Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives

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
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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
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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
viii 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 168
Index 181
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 Nazi-
controlled 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 Spider-
Man 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
2 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
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 5
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
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 7
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 long-
form 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 twenty-
first 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 non-
fictional 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
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
INTRODUCTION 9
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
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
INTRODUCTION 11
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
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 Jewish-
Israeli identity and what it means to live in Israeli society at the height of the
Second Palestinian Intifada.
INTRODUCTION 13
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 self-
studies 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.
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
INTRODUCTION 15
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.
16
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 twenty-
first 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
(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
HISTORICAL OVERVIEW 19
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
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 non-
existent” (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 twelve-
year 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.
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
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.
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
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
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 eight-
page 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
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 self-
identify 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
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
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
FIGURE 2.2 Kitty Pryde describing being a victim of anti-Semitism. Copyright

Marvel Comics, All-New X-Men #13, 2013.
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
[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, Nazi-
like 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
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
FIGURE 2.3 The Thing getting married under a Jewish wedding canopy. Copyright
Marvel Comics, Fantastic Four #5, 2019.
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
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
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
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,
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.
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.
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
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
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 depression-
era 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
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.
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
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.
46
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 first-
hand 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
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
SOCIAL AND CULTURAL IMPACT 49
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
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.
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
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
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 anti-
Holocaust 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,
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)
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
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
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.
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
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
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 third-
generation 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
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
Sauce by left-wing Israeli Michel Kichka (2019) and Beyond the Line by right-
wing 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.
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 [Green-
Eyed 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
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.
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 Jewish-
Israelis 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 self-
destructive” (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,
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.
FIGURE 3.5 Miriam overwhelmed by Israeli news reports. Copyright Miriam

Libicki, Jobnik! Vol 1, 2008, 63.
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,
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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 non-
Jews 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
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 non-
traditional 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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
J 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
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 anti-
government 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.
CRITICAL QUESTIONS 87
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
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
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 (ultra-
Orthodox 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).
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
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
in the 1930s in British Mandatory Palestine and one set in the early twenty-
first 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
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
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.
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.
How Are Gender Constructs Engaged with in

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]
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 stop-
motion 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
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

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 twenty-
first 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
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 twentieth-
century 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
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
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 eighth-
grade 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
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
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
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 religious-
nationalist 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
A 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.
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
KEY TEXTS 107
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
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 text-
bubbles 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
KEY TEXTS 109
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 co-
worker 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
“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 twelve-
page curriculum guide for use in middle and high school literature, history, and
art classes. Brian Kelley, the guide’s author, suggests that Magneto Testament
KEY TEXTS 111
FIGURE 5.1 Public humiliation for having sex with a German. Copyright Marvel
Comics, X-Men: Magneto Testament.
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.
KEY TEXTS 113
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
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
KEY TEXTS 115
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
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.
KEY TEXTS 117
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
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 Ben-
Gurion, 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.
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 non-
Jewish 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.
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
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 non-
Jewish 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
KEY TEXTS 125
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–non-
Jewish 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
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
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
KEY TEXTS 129
FIGURE 5.6 Mendleman looking at the sunset and visualizing a rug. Copyright

James Sturm. Used with permission from Drawn & Quarterly.
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.
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-first-
century 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
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
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
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,
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 non-
kosher 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 otherwise-
realistic 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.

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
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 post-
Holocaust 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 second-
generation 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
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.
KEY TEXTS 147
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
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
KEY TEXTS 149
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 right-
wing 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
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
KEY TEXTS 151
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.
FIGURE 5.14 Glidden’s map of Israel. Copyright Sarah Glidden. Used with

permission from Drawn & Quarterly.
KEY TEXTS 153
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 human-
rights 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
APPENDIX 155
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
156 APPENDIX
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
APPENDIX 157
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 self-
published 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.
GLOSSARY 159
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 Old-
New 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
GLOSSARY 161
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.
162 GLOSSARY
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 English-
language titles if a translation has been published and by their Hebrew-
language 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 open-
immigration 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 employment-
related extended health care benefits.
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Index
Aarons, Victoria 5, 52–3, 55–6, 58 Baghdad 94–5

