Studies in Comics - Volume 6, Issue 2, 2015

‘Contemporary comics by Jewish women’ brings together essays, interviews and original artwork by or about Jewish women comics artists. In this Introduction we reflect on our own approach investment in this project, and in so doing also explain the scope and content of this special issue.

Leela Corman’s 2012 graphic novel Unterzakhn is a historical work that depicts the difficult lives of the Feinberg family, Jewish immigrants living in the tenements of New York at the turn on the twentieth century. Focusing on the lives of the Feinberg women, Corman positions their particular bodily vulnerabilities as central for understanding Jewish female embodiment more generally, especially in the context of immigration and integration. In this article, I examine two different but interrelated ways that Corman utilizes the comics form to explore vulnerability in terms of bodily identity formation: in her various methods of ‘visualizing silence’, she shows how bodily and familial trauma become imprinted and muted in the body; and through her careful deployment of drawing Jewish stereotypes, she illustrates the effects of the ‘marked’ body within the majority culture. In Unterzakhn, these artistic strategies display the highly complex internal and external dynamics of bodily life.

‘Contested spaces in graphic narrative’ argues that spatiality in graphic narratives is conducive to restructuring fraught landscapes. Through an exploration of the contested homelands of the Israeli Palestinian conflict in Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik!: An American Girl’s Adventures in the Israeli Army (2008), this article argues that graphic narratives have a unique ability to depict geographical spaces through lines, panels and various artistic devices. Like maps, such lines and boxes on a page physically create borders and represent corresponding location as bounded; they may represent existing political divisions, or they may subvert and push state-drawn boundaries. These devices within the graphic form open up a recognition of the ways that boundaries obfuscate the multifaceted representations of identity that include multiple nationalisms, ideological discontinuities, as well as human-centred spatial connections. Graphic form, then, becomes a landscape that allows for a complex visual understanding of affective attachment to the state through possibilities of graphic, bordered texts that cut across traditional understandings of territoriality and occupation. Libicki’s status as an outsider and as a woman in the Israel Defense Forces emphasizes her position of precarity in traditional conceptions of the Biblical Jewish homeland as well as in Israel, the modern Jewish state.

This article traces the intertextual relationships between Anya Ulinich’s graphic novel Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel, Bernard Malamud’s short story ‘The Magic Barrel’ and a number of works by Philip Roth. Through these relationships and her construction of a number of variations on what Miriam Libicki has called a ‘gonzo self’ Ulinich explores the tensions between life and art, fact and fiction, and autobiography and the novel, mediating the aesthetic imperatives of what Roth has called the ‘written world’ and the ethical obligations of the ‘unwritten world’ in order to arrive at an authentic sense of herself as an artist and writer.

My article examines how Liana Finck’s 2014 graphic narrative A Bintel Brief contributes to historical studies and artistic representations of the early twentieth-century encounter between Eastern European and American values by her engagement with some letters of Jewish immigrants to the United States addressed to The Forward and her pondering on their relevance in the present. I am particularly interested in how the combination of words and images for the eleven letters included in the narrative adds new possible angles to interpret the Bintel Brief column that has been the focus of a considerable number of scholarly studies. I contend that Finck’s graphic narrative uses history as a form of confession about the dynamics between past and present lifestyles of Jewish Americans differently from the majority of Jewish women authors of comics primarily concerned with the representation of their own personal experiences. Finck brings history and her persona together by including in the narrative a fictionalized version of herself who imaginatively meets The Forward’s legendary editor Abraham Cahan in the present, giving rise to an intriguing dynamics I will examine in this article. She thereby seems to pan out a possible sub-category with its own specifics within Kaminer and Lightman’s broader umbrella-term of Jewish women’s confessional comics.

