College in Clinton, South Carolina, Terry Barr (2009) explains: “By the time we finish Maus, most of my students are staggered by Spiegelman’s imagination, gravity, honesty, and refusal to give the neat comic book resolution that they expect” (77). Maus, Barr argues, challenges his non-Jewish students to reconsider their expectations and assumptions of graphic narratives and of Holocaust testimony. Maus was also the subject of international attention in the winter of 2022 when news outlets reported that a school board in the US state of Tennessee unanimously voted to remove Spiegelman’s graphic narrative from its eighthgrade social studies curriculum. At the McMinn County Board of Education meeting on January 10, 2022, a board member explained that Maus contained an example of nudity, a depiction of suicide, and numerous instances of profanity. The board member said: A lot of the cussing had to do with the son cussing out the father, so I don’t really know how that teaches our kids any kind of ethical stuff. It’s just the opposite, instead of treating his father with some kind of respect, he

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treated his father like he was the victim. We don’t need this stuff to teach kids history. We can teach them history and we can teach them graphic history. We can tell them exactly what happened, but we don’t need all the nakedness and all the other stuff. (“Transcript,” 2022) An additional board member raised concerns with Spiegelman’s illustration of Jewish mice being hanged on gallows, with this board member wondering “why … the educational system promote[s] this kind of stuff” because “it is not wise or healthy” for kids to read about (“Transcript,” 2022). In the immediate wake of the decision, much attention was focused on the decision itself, with outlets using the word “ban” to describe the board’s decision (Managan 2022; Treisman 2022). Calling it a ban, however, is not exactly what happened. Instead, a more accurate description of the meeting’s proceedings reveals that the board elected to remove Maus from their Holocaust curriculum because of objections with the text. Nevertheless, the attention raised by the imbroglio resulted in copies of Maus being given out for free at a local Tennessee comic book store (Free 2022), Maus rising to the top of Amazon’s best seller list (Chakrabarti 2022), and being unavailable for purchase due to low inventory. In the weeks following the announcement, the conversation shifted away from the sensationalism that surrounds banning a work and instead toward how curricular choices are made and whether the concerns raised with Maus are legitimate ones. Spiegelman located in the board’s decision a politicization of the Holocaust and an attempt to present children with a “fuzzier, warmer, gentler Holocaust” that casts Americans as heroes for liberating concentration and death camps but that doing so fails children because it does not allow children to “confront [history] in a way that’s useful” because they obfuscate the horrors of the past and instead teaches “myths and stories that are heartwarming” (Tress 2022). In addition to courses featuring Eisner’s and Spiegelman’s graphic narratives, courses at Montreal’s Concordia University and the University of Kentucky have been offered that pair together Israeli and Palestinian graphic narratives to facilitate dialogue between students about the two communities and to develop a more sophisticated understanding of the nature of the conflict. By way of example, Mira Sucharov (2010, 2017) has used Jewish graphic narratives in her “Political Identity through Graphic Novels” and her “Peace and Conflict in the Middle East” courses. In the former, Spiegelman’s Maus is taught alongside Rutu Modan’s (2013) The Property, while in the latter, Modan’s (2007a) Exit Wounds and Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) Waltz with Bashir are included in the list of required readings. At Kentucky, Janice Fernheimer (2016) has made use of Harvey Pekar and JT Waldman’s (2012) Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me

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and Sarah Glidden’s (2016) How to Understand Israel in 60 Days. In an article describing her pedagogical goals, she explains that she purposefully juxtaposes graphic narratives from different political and religious orientations together. This is done to allow “sometimes incommensurable narratives [be] simultaneously present and, through that simultaneous albeit cacophonous presence, [to] perhaps create some narrative, imaginative space across them” (Fernheimer 2019: 46). In an evaluation of using graphic narratives to teach about Israeli and Palestinian relations, Thomas Juneau and Sucharov (2010) conclude that the texts were effective pedagogical tools in their university class. Their use of Modan’s (2007a) Exit Wounds, Folman and Polonsky’s (2009) Waltz with Bashir and Joe Sacco’s (2014) Palestine allowed for meaningful conversations about the nature of contrasting narratives about sensitive topics in Israeli and Palestinian societies like settlements and refugees. Furthermore, the texts facilitated opportunities for students to consider the perspectives of different sides in the conflict; this let students “contextualize, problematize, and challenge assertions and assumptions” (179). Sucharov and Juneau’s model of using graphic narratives from different vantage points is a tacit recognition of the reality that despite Modan’s, Folman and Polonsky’s and Sacco’s willingness to challenge stereotypes about their own communities, the texts lack nuance and sophistication when addressing the other side. Within an educational setting in particular, the absence of contrasting narratives leads to further entrenchment, partisanship, and conflict because a diversity of ethno-national voices is absent on the page. Furthermore, the texts can be understood by students in ways that reinforce the danger of the single story because each presents a portrait of the two communities engaged in endless conflict, and they are devoid of recognition of any of the regional peace initiatives, or even individual narratives of positive collaboration between Israelis and Palestinians. Curricular recommendations have also been published about using Jewish graphic narratives in high school and elementary classrooms. With regard to teaching about Israel, I have argued that Israel-focused graphic narratives have the potential to help educators introduce a more complex way of thinking about Israel with Jewish adolescents (Reingold 2019d). Texts like Galit and Gilad Seliktar’s (2011) Farm 54, and Sarah Glidden’s (2016) How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less challenge students to think about Israel in new ways by encouraging them to actively wrestle with texts, concepts, ideas, and even their own connections to Israel. By integrating graphic narratives as tools that introduce alternative ways of thinking, students can see the complexity of Israeli society and build new connections with the state. With regard to Holocaust-centered graphic narratives, the inclusion of Tomasz, a non-Jewish Pole in Modan’s (2013) The Property can inform Jewish students about the ways that non-Jews relate to sites of

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Jewish trauma. What results for the Jewish student is an opportunity to gain access to a world in which non-Jews are absorbed by Jewish history as part of their own familial and national histories. The exposure to voices which expand the types of existing Holocaust curricula can be used to introduce Jewish students to new ways of thinking about history and the place of the Jew in global history. Seeing that their stories are relevant to non-Jews can foster a reciprocal relationship that encourages Jewish students to explore communities and cultures outside of their own which can begin a process of greater reconciliation and mutual trust alongside non-Jews to combat racism and anti-Semitism. Furthermore, the weaving together of narrative, image, and primary sources in graphic narratives that revolve around anti-Semitism can allow for meaningful parsing and analysis of original source material. Both Will Eisner’s (2005) The Plot, which makes use of lengthy passages from the anti-Semitic treatise The Protocols of the Elders of Zion and Folman and Polonsky’s (2018) artistic renderings of original diary entries in Anne Frank’s Diary model an engagement with primary sources that show critical and creative thinking about the past and the present while simultaneously leaving space for students to arrive at their own conclusions about text, history, and the continued presence of anti-Semitism in contemporary society. To date, there is limited empirical data about the educational or social benefits associated with using graphic narratives in the classroom. One exception is a small study that I conducted which assessed how teaching sections from Israeli cartoonist Shay Charka’s (2012) autobiographic comic strip Beyond the Line to a group of Canadian high school seniors changed perceptions of religious Jewish Israelis (Reingold 2021a). Charka is a religiousnationalist Israeli who lives in the West Bank and his comic series was first published in the religious newspaper Makor Rishon. The series is about Charka’s experiences in the West Bank and his interactions with fellow Jews and his Palestinians neighbors. The students’ reflections on learning about Charka’s experiences paint a compelling and informative picture about how comics can be used to introduce complexity about religious communities in a classroom and for challenging stereotypes that students may have. Students gained a new understanding and appreciation of religious life in Israel and saw elements of Charka in themselves and in their own identifications with the state of Israel.

­5 Key Texts

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ny conversation—as I have argued throughout this book—about Jewish graphic narratives begins with a discussion of Art Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) Maus and Will Eisner’s (2006a) A Contract with God. To that end, the two works have received considerable attention throughout this volume, especially in Chapter  2 where they were discussed at length in order to demonstrate how their arrival heralded the beginnings of the Jewish graphic narrative as a distinct genre. In consideration of the amount of attention already paid to these graphic narratives, I have decided to not offer further reflection on them in this section on key texts. This is, of course, not because they are not key texts; they are, perhaps, the most key of all texts. Instead, I want to focus on the important Jewish graphic narratives that have been produced in the years since A Contract with God and Maus were released because these are the graphic narratives that have followed in their footsteps, and which have charted new directions for the expression of Jewish identity in a visualized narrative. Using the genre scheme that I introduced in Chapter  3 alongside examples of graphic memoirs, ten different Jewish graphic narratives will be examined here, two from each category. I have decided to limit myself in this way in order to emphasize the salience of the categories and to show that within each of the categories, important Jewish graphic narratives have been published. Of course, importance can be understood in many ways, and, to that end, I will explain why each is a key text in the corpus of Jewish graphic narratives based on recent scholarly literature. It must be acknowledged that many examples of important works have not been included in this chapter. While not every Jewish graphic narrative published is a key text, with over 100 in circulation, more than 10 can certainly be classified as significant. In my selections, I have tried to offer the reader a range of texts that show a diversity of topic and artistic style. As well, I have limited myself to only include an author or artist once, but even with this restriction in place, some notable texts were not included.

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H ­ olocaust X-Men: Magneto Testament Selecting X-Men: Magneto Testament as one of the key Holocaust graphic narratives might be considered a curious choice by some readers. It has won significantly fewer awards than Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) Maus, it is rarely (if ever) taught in university or college classrooms, and it was released by Marvel Comics, a mainstream superhero publishing house that is not known for producing original Jewish graphic narratives. Yet Marvel’s presence in the world of comic books and graphic novels necessitates a recalibration of expectations and a pause when an original work about the Holocaust is published by a press that has a reach like Marvel’s. What Greg Pak and Carmine Di Giandomenico’s (2009) X-Men: Magneto Testament does exceptionally well is to engage with the Jewish past in a meaningful way that depicts the gravity and enormity of the Holocaust while doing so for a large and international readership. Pak and Di Giandomenico’s graphic narrative was first released in five individual issues in 2008 and 2009 before being published as a single volume in 2009. Its importance extends well beyond Pak and Di Giandomenico writing a story that retcons Magneto’s origin story by presenting him as a Jewish Holocaust survivor whose birthname was Max Eisenhardt. The work operates as an origin story, depicting Magneto’s traumatic past, but it does so by only making veiled allusions to his future as a mutant in the X-Men series. Magneto Testament is first and foremost a fictional Holocaust story, and Pak and Di Giandomenico’s work is entirely devoid of references to superheroes, deus ex machina events that save Max’s family, or even superpowers. In fact, while Pak and Di Giandomenico do include scenes that show Max enjoying metalwork, demonstrating a very high IQ, and even wearing a purple vest that resembles the costume Magneto would come to wear, not a single panel indicates that he is yet aware of the Mutant X gene that he possesses or that he will be a supervillain in the future. X-Men: Magneto Testament tells the story of sixteen-year-old Max Eisenhardt who lives in Berlin and is forced to witness the brutal devastation that is wrought upon his family and community. The work proceeds chronologically, starting in 1935 and ending in 1944. The story begins with Max experiencing anti-Semitism at school as the victim of bullying and being expelled by his Nazi-sympathizing principal. Pak and Di Giandomenico include text boxes that explain different Nazi policies, chronicling the escalation of restrictions that culminated in the murder of Max’s entire family and his deportation to Auschwitz to serve as a member of the Sonderkommando, the group that was responsible for burning the bodies of Jews who were

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gassed at a death camp’s crematoria. Dominic Williams (2019) sees in the creative team’s decision to not reveal Max’s superpowers an emphasis on “a question of character, and not one of Max discovering superpowers that would have made it easy for him to destroy his persecutors” (147). Throughout the narrative, Max is consumed with witnessing and observing what happens to the people around him as he is rendered unable or unwilling to act out his frustrations until he is no longer able to restrain himself and he chooses to participate in the Sonderkommando uprising of 1944 before escaping from Auschwitz. Pak and Di Giandomenico’s (2009) graphic narrative operates in concert with many of the details that can be found in Chris Claremont’s (1981, 1985) original X-Men stories, but Magneto Testament embellishes and elaborates on these plot points, crafting a full backstory for Magneto’s character. At times, their work does retcon Claremont’s stories (which themselves retconned Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s original stories from the 1960s). Charlotte F. Werbe (2019) has noted that Pak and Di Giandomenico changed Magneto’s country of birth from Poland to Germany. She writes that, according to Pak, retconning was done because “it was important to show [early Nazi] events such as Kristallnacht” which could only be done by having Magneto living in Nazi Germany during the 1930s (310–11). Situating the story in Germany thus allows readers to fully see the evolution and escalation of anti-Semitism under Hitler and the Nazis. Throughout, Magneto Testament highlights the impossible choices that Jews were forced to make during this period while clearly showing that most choices resulted in death and devastation. This is most notably seen in the Eisenhardt family’s debates about whether it would be better to flee Nazi Germany to go to a different country or to remain in Berlin, a city they know well. Like many Berlin Jews, Max’s father Jakob does not believe that early Nazi laws like the Nuremburg Laws will lead to genocide; they are a blip and an inconvenience, he tells his family. He believes that his national service for the German army in the First World War will protect him and his children. Conversely, Jakob’s brother Erich believes that violence will erupt, but with this knowledge he is no more able to protect himself than the rest of the family, and all members of the family are caught by the Nazis and deported to concentration and death camps. In his seminal work If This Is a Man, Holocaust survivor Primo Levi (2003) wrote about the muselmen, the Jews who have lost purpose in life and who spend their days wandering in the camps while waiting to die. By the end of issue #4, having served in the Sonderkommando for nearly two years, Max contemplates death by suicide. In Magneto Testament’s most haunting section, Di Giandomenico places the reader immediately behind Max, looking along with Max at a room filled with thousands of pairs of eyeglasses. The two full pages include no text, thereby allowing the reader the space to

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process what is being seen at their own pace. Williams (2019) has written that Di Giandomenico’s double splash pages are digitally produced, with only five different pairs of glasses replicated hundreds of times and positioned in different directions. They are, he suggests, “only there to be apprehended as a mass” (148) that stares vacantly back at Max. On the two subsequent pages, Di Giandomenico illustrates six panels that are fully shaded in black. The separation into panels connotes the passage of time, but it is all one extended sequence of suffering for Max. In the textbubbles surrounding the blackened panels, Max says: My name is Max Eisenhardt. I’ve been a Sonderkommando at Auschwitz for almost two years. I watched thousands of men, women, and children walk to their deaths. I pulled their bodies from the gas chambers. I dug out their teeth so the Germans could take their gold. And I carried them to the ovens, where I learned how to combine a child’s body with an old man’s to make them burn better … I have seen at least a quarter million dead human beings with my own eyes. Seeing the glasses and being forced to burn bodies—including his former schoolteacher Kalb’s—has led Max to become like the muselman that Levi (2003) describes, unable to continue living and waiting for death. One evening, as Max is standing outside with a group of his fellow Sonderkommando, his eyes glaze over as he sees Kalb’s lifeless body. As he makes his way over to the barbed-wire fencing, one of the men says “Max! What are you doing? They’ll shoot you!” Another inmate replies with “Shh. He’s done.” Williams (2019) has argued that the reader, who surely knows that Max does not commit suicide because of Max’s future persona as Magneto, should read this scene as a metaphoric death, a break with Max’s past that “psychologizes [Max’s experiences], making them part of his character arc” (149). What saves Max is the discovery that Magda, his girlfriend from before the war, is alive and in the Romani camp at Auschwitz. Before he even realizes that the gaunt girl is Magda, he notices the glint on her metal jewelry, and he recognizes it as the necklace that he had given to her back in Berlin before the outbreak of the war. He begins working to help save her, bribing guards and fomenting rebellion, eventually escaping Auschwitz with her during the October 1944 Sonderkommando revolt. Max’s connection with Magda is only one example of Pak and Di Giandomenico’s (2009) depictions of the importance of relationships and their place as a life-saving instrument for camp inmates. In addition to Magda, Max is also close with the previously mentioned schoolteacher Kalb, who would help him navigate daily life in Auschwitz before he was murdered by the Nazis. These supra familial relationships assuage Max from the loneliness and guilt he feels for serving in the Sonderkommando and

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they provide meaning to his life by giving him a purpose and by redeeming him from the hopelessness associated with being a muselman. Overlapping with the publication of Magneto Testament were 3 X-Men films that also depicted parts of Magneto’s story. Each was increasingly graphic and elaborate in its presentation of the story, with the third film, X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), including a scene wherein Magneto uses his powers to destroy Auschwitz. The film serves as an important foil to Pak and Di Giandomenico’s (2009) graphic narrative because it provides an opportunity to consider the limitations of depicting sites of trauma in creative media. In the years following the Holocaust, Erik – as he was known then – has settled down and is living in Poland. After using his powers to save a coworker during an earthquake, Erik’s non-mutant family was kidnapped and subsequently murdered by a group of Polish civilians who did not want a mutant to be living amongst them. In his rage, Erik uses his powers to kill the group while also attracting the attention of the supervillain Apocalypse. Apocalypse brings Erik to Auschwitz, the site where he first discovered his powers and where he witnessed the murder of his mother. Apocalypse helps Erik come to better understand how he can control metal, and with this new awareness, Erik proceeds to destroy Auschwitz, tearing the buildings and crematoria apart. Throughout the scene, Bryan Singer, the film’s director, interpolates flashbacks of Erik’s childhood and time spent at Auschwitz, including a brief glimpse of metallic medical instruments that were used by the Nazis to torture Erik and draw out his powers. The scene ends with metal shards cascading through the sky overtop the ruins of the concentration camp. Writing about depictions of the Holocaust in Singer’s first X-Men (2000) movie, Lawrence Baron (2003) acknowledges that while “some Holocaust educators and scholars may find Singer’s use of [the Holocaust] as a plot device to teach lessons about the dangers of discrimination and racism as exploitative and inappropriate” (52), he does not see it as such. Instead, he contends that the decision to stage the beginning of the film in Auschwitz effectively conveys the centrality of respecting diversity and rejecting racism and other forms of hatred as primary themes. Baron’s concerns about whether the brief scene in X-Men was exploitative and inappropriate, feature prominently in the consistent critique leveled against Singer for this scene. Jordan Zakarin (2016) called the scene “shocking and deeply uncomfortable” given Auschwitz’s standing as a real place where unfathomable tragedy took place, and which continues to serve as a visual signifier in the present for Holocaust commemoration and remembrance. To destroy it—for the purpose of advancing a fictional plotline—writes Zakarin, rings hollow and offensive. Writing in The Atlantic, David Sims (2016) calls “turning the most solemn site of human suffering imaginable into yet another CGI miasma” an example of

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“tonal confusion” and obliviousness to the somberness and reverence that should be afforded to the historical site. Hillary Chute (2006) has observed that Art Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) accomplishments in Maus demonstrated that “the medium of comics can approach and express serious, even devastating, histories” (200). What is it, then, that makes one work depicting the Holocaust appropriate to many but another inappropriate or exploitative? Kathrine Biber (2009) writes: “representations of Holocaust crimes that are somehow ‘new’ or ‘creative’ or ‘challenging’ invite criticism, sanction, and repeated calls for silence” (228). This emerges because of the difficulty in balancing “historical, ethical, and moral values against artistic aspirations” (228). With regard to the scene from X-Men: Apocalypse, Sims’s (2016) and Zakarin’s (2016) revulsion echoes Michael André Bernstein’s (1994) contention that some Holocaust works of art are offensive because they exhibit “tastelessness,” “vulgarity,” and “exploitation” (52), as both viewers were left wondering about the purpose or the necessity of having Magneto destroy Auschwitz, a site where so much real-world tragedy occurred. One of the most important features of Magneto Testament is Pak and Di Giandomenico’s (2009) willingness to not hide away from the brutalities of Nazi oppression and to present history in an honest—yet not exploitative— fashion. This includes a scene where Max’s uncle is beaten up and forced to wear a sign reading “I have shamed a German woman” because it was illegal for Jews and Germans to have sex together, and another scene where Max is forced to watch his father be humiliated by a group of Nazi soldiers (Figure 5.1). While fictional in Magneto Testament, these details, along with the previously mentioned room of glasses and the depictions of Nazi decrees, are all grounded in objective and documented history. The collected volume includes eight full pages of endnotes which provide citations that show that, unlike nearly every other Marvel work, this one is not wholly fictional. The endnotes serve as their own form of testimony, prominently positioning the graphic narrative as an example of what Jews experienced at that time. The creative team also discussed the work with Mark Weitzman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center to ensure historical accuracy. Telling Magneto’s story in this way also allows for the authors to avoid the pitfalls of exploitative Holocaust fiction that seeks to commercially capitalize on the traumatic past. The graphic narrative, suggests Tabachnick (2014), “treats both Max and the Holocaust so realistically and at a sufficiently high emotional level that it can be called an historical graphic novel rather than a work of popular culture” (74). A further way that Marvel tries to position Magneto Testament as a work that is different from the rest of its catalogue is through the inclusion of a twelvepage curriculum guide for use in middle and high school literature, history, and art classes. Brian Kelley, the guide’s author, suggests that Magneto Testament

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FIGURE 5.1  Public humiliation for having sex with a German. Copyright Marvel Comics, X-Men: Magneto Testament.