Abie the Agent (Hershfield) 19 Baskind, Samantha and Ranen Omer-
Action Comics (Siegel and Shuster) Sherman 2, 11–13
18–19 Batman (character) 19–20, 25
Actus Tragicus 44–5 Battlefield 24
Adler, Silvia and Galia Yanoshevsky Batwoman (character) see also Kate
118–20 Kane 32
The Adventures of Yaakov and Isaac Bechdel, Alison 8, 40
(Kubert) 84 Belinfante, Judith C. E. 50–1
“Aftershock” (Charka) 62–3 Belonging (Krug) 12
Algeria 75–6, 100 Ben Grimm (character) see also The
American Jewish literature 4–6 Thing 31–2, 165 n.11
Angoulême Comics Festival 41, 44 Ben-Gurion, David 119–20
Anne Frank: The Anne Frank House Berlin 73, 106–8
Authorized Graphic Biography Berlin (Lutes) 12
(Jacobson and Colón) 59, 115 Beyond the Line (Charka) 62–3, 104
Anne Frank’s Diary: The Graphic Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design
Adaptation (Folman and 35, 43, 144
Polonsky) 59, 104, 113–16 “A Bintel Brief” 130
anti-Semitism see also Holocaust A Bintel Brief: Love and Longing in
in diaspora 19, 28, 37, 42, 68–75, Old New York (Finck) 43, 73,
104 130–3
Holocaust 18, 23–5, 51–60, Birthright Israel 65, 148–51, 153
106–16, 122–3 Blumenfeld, Tamar 63–4
Apocalypse (character) 109 The Book of Sarah (Lightman) 82–4
Arabs see also Palestinians 22, 26,
149–50, 153 Cahan, Abraham (character) 130–3
Atlas Comics 19, 24 Cahan, Abraham (historical figure) 130
“Atrocity Story” (Chapman and Can’t We Talk About Something
Reinman) 24 More Pleasant? (Chast) 87–9
Auschwitz see also Holocaust 28, Capp, Al 19
30–1, 50, 55, 106–10, 112, 125, Captain America (character) 19, 21
145–7 Cates, Isaac 6–10
autobiography see autographics and Chabon, Michael 4–5
graphic memoir Charka, Shay 62–3, 104
autographics see also graphic memoir Chast, Roz 87–9
85–9, 144–53 Christie Pits (Michaels and Fedrau)
71–3
Baer, Max 71–2 Christie Pits riots 71
Baetens, Jan and Hugo Frey 7–10, 34 Chute, Hillary 40, 58, 110
182 INDEX
“City of Slaves” (Kweskin) 24 Eisner, Will 6–7, 19–20, 35–43