Jerusalem is the frontline and a microcosm of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In recent years, comic artists have turned their attention to the Middle East, including the ‘Holy City’. Scholars, however, have yet to study how comics engage with life in Jerusalem, in particular the relationships between Arabs and Jews. In this article, I will take on this critical oversight and explore how Mira Friedman’s ‘Independence Day’ (2008), Sarah Glidden’s How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2010) and Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik!: An American Girl’s Adventures in the Israeli Army (2008) engage with the complicated social situation. The philosopher, Emmanuel Lévinas, has argued that face-to-face encounters are the basis for recognizing the Other as human and for feeling responsibility towards him or her.1 In this article I show that we rarely see the Other’s face in the corpus of the Jewish comic artists I discuss here. Instead, the Arab presence is brought into the texts by way of urban elements such as the Dome of the Rock, media remediations or indistinct, distant figures. This highlights that comics are closely tied into the current situation between Israelis and Palestinians, where fear and separation rule to a level where the Arab Other – whether Christian or Muslim – of the Jews of Jerusalem is almost invisible.

This article focuses on several representations of Jewishness from American underground cartoonist Aline Kominsky Crumb’s memoir Need More Love (2007) and several more recent publications. In her work, Kominsky Crumb makes repeated references to almost every stereotypical aspect of the Jewish American middle-class community in which she was raised, from the accent to the clothes, social mannerisms, and even preferred type of plastic surgery. In conversation with Federica Clementi, Riv Ellen-Prell, and others, I read the comics collected in Need More Love in conjunction with several of the author’s photographs in order to revisit the debate on the dynamic between comics and photography as modes of self-representation. I argue that, by narrowing down the potential of comics to what the medium can do as caricature, Kominsky Crumb connects to a long tradition of social satire and self-disparaging humour. However, by including photographs of herself in her work, she not only pays tribute to the more traditional norms of life-writing, but also invites an interpretation of her cartoon self as a masquerade of Jewish femininity staged upon a body whose vulnerability complicates the binary logic of the stereotype.

Sarah Leavitt is an artist, cartoonist and writer, and a member of the Creative Writing Department at the University of British Columbia. Her comics and prose works have appeared in magazines, newspapers and anthologies in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom. Tangles: A Story about Alzheimer’s, My Mother and Me (2010) is her first book. The following interview was conducted through Skype on 19 May 2015. It discusses the book, its making, reception and translation.

Ariel Schrag’s 2014 lecture at the University of Chicago’s Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality, entitled, ‘How to write anything’, is emblematic of the artist herself. She is remarkably skilled in all genres, deftly moving from illustrating and writing acclaimed graphic novels like Awkward and Definition (2008), Potential (2008) and Likewise (2009), editing Stuck in the Middle (2007), writing television scripts for the L-Word and How to Make It in America, and composing her latest creation, her first novel, Adam (2014). In the following Skype interview, conducted with Andrea Greenbaum on 9 December 2014, Ariel Schrag explores Jewish identity, artistic habits, and getting ‘lucky’.

This comic strip examines the gendered use of the word ‘confessional’. The strip refers particularly to the ‘Graphic Details’ exhibition title and the meaning of ‘confessional’ within Jewish culture.

I was invited to visually document and respond to the ‘Graphic Details Symposium’ at JW3. Through my association with Laydeez do Comics, who had an evening slot at the symposium, I felt an intimate and personal connection to the subject matter and speakers. For this work, my process involved live drawing of the speakers and their slides. Also included are responses to the illustrative works associated with the event, the exhibition newspaper/catalogue and ‘Graphic Details’ text, edited by Sarah Lightman. For me, drawing them allows me to absorb a different aspect of the work. The themes that resonated with me from the symposium were those of memory and vulnerability. Responding to these themes through the fragility and immediacy of live drawing, and the nostalgia and immediacy of Polaroid photographs ties in with my drawing style of capturing a moment.

This cartoon was created after I attended the ‘Graphic Details’ symposium at JW3 in November 2014. I felt very inspired after I met so many cartoonists I admired in person and heard them speak about their work and I felt, in Jewish cartoon terms, I had been touched by the holy of holies.

An exhibition celebrating donkeys in the Negev makes a cartoonist wonder whose home it really is.

Harry was born 23 December 2013. Beautiful, loud, hungry. Clock of my day. Emperor of my household. At a conference on motherhood in London in June 2015 I heard Bracha Ettinger speak about ‘the three shocks of maternality’. It helped me to understand how much I am still recovering from my new reality.