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can accompany many other Holocaust works like Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) Maus or Elie Wiesel’s (2006) Night to help students learn about the Holocaust or even alongside other graphic narratives about genocide like Joe Sacco’s (2000) Safe Area Goražde which is about the Bosnian War. He includes lesson ideas that teachers can use before, during, and after students read the graphic narrative alongside suggestions for how teachers can create culminating projects that extend beyond the graphic narrative. Curricular guides can of course be found online for texts in many media; what makes this example unique is Marvel’s inclusion of it in every copy of Magneto Testament that is purchased. It serves as a further signifier to the ways that Marvel considers Pak and Di Giandomenico’s (2009) work as something different from their many other comic-book offerings.1 In her analysis of Magneto Testament, Werbe (2019) has effectively shown that it “is not only historically accurate, but also intimately bound to the conventions” of Holocaust memoirs (312). Employing Barbara Foley’s (1982) argument that most Holocaust memoirs follow a pattern wherein they begin with a description of pre-war life, then the harsh adjustment to camp life, then the slow process of habituation, ultimately culminating in liberation and an attempt to rebuild, Werbe carefully deconstructs how Pak and Di Giandomenico’s work mirrors seminal Holocaust memoirs like Night in its narrative exposition of testimony. The power of this is that Pak and Di Giandomenico (2009) have created a work that “can speak to historical truths and resonate with readers” (312).2 In the concluding scene of the graphic narrative, Max returns to Auschwitz in 1948. This return, however, is very different than the one that was included in Singer’s (2016) X-Men: Apocalypse where Magneto used his powers to destroy the death camp. Anticipating that he would die as a member of the Sonderkommando or during the revolt, Max wrote letters to whoever would eventually unearth what was perpetrated at Auschwitz. As he stands amidst the rubble digging for the letters that he had buried, his final letter from 1944 is narrated to the reader. He wrote: “My name is Max Eisenhardt. To whoever finds this, I’m sorry. Because I’m dead … and now it’s up to you. Tell everyone who will listen. Tell everyone who won’t. Please. Don’t let this happen again.” Tabachnick (2014) writes that by ending the graphic narrative with these words, Pak and Di Giandomenico (2009) powerfully communicate to Marvel fandom’s extensive audience “the message that humanity should try to work against such events, instead of being indifferent” (78). By ending Magneto Testament on this note, Pak and Di Giandomenico leave the reader with the message that having now read a work that shows what happened to Jews and that is replete with endnotes that testify to the Holocaust’s authenticity, they must take responsibility to prevent future genocides to ensure that “never again” means never again.

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Anne Frank’s Diary When considering Art Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) Maus, Henry Gonshak (2009) writes: “Maus honors the cartoon genre while simultaneously transcending it … a good Holocaust graphic narrative must take aesthetic risks, as well as try to fully exploit the potential for the genre” (77). A work of this nature is polarizing; it provokes responses and emotional reactions; it leads to agreement and disagreement; perhaps most importantly, it offers a narrative voice that guides the reader through the text by challenging the reader to consider the Holocaust anew. Authorized by the Anne Frank Foundation, Ari Folman and David Polonsky’s (2018) Anne Frank’s Diary is an important example of a contemporary Holocaust graphic narrative that offers new ways to think both about the Holocaust and graphic representations of it. At the end of the graphic narrative, Folman (2018) describes the process that he and Polonsky underwent when trying to adapt Anne’s diary into a graphic narrative. Beyond the ideological risks associated with turning what he calls an “iconic text” into a graphic narrative, “illustrating the entire text in a graphic rendition would require the better part of a decade and would likely be 3,500 pages long” (148). Therefore, Folman and Polonsky endeavored to “retain only a portion of Anne’s original diary while still being faithful to the entire work” (148). The significance of operating in this selective—yet necessary—process is that Folman and Polonsky’s work simultaneously operates as a presentation of Anne’s diary and a commentary on it through their prioritization of certain passages over others. Folman and Polonsky depict a teenager who openly struggled with her dire circumstances while under Nazi rule. Their Anne is one who frequently fights with her family and does not always see the positives in life. One of the ways in which Folman and Polonsky introduce their interpretation of Anne’s diary is by using illustrations to depict Anne’s emotional state. One of Anne’s repeated concerns is a perception that her sister Margot is her parents’ favorite child. This is infuriating for Anne, and it leads her to experience anxiety and sadness as a result. The manifestations of mental health illnesses are made even more apparent when Anne begins to get irritable toward her family members in the annex while Margot seems to be cool, calm, and collected and nonplussed by the external circumstances. In their depiction of a diary entry of these frustrations, Folman and Polonsky place Anne’s and Margot’s faces inside classic works of art that show their interpretations of Anne’s writings. Across a two-page spread, Anne’s face is illustrated atop the body of the central character in Edward Munch’s painting The Scream, and her sister Margot’s face is illustrated atop Adele Bloch-Bauer’s body in Gustav Klimt’s Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I. Accompanying the images are text bubbles that contain criticisms of Anne and compliments to Margot. Polonsky’s artwork in these

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two panels reflects Anne’s cognizance of her deteriorating emotional state and self-awareness of her declining mental health. In her diary, she references feeling depressed and lost. These feelings are a result of a confluence of factors that include the extended period spent in the annex and her feelings of frustration over the way the other residents treat her. The paintings serve as metonyms that reflect how Polonsky understands Anne’s increasing descent into depression, as reflected by Munch’s painting, and her increasing jealousy toward Margot who is visualized as the perfect woman in Klimt’s painting. Beyond using passages directly from Anne’s diary, the graphic narrative also makes use of images to visually depict Anne’s diary entries. Polonsky’s illustrations highlight the feelings that Anne describes in her text; they even replace the printed text itself in some instances. The graphic narrative is, therefore, a multilayered adaptation of the diary in which the printed text is only one component of Folman and Polonsky’s presentation of the diary. Both image and word are conjoined and when read together, the reader can gain a more complete understanding of Anne’s life and experiences. One example of an instance where Polonsky (2018) uses images to preserve the content of the diary without including any of Anne’s prose is found early in the graphic narrative. A constant source of frustration for Anne is her perception that her family loves Margot more than her because Margot is a perfect child. Using only the textual prompt “It’s always about me and my sister” (28), Polonsky illustrates eight different examples from the diary of specific things that Anne believes that Margot does better than her. Illustrated as juxtaposed images, Anne is shown to be temperamental to Margot’s docile, messy to Margot’s neat, picky to Margot’s amenable and, ultimately, rejected to Margot’s accepted. Stylistically, Polonsky includes all eight pairings within one panel. While the eight different events occurred at different moments in time, and were thus noted in different diary entries, by containing them within one panel, which indicates a singular unit of time, Polonsky fuses them together to reflect Anne’s increasingly heightened feelings of frustration at the comparisons between her and her sister, while still preserving the intent of Anne’s words. Polonsky’s images are important devices in discerning the ways that he and Folman understand Anne. Their text is what all good adaptations are: “a derivation that is not derivative—a work that is second without being secondary. It is its own palimpsestic thing” (Hutcheon and O’Flynn 2013: 9). One of the most repeated depictions that Folman and Polonsky include are images of Anne falling, sinking, or drowning. Anne never mentions any of these happening in her fantasies or fears in the diary itself. Instead, they serve as visual metaphors that reflect the ways that Folman and Polonsky understand Anne’s narrative. They are the most consistent narratological device that is included in the work, and they frame the diary as not a text

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of hope, but one of both complexity and tragedy in which the titular figure, despite experiencing some moments of levity and joy, is weighed down by the world around her. Folman and Polonsky’s willingness to engage with Anne’s darker diary entries contrasts with how Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón (2010) acknowledged her struggles in their Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography. They included a one-line description that Anne was depressed while living in the annex. Folman and Polonsky’s inclusion of visual commentary of Anne’s depression, as opposed to a perfunctory mention of a topic that shapes the way that Anne sees and interacts with the world, is reflective of the contrasting editorial agendas of each of the texts. Whereas Jacobson and Colón’s text is objectively descriptive of what Anne experienced in her lifetime, Folman and Polonsky’s text is subjectively descriptive of how Anne experienced living in the annex, and this speaks to the creativity and originality at play in their work about Anne’s life. Folman and Polonsky’s (2018) interpretation of Anne as a tragic figure is made clear with how they chose to end their graphic narrative. The final page of the work is a montage of over twenty illustrations of Anne that show facial expressions ranging from happiness to sadness and from anger to placidity. This image leaves the reader with a greater awareness of the complexity of Anne’s life and the diverse feelings and emotions that she experienced. This image symbolizes a rejection of the type of simplistic Holocaust narratives that gloss over complex narratives and feelings like the ones that Gonshak (2009) has identified as being present in many Holocaust graphic narratives. He contends that these works rely on “stock assumptions” that turn the Holocaust “into an easily dismissible cliché” (Gonshak 2009: 76). The concluding image also presents an interpretation of Anne Frank as a universalizable character with a range of feelings, and through their juxtaposition of her diary entries, Folman and Polonsky consider how this range is part of the richness, complexity, and difficulty of fully appreciating Anne’s story. Folman and Polonsky suggest that while no one will be able to relate to all of her experiences or feelings, because of the range of emotions that emerge from their close reading of the diary, everyone will be able to connect on a deep and personal level with some of her experiences. Sara R. Horowitz (2012) writes that Anne has been used as “authorial role model, as publishing brand, as imagined companion or lover, as literary icon to be reckoned with … [Her use] prompts questions about our relationship with the past and about assumptions and desires readers bring to the act of reading” (216) about Anne. What Folman and Polonsky’s (2018) text accomplishes is that it requires the reader to consider Anne anew. The creative and complex interplay between text and image adds layers of insight into how the Holocaust affected her in ways that are not always clear to even Anne herself. The juxtaposition of authentic text with the sub-textual tacit acknowledgment

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of what befalls her provides the reader with an opportunity to engage with the text on its own terms and to consider it in provocative ways that challenge our understanding of Anne’s own mental health and her relationships with her family, leading ultimately to a richer and more meaningful engagement with the Holocaust.

Israel Sipur Varod Part autobiography and part history, Ilana Zeffren’s (2005) Hebrew-language graphic narrative Sipur Varod [Pink Story] juxtaposes the history of LGBTQ communities in Israel with Zeffren’s own coming out story. These two stories are not told separately; instead, Zeffren blends the national and personal stories, weaving the disparate histories together to show how her own story can be synthesized with the larger Israeli LGBTQ story. When Sipur Varod was published in 2005, it was the first Israeli graphic narrative to feature a lesbian protagonist, and its commercial and critical success firmly established Zeffren as the most prominent lesbian cartoonist in the country. The graphic novel is divided into two sections, with the first called “In the Closet” and the second called “Out of the Closet.” The former section is illustrated in black and white with a few instances of color, while the latter is illustrated in rich and vibrant colors. Alon Raab (2008) sees in Zeffren’s color palette an artistic vision that “reflects the limited options and repressed lives of many Israeli gays and lesbians forced to pass as heterosexuals” who are only later able to live “a life out of hiding [with] the full spectrum of human possibility available” (224). Sipur Varod begins with the births of Zeffren and her identical twin sister Sarah in 1978. A recurring joke throughout the work involves people asking if they are twins. The physical similarities Zeffren shares with her twin coupled with their differing sexual orientations serve as a central theme of the work in how Zeffren calls attention to how similar and yet different two people can be. Throughout Sipur Varod, Zeffren meticulously documents the historical presence of LGBTQ communities in Israel even if hegemonic Israeli society refused to recognize or legitimize their existence. The fact that people around the twins cannot tell them apart reinforces Zeffren’s interest in normalizing LGBTQ communities, demonstrating that sexual identity should not be the basis for discrimination or even identification. While this might seem obvious or trite to Western readers, as Zeffren (2005) details, LGBTQ rights are a highly complex and charged topic in Israeli society.

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Gradually, homosexual Israelis have been granted increased rights and access to normative Israeli society, but barriers do remain; for example, there is no civil marriage in Israel and the religious courts will not marry homosexuals. Therefore, there is no mechanism for same-sex marriage in the country.3 Zeffren provides readers with an overview of the evolution of LGBTQ rights in Israeli society. While she does make mention of the biblical prohibition against sodomy that is found in Leviticus, much of her history focuses on the growth of the LGBTQ community and the opposition it faced in establishing itself in modern Israel. Zeffren’s portrayal of this history suggests that opposition to LGBTQ rights has changed over time. In the 1970s, there was outright denial that homosexuals even existed in Israel, but by the 1980s and 1990s, LGBTQ Israelis were positioned as outsiders who should not encroach on normative Israeli society. As examples, she cites the Israeli army’s 1983 law that prohibited gay soldiers from serving in military intelligence units and Israeli President Erez Weizman’s 1993 speech to high school students in which he called homosexuals an anomaly and homosexuality as something negative. It is against this negative backdrop that Zeffren (2005) highlights the accomplishments of LGBTQ Israelis and their hetero allies who helped to normalize homosexuality within Israel. By focusing on the accomplishments of actors, politicians, musicians, and celebrities, Zeffren carefully constructs a counter-narrative to the hegemonic story that positioned homosexuals as non-Israeli in character. Zeffren shows that while homosexuals were marginalized, they were always present. By calling attention to the ways that advocates worked in different spheres, Zeffren documents how difficult it was to overcome many of the stigmas associated with homosexuality in Israeli society. These heroes include Dana International, a transgender singer who won Eurovision in 1998, and Itzhak Rabin, the Israeli Prime Minister who granted a Palestinian man Israeli permit papers in 1994 so that he could live with his Israeli partner. Zeffren’s (2005) artwork also reinforces the idea that LGBTQ Israelis have occupied spaces at the margins of Israeli society, present even if unseen. The primary way that she identifies homosexuals in the graphic narrative is by illustrating them with pink devil horns. This visual signifier highlights the otherness associated with homosexuality, yet their ubiquity throughout Sipur Varod testifies to the presence of LGBTQ Israelis in all sectors of Israeli society. Zeffren also uses a variety of mixed media to both show LGBTQ presence in the land and also subvert the hegemonic discourse about homosexuality in Israel. Raab (2008) sees in the graphic narrative “a strong commitment to questioning important Israeli historic and cultural events and myths while shining light on neglected identities and issues” (214). This is often done by manipulating some of Israel’s most iconic national posters and images, turning them into pro-LGBTQ texts. For example, in a panel depicting

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the founding of Otzmah, an LGBTQ political lobby group, Zeffren illustrates the famous photograph of Israel’s Independence Hall where the state’s founders declared independence. In the original image, two large Israeli flags hang vertically and a photo of Theodor Herzl, the founder of political Zionism, hangs in between them. In Zeffren’s reimagining of this scene, the flags remain but a bikini-clad muscular man replaces Herzl (Figure 5.2). For Israelis and others who are familiar with the original image, Zeffren’s point is clear. The founding of Otzmah as a lobby group for LGBTQ interests in the state is no less revolutionary in its goals and aspirations for Israel than Theodor Herzl’s. Concerns about the peripheral place of LGBTQ Israelis are also addressed through Zeffren’s (2005) purposeful use of space. Pages are highly detailed and very busy, including details that are central to the story, alongside sidebars in the gutters and margins that offer commentary on the main narrative. One of the ways that these commentaries are introduced is in the form of small emoji-like illustrations that are included beside every page number. They symbolize an emotion or feeling associated with the topic of the page. For example, on pages that primarily show opposition to LGBTQ communities, a locked lock is illustrated, while on pages that show progress and inclusion, a key is drawn. On other pages, Zeffren’s cat Spaghetti provides a running commentary on Zeffren’s story, identifying sections he finds interesting or boring. Spaghetti also offers Zeffren emotional support when she finds writing difficult, a feature that reminds the reader that “Zeffren is not just lesbian, and that, more importantly, she is a writer struggling with her chores as one” (Adler and Yanoshevsky 2018: 93). Spaghetti’s role is therefore as more than just a companion; Spaghetti humanizes Zeffren, reinforcing the metastatement to the Israeli reader that homosexuality is not the sole identifying feature of LGBTQ Israelis and that, just like heterosexual Israelis, they lead lives that are

FIGURE 5.2  Re-envisioning Independence Hall as a site of LGBTQ independence. Ilana Zeffren, Sipur Varod, MAPA Publishers, 2005.