Claremont, Chris 27–8, 30–1, 107 A Contract with God 6, 36–7, 42,
color (uses of) 8, 86–7, 89, 99, 116, 74, 101
122, 127, 140, 145 in education 101–2, 104
concentration and death camps see The Plot 69–71, 104
Auschwitz; Holocaust The Spirit 6, 20
A Contract with God (Eisner) 6–7, 10, Elisha the son of Avuyah (Rabbinic
17, 36–8, 42, 101, 105 figure) 79–80
Corman, Leela 43 Englander, Nathan 4–5
Crumb, Robert 34, 166 n.3 Esther (biblical figure) 133–4, 136–8
Esther, book of 77–9, 133–8
Dana International 117 Ethics of the Fathers 78–9
Dancing at the Pity Party (Feder) Exit Wounds (Modan) 12, 44–5, 63,
76–7 93–4, 102–3
dating see relationships
Dauber, Jeremy 30, 69, 163 n.1 Falafel with Hot Sauce (Kichka)
Davar 22 61–2, 86, 145
Davis, Vanessa 87, 89–90, 96 Famous Funnies 18
DC Comics 18, 21, 25, 27, 32, 163–4 Famous Funnies: A Carnival of
n.2, 164 n.4, 165 n.9 Comics 18
Der Forverts 130–1 Fantastic Four (characters) 19, 28,
Deutsch, Barry 84, 139–44 31–3
Deutsch, Jessica Tamar 78–80 Farhud 94–5
di Giandomenico, Carmine 31, Farm 54 (Seliktar and Seliktar) 103
106–12 fathers
The Dialogue in Hell Between Holocaust 38, 53, 55, 91, 107, 110,
Machiavelli and Montesquieu 121, 145–8
(Joly) 69 relationship with children 8, 26,
diaspora (Jewish) 68–9 38, 55, 86, 88, 92, 100–2, 121,
diaspora experience (depictions in 128, 145–8
graphic narratives) 42–3 Feder, Tyler 76–7
adjusting to new life 73–5 femininity see also gender 83, 96–7,
anti-Semitism 69–73 138–40
cultural richness and diversity of Ferris, Emil 59–60
Jewish life 75–6 Finck, Liana 43, 73, 75, 96, 130–3
economics 127–30 Finger, Bill 19
relationship with Israel 65–6, 149, Fingeroth, Danny 11, 163 n.1
153 Fink, Uri 21, 35, 43, 145
religious life 36–7 First Lebanon War 45, 61, 67
ritual observance 76–7 Flying Couch (Kurzweil) 43, 47–50,
social and cultural obstacles 130–3 55–8, 147–8
Doctor Occult 18 Folman, Ari
Dosh 22 Anne Frank’s Diary 59, 104, 113–16
Waltz with Bashir 44–5, 61, 93–4,
Eastern Color Printing (ECP) 17–18 97–8, 102–3
EC Comics 24–5 France 50–2
Egypt 19, 79, 138 Frank, Anne 58–9, 113–15
Eisner Awards 44–5, 96, 121, 165n14 Freaky – The Most Stoned Children’s
Eisner & Iger Studio 20 Magazine in Israel 35
INDEX 183
Friedmann, Mira 44 Hanuka, Asaf 44–5, 60, 91–2,

Fun Home (Bechdel) 8 165 n.14
Harvey Awards 41
Gaines, Maxwell 17–18 Haworth, Kevin 22, 35, 43–4, 90–1,
Gardosh, Kariel see Dosh 122, 124–5
gender see also femininity; HaYehudi HaAravi (Hanuka) 45, 91–2
masculinity 82–4, 96–8 Hebrew 21–2, 45, 50, 78–9, 81, 90–2,
Gender and Sexuality in Israeli 98, 116, 120, 134, 145
Graphic Novels (Reingold) 13, Hereville (Deutsch) 84, 139–44
97 heritage trip 121, 124–5, 146
The Generation of Postmemory: Hershfield, Harry 19
Writing and Visual Culture Herzl, Theodor 118
after the Holocaust (Hirsch) 91 Hescher, Achim 8–10, 13
Germany 18, 21, 56–8, 73, 107 Hirsch, Marianne 55, 91, 95, 147
Geva, Dudu 35, 43 Hitler, Adolf 21, 53, 71–2, 107, 146
Gidi Gezer (character) 22 Holocaust
Glidden, Sarah 43, 65, 87, 96, 102–3, appropriateness of representation
148–53 53, 56
Goebbels, Joseph 21 burden of history and memory 38,
“The Golem” (Bernstein and Kubert) 59, 144–8
24 commemoration 109–10, 125
The Golem (character) 26–7 and education 101–4
The Golem’s Mighty Swing fiction 28, 30–1, 59–60, 106–12
(Chabon) 42 graphic narratives 10, 24–5, 50–60,
Goldberg, Leah 22 106–16, 120–6, 144–8
Goldberg, Myla 4–5 intergenerational transmission see
Golden Haggadah 138 also postmemory 36, 38, 43,
golem (mythological figure) 24, 25–7, 47–8, 54–6, 86, 91
32, 42, 74 and Israel 103–4, 123–7
Gonshak, Henry 50, 113, 115 and mental health 51, 113–14
gouache 50–1 preserving history and memory of
grandparents 4, 12, 27, 47–8, 56–8, 40, 43, 47–8, 52, 58, 91, 144–8
91–2, 121–2, 131–3 testimony 48–9, 55–6, 58–60,
graphic memoir see also autographics 81–2, 145, 148
diaspora 76, 81, 83–4, 94–7 “How Come Boys Get to Keep
features and uses 34, 40, 85–90, Their Noses?”: Women and
96–7, 112 Jewish American Identity
Holocaust 12, 40, 43, 47, 49, 54–6, in Contemporary Graphic
81–3, 86, 112, 121–2, 144–8 Memoirs (Oksman) 13, 96
humor 87–9 How to Understand Israel in 60
Israel 43, 61, 66, 86–7, 91–2, Days or Less (Glidden) 43,
116–20, 148–53 65–6, 87, 103, 148–53
graphic novel (definitions) 6–9 The Hulk (character) 25–6
Green Line 151 humor 87–9, 148
Gurs 51–2 Hungary 81
Haggadah 79–80, 138 If This Is a Man (Levi) 107

Haman (biblical figure) 78, 133–4, Iger, Jerry 20
137–8 illuminated manuscripts 134, 138
184 INDEX
The Illustrated Pirkei Avot: A Jobnik! (Libicki) 65–7

Graphic Novel of Jewish Joly, Maurice 69
Ethics (Deutsch) 78–9, 138 Judaism (depictions of) see also
Impact 24–5 Orthodox Jews and Judaism 28,
In a Relationship (Blumenfeld) 63–4 30, 34, 75–6, 79, 130, 137
In the Shadow of No Towers Juneau, Thomas and Mira Sucharov
(Spiegelman) 8, 85–6 see also Sucharov, Mira 102
The Incredible Hulk (Thomas) 25
Israel (country) 25, 66, 103, 116–17, Kane, Bob 19
121–2, 150 Kaplan, Arie 14, 19
Israel-focused graphic narratives 10, Katchor, Ben 43
14 Kate Kane (character) 32
criticism of government 3, 65, Katin, Miriam 80–3
97–100, 149–50 Keret, Etgar 44
depictions of army 61–3, 66, 97–8 Kichka, Michel 35, 43, 61–3, 86–7, 94,
deconstruction of gender 144–8
hegemonies 97–8 The Kidnappers (Nadel) 90–1
and education 102–3, 104 Kinah Tovah (Blumenfeld) 63–4
history and development of Kirby, Jack 19–21, 28, 107
tradition 21–2, 35, 43–5, 90–1 Kirsch, Adam 4–5
Holocaust 122–7 Kitty Pryde (character) 27–31
Israel-diaspora relationship 43, Klezmer: Tales of the Wild East (Sfar)
47–9, 65–6, 87 75–6, 99–100
by Israelis 61–4, 86, 91–2, 97–8, “Kneller’s Happy Campers” (Keret) 44
116–27 Kominsky Crumb, Aline 96–7
and memoir 61–3, 65–6, 86–7, Krigstein, Bernie 24–5, 50
91–2, 97–100, 116–20, 148–53 Krug, Nora 12
minority communities 45, 116–20 Kubert, Joe 24–5, 84
mistreatment of Arabs 45, 61–3, Kurzweil, Amy 43, 47–50, 55–8, 147–8
65
by non-Israelis 65–6, 87, 99–100, Lambert, Josh 4, 9–10
148–53 Lee, Stan 19, 28, 107
trauma, terror, and violence 12, 26, Levi, Primo 107–8
44, 63, 66 LGBTQ (in Israel) 45, 116–20
Itoneynu l’Ktanim 21 Li’l Abner (character) 19
Libicki, Miriam 65–6, 96
Jacobson, Sid and Ernie Colón 59, 115 A Life Force (Eisner) 10, 37
Jetlag (Keret and Actus) 44 Life? Or Theatre? (Salomon) 50–1
The Jew of New York (Katchor) 43 Lightman, Sarah 3, 80, 82–3
Jewish diaspora see diaspora Lutes, Jason 12
experience
Jewish graphic narratives (definitions) Maariv 22, 35
9–13 Maariv l’Noar 35
Jewish Hero Corps (Oirich and Magneto (character) 28, 30–1, 106–10,
Randall) 84 112
Jewish literature (definitions) 4–6 Mahr, Eric 84, 139, 143–4
Jewish Women’s Confessional Mahrwood Press 84, 143–4
Comics in Essays and Make Me a Woman (Davis) 89
Interviews (Lightman) 3, 96 Makor Rishon 104
INDEX 185
Man of Steel (Simonson and The Property 45, 102, 120–7