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far richer and more complex than just their sexual identities. The use of space thus comes to signify the presence of LGBTQ Israelis in all facets of Israeli society and serves as a rejection of their historical marginalization. In a fascinating analysis of Sipur Varod, Silvia Adler and Galia Yanoshevsky (2018) argue that Zeffren’s (2005) graphic narrative should be read as a work of minor literature. The literary concept of minor literature was formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986), and it refers to works produced by minority communities in direct response to majority communities. The response is manifested linguistically using the hegemonic language and politically through the creation of a highly charged text that deconstructs the majority and reinforces the existence and presence of the minority community. Adler and Yanoshevsky see in the ways that Zeffren appropriates historical texts (linguistic and visual), which, in their original conception, were used to promote Israeli hegemony, to challenge the hegemony. In Sipur Varod, these texts are used “in a subversive manner, re-territorializing or breaking the system from within” (89). They cite examples where Zeffren uses newspaper headlines that originally connoted warnings against homosexuality, but which now come to serve as a critique of the government. As well, in one of Sipur Varod ’s most iconic scenes, Zeffren takes the photograph of David BenGurion, Israel’s first Prime Minister, declaring independence, and she adds a speech bubble that has him announce the founding of a homophobic state called Israel (Figure 5.3). Ben-Gurion’s new speech is nearly identical language to his original one, save for the homophobic addition. Employing these iconic

FIGURE 5.3  Ben-Gurion declaring the founding of a homophobic state. Ilana Zeffren, Sipur Varod, MAPA Publishers, 2005.

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visual and verbal devices allows for a highly charged critique because, as Adler and Yanoshevsky suggest, Israel was founded for the purpose of protecting a minority population (Jews) but Zeffren shows that the state has become a place that persecutes a different minority population (homosexuals). Sipur Varod, they suggest, has the effect of “reterritorializ[ing] the discussion by creating a graphic and verbal place for lesbianism” (95) within Israeli society. Sipur Varod is not only a literary fusion of history and autobiography. At the end of the story, Zeffren (2005) includes an index, a glossary of LGBTQ terminology in Hebrew, a glossary that explains the different LGBTQ signs, symbols and flags, a timeline of significant LGBTQ events in Israeli history, a timeline of significant LGBTQ events in world history, a bibliography, and a list of community resources with website URLs and phone numbers that people can use. The inclusion of this information positions the work as more than just a memoir or even a historical work. Rather, Sipur Varod is also a guidebook to accessing and allying with the Israeli LGBTQ community; the work represents not the end of the process of learning and developing relationships with the LGBTQ Israelis but the starting point for meaningful interaction. It must be noted that Sipur Varod did not usher in a wave of subsequent LGBTQ-friendly Israeli graphic narratives. In fact, their absence almost reinforces the work’s claims about the community’s unfortunate place on the periphery of Israeli society. Since Sipur Varod ’s publication in 2005, only one other notable work—Rutu Modan’s (2021) Tunnels—has been published that includes LGBTQ characters. Additionally, Zeffren’s graphic narrative did not alter the political or religious landscape in Israel; LGBTQ Israelis remain unable to legally wed within the country. Neither the absence of same-sex depictions nor the lack of extended legal rights does not mitigate the importance of Sipur Varod. As Raab (2008) writes, Zeffren’s graphic narrative “demonstrates that Israeli history is not a monolithic thread with a redemptive trajectory, and that there is much to reconsider” (214). Perhaps more than any other Israeli graphic narrative, Zeffren’s work creatively and imaginatively envisions Israeli society as something new, something different, something better. This is a society that more accurately fulfills its intended mandate of being an inclusive space for all its citizens, irrespective of sexual identity, and which does not distinguish or discriminate because of sexuality.

The Property In a 2018 article about Holocaust graphic narratives, Joanne Pettitt recognizes that comic book and graphic narrative representations of the Holocaust may be considered controversial due to their perception as “lower forms of artistic expression” (173), but she ultimately rejects this categorization. Instead, she argues that these texts allow for the expression of the “complexities

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between global and local memories” (174). By this, Pettitt means that the act of visualizing sites of trauma allows for greater understanding of the universal human experience of suffering. Winner of the 2014 Eisner Award for best original graphic narrative, Rutu Modan’s (2013) The Property presents a powerful articulation of the complexities of memories as described by Pettitt (2018). The graphic narrative tells the story of Israeli Holocaust survivor Regina Segal’s trip to Warsaw with her granddaughter Mica following the death of Reuben, Mica’s father and Regina’s son. Regina organizes the trip to Warsaw under the premise of reclaiming a family property that had belonged to her family prior to the outbreak of the Second World War. On the airplane, the pair is joined by Avram Yagodnik, a cantor who is traveling to a cantor convention and is dating Regina’s daughter, and a group of young Israelis who are traveling on a heritage trip to visit Holocaust concentration and death camps. Almost immediately upon arrival in Warsaw, the narrative veers off course. Regina loses interest in finding the family property and becomes withdrawn; Mica begins wandering the city and befriends Tomasz Novak, a non-Jew who leads historical tours of Warsaw’s Jewish neighborhoods; and Yagodnik begins to secretly follow Mica around the city. With the help of Tomasz, Mica arranges a meeting with a Polish lawyer and realizes that Poles did not illegally appropriate her family’s property and leave it in need of reclaiming; in fact, it was legally sold prior to the war, and as a result, her family has no claim to it. The denouement of the text—and the real purpose of the visit—is revealed as the reader discovers that Regina harbors a long-held family secret. Prior to her migration to Israel during the Second World War, she was in love with a nonJewish Pole named Roman Gorski, who impregnated her with Mica’s father. Regina has returned to Poland not to reclaim a building, but to reconnect with Roman and, through this, unburden herself from the weight she has been carrying by hiding the fact that Mica’s grandfather was a non-Jew and that Mica’s father never knew his own father. Mica meets her grandfather for the very first time, and Regina reconnects with Roman and tells him about his son and shares that he has died. As Mica learns more about her family’s complex history in Warsaw alongside Tomasz, Mica echoes her grandmother’s relationship choices and begins her own sexual relationship with a non-Jewish Pole. However, unlike Regina and Roman, Mica and Tomasz’s relationship is public and not hidden, and the graphic narrative ends with Mica sharing with Regina that she is planning a trip to Europe with Tomasz so that they can spend more time together. The Property is Modan’s first graphic narrative to actively address both the Holocaust and Israel’s relationship with it. It is not, however, her first work about the Holocaust. Following a short story in an edited collection called Cargo from 2005, between May and October 2007, Modan published six short nonfiction memoirs called “Mixed Emotions” on the New York Times website.

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Throughout the series, Modan told stories about her paternal grandmother, a woman who Modan called a “tough, unpleasant old woman” (Sobel 2013) but who was also a hit amongst the online site’s readers. The experience of writing about her Holocaust-survivor grandmother “made [Modan], maybe for the first time, think about her as a person and not only through her (grandmother’s) role in [Modan’s] life” (Meadley 2013). Modan has acknowledged that The Property has roots in her family’s experience, with both of her maternal grandparents anticipating worsening anti-Semitism and immigrating to Israel from Warsaw in 1934. For Israelis, writing about Poland, and therefore the Holocaust, is a highly complex terrain due to residual feelings of anger and resentment (Ronen 2007), and in an interview, Modan shared that these feelings were present in her family as well. Growing up, my parents and grandmothers never spoke about Poland. They never spoke about the families that were left behind either. If Poland was mentioned at all, they called it “the land of the dead” or they’d refer to it as “one big cemetery.” For me, it wasn’t a country. Until I started to work on The Property, I never even thought about Poland. ­(Sobel 2013) The complex attitudes that Israelis feel toward Poland are made manifest in Modan’s (2013) use of color throughout The Property. Color plays a prominent role in The Property, with most panels being illustrated in a vibrant color palette. Assaf Gamzou (2019) writes that Modan’s work is “not gray scale with touches of color, not muted browns indicative of nostalgia or times long past, but vibrant blocks of color” (232). Twenty-first century Poland, Modan seems to indicate, is not a 1940s graveyard but a contemporary society full of life. Kevin Haworth (2019) writes that throughout the story, colors are used to “cue the reader to shifts in space and time and to reinforce the characters’ moods and feelings” (137). An example of Modan’s effective use of color can be found in a series of illustrations featuring Regina. As she is driven around the streets of Warsaw, Regina’s memories become superimposed over illustrations of contemporary Warsaw’s streets. Regina’s memories are colored in sepia tones, which sharply contrast with The Property’s otherwise bright colors (Figure  5.4). The juxtaposition of Regina’s wordless memories overlaying her experiences in contemporary Poland serves as a visual signifier of her inability to divorce her past from her present. At the same time, while the sepia-tinged illustrations evoke feelings of nostalgia, the monochromatic effect also highlights the vibrancy of the colors in the present and reminds the reader of what Regina has lost because of her traumatic past. The premise of The Property—a family returning to Poland to reclaim appropriated buildings after the Second World War—positions the reader to

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FIGURE 5.4  Regina seeing historical Warsaw overlaid atop contemporary Warsaw. Copyright Rutu Modan. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly. expect a series of conflicts between the Israeli family and the Polish family and resultant bitterness, enmity, and perhaps even anti-Semitism. However, through the inversion of the traditional narrative and elimination of any cause for conflict over the apartment by having it legally sold in the 1940s, Modan muddies the waters between how each group operates. Instead, she questions the meaning of land, nationality, and family. Whereas in the classical version of looted objects and buildings, it is the Nazis and their collaborators who steal from the Jews and are then adamant in their refusal to return the object, in The Property, it is the Jewish Israeli Yagodnik, a man who has no legal or direct familial connection to the building, who desperately tries to take possession of the property, even in the face of clear legal opposition because of binding contracts proving its sale. The rejection of Yagodnik’s narrative and Mica and Regina’s support of Roman Gorski’s legal claim to the property result in a narrative that shows that reconciliation is possible between Israeli Jews and Poles. While The Property is both primarily set in Poland and features the Holocaust as a central component of the story—and therefore could be considered a

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Holocaust graphic narrative—it is also very much a story about Israel and twenty-first-century Israeli society. Implicit in Modan’s (2013) graphic narrative is a critique of how contemporary Israelis relate to the Holocaust. Throughout The Property, it is the Jewish and Israeli characters who repeatedly invoke negative stereotypes of Polish citizens. For example, in a moment of anger, Regina tells Mica that she can never trust a Polish man. Furthermore, Yagodnik’s willingness to do anything—even if it is illegal—to take the property away from Roman because he doesn’t think that Roman deserves it reinforces the idea that Israelis believe they can treat contemporary Poles poorly based on historical Polish mistreatment of Jews. Conversely, it is the Poles—Tomasz and Roman—who come across as worldly, sensitive, and deserving of compassion because of how they treat Mica and Regina. Modan’s criticism of Jewish Israelis suggests that through the act of preserving the memory of the Holocaust by way of perpetuating Polish guilt and responsibility, it is the Israelis who have not evolved past a 1940s understanding of Poland and its people and who have remained entrenched in the past. Gamzou (2019) has argued that a central motif of The Property is its deconstruction of Israeli attitudes toward Poland, the Second World War, and the Holocaust. This necessitates a reconfiguration of Israeli orientations toward Poland as not merely a site of trauma and tragedy; Israelis, Modan (2013) seems to suggest, cannot view Poland as an object, a place where they can project their feelings onto. Instead, at its core, The Property rejects these traditional associations and inverts the Holocaust narrative; “instead of a Holocaust survivor traveling to Poland in order to take back what is rightfully hers, we discover a different history, one not motivated by conflicting national identities, but by personal memory, love, and tragedy” (Gamzou 2019: 235). This subversion is accomplished in several ways. First, Modan’s decision to couple Mica, the granddaughter of a Holocaust survivor, and Tomasz, a nonJewish Pole, rejects the Israeli emphasis on endogamy to preserve Jewish continuity. Mica’s coupling with Tomasz recreates Regina’s own relationship with Roman as both Jewish women develop feelings for non-Jewish Polish men. Gamzou explains that Modan’s relationships are “the Israeli nightmare” because every female in the text falls in love with a non-Jewish man (cited in Haworth 2019: 128). Haworth (2019) makes the important observation that just because Modan challenges Israeli notions of who its citizens should date and marry, The Property is not a romanticized fantasy that ignores the realities of deep-rooted historical slights and prejudices. He writes: “In her conversations with Tomasz, Mica seems able to see herself—at the same time—as a young woman able to be attracted to whichever young man she likes, and as a Jew navigating the tricky terrain of a relationship with the ‘other’” (129). Secondly, on Regina’s and Mica’s flights into and out of Warsaw, they are joined by a group of Israeli teens who are traveling on a heritage trip to

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Poland to tour the Holocaust concentration and death camps. These trips often encourage us vs. them mentalities that result in Israeli youth feeling more patriotic toward Israel while feeling more resentful toward Poland because it was the site of the worst Holocaust atrocities (Feldman 2002). In The Property, “the dreadful history of the camps becomes an itinerary; one camp destination is preferred to another for its ability to scare the teenagers into seriousness. Only in this context would it be seen as a pity that Regina is not a Holocaust survivor” (Haworth 2019: 120). One of the central claims of The Property is that traditional heritage trips and the insular worldviews that they create are not effective at responding to contemporary Holocaust commemoration or reconciliation between Poles and Israelis. Heritage trips and the resultant perspectives on Poland serve as a foil to the type of genuine engagement that takes place throughout The Property, and it is this engagement that Modan (2013) seems to favor as the better model for Polish–Israeli interactions. Jackie Feldman (2002) suggests that trip organizers need to actively seek out complexities in the type of programming that is offered for effective and meaningful commemoration. He writes: An encounter with a young, Polish Jew, an in situ encounter with the Righteous Gentile, a discussion on the Holocaust with a non-Jewish group of Polish high school students (perhaps followed by home visitation), testimony at Auschwitz from a non-Jewish Polish victim … all these provide loci for identification with an other who can never be assimilated into the “we” of the Jewish-Israeli community, and problematize the identity between moral and ethnic categories. (109) The types of historically and culturally complex engagement with the Holocaust that Feldman identifies—ones that alter the Polish–Israeli and Jewish–nonJewish landscapes and challenge the notion of bifurcated space—are replete throughout The Property. These include the mundane like Mica’s willingness to wander the streets of Warsaw by herself, to her desire to try local cafes and restaurants, not to mention the conversations that she has with Tomasz about Warsaw’s Jewish history. As Barbara Mann (2014) observes of Modan’s Warsaw, the “narrative takes place in the more expressly mundane sites of everyday life: cafes, streets, restaurants, cinemas, public transportation, hotel rooms and bathrooms, and other domestic interiors.” In one particularly evocative illustration, Modan captures the pathos of Roman and Regina’s shared suffering over the death of their son. The two are illustrated hugging each other atop a white background (Figure 5.5). While landscapes and settings provide opportunities throughout The Property to better understand the local milieu, the absence of an identifiable setting situates Roman and Regina front

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FIGURE 5.5  Regina and Roman hugging. Copyright Rutu Modan. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly.

and center. This is their first moment together wherein they stand together, despite their national and religious differences, in a shared space that marks Reuben’s passing. Despite having never met his son, Roman, too, mourns Reuben’s death, and in this scene, Modan shows the reader that Polish citizens were also scarred by the events of the Holocaust and the Second World War. As the first Israeli graphic narrative to probe the relationships between Israelis and Poles and between Israelis and the Holocaust, The Property calls attention to the complex dynamics that exist between the Jewish state and the site of where the worst tragedy in Jewish history occurred. And while the

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main protagonists remain committed to preserving and honoring history, they also suggest the need for contemporary Israelis to adopt new approaches to retaining these connections in the present.

The Jewish Diaspora Market Day Set in the very early twentieth century, James Sturm’s (2010) graphic narrative Market Day presents a single day in the life of an Eastern European Orthodox Jew named Mendleman and his attempt to sell his handmade rugs in the marketplace near his shtetl, the village he calls home. The seemingly routine experience is interrupted when Mendleman’s regular purchaser is replaced and the new one is not interested in paying for handcrafted original merchandise when cheaper, industrial-produced rugs are easier to sell. Mendleman’s sudden unemployment forces him to reevaluate his purpose in life and to question how he will be able to support his young and pregnant bride. By the novel’s end, Mendleman has still not resolved his issue. The lack of resolution is a testament to Sturm’s understanding that there is no quick fix or easy solution available for Mendleman’s predicament. Tabachnick (2014) has observed that the story “seems to inspire foreboding from the beginning as Mendleman sets off to market with his rugs to sell, not sure of what he might find there” (104). According to Mark Zborowski and ChaeRan Freeze (2007), during the early twentieth century in which Mendleman would have lived, “anti-Jewish persecutions, economic restrictions, and outbreaks of violence pressed increasing on the socioeconomic foundations of the Jews” (524). Furthermore, while the marketplace was the source of livelihood, “the majority of the population lived in poverty, where the major problem was to earn enough during the week in order to be able to buy a chicken or a fish for Sabbath” (525). While Sturm’s illustrated marketplace does not contain depictions of anti-Semitism, the tension and anxieties felt by Jews to earning a livelihood are palpable throughout. Tabachnick locates in Sturm’s Market Day a text that is easily understandable by all artists. He writes: “set in the ghetto, with few resources available to Mendleman to try to alleviate his situation, it is particularly stark and sad” (106–7). However, in making Mendleman’s shtetl a dark and foreboding place, Sturm is doing more than showing that Mendleman’s physical space is dark. In Mendleman’s world, the muted and drab colors signify that the entire world is dark, as are the people in it. Life for Mendleman has lost its vibrancy and the prism through which he sees the world now is one that is tinged with gray, with Sturm’s

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beautiful imagery reflecting Mendleman’s experiences and feelings. Sturm’s illustrations of a dark shtetl mirror Mendleman’s own tumultuous inner world as he struggles to adjust to his new reality as an unemployed husband and almost-father. While certainly depicting some of the challenges and bleakness of life in the shtetl, Sturm’s (2010) work also includes moments of exceptional beauty, capturing the essence of what it means to be an artist. Mendleman does not do art, Mendleman is an artist who sees the world through a prism of looms, textiles, and rugs. In some of the most striking images in the graphic novel, Sturm illustrates Mendleman’s thought process as he sees a crowded marketplace or a sunrise and visualizes it as a rug that could be sold (Figure 5.6). These scenes speak to the cognitive and emotional experience of the artist, who sees the world in this way. The illustrations serve as windows into Mendleman’s soul, capturing his emotional, intellectual, and creative engagements with the world. They also reify how devastated he must feel when his craftsmanship is rejected in favor of industrialized goods. The tragedy at the heart of Market Day is Mendleman’s difficulty living simultaneously in two worlds, both of which are rapidly changing. Sturm’s (2010) text captures a time wherein both the place of the Jew in society and the place of the artisan in society are both diminishing. This decline is captured in the most heartbreaking scene in the text when, after being paid below market value for his latest rugs just to earn enough money to support his family, Mendleman sells his loom, the very item that not only provided him with money but provided his life with meaning and purpose. This decision leads Mendleman to regret ever having become an artist, a husband, and a father. By the end of the graphic narrative, Mendleman is forced to abandon his art “because he must face the real world. He will do what he must do to support his family, and he hopes that he will not turn back to genuine art and betray his need to live in the world of reality” (Tabachnick 2014: 106). Sturm’s text ends on an unresolved point with the reader left unsure whether Mendleman will actually give up his craft and remain loyal to his family, or whether the pull of creativity will draw him back to weaving at the expense of his family. Sturm’s (2010) text also operates like a mirror for the Jewish community’s experiences integrating into secular society while also maintaining their unique values, customs, and integrity. Market Day’s enigmatic ending is more than just a statement about Mendleman being unsure about what will happen in his future. The idea that the text revolves around contemporary and historical integrationist challenges is alluded to in one of the final scenes of the work, in which Mendleman, while struggling with which choice to make, laments to himself: “And this is my dilemma. I am a citizen of two nations that are suddenly at war” (Sturm 2010). Seeing Mendleman as someone who is struggling with a bifurcated existence, he becomes a case study for Jews

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FIGURE 5.6  Mendleman looking at the sunset and visualizing a rug. Copyright James Sturm. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly.