Bogdonove) 25 “The Monolith” (Gray, Palmiotti, and
maps 56, 58, 86, 151–3 Winslade) 27
Market Day (Sturm) 43, 127–30 “Moo Goo Gaipan” (Kominsky Crumb)
Marvel Comics 1, 14, 19–20, 25–7, 96–7
30–2, 106, 110–12 Mordecai (biblical figure) 136–7
masculinity see also gender 83, 96–8, Moses (biblical figure) 19
136–8, 140 mourning see also shiva 76–7, 83, 98,
“Master Race” (Feldstein and 126, 134, 147
Krigstein) 24–5, 50 muselmen 108–9
Maus (Spiegelman) My Favorite Thing Is Monsters
artistic style 36, 41, 52, 113 (Ferris) 59–60
and education 101–2, 112
graphic memoir 8, 40–1, 43, 54–6, Nadel, Elisheva 22, 90–1
58 Nagdila: A Tale of the Golden Age:
importance and impact 2, 10, 24, Shmuel HaNagid (Mahr) 84
40, 42, 50, 52–4, 110, 113 National Allied Publications 18
parent-child relationships 38, 145, Navon, Arieh 22
148 Nazism see also Holocaust
serialization in Raw 7, 38 and comic books 21, 24–5, 27–8,
use of photographs 91–3 30–1
Max Eisenhardt (character) 106–12 and graphic memoir 41, 47, 50–1,
McGlothlin, Erin 40, 54 81–2 146
McMinn County Board of Education Nazi flag 71, 81–2
101 Nazi Germany 18, 106–7
Megillat Esther (Waldman) 78–9, Nazi party 12, 24, 58–9, 71–2, 81,
133–8 138
memoir see graphic memoir persecution of Jews 4, 23–4, 30–1,
Mendy and the Golem (Estrin and 59, 69, 81–2, 108–10, 113, 123
Sears) 84 146
MetaMaus (Spiegelman and Chute) Need More Love (Kominsky Crumb)
51–2 96
Michaels, Jamie and Doug Fedrau New York City 20, 37, 41, 43, 74, 89,
71–3 130–2
Mickey Mauo and Eliahu (Yaffe) 21–2 The New York Times 53–4, 121
Mickey Mouse (character) 21, 51–2 The New Yorker 24, 87
“Mickey Mouse in the Gurs Not the Israel My Parents Promised
Internment Camp” (Rosenthal) Me (Pekar and Waldman) 65,
51–2 99–100, 102
Mihā ilescu, Dana 48, 60, 132–3 Nuremburg Laws 107
minor literature (Guattari and Deleuze)
119–20 Oksman, Tahneer 13, 43, 86, 89, 96–7,
Mirka (character) 84, 139–40, 143–4 130, 133, 149–51
Miron, Dan 5–6 Orthodox Jews and Judaism 4, 84,
Mishna 78–80 89, 139–40, 143–4
mixed media 53, 90–1, 117
Mizrahim (Judeo-Arabs) 45 painting (technique) 151–3
Modan, Rutu 43–5, 60 Pak, Greg 31, 106–10, 112
Exit Wounds 12, 44, 63, 93, 102–3 Palestine (Sacco) 8, 103
186 INDEX
Palestinians see also Arabs relationships

conflict with Israel 8, 87, 102–3, dating 44, 66, 73, 108, 121, 124,
149–50 149
mistreatment of 8, 45, 61–3, 65, father-son 54–6, 86, 91–2, 145–8
97, 150, 153 grandparent-grandchild 12, 47–8,
positive interactions with Jews 22, 56–8, 91–2, 120–7, 132–3
62–3, 117 mother-daughter 47–8, 56, 76–7,
Passover 62, 78–80, 138 143
Passover Haggadah Graphic Novel parents-child 19, 83, 87–9,
(Gorfinkel and Zadok) 78–9, 138 113–14
peace process see also Israel 66, religious graphic narratives
103, 150 adaptations of sacred literature
Pekar, Harvey 65–6, 99–100, 102–3 77–80, 166n3
Pellejero, Rubén 74–5, 165n12 texts inspired by sacred literature
Persepolis (Satrapi) 8, 86 80–4, 133–8
photographs 22, 90–5 texts that target religious readers
Pinkus, Yirmi 44 84, 143–4
Pizzeria Kamikaze (Keret and Rennert, Itzik 44
Hanuka) 44 retcon 18, 28, 30–1, 106–7
The Plot: The Secret Story of the Romani 31, 108
Protocols of the Elders of Zion Rosenfeld, Shalom 22
(Eisner) 69–71, 104 Rosenthal, Horst 50–2
Poland 38, 45, 56, 58, 107, 109, 121–5 Roth, Laurence 38, 42–3, 84, 143–4
Polonsky, David Royal, Derek Parker 11, 13
Anne Frank’s Diary 59, 104, Rucka, Greg 32
113–16
Waltz with Bashir 44, 61, 93–4, Sabra and Shatila 61, 97
97–8, 102–3 Sacco, Joe 8, 40, 103, 112
“Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I” Sadeh, Pinhas 90
(Klimt) 113 Safe Area Goražde (Sacco) 112
postmemory (Hirsch) 55, 91, 147 Safran Foer, Jonathan 4–5
Prague 26–7, 164–5 n.8 Salomon, Charlotte 50–1
The Print Mint 36 Sarah (biblical figure) 83
The Property (Modan) 44–5, 102–3, Satrapi, Marjane 8, 40, 86
120–7 Schmeling, Max 71–2
The Protocols of the Elders of Zion “The Scream” (Munch) 113
69–71, 104 second generation see also
Pulitzer Prize 4, 41–2 Holocaust; graphic memoir
54–6, 60 145, 147–8
Rabbi Harvey (Sheinkin) 84 Second Generation: Things I Didn’t
“Rabbinical Questions” (Charka) 62 Tell My Father (Kichka) 86–7,
Rabbis (depictions) 27, 37, 75–6, 79, 144–8
84, 98–100, 144 Second Palestinian Intifada 12, 44,
The Rabbi’s Cat (Sfar) 75–6, 100 63, 66
Rabin, Itzhak 117 Second World War 4, 21, 25, 27, 36,
Rambam: The Story of Maimonides 57, 71, 121–6
(Wein) 84 secular Jews 12, 32, 149, 151
Raw 7, 38 Seliktar, Galit and Gilad 103
Red Skull (character) 21 Sephardic 75
INDEX 187
sex 32, 34, 66, 73, 89, 110, 121 Tabachnick, Stephen E.