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who are unsure how to fit in two worlds. The text concludes that there are no simple routes to maintaining one’s Jewish identity in an increasingly pluralistic and commercial society, and the challenges of doing so are innumerable. Seen in this way, Sturm’s text is a modern Jewish fable, set against the backdrop of Eastern European shtetl life and the impact of industrialization. It considers the complicated process through which Jews wrestle with their multifaceted Jewish consciousness and identities as they balance trying to acculturate into the larger world while still maintaining their own uniqueness. The difficulty that the text raises, and its lack of a neat conclusion, reflects the multiple ways in which diaspora Jews work through the problem themselves and struggle trying to simultaneously be part of two worlds.

A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York Under the leadership of its editor Abraham Cahan, the New York City Yiddish daily newspaper Der Forverts printed letters from Jewish immigrants about their struggles to adjust to life in America in the early 1900s. Cahan would then write back to these Jews, offering them advice. This letter to the editor column was called “A Bintel Brief,” which in English means “A bundle of letters.” Cahan’s goal was to provide insights and explanations to Jews who were trying to better understand American society and the interplay between Judaism and modernity. Cahan’s letter writers described their personal struggles with immigration, and the tensions they felt between being Jewish and being American. While initially published in Yiddish, Cahan’s writings have since been translated into English and published for a wider audience (Metzker 1990), and in 2014, a selection of them were turned into a graphic narrative by Liana Finck. Finck’s (2014) graphic narrative A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York makes use of eleven of Cahan’s original letters and answers, and she weaves them into a cohesive narrative about a present-day character named Liana Finck who is reading the original letters and learning about old Jewish New York for the first time. Over the course of the work, Finck experiences the “empowerment [and] orientation” that comes with the “renderings that bridge together past and present versions of a self, alongside the real and imagined communities that influence that ever changing self … and in this case, one’s intersectional Jewish, American, and female identities” (Oksman 2016: 222). Accompanying her through this journey is the ghostly spirit of Abraham Cahan who acts as her tour guide for understanding her own family’s past as well as the history of the American Jewish community in early-twentieth-century New York City. Concurrent with Cahan acting as a tour guide for Finck, she serves as one for Cahan as he begins learning how to fit into contemporary New York City.

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The graphic narrative begins with Finck’s discovery of the original bound letters in a box that she inherited from her recently deceased grandfather. Upon opening the box, she is greeted by Cahan, and from this point onwards, the text is structured around a pattern that repeats eleven times. First Cahan narrates a letter, then he reads his response, and lastly, there is an interaction between Finck and Cahan. Each illustration of a letter is done in a unique style and so each has its own personality. Finck’s choice to vary her techniques is effective in reinforcing how each letter in Der Forverts was stand-alone and independent from the next. At the same time, by presenting Cahan’s response in an identical format of a typed letter, she reinforces the consistency in Cahan’s editorial voice. When considered together, the varying styles show that it is Cahan and Finck’s relationship and their shared explorations of past and present New York City which are the focus of the text. Cahan’s role in A Bintel Brief is to provide historical details and a personal connection to the past so that Finck can better understand her own heritage. In her very first meeting with him, Finck observes how the way Cahan licked his finger before reading to her “reminded [her] of [her] grandpa” (Figure 5.7). This scene is beautifully illustrated as the reader is catapulted back in time and no longer sees Cahan reading to Finck but her own grandfather reading to her. The link between Cahan and her own grandparents is a powerful

FIGURE 5.7  Liana reading a story with her grandfather. From A Bintel Brief by Liana Finck. Copyright © 2014 by Liana Finck. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

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recurring motif throughout the work, and in Cahan, Finck sees a way back to her past and to understanding her own story. As Dana Mihā ilescu (2015) notes, “by overlapping her personal, affectionate, remembrance of her caring grandfather with the … image of Cahan … Finck offers us a family-centered means of access to this distant lost world” (278). Many of the juxtapositions between letter and interaction move beyond the content of the letter and address the themes found therein. For example, in the second letter, a family is unsure whether they should relocate their father to America because they worry that he will not fit in. This letter is followed by Finck sharing with the reader how happy she is now that Cahan has joined her and how he completes her life. Through this act of revealing her feelings, Finck assumes the role of the letter writer and shares how satisfied she is now that she has brought Cahan, a man from the “old world,” to life by opening the box that contained him. Letter six tells the story of a woman torn between loving a man from Europe and her new American friends who do not respect his European accomplishments. The tension between the old and new worlds that is present in this letter is equally present in the interactions between Finck and Cahan; as their story progresses, Cahan becomes increasingly interested in contemporary New York City and less interested in conversing with Finck because she is primarily interested in learning about the past. To remedy this, and to keep Cahan invested and anchored in the twentieth century, Finck prepares him schav (sorrel soup), his favorite old-world dish. Even though his gratitude and excitement bring him to tears, Cahan eventually leaves Finck, preferring to live exclusively in twenty-first-century New York City. Cahan’s decision to leave Finck led her to feeling abandoned and saddened by what she believes is a selfish choice. Her feelings of pain are mirrored in the letters she reads, with both letters eight and eleven addressing instances of lost love. In letter eight, a man is tricked into divorcing his wife so that she can marry his brother, and in letter eleven, a young bride is left devastated when her husband dies in a fire, and she feels unable to resume her life. Following letter eight, the reader is presented with a series of images of recalcitrant husbands who have left their wives. The illustrations of husbands who have abandoned their wives alongside depictions of Finck traveling around New York alone reflects how she knows that Cahan has left her and is enjoying his life, while she feels stuck, unable to live without him. Finck’s (2014) text concludes with her return to her grandparents’ home and a conversation about the past with her grandmother. Without Cahan to serve as her guide and unable to find him in local Jewish haunts, Finck turns to her grandmother, the individual who is most able to recapture the magic and spirit that Finck felt with Cahan, because it is her grandmother who has the most vivid memories of life in old New York. A Bintel Brief ends on a note of optimism, with the reader seeing Finck establishing a relationship

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with her grandmother and being able to form a link to the past through her. As Tahneer Oksman (2016) points out, other than Cahan, “we never see Finck interact with anyone from her present life” (225) until she speaks with her grandmother on the last two pages of the graphic narrative. What emerges most clearly through her relationship with Cahan is that it facilitates for Finck an investment in her own history and helps her realize that she can talk with her grandmother about her Jewish past. Her willingness to engage with the past in this way demonstrates that Finck is moving toward what Erica Lehrer (2010) has termed an “active dialogue about the past” (278). Cahan’s absence serves as an alarm bell for Finck to realize that the past is not the past if you want to bring it into the present. This lesson demonstrates the complex interplay of the relationship between contemporary Jews and the Jewish past. As Mihā ilescu (2015) notes, in A Bintel Brief, “history [is] a form of confession about the dynamics between past and present lifestyles of Jewish Americans” (272). This interplay is what ultimately allows Finck to recognize that she has her own link to the past through her grandmother who can bring the past to life through her lived experiences and who explains Finck’s own Jewish story to her. Ultimately, the final version of Finck, which involves a fusion of parts of her earlier self with what Cahan offered her from the twentieth century, promotes the best model for preserving the memory of the diasporic and historical Jewish experience without being exclusively tied to the past. This involves bridging together the historical and contemporary Jewish experiences to create a new Jewish identity for the twenty-firstcentury diaspora Jew.

Religious Graphic Narratives Megillat Esther JT Waldman’s (2006) graphic narrative Megillat Esther is a visualized retelling of the biblical book of Esther. The biblical story is set during the reign of the Persian King Ahasuerus in his capital city Shushan. Following the dismissal of his wife Vashti, Ahasuerus weds a Jewish orphan named Esther. At the urging of her uncle Mordechai, Esther elects to keep her Jewish identity a secret, and does not tell anyone, including her new husband, that she is Jewish. While sitting near the city’s gates, Mordechai overhears two men plotting to assassinate Ahasuerus and as a result, the king is saved, and Mordechai’s role is noted in the king’s book of records. Elsewhere in the city, Mordechai upsets Haman, one of Ahasuerus’s ministers, by refusing to bow down to him as was customary. In response, Haman secures permission from Ahasuerus to kill all

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the Jews in the empire. Mordechai begins to publicly mourn and encourages Esther to ask the king to nullify the genocidal decree. Following a three-day fast, Esther reveals that she is Jewish, and with Ahasuerus’s permission, the Jews are allowed to defend themselves. Haman and his sons are hanged for planning to kill the Jews and Mordechai takes on a leadership position in Ahasuerus’s royal court. Ori Z. Soltes (2003) writes that the Book of Esther received a radically different treatment than all the other canonized books of the Torah in relation to the ways in which the text was visualized. Unlike the other books in which Jewish tradition was “reticent with regard to embellishing the text,” where “the Scroll of Esther is concerned, the situation has been completely different” (142). Dating to the ancient synagogue at Dura Europos, the Book of Esther has been illustrated on the walls of synagogues and used as an opportunity for crafting beautiful scrolls for personal use as illuminated and illustrated manuscripts. Following the historical trend of illustrating the Book of Esther, JT Waldman’s (2006) Megillat Esther is a graphic narrative rendering of the biblical text. The work, which took seven years to produce (Tabachnick 2014), is an engaging and interesting work that provides many opportunities to think about the biblical story in new ways. Tabachnick (2014) identifies six unique features of Waldman’s visualized rendition of the story. First is Waldman’s decision to use Hebrew, English, and illustrations for every verse of the book. Second is that Waldman plays with page layout, frequently altering the size of the panels, shifting the reader’s expectations from one page to the next. Third, visual and verbal puns are included; these encourage the reader to parse the text carefully and critically, searching for playful inclusions that offer new understandings of the biblical text. For example, in his depiction of verse 12 in chapter 2 which says that women brought to King Ahasuerus were immersed in oil of myrrh for six months, Waldman illustrates women submerged under oil in large drums, with only their eyes and the tops of the heads visible as each breathes through a blowpipe (Figure 5.8). Fourth is Waldman’s decision to embrace the Persian setting by illustrating the story in its historical context. Fifth is Waldman’s willingness to honestly engage with some of the brutal scenes of violence in the text and to not gloss over them. And lastly, Waldman makes use of a master of ceremonies who presides over parts of the text, adding context and playfulness to the story. Waldman’s (2006) work operates like many other graphic narrative adaptations in which the illustrations provide an interpretation of the original source material. In his rendition of the text, Waldman weaves Rabbinic and Middle-Ages Jewish exegetes’ commentaries on the Book of Esther into the narrative in addition to offering his own original commentary on the text. The starting point for a discussion on the commentary found in Waldman’s Megillat

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FIGURE 5.8  Women bathing in vats of oil of myrrh. Excerpt of page 47 from Megillat Esther. Image from Megillat Esther. Copyright JT Waldman 2005.

Esther begins with first recognizing the way in which he acknowledges and makes use of earlier commentaries and sources. In no fewer than four places does Waldman cite his sources, doing so based on a rabbinic imperative that sourcing—and therefore giving credit to an author for their ideas—redeems the world. Waldman (2006) includes a bibliography, a paragraph explaining that his Megillat Esther “locates [itself] within the framework of rabbinic literature” (157), and endnotes embedded within panels that correspond to the specific rabbinic teachings that he illustrates. Furthermore, given his choice of crafting a visual document, Waldman also creates a visual representation of his sources. On the page in which the king’s would-be assassins are hanged on a tree (58), the ground surrounding the tree is a matrix of all of Waldman’s bibliographic entries (Figure  5.9). Combined, the image and the other written citations show that the foundation for Waldman’s text is not his own understanding of Esther, but rather the understandings of earlier exegetes who have already explicated the text. Waldman’s (2006) inclusion of sources does more than just give credit and indicate what inspired his interpretation. Soltes (2009) writes that “the involvement of the reader is intensified by Waldman’s swaying interweave of passages from the story with passages commenting on the story that reinforce the notion that it is part of a larger narrative.” The addition of commentary places readers within a framework of Jewish textual history and forces them

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FIGURE 5.9  The tree’s roots are a compilation of the exegetical sources Waldman used. Excerpt of page 58 from Megillat Esther. Image from Megillat Esther. Copyright JT Waldman 2005. to recognize that the story of Esther does not end with the conclusion of the narrative in chapter  10, but it continues through thousands of years of commentary including the very book Waldman has produced. I see in Waldman’s Megillat Esther an informed contemporary commentary on the ways that masculinity is performed in the twenty-first century based on how he depicts Esther and her uncle Mordecai. This is a masculinity that rejects notions of Jews as weak or feeble and instead presents a masculine ideal that

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both is powerful and confident while being not savage or destructive. This is most evident in the ways that he portrays the relationship between Esther and Mordechai. For example, when Esther is forcefully taken away to wed Ahasuerus, Mordecai is depicted as a physically strong and robust man, as evidenced by his sculpted physique and toned muscles. Despite Mordechai’s appearance, Waldman’s Mordechai does not in any way physically resist Esther’s kidnappers. To further emphasize to the reader that Mordechai was capable of fighting with the men but chose not to, Waldman illustrated one of the guards as overweight and doughy. The contrast between Mordechai and the kidnappers is stark and begs the question of why Waldman did not have Mordechai engage in any type of physical confrontation and instead appear weak. Beyond the obvious need to adhere to the story in which violence might compromise Mordechai’s later role, Waldman apparently wants his Mordechai to be read not as weak, but instead as one who has chosen not to fight because he has calculated the risks and determined that in this situation, violence would be an inappropriate choice that could cause danger not only to himself but also to Esther. Through the juxtaposition of aggressive Persians who act savagely along with Mordechai who chooses to not fight, Waldman presents a strong case for a masculinity that can be powerful through its nonviolence. By thinking of Esther’s needs and safety, Mordechai performs masculinity as an individual who has calculated when violence is necessary and when it is not in the hope of later finding a way to ensure Esther’s safety. A further way that Waldman (2006) integrates commentary into sacred literature is by adding thematic and nonlinear scenes to the original narrative. These scenes include a prologue depicting Timna, a female who was, according to the Babylonian Talmud, prevented from converting to Judaism by the Jewish people and who in turn went on to bear the ancestor of Haman, the villain in the book of Esther. Another scene with Timna is included at the conclusion of chapter 2. There, Mordecai has just helped save King Ahasuerus’ life and his good deed has been recorded in the king’s record book. Chapter 3 begins with Haman’s request from King Ahasuerus to kill all the Jews. Sandwiched between these two events is a one-page illustration of a teardrop with an occluded face contained inside (Waldman, 59); surrounding the teardrop is a verse from Deuteronomy that reads “I will surely hide My face on that day because of the evil people have done” (31:18). Waldman’s inclusion of these texts serve as commentary on one of the significant questions that the book of Esther does not answer: Why does Haman hate the Jewish people so much that he wants to commit genocide? By linking the biblical past to the present situation in which the Jewish people were facing genocide, Waldman suggests the importance of being sensitive to the needs of others, especially those, like Timna, who are the most vulnerable. The inclusion of the text about

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Timna does not make Haman any less culpable of trying to commit genocide, but by including a text that provides a background motive that revolves around his ancestor being rejected by the Jews, Waldman complicates the narrative in a way that is not even implicitly hinted at in the original biblical text. Beginning in the Middle Ages and continuing down to the present, artists of illuminated manuscripts introduced commentary into their works by including clothing and other objects that are not contemporaneous with the society that is described in the written text. These illustrated allusions, when parsed, introduce visual commentary on the text and provide insight into the ways that the artist thought about the text and the unique socio-political climate of his or her own lifetime. One example of this dynamic is identified by Julie Harris (2002) in her analysis of the Medieval Golden Haggadah and the artist’s decision to depict the spoils that the Israelites leave Egypt with as Christian ritual objects and the Egyptians that are chasing them as Christian knights. Introducing anachronistic Christian elements is an intentional way of juxtaposing the artist’s understanding of the Israelites’ persecution in Egypt alongside the persecution of Jews in Christian Europe. Similarly, in a more recent Haggadah, American artist Arthur Szyk drew parallels between Nazi Germany and ancient Egypt when he created his version of the Haggadah in the 1930s. These types of visual encoding which critique society are similarly evident in Waldman’s depictions of Esther. As Soltes (2009) notes: Esther “looks more like Bette Midler than like the latest Playboy centerfold” and by doing this, “Waldman plays with whatever conceptions and preconceptions shape the concept of ‘beauty’ in history and art history, in Persia then or America now.” Waldman challenges contemporary notions of sexuality and rejects the ways that masculinity and femininity have been defined as binary opposites. By illustrating Esther in a non-stereotypical way, Waldman encourages the reader to move beyond singular notions of beauty and to recognize that Esther’s beauty is tied not only to her physical appearance but to the ways that she behaves. For Waldman’s graphic novel, as argued by Susan Vick and Marc Michael Epstein (2015), the “iconography does not merely illustrate text and exegesis, it becomes powerful exegesis in and of itself” (241). As a religious Jewish graphic adaptation, Megillat Esther is unrivaled in scope and ambition. Waldman’s graphic narrative was the first to prominently show how visual exegesis could be offered in a Jewish graphic narrative. Megillat Esther modeled a deep commitment to the traditional biblical text along with showing the creative potential available through artistic media. It would lay a foundation for successive works like Jessica Tamar Deutsch’s (2017) The Illustrated Pirkei Avot and Jordan Gorfinkel and Erez Zadok’s (2019) Passover Haggadah Graphic Novel, a testament to its importance as a religious graphic adaptation.

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­Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword Targeting a particularly niche audience are graphic narratives published primarily for Orthodox Jews. As the most traditional of Judaism’s religious communities, some Orthodox Jews prohibit their children from reading secular literature, especially if it includes depictions of sexuality or overt references to secular society. Beginning in the early twenty-first century and continuing through to today, several graphic narratives have been published either by members of this traditional Jewish community or by Jews who are willing to work within the community’s restrictions. Examples of religious graphic narratives of this nature include Eric Mahr’s (2005) Nagdila: A Tale of the Golden Age: Shmuel HaNagid and Barry Deutsch’s (2010) Hereville series. While these religious graphic narratives cater to the needs of the Orthodox community, Deutsch’s is notable for not being exclusive to it. The first volume in Deutsch’s (2010) Hereville series was published by Amulet Books in 2010. Titled Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword, the graphic narrative stars Mirka, a plucky eleven-year-old Orthodox girl who lives in the fictional village of Hereville. In addition to being a full participant in her Jewish community, Mirka also loves reading books about mythological monsters, creatures she believes are real and exist in her world. The story begins with Mirka standing up for her brother Zindel when he is bullied by a group of fellow Orthodox Jews who routinely pick on him. As she flees from the bullies, Mirka discovers a house and a witch and a magical pig who live therein. Hungry, she eats one of the pig’s grapes, angering him in the process. Over the course of the graphic narrative, the pig begins following Mirka around Hereville, bullying her, eating her homework, and revealing himself only to Mirka and hiding when others are around. When Mirka eventually helps save the pig from being tormented by Zindel’s bullies, the witch offers to help Mirka fulfill her dream of becoming a dragon slayer by locating a sword for her. Mirka bests a magical troll in a yarn-knitting duel by using the knitting skills she learned from her stepmother Fruma who tried to impress upon her that learning to knit is an important skill for Jewish girls. As an example of a religious Jewish graphic narrative, Tabachnick (2014) contends that Deutsch makes “the case for the power of Orthodoxy” (454). Despite not being Orthodox himself, Deutsch fully embraces the community’s lifestyle in his depictions of the Orthodox community’s norms because throughout the story he weaves in significant Orthodox-specific content. In addition to the inclusion of phrases and words in Yiddish on many pages (with English translations provided in footnotes), the underlying ethos of the work locates it within the Orthodox community. Mirka’s desire to get a sword and to slay a troll never come at the expense of her Jewish values. For instance,

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Tabachnick (2014) cites as an example from the start of graphic narrative when Fruma chastises Mirka for making mistakes in her stitchwork while knitting. Mirka replies that since it is God who wills everything in existence, it must have been God’s desire for her to make mistakes in her knitting. The experiences that Mirka has—whether her talking to boys will make it difficult for her siblings to get married, whether obsessing over the pig, a nonkosher animal, is inappropriate, and her ultimate defeat of the troll in a knitting competition—are all irreverent nods to the Jewish Orthodox experience that insiders will appreciate. Similarly, Deutsch unabashedly depicts Jewish rituals and customs, including ones that non-Jewish readers would be less familiar with like the havdalah ceremony that marks the end of the Sabbath. Deutsch’s (2010) illustrations also highlight the unique features of the Orthodox community. His depictions of different types of Orthodox girls based on the ways that they style their hair and wear their school uniforms show a keen understanding of the nuances of the community while simultaneously calling attention to some of its quirks (Figure  5.10). Tabachnick (2014) has noted that throughout Hereville, Deutsch makes use of muted colors, a further nod to the Orthodox community’s tendency to not dress in loud or bright colors. As well, Fruma’s long nose positions her to be a villain in the story but, as Tabachnick correctly has observed, Deutsch inverts typical stereotypes associated with Jews and wickedness. This models for Mirka (and the reader) that superficial external appearances only run skin deep and what matters most is what is found inside, with Fruma caring about Mirka very much and wanting to protect her from the village witch (Figure 5.11). In his analysis of Hereville, Tabachnick (2014) makes an interesting observation about Deutsch’s (2010) blend of fantasy tropes into an otherwiserealistic world. He notes that while the Orthodox world does not generally believe in trolls or magical swords like Mirka does, the community does believe in elements of the fantastical including spirits and miracles. Tabachnick writes that the community’s openness to the supernatural makes Deutsch’s work “more believable in an Orthodox world than they would be in the secular world that many Jews inhabit” (218). Furthermore, Mirka’s willingness to engage with her imagination and to combat dragons and trolls enables her to model an alternative type of Orthodox femininity, one that is interested in conjoining two separate spheres together: the external masculine world where she fights against mythological creatures and the home-based feminine world where she knits and prepares Shabbat dishes. Beyond the fusion of fantasy and Jewish elements that are woven throughout the text, Hereville’s importance rests in Deutsch’s depiction of a strong and powerful female character who is also capable of demonstrating emotional vulnerability with her family. While Mirka does stand up and defend her brother Zindel when he is bullied, she also tries to help him gain the

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FIGURE 5.10  Orthodox Jewish dress styles. Copyright © 2010 Barry Deutsch.

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FIGURE 5.11  Fruma’s stereotypical Jewish nose. Copyright © 2010 Barry Deutsch.

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strength to have the confidence to stand up for himself and to not be afraid. Furthermore, Mirka models kindness, recognizing that even though the pig was making her life difficult, it was not acceptable for the bullies to torment an animal and so she helps the pig when he needs assistance. Perhaps most importantly, Mirka comes to embrace her stepmother Fruma and recognizes that having a relationship with Fruma does not negate the relationship she had with her deceased mother. One mother, Mirka learns, does not need to replace another mother. Gwen Athene Tarbox (2017) has noted that Deutsch uses braiding (Groensteen 2007) to visually show the evolving relationship between Fruma and Mirka, and how Mirka comes to benefit from Fruma’s involvement in her life. This is done by illustrating the two women demonstrating similar poses, expressions, and body language at different points in the graphic narrative. Doing so, Tarbox suggests, allows readers to “intuit that though [Mirka] initially seemed resistant, Mirka did benefit from listening to the counsel of her stepmother” (151). It is precisely Mirka’s quirkiness, cuteness, and universality that has endeared her to audiences outside of the Orthodox community and has led to considerable recognition in non-Jewish publications. Margaret Robbins (2014–15) writes that Mirka’s story speaks to universal values about how to “reconcile cultural values with a desire to develop an identity” within the sociocultural context of a society that expects women to be more docile (14). Hereville, according to Tarbox (2017) is a work that “takes up the question of how a young woman can develop her individuality while remaining observant of religious and cultural practices valued in her community” (149). And while questions about the individual’s autonomy in relation to a community’s expectations are not new in literature, Deutsch’s exploration of this trope within the Orthodox community is “something that we’ve never seen in speculative fiction’s leading ladies” (Friedman 2016). Monica Friedman (2016) sees in Mirka a “familiar modern protagonist: determined, impulsive, unconstrained by traditional notions of gender.” It is this that will speak to the average reader who will come to recognize that just because Mirka’s lifestyle and community are different from their own, the underlying challenges of becoming independent are similar enough that it will allow readers to embrace Mirka. Orthodox Judaism, Friedman writes, “is just a backdrop. In the foreground, we have this girl—headstrong, precocious, pugnacious— tearing her way through life.” Hereville’s appeal to both Jewish and non-Jewish readers of graphic narratives makes it unique from other examples of religious Jewish graphic narratives which are significantly more religious, and in turn insular, in nature. Laurence Roth (2012) has written extensively about Eric Mahr’s Mahrwood Press and the graphic narratives it published prior to folding after Mahr’s unexpected passing in 2010. Mahr’s graphic narratives are extremely Jewish

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in their content, with Jewish scriptures and values depicted on every page. For example, in his biography of the Medieval Spanish rabbi and military general Shmuel HaNagid, nearly every internal monologue includes a reference either to religious texts or to translations from Shmuel’s own works of exegesis. These passages “function as snippets of internal monologue that humanize this superhero” (Roth 2012: 140). Roth’s choice of word “superhero” is important because in Mahr’s work, Jewish historical figures are positioned as heroes that Jewish children can look up to with reverence and from whom they can learn Jewish values and behaviors. While it is all in English, Mahr’s extensive use of Jewish religious texts clearly and overtly positions his graphic narratives as insider texts that are primarily designed for the Orthodox community. Roth even notes that Mahr went out of his way to get rabbinic recognition for his graphic narratives’ “religious merit and educational merit,” transforming them from “not only religiously sanctioned Jewish books but a new form of Jewish [literature]” by dint of the rabbis’ glowing endorsements of the works. Mahrwood Press’ catalogue even led American Judaica stores to begin selling Orthodox Jewish American comic books for the very first time (Roth, 580). Deutsch’s (2010) Hereville works much differently from Mahr’s graphic narratives. This is not a criticism of Mahr’s work but a recognition of the different intended audiences and purposes for each graphic narrative. While Mirka may be found in a Judaica shop alongside Shmuel HaNagid, her appeal extends far beyond the Orthodox Jewish American enclave. This is because, despite Mahr’s investment in artists who understand the comics medium and can therefore give the work a professional appearance (Roth 2012), Mahr’s graphic narratives are not designed to be universal but rather particular. They speak to the Orthodox community and readers who inhabit its more insular world. The beauty and brilliance of Hereville is in Deutsch’s ability to simultaneously speak to the uniqueness of the ultra-Orthodox community’s particular experiences and to the universal experience of children trying to forge a path of their own in the world while remaining rooted to their families and communities.

G ­ raphic Memoir Second Generation: Things I Didn’t Tell My Father Since immigrating to Israel from Belgium in 1974, Michel Kichka has been one of Israel’s most prominent cartoonists. As an instructor at the prestigious Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, he has played a formative role in the development of Israel’s comic-book and graphic narrative community, having

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taught many of the country’s most accomplished cartoonists, including Uri Fink and Rutu Modan. Kichka’s Second Generation: Things I Didn’t Tell My Father was initially published in French in 2012, before being released in Hebrew in 2013 and in English in 2016. It would be followed by Falafel with Hot Sauce in 2018, which was also first released in French, before being released in Hebrew and English in 2019. The duology tells parallel autobiographical stories about Kichka’s experiences being the child of Holocaust survivors in the 1950s and his subsequent decision to immigrate to Israel in 1974. In many ways, Second Generation takes inspiration from Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) Maus. Both works are written by members of the second generation, children whose parents were Holocaust survivors. As a work of the second generation, Kichka’s (2016) autography includes “all the characteristic elements of the experience of the second generation” (Leichter-Flack 2016, 70) including the complex and fraught relationship between parent and child. Like Spiegelman, Kichka also makes use of photographs to understand and navigate the past. Their presence, notes Assaf Gamzou (2019) “brings to the fore questions of representation, authenticity, truth, and the implicit authority and legitimacy of documentation” (229). When his father Henri is unwilling to share his Holocaust experiences, a young Kichka begins looking through his father’s books about the Holocaust searching—unsuccessfully— for photographs of Henri which would not only prove that his father was in Auschwitz, but also help him better understand what it means to have been traumatized by the Holocaust. Additionally, like Spiegelman, Kichka opted to produce Second Generation entirely in black and white. When contrasted with his subsequent Falafel with Hot Sauce in which every panel makes use of vibrant colors, a clear statement about the dreariness Kichka felt in postHolocaust Europe emerges. Lastly, while Kichka does not make use of visual metaphor like Spiegelman did with his animal imagery, he does make use of non-literal visualization, like when he illustrates himself walking on top of an enlarged version of his father’s Auschwitz hat or when he illustrates his own face superimposed over the body of the young boy who holds his hands aloft in the famous 1943 photograph from the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (Figure 5.12). These images serve as visual exegesis of Kichka’s experiences as the child of a Holocaust survivor, and his difficulty navigating his family’s history. Despite these similarities, Second Generation differs from Maus in many ways, offering a new way of understanding what it means to be a secondgeneration survivor in the twenty-first century. Unlike Maus in which both Art and Vladek co-starred, with Vladek’s testimony taking up a significant number of pages alongside Art navigating how best to tell his father’s story, Second Generation barely includes Henri’s survivor testimony. Henri, Gamzou (2019) writes, “has no voice” (220). This absence is initially a by-product of Henri’s unwillingness to tell his own story, defaulting instead to providing his children

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FIGURE 5.12  Kichka illustrating himself as a victim of the Holocaust. Deuxième Génération—Ce que je n’ai pas dit à mon père © DARGAUD 2012, by Kichka www.dargaud.com. All rights reserved. with veiled allusions to his suffering, but not providing them with substantive details. As he matures, Kichka loses interest in hearing Henri’s story, and he eventually rejects Henri’s overtures to hear it. Kichka’s refusal to listen to Henri’s story, to read Henri’s published autobiography, or even to accompany him on a heritage trip to Auschwitz, position him as a very different member of the second generation than Spiegelman. Kichka’s (2016) reticence to be party to Henri’s memories is part of an evolution in his own relationship with his father. At first, when he was a child, he was deeply interested in learning about the Holocaust, imagining his father in every photograph that he saw of the Holocaust. Henri’s refusal to share his personal experiences led Kichka to have nightmares and experiencing moments of being terrified as his imagination ran amok with speculations about what life in the Holocaust would have been like. Lola Serraf (2019) beautifully captures the young Kichka’s formative years by describing the Holocaust as both “everywhere, but also nowhere” (5). Its presence overwhelms Kichka’s family, but the silences surrounding it confine it, shrouding it in mystery, unspoken even amongst immediate family members. Over time, Kichka came to realize that despite Henri’s refusal to discuss it, the Holocaust dominated Henri’s—and in turn the family’s—life. Throughout his adolescence, Kichka’s very existence was used as a weapon by Henri against a fictional Hitler, to “prove” to the Nazis that Henri won by having children.

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It is only after the death by suicide of his youngest son Charli in 1988 that Henri begins to speak about his experiences. The psychological trauma associated with Charli’s death facilitates an outpouring of memories from his earlier trauma as a youth in the Holocaust. By this point, however, Kichka has lost interest in hearing his father’s story. While he is sympathetic to his father’s delayed-onset post-traumatic stress disorder, he is equally frustrated with how Henri has coopted Charli’s mourning period into an opportunity for it to revolve around Holocaust trauma. As a thirty-four-year-old, Kichka is now fatigued by the weight of the Holocaust and he is distressed that Henri has shifted the focus away from Charli’s life and suicide to Henri’s experiences in the Holocaust from decades earlier. Serraf (2019) writes that Kichka’s anger indicates how “the Holocaust goes from being a memory that ruined his childhood to one that prevents him from mourning his brother” (7). This anger is what ultimately leads Kichka to refuse to participate in any future exchanges with Henri about the Holocaust. Kichka’s (2016) disinterest in facilitating the transmission of Henri’s memories to subsequent generations introduces an alternative position for second-generation survivors. Kichka’s work demonstrates an absence of postmemory. He is not the chronicler of the past that Art Spiegelman (1986, 1991b) is for Vladek nor does he grapple with balancing the past alongside his own independence like Amy Kurzweil (2016) does in Flying Couch. Instead, his autography focuses on the ways that the Holocaust necessitated the creation of an alternate identity, one that was divorced from the Holocaust. This new identity could only be actualized away from Europe, leading Kichka to immigrate to Israel and physically separate himself from his father. While gradually built over time, this new identity would come to its sharpest fruition in Kichka’s refusal to visit Auschwitz with Henri despite the encouragement from many of his closest friends that doing so would be a very meaningful and memorable experience. Kichka’s (2016) complex relationship with his father and the way that he was parented are reflected in the graphic narrative’s subtitle: Things I Didn’t Tell My Father. While Kichka might not be interested in serving as Henri’s chronicler in perpetuity, nor is he comfortable sharing his frustrations with his father. What begins with not telling Henri about the content of his nightmares, morphs into gaping yawns of silence, an unbridgeable gap that Kichka is unable or unwilling to ford. And so, while he does not visit Auschwitz with Henri, nor is he able to explain to his father why this is the case, and what has led to his disinterest in his father’s Holocaust past. By refusing to tell Henri the story of how he survived a childhood of being a member of the second generation, Kichka mirrors the ways that Henri refused to tell Kichka about Auschwitz. Serraf (2019) sees in Kichka’s eventual willingness to tell his story as a graphic memoir an attempt “to regain agency in his own progression and

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his own history, against the figure of a father whose past overshadows all of his family’s lives” (4). The irony, of course, is that in not wanting to tell Henri’s Holocaust story, Kichka (2016) has still produced a graphic narrative about the Holocaust. The differences between Second Generation and Maus or Flying Couch are, however, significant. The absence—save for snippets here and there—of Henri’s testimony positions Second Generation not as a Holocaust memoir but as a post-Holocaust memoir. Henri is a character in Kichka’s story; he is not the protagonist or co-protagonist in the ways that Vladek and Bubbe Lily are in Spiegelman’s and Kurzweil’s graphic narratives. Kichka’s work is an interrogation of the self and the ways that growing up in the pale of the Holocaust has cast a shadow over his life. Serraf (2019) has suggested that Kichka’s use of the Holocaust might even be controversial; Second Generation invokes no reverence for the Holocaust. Instead, “it depicts the story of a rebellion against it and its consequences on survivors’ children and grandchildren” (8). Though it does include moments of levity and humor—there are quite a few Holocaust-related jokes—Second Generation prominently shows the burdens associated with the unknown past that Kichka has felt throughout his life. The graphic narrative is primarily about “deconstructing [the Holocaust’s] aftermath in the personal realms of memory” (Gamzou 2019: 235). In the final page of Second Generation, Kichka illustrates himself haggard and rundown, wearily staring at his reflection in the mirror as he has been working frantically to produce the book. Despite his exhaustion, he writes that he “would jump out of bed at 8 A.M., with drawn features and dark circles under [his] eyes, but with a sweet feeling of lightness” (104). In the final panel, the reader sees Kichka, weightlessly floating above his desk, casting a shadow across a page from Second Generation (Figure 5.13). Writing and illustrating the story as an autography have mitigated the experience forced upon him as a member of the second generation, allowing him to become a little less burdened and to feel a little freer to tell the stories from his past as he experienced them.

How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less Since its publication in 2010 by Vertigo Press, Sarah Glidden’s (2016) How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less has rightly been considered one of the most important contemporary Jewish graphic narratives. Part travelogue and part memoir, Glidden’s water-colored graphic novel details her experiences as a tourist to Israel. The autography begins with Glidden departing for Israel from America as a participant on Birthright Israel’s free ten-day trip that brings Jewish young adults to Israel to learn about the country and to experience it first-hand. Much of the work chronicles her travels in the country with her group and eventually alongside friends who, like her, choose to extend

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FIGURE 5.13  Kichka relieved at completing his manuscript. Deuxième génération— Ce que je n’ai pas dit à mon père © DARGAUD 2012, by Kichka www.dargaud. com. All rights reserved. their stay and tour the country on their own. Glidden’s text emphasizes the important—yet contested—space that Israel occupies in North American Jewish discourse and the complex relationships that diaspora Jews have with the country. ­Glidden (2016) is transparent in her political and religious orientations right from the beginning of the graphic narrative. As a left-wing and secular Jewish American woman, she is deeply critical of the state of Israel and its rightwing political leadership. She reveals early in the work that she is dating a non-Jewish Arab man and she is nervous that she will be a social outcast on the trip for not promoting endogamy. Prior to departure, Glidden’s biggest fear is that the trip will be a form of Jewish and Israeli indoctrination that is designed to convert her (and her fellow travelers) into ardent Zionists through a program that glosses over, minimizes, and diminishes left-wing Jewish voices and/or Palestinian voices. While Glidden does rhetorically wonder how the Israeli-Palestinian conflict has evolved to the present impasse, the first forty pages demonstrate that she has already formed her own answer to this question even though she says that she is “keeping an open mind” (23). While she has spent the six weeks that precede her trip reading books about Israel, a review of the bibliography she includes at the end of the book shows primarily left-wing texts and texts that directly criticize Israeli policies. Tahneer Oksman (2016) suggests that Glidden’s position as an oppositional contrarian to the Birthright trip is directly linked to her self-identity; she

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writes: “[Glidden’s] sense of self is often tied to her inability to conform, to find a space of belonging” (182). This self-identity is, however, what allows her to arrive at her own understanding of Israel and to “avoid the biases of others” (182). Combined, these factors position Glidden to be cautious about any attempts to convince her that Israel is different from the position she has already formed and participating on the trip is more of a confirmation of her own biases than an honest exploration of her Jewish identity and heritage. As she becomes a more active participant on the trip, Glidden (2016) becomes increasingly conflicted in her feelings about Israel. Participating in seminars that feature Arab speakers who speak glowingly about the country, and hearing from Jewish Israelis who are actively working on peace initiatives leads Glidden to realize that the assumptions she had before the trip are not necessarily incorrect but are instead incomplete. Israel, she determines, is far more nuanced than she had previously thought, and this is demonstrated in a series of speeches and inner monologues that show her increasingly complicated relationship with the country. When speaking with one of the tour guides, she acknowledges that she “likes it more than [she] thought” (76) even though she remains troubled by Israel’s treatment of Palestinians. Later in the text, she writes: “people oversimplify the current conflict in Israel” (87). Even further in the text, she says: “there’s so much that I’m angry about, and I don’t think that will ever change. But I am kind of seeing this other side to Israel … I would never make aliyah (immigrate to Israel) … but I kind of like it here. Maybe I’d come back here to study” (92). Eventually, she explains how she “thought [she] knew what [she] felt about Israel and now [she’s] all messed up” (103) because she is considering that maybe Israel is not the only party that is at fault for the conflict. Concurrent with this realization, she wonders how she can “feel a connection to a place that causes so much suffering” (104). Glidden’s confused feelings emerge in greater detail when, at the end of the memoir, she is in a room surrounded by Jewish Israelis and she acknowledges that even though they do not share the same citizenship or even language, she likes being in a room with them. At the same time, however, she also feels “ashamed” that she likes it as much as she does, and she allows the “shame and comfort wash” over her (192). Oksman (2016) suggests that what is happening here is that “as her Israel trip unfolds, she begins to recognise a connection between this tour and a much more expansive lifelong journey of coming to terms with her Jewish identity” (176). Glidden (2016) begins her exploration of Israel in a comfortable—yet nervous—space where she thinks she knows everything about Israel but is prepared to participate in the Birthright trip to validate her feelings and thoughts. The trip itself is, however, highly painful for Glidden. As she comes to learn about Israel, she chooses to begin engaging with Israelis on their own terms. Her learning about the impact of suicide bombings, failed peace negotiations, and the daily lives of Israelis leads to emotional outbursts, public

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shedding of tears, and a confrontation with her preconceived notions about Israelis as aggressive, rude, and unethical. As Ariel Kahn (2016) aptly notes, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less involves “a death of ideology, of preconceptions” (243). Glidden’s (2016) journey is one in which a secular and unaffiliated Jew had adopted a stance that was openly hostile toward Israeli policies and, following a personal encounter with Israeli Jews on the other side of the world, developed a more complex appreciation of her own history and identity. This realization also involves what Oksman (2016) refers to as a confrontation with “her entire misdirected approach to her Israel mission” (188). Given that an objective perspective or understanding of Israel is not possible, Glidden realizes that the stance toward Israel she entered the country with was no less subjective or biased than Birthright Israel’s biases. Sigrid Thomsen (2020) sees parallels between Glidden’s physical movement across Israel and her ideological movement across the country’s political boundaries. What emerges by the end of the graphic memoir is that Glidden has come to realize that she can be both sympathetic to the Israeli experience and outraged by it as she becomes comfortably uncomfortable living simultaneously in multiple ideological spaces. How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less is divided into chapters that roughly correspond to different phases of the trip. Nina Fischer (2015) has suggested that the graphic narrative is loosely structured like a guidebook, with each chapter beginning with an illustrated map that previews what readers should expect to find in the section that follows. Yet, as Fischer correctly notes, the maps have additional features and functions: “They emphasize the fact that this is not a fictional journey; they help readers to orient themselves; and [they] tell a story about the places being visited.” As cartographic works of a contested geographical space, the maps must also be considered in light of how they reflect Glidden’s (2016) own emerging understanding of the complex politics that are found Israeli society. Glidden’s seven maps of Israel are illustrated in a consistent way. Each is lushly painted with watercolors that highlight different geographical and political features of the country including its waterways, highways, and major cities and towns. She takes care to demarcate both the Green Line that separates Israel’s internationally recognized borders from lands that it took possession of following the 1967 Six Day War and the security fence/separation barrier that surrounds much of the West Bank. Glidden also identifies areas that are under Palestinian control. The maps are personal to Glidden’s experiences; they identify the route that her bus takes to traverse the country, and the stops that her group makes along the way. For each of the stops, Glidden includes a miniature illustration of the location (Figure  5.14). These stops include Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust museum, the ancient fortress at Masada, and Kibbutz Degania in the Golan Heights.

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FIGURE 5.14  Glidden’s map of Israel. Copyright Sarah Glidden. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly.

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Even though her maps include legends and notable points of interest which lend credibility to them, Glidden’s (2016) maps do not depict Israel’s precise borders. Rather, she has simplified the contours of the borders to make the geography more easily understandable for the reader. Simplifying the map regarding its borders does not mean that Glidden’s maps are simplistic. In fact, because of the visual simplification, Glidden has greater flexibility to introduce her own understanding of the conflict and her role as a participant in Birthright Israel. Arnon Medzini (2012) has noted that maps have historically been used as “means of propaganda and as an instrument of persuasion and political indoctrination” (23). While her maps might not be a form of political indoctrination, Glidden’s maps clearly reflect an Israeli orientation toward the land based on what she chooses to include and label. Except for Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Nazareth, no other predominantly Arab cities are included on any of the maps, including the Arab city of Jaffa that abuts Tel Aviv, even though she identifies numerous predominantly Jewish cities, including ones that she does not even visit like Caesarea and zefat. Glidden’s (2016) maps reflect her evolving connections to Israel as a place wherein she feels comfortable as a Jew. These are maps that, had she painted them prior to her trip, would have looked very different because of her different political and ideological orientations. Instead, as maps produced after her trip, they demonstrate her new understanding of the complexity of Israeli society. These are maps that focus on and identify Jewish Israeli tourist and historical sites, but by including significant left-wing markers like the security fence/separation barrier and the borders of the West Bank, Glidden equally shows her refusal to compromise on some of her core beliefs about the ways that Israel treats the Palestinian people. Maps come, therefore, to visually symbolize Glidden’s understanding of contested space and how she tries to balance her competing values as a left-wing Jewish American Zionist humanrights activist. The questions and concerns that Glidden (2016) raises in her autography are still relevant more than a decade on from when she published How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less in 2010. For diaspora Jews, Israel remains a contested topic. It is a place that many undoubtedly feel a connection to, but it is also a place that many have concerns about. Glidden’s own process of investigating her relationship with Israel and of investigating Israel first-hand serve as models for honest inquiry, showing the ways that individuals living in a diaspora can simultaneously support and struggle with the homeland nation.

Appendix List of Jewish graphic novels by type; only English (original or in translation) and Hebrew works are included * Indicates text is also an autobiography/memoir

Holocaust Amy Kurzweil, Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir* Ari Folman and David Polonsky, Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation Art Spiegelman, Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History* Art Spiegelman, Maus II: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began* Bernice Eisenstein, I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors* Carla Jablonski and Leland Purvis, Resistance (three volumes) Charlotte Salomon, Life? Or Theatre? Charlotte Schallie (editor), But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust Dan Goldman and George Schall, Chasing Echoes Dave Sim, Judenhass Emil Ferris, My Favorite Thing Is Monsters Eric Heuvel, Ruud van der Rol, Lies Schippers, The Search Greg Pak and Carmine di Giandomenico, X-Men: Magneto Testament Jean-David Morvan, Séverine Tréfouël, David Evrard, Walter, Irena (three volumes) Jérémie Dres, We Won’t See Auschwitz Joe Kubert, Yossel: April 19, 1943 Ken Krimstein, When I Grow Up Loïc Dauvillier and Marc Lizano, Hidden: A Child’s Story of the Holocaust Martin Lemelman, Mendel’s Daughter Marvano, The Jewish Brigade Michel Kichka, Second Generation: The Things I Didn’t Tell My Father* Miriam Katin, Letting It Go* Miriam Katin, We Are on Our Own* Pascal Croci, Auschwitz R. J. Palacio, White Bird: A Wonder Story Shay Charka, Yudisea Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón, Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography

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Sylvain Vallée and Fabien Nury, Once Upon a Time in France Trina Robbins, Anne Timmons, and Mo Oh, Lily Reneé, Escape Artist: From Holocaust Survivor to Comic Book Pioneer

Israel Ari Folman and David Polonsky, Waltz with Bashir* Asaf Hanuka, HaYehudi HaAravi [The Jewish Arab]* Boaz Yakin and Nick Bertozzi, Jerusalem: A Family Portrait Etgar Keret and Actus Tragicus, Jetlag Etgar Keret and Asaf Hanuka, Pizzeria Kamikaze Etgar Keret and Asaf Hanuka, Simtaot HaZaam [Streets of Rage] Galit and Gilad Seliktar, Farm 54 Harvey Pekar and JT Waldman, Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me* Ilana Zeffren, Sefer Varod [Pink Story]* Ilana Zeffren, Urban Tails* Jack Baxter, Joshua Faudem, and Koren Shadmi, Mike’s Place: A True Story of Love, Blues, and Terror in Tel Aviv* Karina Shor, Silence, Full Stop: A Memoir* Michael Kovner, Ezekiel’s World Michel Kichka, Falafel with Hot Sauce* Miriam Libicki, Jobnik!* Miriam Libicki, Toward a Hot Jew* Reut Bortz, YaVoh BeKalut: MiYomna shel Metupelet Poriyut [Project Mom: From the Memories of a Fertility Patient]* Rutu Modan, Exit Wounds Rutu Modan, Jamilti and Other Stories Rutu Modan, The Property Rutu Modan, Tunnels Sarah Glidden, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less* Shay Charka, Beyond the Line* (two volumes) S. Y. Agnon and Shay Charka, From Foe to Friend & Other Stories Tamar Blumenfeld, In a Relationship Tamar Blumenfeld, Kina Tova [Green-Eyed Monster] Uri Fink, Eretz Shelanu [Between War and Peace]

Diaspora Anya Ullinich, Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel: A Graphic Novel Ben Katchor, The Dairy Restaurant* Ben Katchor, The Jew of New York Carol Isaacs, The Wolf of Baghdad: Memoir of a Lost Homeland* Danny Noble, Shame Pudding: A Graphic Memoir* E. Lockhart, Whistle

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Ilan Stavans and Steve Sheinkin, El Iluminado: A Graphic Novel James Sturm, The Golem’s Mighty Swing James Sturm, Market Day Jamie Michaels and Doug Fedrau, Christie Pits Joann Sfar, Klezmer: Tales of the Wild East Joann Sfar, The Rabbi’s Cat (two volumes) Joe Kubert, Jew Gangster Jorge Zentner and Rubén Pellejero, The Silence of Malka Judd Winick and Farel Dalrymple, Caper Julia Alekseyeva, Soviet Daughter: A Graphic Revolution Kate Evans, Red Rosa: A Graphic Biography of Rosa Luxemburg Leela Corman, Unterzakhn Liana Finck, A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York Martin Lemelman, Two Cents Plain* Max B. Perlson and Trina Robbins, A Bunch of Jews (and Other Stuff) Miss Lasko-Gross, Escape from “Special”* Miss Lasko-Gross, A Mess of Everything* Neil Kleid and Jake Allen, Brownsville Neil Kleid and Nicholas Cinquegrani, The Big Kahn Nina Caputo and Liz Clarke, Debating Truth: The Barcelona Disputation of 1263, A Graphic History Roz Chast, Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?* Sarah Lightman, The Book of Sarah* Shira Spector, Red Rock Baby Candy* Ted Stanton and Josh Rosen, The Good Fight Tyler Feder, Dancing at the Pity Party: A Dead Mom Graphic Memoir* Vanessa Davis, Make Me a Woman* Vittorio Giardino, A Jew in Communist Prague (three volumes) Will Eisner, A Contract with God Will Eisner, Fagin the Jew Will Eisner, The Name of the Game Will Eisner, The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion* Will Eisner, To the Heart of the Storm*

Religious Aaron Freeman and Sharon Rosenzweig, The Comic Book Torah: Reimagining the Very Good Book Al Wiesner, Shaloman Alan Oirich, Jewish Hero Corps Barry Deutsch, Hereville (three volumes) Berel Wein and Destiny, Rambam: The Story of Maimonides: Torah Sage, Healer, Philosopher, Hero Berel Wein and Destiny, Rashi HaKadosh: A Light after the Dark Ages Dov Smiley, Jewish Holiday Comics Eric Mahr, Shmuel HaNagid: Nagdila: A Tale of the Golden Age (two volumes) Eric Mahr and Moshe Chaim Levy, Journeys

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Jessica Tamar Deutsch, The Illustrated Pirkei Avot: A Graphic Novel of Jewish Ethics Joe Kubert, The Adventures of Yaakov and Isaac Jordan Gorfinkel and Erez Zadok, Passover Haggadah Graphic Novel JT Waldman, Megillat Esther Leibel Estrin and Dovid Sears, Mendy and the Golem Liana Finck, Let There Be Light: The Real Story of Her Creation Matt Brandstein, Mendy and the Golem Shay Charka, Baba (series) Steve Sheinkin, Rabbi Harvey (three volumes) Torah Umesorah, Best of Olomeinu Back Cover Stories Uri Auerbach and Shay Charka, Muktza Stan Mack’s The Story of the Jews: A 4,000-Year Adventure is an overview of Jewish history from the biblical period through to the end of the twentieth century and it therefore could be included in all the categories. Steven M. Bergson’s collected volumes The Jewish Comix Anthology and SCI: The Jewish Comics Anthology Volume 2 include examples of works from across the categories and they therefore eschew categorization.

Glossary Actus Tragicus Israel’s first comics collective. It was founded in 1995 by Rutu Modan, Yirmi Pinkus, Itzik Rennert, and Ephrat Beloosesky. Beloosesky would later leave the collective and be replaced by Batia Kolton and Mira Friedmann. Actus Tragicus was designed to elevate the medium of graphic storytelling within Israel, and to gain international exposure and readership by participating in the yearly Angoulême Comics Festival. To do so, it selfpublished the artists’ work, being involved in all stages of design and printing. Between 1995 and 2007, the collective published nine English-language anthologies featuring original works and, in the case of Jetlag, adaptations of Israeli author Etgar Keret’s short stories. Anne Frank Holocaust victim who was born in 1929 in Frankfurt, Germany. Anne and her family fled Germany to the Netherlands after the Nazi party was elected to power in Germany. The diary that Anne kept while living in a secret annex in Amsterdam is one of the most important Holocaust-era texts because of Anne’s willingness to openly reflect on her experiences and feelings as her life becomes increasingly restricted. Anne and her family were captured in August 1944 and Anne was first sent to Auschwitz before being transported to Bergen-Belsen. Anne died in winter 1945, likely from typhus. Anti-Semitism Refers to the persecution and discrimination against Jews. In Medieval Christian Europe, Jews were often the targets of violence and oppression for religious reasons; their refusal to accept the divinity of Jesus alongside Christian doctrine that blamed Jews for Jesus’s death led to widespread incidents of persecution. With the rise of nationalism in the late eighteenth century and the concomitant rejection of religion as the framework that guided society, anti-Jewish persecution shifted away from being grounded in religious rationales and instead shifted to being based on genetic or racial factors. As most clearly evidenced in the Nazi-perpetrated Holocaust, Jews were categorized as subhuman because of a belief that, genetically, they were inferior. Ashkenazim Historically, the term referred to diaspora Jews who lived in western Germany and northern France in the Middle Ages. By the end of the Middle Ages, Ashkenazi Jews moved eastward into the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in Eastern Europe. Due to anti-Semitism, many Ashkenazi Jews moved out of Europe to New York or Palestine in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The Holocaust decimated much of Europe’s remaining Ashkenazi population. In the years since the Holocaust, Ashkenazi Jews can be found in diaspora Jewish communities around the world.

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Auschwitz The most infamous Holocaust concentration camp. Located in Poland, Auschwitz was opened by the Nazis in 1940 and was operated until it was liberated by the Soviet Union in 1945. Over 1.3 million inmates, the majority of whom were Jews, were interned at Auschwitz, with at least 1.1 million people killed at the site. Autography Neologism coined by Gillian Whitlock (2006). Autography is a portmanteau of the phrase autobiographical graphic novels and is used to refer to the unique ways that verbal and visual life writing provide opportunity for new ways of exploring the nature of autobiography. Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design Israel’s oldest institute of higher education and its preeminent college of art and design. It was the first Israeli school to offer courses in comic book and graphic novel production. Under the tutelage of Michel Kichka, the school became an incubator that trained many of the country’s foremost graphic novelists, including Rutu Modan. As of 2021, both Kichka and Modan teach at Bezalel. Book of Esther (Megillat Esther) One of the later books of the Old Testament, the book of Esther is set during the period when Jews lived in exile in Persia in the fifth century bce. In the story, Esther, a Jewish woman, is crowned queen and she uses her power to intercede on behalf of the Jewish people to avert a decree issued by her husband King Ahasuerus that would have seen all of the Jews killed. The book is read on the holiday of Purim which celebrates the miraculous salvation of the Jewish people. Birthright Israel A privately funded international organization that sends diaspora Jews between the ages of 18–32 to Israel for a free ten-day trip. The trip is designed to introduce them to the country and its political and cultural heritages. Since the program began operating in 1999, over 750,000 participants from more than sixty-five countries have attended a Birthright trip. Braiding Technical term coined by French comics scholar Thierry Groensteen (2007), braiding requires artists to establish a “powerful semantic network … that will later be revealed as rich in narrative consequences and symbolic implications … Images [which are] physically and contextually independent, are suddenly revealed as communicating closely, in debt to one another” (158). Bubbe Yiddish word for grandmother. Diaspora Diaspora originally was exclusively used to refer to Jewish communities that were dispersed throughout the Babylonian Empire following the destruction of the First Temple in the sixth century bce. Today, diaspora has “come to be applied to almost any population or group living outside its homeland” (Story and Walker 2016: 135). For Jewish communities today, the term is used to describe Jewish communities outside of Israel. Drawn & Quarterly Independent graphic novel publishing house founded by Chris Oliveros in Montreal in 1990. The press is one of the most well known in the graphic novel industry. Many works in its catalogue—including Rutu Modan’s Exit Wounds and The Property—have garnered international acclaim. Eisner Awards One of the preeminent yearly award ceremonies that recognizes excellence in American comic-books and graphic novels. The award is named after Will Eisner in recognition of his contributions to the medium. Ethics of the Fathers (Pirkei Avot) A Mishnaic tractate that contains ethical and moral principles taught by Jewish sages from 200 bce to 200 ce.

160

GLOSSARY

Farhud A violent attack committed against Baghdad’s Jews on June 1–2, 1941. The riots resulted in over 180 Jewish deaths, 1000 Jews injured, and hundreds of Jewish homes and businesses were destroyed. First Lebanon War Military conflict between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) that took place in southern Lebanon in 1982. In September 1982, Israeli leaders permitted a group of Christian Lebanese militiamen known as the Phalange, to enter the Palestinian refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila where a massacre was committed. Israeli soldiers did not directly participate in the violence but results of the Kahan Commission, an internal Israeli report about what transpired, attributed indirect blame to the country’s leaders for failing to anticipate the massacre or for stopping it once soldiers began reporting the violence to their supervisors. Golem Mythological Jewish creature who lives in the attic of the OldNew Synagogue in Prague’s Jewish quarter. The earliest versions of the golem myth were written in the nineteenth century, but they date the golem’s creation to sixteenth-century Prague, where Jews were victims of persecution by the neighboring Christian communities. According to legend, under the direction of God, the rabbi of Prague’s Jewish community, Judah Loew, and his two assistants, built a human-like creature from mud found on the banks of the Vltava River. Loew brought the creature to life, clothed him, and named him Joseph. The golem protects the Jewish community from harm and saves the lives of many Jews in Prague when they are attacked by non-Jews. He also takes care of daily tasks around the community, such as chopping wood and hewing water. Despite the golem’s service to the community, Loew killed him either because Joseph became violent toward Jews or because the Jewish community no longer needed his services because non-Jews have stopped harming Jews. Haggadah Religious text that is used on Passover, the Jewish holiday that celebrates the exodus from Egypt. Harvey Awards Named after writer-artist Harvey Kurtzman, the Harvey Awards are one of the comic-book industry’s most important yearly award ceremonies. Winners are selected by comic-book professionals who vote in the different award categories. Hebrew Primary language used in Israel. Its characters are written from right to left. Holocaust Targeted genocide of European Jews during the Second World War. Between 1941 and 1945, six million Jews were killed in German-controlled territories. Also known as the Shoah. Israel Middle Eastern country that was founded in 1948. The country self-defines as Jewish and democratic, serving the needs of its majority Jewish population and minority Arab population. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) Israel’s national army in which all Jewish citizens are expected to serve following high school matriculation. Exemptions are made for the country’s ultra-Orthodox population and for individuals whose unique physical or psychological conditions prevent enlistment. Jobnik A non-combat soldier in the Israeli army who is relegated to desk duty. Judaism (Jew, Jewish) Oldest and smallest of the three Abrahamic religions. Members of the faith are called Jews and described as Jewish. Israel and

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the United States are the two nations with the most Jewish residents and seventeen cities in these two countries are on the list of most Jewishly populated cities in the world. LGBTQ Initialism that stands for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer. Minor literature Literary concept formulated by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (1986) that refers to works produced by minority communities in direct response to majority communities. The response is manifested linguistically using the majority language, and politically through the creation of a highly charged text that deconstructs the majority and reinforces the existence and presence of the minority community. Mizrahi Term that refers to Judeo-Arabs whose ancestors lived in North Africa, the Middle East, and Western Asia from biblical times through to the present. While often living amongst Sephardim beginning in the sixteenth century, by dint of never having lived in Spain or Portugal, Mizrahim are a different ethnic community. Today, the overwhelming majority of Mizrahim live in Israel, with only the United States also having a sizable Mizrahi population. Despite their distinct ethnic origins, Mizrahi religious practices are very similar to Sephardic religious practices and the two communities are often conjoined in the Israeli consciousness. Mutant Term used in Marvel Comics’ X-Men series to refer to individuals born with the X-gene. Those who possess the gene develop superhuman powers, most often at puberty. During Chris Claremont’s time as writer for the series, the Holocaust was written into the backstory of Magneto, and Kitty Pryde was created as a Jewish character. Postmemory Term coined by literary scholar Marianne Hirsch (2012) to refer to the ways that the descendants of victims of trauma possess a “connection to the past mediated not by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation” (5). This is a form of vicarious witnessing wherein members of the second and third generation (i.e., descendants of survivors) can make meaning of the past while remaining grounded in the present. Protocols of the Elders of Zion Anti-Semitic text purportedly written in the late 1800s by a cabal of Jewish leaders who outline their plot to take over the world. Proved a forgery by 1921, it has remained a fixture in spreading hatred of Jews in contemporary society. Pulitzer Prize A yearly American award that recognizes excellence in writing, with prizes given for journalism, musical composition, literature, poetry, and drama. Art Spiegelman’s Maus is the only graphic novel to have been awarded the prize. Retconning Creative process in which authors and artists retroactively insert details into a character’s backstory that were not included in the original narrative or write over the previously published narrative by contradicting the established facts through the insertion of new details. Retconning is an accepted practice amongst mainstream comic book publishers even as it disrupts the continuity through the insertion of competing narratives which are not always able to be synthesized together. Second Palestinian Intifada Palestinian uprising against Israel between September 2000 and February 2005 characterized by high casualties on both sides of the conflict. Palestinian suicide bombers targeted civilian sites in Israel, detonating inside restaurants and buses.

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Sephardim Jewish ethnic group referring to Jews whose ancestors lived in Spain and Portugal prior to the mass expulsions that took place in the late fifteenth century. Many Sephardic communities brought their Iberian Jewish cultural expressions into their adopted homelands in North Africa, the Middle East and, in limited numbers, America. Following the creation of the state of Israel in 1948, most of the Sephardim living in the Middle East immigrated to Israel, with others moving primarily to America or France. Srulik One of Israel’s most recognizable cartoon characters. Srulik was created in 1956 by Dosh, the pen name of Kariel Gardosh, and he appeared in Maariv, one of the country’s national newspapers. Srulik was the quintessential Israeli, much like Uncle Sam was for Americans (Helman 2011). In addition to his name which is a nickname for people named Israel, Srulik’s physical appearance and sartorial choices—a young man, sandals, and a tembel hat— position him as the epitome of Israeliness because these markers became synonymous with Israeli. Tembel hat Floppy cone-shaped hat worn by Srulik. Much like Srulik, illustrations of the tembel hat are synonymous with Israeli identity and Israeliness. Tenements Low-income apartment-style residences that populated industrialized Western cities like New York City in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Torah Hebrew term to refer to the first five books of the Old Testament. Underground comix Underground comix were first produced on American college and university campuses and in culturally diverse neighborhoods in metropolitan cities like New York and San Francisco in the second half of the 1960s. These comix challenged prevailing assumptions about the comic book genre, showcasing that graphic narratives could do more than tell fictional stories featuring superheroes. These artists produced works that were “amusing, sexually explicit, and often satirical … [it] was self-conscious, sometimes quasi-autobiographical, and utterly irreverent” (Baetens and Frey 2015: 55). Zionist Person who supports Zionism, the Jewish national and ideological right to self-determination in Israel.

Notes Chapter 1 1

Throughout this book, I refer to graphic narratives as a medium and not a genre. Like drama and poetry, telling a story in words and pictures is a medium, an expression of communication, and not a topic. Genres of graphic narratives exist, much like they do in dramas and poetry. These include the genres of graphic medicine, autobiography, gender, and of course Jewish graphic narratives. These genres employ the medium of graphic narrative to convey a story. For a fuller analysis of this distinction, see the introduction in Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey’s (2015) The Graphic Novel: An Introduction.

2

With graphic novels published in Hebrew, I identify them by their Englishlanguage titles if a translation has been published and by their Hebrewlanguage titles if a translation has not been published.

Chapter 2 1

As a work that is primarily focused on the content of graphic narratives and not on the authors of graphic narratives, I have elected to not wade too deeply into the debates on the significance that Judaism and Jewish identity played in the lives of these early comic book writers. My interest throughout this chapter and the subsequent ones is on works that make explicit reference to Jewish content. However, it is worth briefly recognizing that Danny Fingeroth (2007) makes a strong case that writers and artists were influenced by their Jewish backgrounds in how they developed characters and narratives in his Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics and the Creation of the Superhero. Conversely, in his American Comics: A History, Jeremy Dauber (2021) explains why he is not as convinced by the argument. Dauber does, however, acknowledge that the authors and artists would have experienced anti-Semitism which he sees impacting how they were sensitive in their depictions of other minorities.

2

Retconning is a creative process in which authors and artists retroactively insert details into a character’s backstory that were not included in the original narrative, or they write over the previously published narrative by

164

NOTES contradicting the established facts through the insertion of new details. Retconning is an accepted practice amongst mainstream comic book publishers like Marvel and DC Comics even as it disrupts the continuity through the insertion of competing narratives which are not always able to be synthesized together.

3

Reading Superman, and other superheroes, as metonyms for Jews (or other ethnic, religious, sexual, etc. communities) has been discouraged by Martin Lund (2015) who contends that issues of confirmation bias exist between reader and subject. He has noted that there are many examples where individuals from historically marginalized communities metaphorically locate themselves and their community’s experiences in the X-Men characters’ experiences and identities, even though the series itself (with a few exceptions) is silent on questions of this metaphoric nature.

4

Wonder Man was the subject of a lawsuit brought by DC Comics due to his similarity to Superman. Despite Eisner’s insistence that there was copyright infringement, the case was decided in DC Comics’ favor and no additional stories following the initial issue were published that featured Wonder Man.

5

Thanks go to Chris Gavaler who shared this idea with me.

6

Israel would declare independence in May 1948 following the passing of United Nations Resolution 181 and the termination of the British Mandate.

7

Instead, throughout the war years Superman fought against fictionalized versions of Germany and Japan.

8

For those less familiar with the golem’s origins, the earliest versions of the golem myth were written in the nineteenth century, but they date the golem’s creation to sixteenth-century Prague, where Jews were victims of persecution by neighboring Christian communities. Yudl Rosenberg published a full-length work about the golem’s origins in 1909 that added many previously unpublished details about the golem’s life; this version has become the template for all subsequent golem works. According to legend, under the direction of God, Prague’s Rabbi Judah Loew and two assistants built a human-like creature from mud found on the banks of the Vltava River. Employing mystical incantations, Loew brought the creature to life, clothed him, and named him Joseph. Traditionally, the golem is both mute and impotent. Some versions of the story included that Loew inscribed the name of God on the golem’s forehead or mouth. What all versions agreed upon was that Loew instructed Joseph to be his servant, bound to follow any of Loew’s requests. Joseph’s primary role is to protect the Jewish community from harm and in his capacity, he saves the lives of many Jews in Prague when they are attacked by non-Jews. He also takes care of daily tasks around the community, such as chopping wood and hewing water. These tasks reflect what David Honigsberg (1996) sees as part of the golem’s essence: “purity of purpose … a golem cannot be created for the purpose of evil” (139). Despite the golem’s service to the community, Loew ultimately chose to kill him. Elizabeth R. Baer (2012) identifies two possible reasons for why Loew did this. The first is that Joseph became violent and destructive to the Jewish community on a Sabbath when Loew forgot to put him to rest, and the second is that the Jewish community no longer needed his services because Prague’s Christians have stopped harming Jews.

NOTES

165

Regardless, the golem’s body is stored in the attic of Prague’s Old-New Synagogue, where it can be reawakened in the future if necessary. 9

It is not my interest to summarize every issue that features Jewish characters or examples of depictions of Jewishness. Instead, I aim to provide readers with a concise understanding of the shift that occurred in superhero narratives as depictions of Jews and Jewishness became more mainstream. To that end, readers will not find any references to Sabra, the Israeli mutant, who is a minor character in Marvel Comics. Similarly, I do not make mention of Ragman, a minor DC Comics character who was purposefully created as a non-Jew but was rewritten as a Jewish character in 1991. Readers interested in an analysis of Ragman’s evolution are encouraged to read Caplan (2021).

10 See Chapter 5 for detailed analyses of X-Men: Magneto Testament. 11 As a character who has undergone significant retconning over the years, a full biography of Ben Grimm is beyond the scope of this work. I have therefore included basic and rudimentary details that are consistent across most of the narratives. 12 Exceptions to this geographic trend include France’s Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat and Klezmer, Pascal Croci’s Auschwitz, and Jérémie Dres’s We Won’t See Auschwitz, England’s Carol Isaac’s The Wolf of Baghdad and Danny Noble’s Shame Pudding, Canadians Shira Spector’s Red Rock Baby Candy, Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors and Jamie Michaels and Doug Fedrau’s Christie Pitts, Argentineans Jorge Zentner and Rubén Pellejaro’s The Silence of Malka, and Italian Vittorio Giardino’s A Jew in Community Prague. These examples, while noteworthy, speak to the relative absence of a community of artists producing Jewish graphic novels. In comparison, a list of Americans who have produced Jewish graphic novels totals well over two-dozen, and a similar list of Israelis would include over twelve names. 13 Readers interested in a more detailed history of comics, cartoons, and graphic novels in Israel are encouraged to read Haworth’s (2019) first two chapters. 14 It is worth acknowledging that Hanuka won an Eisner award in 2016 for the translation of his weekly cartoon series “The Realist” which appeared in Calcalist, an Israeli newspaper that focuses on economics.

Chapter 3 1

It is important to acknowledge that what it means to live outside of Israel differs depending on the year in question. Prior to Israel’s independence in 1948, Jews would see themselves as part of the diaspora because they do not live in the land of Israel, while after 1948, diaspora status is conferred because of not living in the state of Israel (except for a small subset of diaspora Jews who do not recognize Israel as a national entity and instead see it solely as a religious entity). Whereas the former distinction is tied

166

NOTES solely to religious and historical connections to the land, the latter also recognizes nationalist connections to the land. While all of the Jewish graphic narratives that have been published about diasporic Jewish communities were produced after Israel’s founding, not all of the stories are set after Israel’s independence in 1948 and therefore, while characters set in works post-1948 could immigrate to Israel because of Israel’s openimmigration policy to global Jewry, characters set in stories before 1948 could not always migrate to Israel due to varying political, economic, religious, and cultural policies and considerations.

­2

See Chapter 2 for a detailed overview of the legend of the golem.

3 In The Quest for Jewish Identity and Religious Belief in the Graphic Novel, Stephen E. Tabachnick (2014) includes examples of graphic adaptations of biblical books like R. Crumb’s The Book of Genesis Illustrated. I have chosen to not include it (and others like it) not because Crumb isn’t Jewish by religion. Rather, I do not see in his graphic novel an example of a Jewish graphic narrative and instead, I locate in Crumb’s adaptation an interest in a religious work irrespective of its Jewish content. The same intentions cannot be said for the religious graphic adaptations that are considered in this section, all of which make use of Hebrew and weave Jewishly oriented content into their graphic narratives. 4

Soltes is referring to the Jewish custom to become inebriated on the holiday of Purim. He equates Waldman’s intense and disorienting graphic novel to the experience of being drunk.

Chapter 4 1

Excluding religious graphic novels, over 35 percent of the Jewish graphic narratives listed in the appendix are graphic memoirs.

2

I will return to mixed media and provide an additional example of its use in Jewish graphic novels in my analysis of Ilana Zeffren’s Sipur Varod [Pink Story] which can be found in Chapter 5.

3

The irony, of course, is that Pekar is also publicly calling attention to the experience by publishing about it in the graphic novel as opposed to speaking privately with Stadtmauer about how he felt hurt.

4

Examples of schools where Maus has been used in classroom learning include University of Pennsylvania, University of Hawaii, University of Oregon, California State University (Northridge), Kansas State University, University of Maryland, and Boston University.

­5

For example, Florian Groß taught it in a course in the American Studies program at the Leibniz University of Hannover.

6

Examples of schools that have offered Jewish graphic novel courses include Washington University in St. Louis, University of Texas, Washington University, University of California (Santa Barbara), Lehigh University, and Rutgers University.

NOTES

167

Chapter 5 1

Kelley (2010) subsequently published an article in SANE journal: Sequential Art Narrative in Education about the merits of using Magneto Testament in classroom settings.

2

I would be remiss in not pointing out that Werbe (2019) does not read Magneto Testament as a graphic narrative about Magneto. Instead, she argues that the text is so universal in its depictions of Holocaust experiences that “the specificity of what makes Magneto Magneto is lost” (312). I am not convinced by this argument and, as I have pointed out in my analysis, there are subtle nods to Magneto that do place the text as an origin story that tries to make his future choices more understandable.

3

The state does recognize common law partnerships and it also post-facto recognizes same-sex marriages that were conducted outside of the state. As well, following successful lobbying by the LGBTQ community, common law partnerships do also allow LGBTQ couples access to employmentrelated extended health care benefits.

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Index Aarons, Victoria 5, 52–3, 55–6, 58 Abie the Agent (Hershfield) 19 Action Comics (Siegel and Shuster) 18–19 Actus Tragicus 44–5 Adler, Silvia and Galia Yanoshevsky 118–20 The Adventures of Yaakov and Isaac (Kubert) 84 “Aftershock” (Charka) 62–3 Algeria 75–6, 100 American Jewish literature 4–6 Angoulême Comics Festival 41, 44 Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Authorized Graphic Biography (Jacobson and Colón) 59, 115 Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Adaptation (Folman and Polonsky) 59, 104, 113–16 anti-Semitism see also Holocaust in diaspora 19, 28, 37, 42, 68–75, 104 Holocaust 18, 23–5, 51–60, 106–16, 122–3 Apocalypse (character) 109 Arabs see also Palestinians 22, 26, 149–50, 153 Atlas Comics 19, 24 “Atrocity Story” (Chapman and Reinman) 24 Auschwitz see also Holocaust 28, 30–1, 50, 55, 106–10, 112, 125, 145–7 autobiography see autographics and graphic memoir autographics see also graphic memoir 85–9, 144–53 Baer, Max 71–2 Baetens, Jan and Hugo Frey 7–10, 34

Baghdad 94–5 Baskind, Samantha and Ranen OmerSherman 2, 11–13 Batman (character) 19–20, 25 Battlefield 24 Batwoman (character) see also Kate Kane 32 Bechdel, Alison 8, 40 Belinfante, Judith C. E. 50–1 Belonging (Krug) 12 ­Ben Grimm (character) see also The Thing 31–2, 165 n.11 Ben-Gurion, David 119–20 Berlin 73, 106–8 Berlin (Lutes) 12 Beyond the Line (Charka) 62–3, 104 Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design 35, 43, 144 “A Bintel Brief” 130 A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in Old New York (Finck) 43, 73, 130–3 Birthright Israel 65, 148–51, 153 Blumenfeld, Tamar 63–4 The Book of Sarah (Lightman) 82–4 Cahan, Abraham (character) 130–3 Cahan, Abraham (historical figure) 130 Can’t We Talk About Something More Pleasant? (Chast) 87–9 Capp, Al 19 Captain America (character) 19, 21 Cates, Isaac 6–10 Chabon, Michael 4–5 Charka, Shay 62–3, 104 Chast, Roz 87–9 Christie Pits (Michaels and Fedrau) 71–3 Christie Pits riots 71 Chute, Hillary 40, 58, 110

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“City of Slaves” (Kweskin) 24 Claremont, Chris 27–8, 30–1, 107 color (uses of) 8, 86–7, 89, 99, 116, 122, 127, 140, 145 concentration and death camps see Auschwitz; Holocaust A Contract with God (Eisner) 6–7, 10, 17, 36–8, 42, 101, 105 Corman, Leela 43 Crumb, Robert 34, 166 n.3 Dana International 117 Dancing at the Pity Party (Feder) 76–7 dating see relationships Dauber, Jeremy 30, 69, 163 n.1 Davar 22 Davis, Vanessa 87, 89–90, 96 DC Comics 18, 21, 25, 27, 32, 163–4 n.2, 164 n.4, 165 n.9 Der Forverts 130–1 Deutsch, Barry 84, 139–44 Deutsch, Jessica Tamar 78–80 di Giandomenico, Carmine 31, 106–12 The Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu (Joly) 69 diaspora (Jewish) 68–9 diaspora experience (depictions in graphic narratives) 42–3 adjusting to new life 73–5 anti-Semitism 69–73 cultural richness and diversity of Jewish life 75–6 economics 127–30 relationship with Israel 65–6, 149, 153 ­religious life 36–7 ritual observance 76–7 social and cultural obstacles 130–3 Doctor Occult 18 Dosh 22 Eastern Color Printing (ECP) 17–18 EC Comics 24–5 Egypt 19, 79, 138 Eisner Awards 44–5, 96, 121, 165n14 Eisner & Iger Studio 20

Eisner, Will 6–7, 19–20, 35–43 A Contract with God 6, 36–7, 42, 74, 101 in education 101–2, 104 The Plot 69–71, 104 The Spirit 6, 20 Elisha the son of Avuyah (Rabbinic figure) 79–80 Englander, Nathan 4–5 Esther (biblical figure) 133–4, 136–8 Esther, book of 77–9, 133–8 Ethics of the Fathers 78–9 Exit Wounds (Modan) 12, 44–5, 63, 93–4, 102–3 Falafel with Hot Sauce (Kichka) 61–2, 86, 145 Famous Funnies 18 Famous Funnies: A Carnival of Comics 18 Fantastic Four (characters) 19, 28, 31–3 Farhud 94–5 Farm 54 (Seliktar and Seliktar) 103 fathers Holocaust 38, 53, 55, 91, 107, 110, 121, 145–8 relationship with children 8, 26, 38, 55, 86, 88, 92, 100–2, 121, 128, 145–8 Feder, Tyler 76–7 femininity see also gender 83, 96–7, 138–40 Ferris, Emil 59–60 Finck, Liana 43, 73, 75, 96, 130–3 Finger, Bill 19 Fingeroth, Danny 11, 163 n.1 Fink, Uri 21, 35, 43, 145 First Lebanon War 45, 61, 67 Flying Couch (Kurzweil) 43, 47–50, 55–8, 147–8 Folman, Ari Anne Frank’s Diary 59, 104, 113–16 Waltz with Bashir 44–5, 61, 93–4, 97–8, 102–3 France 50–2 Frank, Anne 58–9, 113–15 Freaky – The Most Stoned Children’s Magazine in Israel 35

INDEX

183

Gaines, Maxwell 17–18 Gardosh, Kariel see Dosh ­gender see also femininity; masculinity 82–4, 96–8 Gender and Sexuality in Israeli Graphic Novels (Reingold) 13, 97 The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust (Hirsch) 91 Germany 18, 21, 56–8, 73, 107 Geva, Dudu 35, 43 Gidi Gezer (character) 22 Glidden, Sarah 43, 65, 87, 96, 102–3, 148–53 Goebbels, Joseph 21 “The Golem” (Bernstein and Kubert) 24 The Golem (character) 26–7 The Golem’s Mighty Swing (Chabon) 42 Goldberg, Leah 22 Goldberg, Myla 4–5 Golden Haggadah 138 golem (mythological figure) 24, 25–7, 32, 42, 74 Gonshak, Henry 50, 113, 115 gouache 50–1 grandparents 4, 12, 27, 47–8, 56–8, 91–2, 121–2, 131–3 graphic memoir see also autographics diaspora 76, 81, 83–4, 94–7 features and uses 34, 40, 85–90, 96–7, 112 Holocaust 12, 40, 43, 47, 49, 54–6, 81–3, 86, 112, 121–2, 144–8 humor 87–9 Israel 43, 61, 66, 86–7, 91–2, 116–20, 148–53 graphic novel (definitions) 6–9 Green Line 151 Gurs 51–2

Hanuka, Asaf 44–5, 60, 91–2, 165 n.14 Harvey Awards 41 Haworth, Kevin 22, 35, 43–4, 90–1, 122, 124–5 HaYehudi HaAravi (Hanuka) 45, 91–2 Hebrew 21–2, 45, 50, 78–9, 81, 90–2, 98, 116, 120, 134, 145 Hereville (Deutsch) 84, 139–44 heritage trip 121, 124–5, 146 Hershfield, Harry 19 Herzl, Theodor 118 Hescher, Achim 8–10, 13 Hirsch, Marianne 55, 91, 95, 147 Hitler, Adolf 21, 53, 71–2, 107, 146 Holocaust appropriateness of representation 53, 56 burden of history and memory 38, 59, 144–8 commemoration 109–10, 125 and education 101–4 fiction 28, 30–1, 59–60, 106–12 graphic narratives 10, 24–5, 50–60, 106–16, 120–6, 144–8 ­intergenerational transmission see also postmemory 36, 38, 43, 47–8, 54–6, 86, 91 and Israel 103–4, 123–7 and mental health 51, 113–14 preserving history and memory of 40, 43, 47–8, 52, 58, 91, 144–8 testimony 48–9, 55–6, 58–60, 81–2, 145, 148 “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (Oksman) 13, 96 How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (Glidden) 43, 65–6, 87, 103, 148–53 The Hulk (character) 25–6 humor 87–9, 148 Hungary 81

Haggadah 79–80, 138 Haman (biblical figure) 78, 133–4, 137–8

If This Is a Man (Levi) 107 Iger, Jerry 20 illuminated manuscripts 134, 138

Friedmann, Mira 44 Fun Home (Bechdel) 8

184

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The Illustrated Pirkei Avot: A Graphic Novel of Jewish Ethics (Deutsch) 78–9, 138 Impact 24–5 In a Relationship (Blumenfeld) 63–4 In the Shadow of No Towers (Spiegelman) 8, 85–6 The Incredible Hulk (Thomas) 25 Israel (country) 25, 66, 103, 116–17, 121–2, 150 Israel-focused graphic narratives 10, 14 criticism of government 3, 65, 97–100, 149–50 depictions of army 61–3, 66, 97–8 deconstruction of gender hegemonies 97–8 and education 102–3, 104 history and development of tradition 21–2, 35, 43–5, 90–1 Holocaust 122–7 Israel-diaspora relationship 43, 47–9, 65–6, 87 by Israelis 61–4, 86, 91–2, 97–8, 116–27 and memoir 61–3, 65–6, 86–7, 91–2, 97–100, 116–20, 148–53 minority communities 45, 116–20 mistreatment of Arabs 45, 61–3, 65 by non-Israelis 65–6, 87, 99–100, 148–53 trauma, terror, and violence 12, 26, 44, 63, 66 Itoneynu l’Ktanim 21 Jacobson, Sid and Ernie Colón 59, 115 Jetlag (Keret and Actus) 44 The Jew of New York (Katchor) 43 Jewish diaspora see diaspora experience Jewish graphic narratives (definitions) 9–13 Jewish Hero Corps (Oirich and Randall) 84 Jewish literature (definitions) 4–6 Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews (Lightman) 3, 96

Jobnik! (Libicki) 65–7 Joly, Maurice 69 Judaism (depictions of) see also Orthodox Jews and Judaism 28, 30, 34, 75–6, 79, 130, 137 Juneau, Thomas and Mira Sucharov see also Sucharov, Mira 102 ­Kane, Bob 19 Kaplan, Arie 14, 19 Katchor, Ben 43 Kate Kane (character) 32 Katin, Miriam 80–3 Keret, Etgar 44 Kichka, Michel 35, 43, 61–3, 86–7, 94, 144–8 The Kidnappers (Nadel) 90–1 Kinah Tovah (Blumenfeld) 63–4 Kirby, Jack 19–21, 28, 107 Kirsch, Adam 4–5 Kitty Pryde (character) 27–31 Klezmer: Tales of the Wild East (Sfar) 75–6, 99–100 “Kneller’s Happy Campers” (Keret) 44 Kominsky Crumb, Aline 96–7 Krigstein, Bernie 24–5, 50 Krug, Nora 12 Kubert, Joe 24–5, 84 Kurzweil, Amy 43, 47–50, 55–8, 147–8 Lambert, Josh 4, 9–10 Lee, Stan 19, 28, 107 Levi, Primo 107–8 LGBTQ (in Israel) 45, 116–20 Li’l Abner (character) 19 Libicki, Miriam 65–6, 96 A Life Force (Eisner) 10, 37 Life? Or Theatre? (Salomon) 50–1 Lightman, Sarah 3, 80, 82–3 Lutes, Jason 12 Maariv 22, 35 Maariv l’Noar 35 Magneto (character) 28, 30–1, 106–10, 112 Mahr, Eric 84, 139, 143–4 Mahrwood Press 84, 143–4 Make Me a Woman (Davis) 89 Makor Rishon 104

INDEX Man of Steel (Simonson and Bogdonove) 25 maps 56, 58, 86, 151–3 Market Day (Sturm) 43, 127–30 Marvel Comics 1, 14, 19–20, 25–7, 30–2, 106, 110–12 masculinity see also gender 83, 96–8, 136–8, 140 “Master Race” (Feldstein and Krigstein) 24–5, 50 Maus (Spiegelman) artistic style 36, 41, 52, 113 and education 101–2, 112 graphic memoir 8, 40–1, 43, 54–6, 58 importance and impact 2, 10, 24, 40, 42, 50, 52–4, 110, 113 parent-child relationships 38, 145, 148 serialization in Raw 7, 38 ­use of photographs 91–3 Max Eisenhardt (character) 106–12 McGlothlin, Erin 40, 54 McMinn County Board of Education 101 Megillat Esther (Waldman) 78–9, 133–8 memoir see graphic memoir Mendy and the Golem (Estrin and Sears) 84 MetaMaus (Spiegelman and Chute) 51–2 Michaels, Jamie and Doug Fedrau 71–3 Mickey Mauo and Eliahu (Yaffe) 21–2 Mickey Mouse (character) 21, 51–2 “Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Internment Camp” (Rosenthal) 51–2 Mihā ilescu, Dana 48, 60, 132–3 minor literature (Guattari and Deleuze) 119–20 Mirka (character) 84, 139–40, 143–4 Miron, Dan 5–6 Mishna 78–80 mixed media 53, 90–1, 117 Mizrahim (Judeo-Arabs) 45 Modan, Rutu 43–5, 60 Exit Wounds 12, 44, 63, 93, 102–3

185

The Property 45, 102, 120–7 “The Monolith” (Gray, Palmiotti, and Winslade) 27 “Moo Goo Gaipan” (Kominsky Crumb) 96–7 Mordecai (biblical figure) 136–7 Moses (biblical figure) 19 mourning see also shiva 76–7, 83, 98, 126, 134, 147 muselmen 108–9 My Favorite Thing Is Monsters (Ferris) 59–60 Nadel, Elisheva 22, 90–1 Nagdila: A Tale of the Golden Age: Shmuel HaNagid (Mahr) 84 National Allied Publications 18 Navon, Arieh 22 Nazism see also Holocaust and comic books 21, 24–5, 27–8, 30–1 and graphic memoir 41, 47, 50–1, 81–2 146 Nazi flag 71, 81–2 Nazi Germany 18, 106–7 Nazi party 12, 24, 58–9, 71–2, 81, 138 persecution of Jews 4, 23–4, 30–1, 59, 69, 81–2, 108–10, 113, 123 146 Need More Love (Kominsky Crumb) 96 New York City 20, 37, 41, 43, 74, 89, 130–2 The New York Times 53–4, 121 The New Yorker 24, 87 Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me (Pekar and Waldman) 65, 99–100, 102 Nuremburg Laws 107 Oksman, Tahneer 13, 43, 86, 89, 96–7, 130, 133, 149–51 Orthodox Jews and Judaism 4, 84, 89, 139–40, 143–4 painting (technique) 151–3 ­Pak, Greg 31, 106–10, 112 Palestine (Sacco) 8, 103

186

INDEX

Palestinians see also Arabs conflict with Israel 8, 87, 102–3, 149–50 mistreatment of 8, 45, 61–3, 65, 97, 150, 153 positive interactions with Jews 22, 62–3, 117 Passover 62, 78–80, 138 Passover Haggadah Graphic Novel (Gorfinkel and Zadok) 78–9, 138 peace process see also Israel 66, 103, 150 Pekar, Harvey 65–6, 99–100, 102–3 Pellejero, Rubén 74–5, 165n12 Persepolis (Satrapi) 8, 86 photographs 22, 90–5 Pinkus, Yirmi 44 Pizzeria Kamikaze (Keret and Hanuka) 44 The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (Eisner) 69–71, 104 Poland 38, 45, 56, 58, 107, 109, 121–5 Polonsky, David Anne Frank’s Diary 59, 104, 113–16 Waltz with Bashir 44, 61, 93–4, 97–8, 102–3 “Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” (Klimt) 113 postmemory (Hirsch) 55, 91, 147 Prague 26–7, 164–5 n.8 The Print Mint 36 The Property (Modan) 44–5, 102–3, 120–7 The Protocols of the Elders of Zion 69–71, 104 Pulitzer Prize 4, 41–2 Rabbi Harvey (Sheinkin) 84 “Rabbinical Questions” (Charka) 62 Rabbis (depictions) 27, 37, 75–6, 79, 84, 98–100, 144 The Rabbi’s Cat (Sfar) 75–6, 100 Rabin, Itzhak 117 Rambam: The Story of Maimonides (Wein) 84 Raw 7, 38 Red Skull (character) 21

relationships dating 44, 66, 73, 108, 121, 124, 149 father-son 54–6, 86, 91–2, 145–8 grandparent-grandchild 12, 47–8, 56–8, 91–2, 120–7, 132–3 mother-daughter 47–8, 56, 76–7, 143 parents-child 19, 83, 87–9, 113–14 religious graphic narratives adaptations of sacred literature 77–80, 166n3 texts inspired by sacred literature 80–4, 133–8 texts that target religious readers 84, 143–4 Rennert, Itzik 44 retcon 18, 28, 30–1, 106–7 Romani 31, 108 Rosenfeld, Shalom 22 ­Rosenthal, Horst 50–2 Roth, Laurence 38, 42–3, 84, 143–4 Royal, Derek Parker 11, 13 Rucka, Greg 32 Sabra and Shatila 61, 97 Sacco, Joe 8, 40, 103, 112 Sadeh, Pinhas 90 Safe Area Goražde (Sacco) 112 Safran Foer, Jonathan 4–5 Salomon, Charlotte 50–1 Sarah (biblical figure) 83 Satrapi, Marjane 8, 40, 86 Schmeling, Max 71–2 “The Scream” (Munch) 113 second generation see also Holocaust; graphic memoir 54–6, 60 145, 147–8 Second Generation: Things I Didn’t Tell My Father (Kichka) 86–7, 144–8 Second Palestinian Intifada 12, 44, 63, 66 Second World War 4, 21, 25, 27, 36, 57, 71, 121–6 secular Jews 12, 32, 149, 151 Seliktar, Galit and Gilad 103 Sephardic 75

INDEX sex 32, 34, 66, 73, 89, 110, 121 sexual abuse 27, 59–60 sexuality and sexual identity 32, 96–7, 116–20, 138–9 Sfar, Joan 38, 75–6, 99–100 Sheena, Queen of the Jungle (character) 20 Sheinkin, Steve 84 Sherlock Holmes (character) 69–70 shiva see also mourning 76–7 Shmuel HaNagid 144 shtetl 127–8, 130 Shuster, Joe 18–20 Siegel, Jerry 18–20, 25 The Silence of Malka (Zentner and Pellejaro) 74–5 Simon, Joe 19, 21 Singer, Bryan 109, 112 Sipur Varod (Zeffren) 45, 116–20 Soltes, Ori Z. 78, 134–5, 138, 166 n.4 Sonderkommando 106–8, 112 Spider-Man (character) 1, 19 Spiegelman, Art 7, 41–2 Maus 2, 7, 10, 24, 35–6, 38, 40–1, 50–6, 91–3, 101–2, 110, 112–13, 145–8 In the Shadow of No Towers 8, 85–6 The Spirit (character) 19–20, 36 The Spirit (Eisner) 6 Srulik (character) 22 stereotypes 20, 42, 96–7, 124, 140 Strange Tales (Friedrich and Wein) 26 Sturm, James 42–3, 127–30 Sucharov, Mira 102–3 ­superheroes 1–2, 6–8, 10, 18–22, 25–8, 30–4, 38, 84, 106, 144 suicide 51, 59, 101, 107–8, 147 suicide bombings 44, 150 Superman (character) 18–19, 20–1, 25, 164 n.3 survivor testimony see also Holocaust 48–9, 52, 55–6, 58–60, 101, 125, 145, 148 swastika see also Nazism 21, 71, 73, 81 Szyk, Arthur 138

187

Tabachnick, Stephen E. Holocaust graphic narratives 54–5, 110, 112 Jewish graphic narrative definition 10–13 Market Day 127–8 Religious graphic narratives 78, 84, 134, 139–40, 166 n.3 Talmud 5, 77, 137 teaching graphic narratives 100–4, 110, 112 tembel hat 22 testimony see also survivor testimony 35, 40, 58, 110, 112 The Thing (character) see also Ben Grimm 28, 31–4 third-generation see also graphic memoir; Holocaust 47–8, 55–6, 60 Timely Comics 19, 21 Timna (Rabbinic figure) 137–8 To the Heart of the Storm (Eisner) 10, 36, 41–2 Torah 32, 64, 77, 81–3, 134 Toronto 1, 71–3 travelogue 148 Tunnels (Modan) 45, 120 underground comix 6–7, 34–8 Unterzakhn (Corwin) 43 Uri Muri (character) 22 visual metaphor 41, 87 Waldman, JT 38 Megillat Esther 77–8, 79, 83, 133–8 Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me 65, 99–100, 102–3 Waltz with Bashir (Folman and Polonsky) 44–5, 61, 93–4, 97–8, 102–3 Ware, Chris 8, 40 Warsaw 121–5 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 25, 145 We Are on Our Own (Katin) 80–2 Wein, Berel 84 West Bank 45, 61–2, 65, 104, 151–3 Wheeler-Nicholson, Malcolm 18

188

INDEX

Whistle (character) see Willow Zimmerman Whitlock, Gillian 85–6 Wildenberg, Harry 17–18 Williams III, J. H. 32 Willow Zimmerman, (character) (Lockhart and Preitano) 32, 34 Wonder Man (character) 19, 164 n.4 Wonder Woman (character) 21 X-Men (characters) 19, 27–31, 106–12 ­X-Men (Singer) 109–10

X-Men: Apocalypse (Singer) 109–10, 112 X-Men: Magneto Testament (Pak and di Giandomenico) 31, 106–12 Xavier-Magneto dynamic 28 Yaffe, Emannuel 21 Zakarin, Jordan 109–10 Zbeng! (Fink) 35 Zeffren, Ilana 45, 116–20 Zentner, Jorge 74–5, 165 n.12

189

190

191

192

193

194