sexual abuse 27, 59–60 Holocaust graphic narratives 54–5,
sexuality and sexual identity 32, 96–7, 110, 112
116–20, 138–9 Jewish graphic narrative definition
Sfar, Joan 38, 75–6, 99–100 10–13
Sheena, Queen of the Jungle Market Day 127–8
(character) 20 Religious graphic narratives 78, 84,
Sheinkin, Steve 84 134, 139–40, 166 n.3
Sherlock Holmes (character) 69–70 Talmud 5, 77, 137
shiva see also mourning 76–7 teaching graphic narratives 100–4,
Shmuel HaNagid 144 110, 112
shtetl 127–8, 130 tembel hat 22
Shuster, Joe 18–20 testimony see also survivor testimony
Siegel, Jerry 18–20, 25 35, 40, 58, 110, 112
The Silence of Malka (Zentner and The Thing (character) see also Ben
Pellejaro) 74–5 Grimm 28, 31–4
Simon, Joe 19, 21 third-generation see also graphic
Singer, Bryan 109, 112 memoir; Holocaust 47–8, 55–6,
Sipur Varod (Zeffren) 45, 116–20 60
Soltes, Ori Z. 78, 134–5, 138, Timely Comics 19, 21
166 n.4 Timna (Rabbinic figure) 137–8
Sonderkommando 106–8, 112 To the Heart of the Storm (Eisner)
Spider-Man (character) 1, 19 10, 36, 41–2
Spiegelman, Art 7, 41–2 Torah 32, 64, 77, 81–3, 134
Maus 2, 7, 10, 24, 35–6, 38, 40–1, Toronto 1, 71–3
50–6, 91–3, 101–2, 110, 112–13, travelogue 148
145–8 Tunnels (Modan) 45, 120
In the Shadow of No Towers 8,
85–6 underground comix 6–7, 34–8
The Spirit (character) 19–20, 36 Unterzakhn (Corwin) 43
The Spirit (Eisner) 6 Uri Muri (character) 22
Srulik (character) 22
stereotypes 20, 42, 96–7, 124, 140 visual metaphor 41, 87
Strange Tales (Friedrich and Wein)
26 Waldman, JT 38
Sturm, James 42–3, 127–30 Megillat Esther 77–8, 79, 83, 133–8
Sucharov, Mira 102–3 Not the Israel My Parents
superheroes 1–2, 6–8, 10, 18–22, Promised Me 65, 99–100,
25–8, 30–4, 38, 84, 106, 144 102–3
suicide 51, 59, 101, 107–8, 147 Waltz with Bashir (Folman and
suicide bombings 44, 150 Polonsky) 44–5, 61, 93–4, 97–8,
Superman (character) 18–19, 20–1, 102–3
25, 164 n.3 Ware, Chris 8, 40
survivor testimony see also Warsaw 121–5
Holocaust 48–9, 52, 55–6, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 25, 145
58–60, 101, 125, 145, 148 We Are on Our Own (Katin) 80–2
swastika see also Nazism 21, 71, 73, Wein, Berel 84
81 West Bank 45, 61–2, 65, 104, 151–3
Szyk, Arthur 138 Wheeler-Nicholson, Malcolm 18
188 INDEX
Whistle (character) see Willow X-Men: Apocalypse (Singer) 109–10,

Zimmerman 112
Whitlock, Gillian 85–6 X-Men: Magneto Testament (Pak and
Wildenberg, Harry 17–18 di Giandomenico) 31, 106–12
Williams III, J. H. 32 Xavier-Magneto dynamic 28
Willow Zimmerman, (character)
(Lockhart and Preitano) 32, 34 Yaffe, Emannuel 21
Wonder Man (character) 19, 164 n.4
Wonder Woman (character) 21 Zakarin, Jordan 109–10
Zbeng! (Fink) 35
X-Men (characters) 19, 27–31, Zeffren, Ilana 45, 116–20
106–12 Zentner, Jorge 74–5,
X-Men (Singer) 109–10 165 n.12
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Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives

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Jewish Comics and Graphic Narratives

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Jewish Comics and

Covering major genres, creators, and themes, the Bloomsbury Comics

Series Editor: Chris Gavaler

Titles in the series

Superhero Comics, Christopher Gavaler

­BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo

First published in Great Britain 2023

Copyright © Matt Reingold, 2023

Matt Reingold has asserted his right under the Copyright,

For legal purposes the Acknowledgments on p. xiii constitute an

Cover design and illustration by Tamar Blumenfeld

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Series: Bloomsbury Comics Studies

Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd.

­3 Social and Cultural Impact 47

­5 Key Texts 105

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

3.6 Graves illustrated to look like Sherlock Holmes. From The

4.6 Family members shaded in black in photographs. Page 169

5.10 Orthodox Jewish dress styles. Copyright © 2010 Barry

W hen writing the origin story of my academic life as a scholar of Jewish

narratives. Neita even agreed to be my graduate supervisor, encouraging me

Is there some quality or essence that unites different forms of literary

Graphic Novels and Comic Books

appreciated at small-scale independent comics conventions, and this afforded

Jewish Graphic Narratives

throughout the twentieth century, with the exceptions of Art Spiegelman’s

books are frequently produced by teams of creators, some of whom might

My understanding of Jewish graphic narratives certainly includes the

An important caveat that I want to acknowledge upfront is that I have

A ny history of Jewish graphic narratives would be incomplete without

Jewish Comic Books

Hearing and reading of the oppression and slaughter of helpless, oppressed

As the creative product of two young Jews, questions surrounding

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

by a group of people in Moravia, an Eastern European region close to where

FIGURE 2.2 Kitty Pryde describing being a victim of anti-Semitism. Copyright

The second recent character that DC Comics developed is Willow Zimmerman,

Jewish Graphic Novels

commits to performing good deeds. In exchange, he expects God to look

he allocates full pages to single panels with large blocks of narration

If by force or compulsion we were required to erect a single, definitive

autobiographical self at the crossroads of history, culture and discourse, a

in present-day Israel and recounts Folman’s experiences as a soldier in 1982’s

of her family’s history. She shows the relevance of history by protesting

graphic narratives, I draw distinctions between texts produced about Israel

Holocaust Graphic Narratives

It is important not because it offers a way to escape or transcend coercive

Spiegelman’s (1986, 1991b) willingness to use the graphic narrative medium

the intimacies of history, providing midrashic—interpretive, expansive, elastic,

Spiegelman’s response to the Times is fascinating on many levels in how he

“Spiegelman” means mirror maker or seller in German, and Maus, an

If Maus is “the most compelling representation of [the Holocaust] ever

plays an important role for the third-generation, children whose grandparents

FIGURE 3.2 Amy mapping the distance Lily traveled to escape Nazi-controlled

Kurzweil’s contemporary experience of plugging in two locations into a

important questions about ownership, interpretation, and to what extent

Israel-Focused Jewish Graphic Narratives

certainly Jewish—characters celebrate Jewish holidays, mention studying

Amongst graphic narratives about Israel by non-Israelis, most of the texts

FIGURE 3.5 Miriam overwhelmed by Israeli news reports. Copyright Miriam

Diasporas—like all cultural or ethnic groups—are distinguished by shared

the use of Holmes—a character renowned for his commitment to truth—as

BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo

3 Social and Cultural Impact 47

5 Key Texts 105

FIGURE 3.8 Elisha ben Avuya on a motorcycle (chapter 4, mishnah 25). Copyright

FIGURE 4.4 Photograph of Asaf Hanuka’s grandmother’s tombstone. Used with

Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword

Isaacs, C. (2020), The Wolf of Baghdad: Memoir of a Lost Homeland, Brighton:

Lambert, J. (2015), “Since 2000,” in H. Wirth-Nesher (ed.), The Cambridge

Schumacher, M. (2010), Will Eisner: A Dreamer’s Life in Comics, New York: