hroughout this book I have been utilizing the language of exile and diaspora—words like home, homelessness, belonging, and not belonging—to discuss the approaches that contemporary Jewish American women cartoonists use to map their identities.1 Jews have often been considered the “archetypal or prototypical diaspora people,” diaspora being a term meaning “dispersion” that originated in the one of the original Greek translations of the bible (Zeitlin 1; Aviv and Shneer 3). Given the long-standing associations of Jews as travelers and wanderers, as well as the more recent employing of such concepts by scholars exploring Jewish identity, the application of these and related expressions by contemporary Jews to describe themselves seems inevitable. This terminology has also strongly informed the works of many cultural theorists, including those engaged in postcolonial discourse. Scholars such as Paul Gilroy and Edward Said openly acknowledge their “creative debts” to nineteenth-century Jewish intellectuals who “sought ways to account for the Jews’ persistence over the long span of centuries in a variety of lands that were not their homeland” (Omer-Sherman 12, 3).Despite these historical connections between Jews and concepts of diaspora, as many have recently pointed out, there is a danger in relying too heavily on such rhetoric to describe the situation of a group of people—however diverse and diversely located—whose place in the American landscape, as well as, generally speaking, most parts of the world, is no longer easily or directly related to a condition of literal exile. As Susan Stanford Friedman articulates in Mappings, “The metaphor of migrancy may well be the luxury of the housed and the relatively stationary” (102). To ruminate on one’s sense of homelessness is to recognize the possibility of what it means to belong, to have a home. It is an act that, if carelessly executed, potentially and harmfully erases the realities of those who do not have that choice.
The problem of figurative diasporic discourse, and particularly the valorization of such states of being, is not limited to its potential to diminish the experiences of others. Such language, specifically when used in discussions about Israel, can also, and relatedly, evoke Jews in particular as impotent victims. This characterization leads to problematic justifications for illegitimate and otherwise indefensible actions, as comic book writer Harvey Pekar points out in his posthumously published 2012 graphic narrative illustrated by J. T. Waldman and titled Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me. Like some other liberal and secular Jews, Pekar draws the connection between the history of Jewish exile as caused by oppression and the resultant justifications made, by some, of certain actions in recent Israeli history. As he writes, “Being Jewish does not automatically absolve one of guilt. Despite the fact that Jews have such a long history of being oppressed, Israeli treatment of Palestinians eats at Jewish claims of fairness” (149). In a 2010 essay on the topic in the New York Review of Books, in an attempt to understand why so many young Jews have “checked their Zionism,” Peter Beinart points to a similar discrepancy. As he explains, an “obsession with victimhood lies at the heart of why Zionism is dying among America’s secular Jewish young. It simply bears no relationship to their lived experience, or what they have seen of Israel’s.”
Like many young, self-proclaimed left-wing North American Jews, the cartoonists under discussion in this chapter, Sarah Glidden and Miriam Libicki, reject a comfortable figuration of Jewish identity as easily rooted in diasporic conceptualizations. But in their graphic narratives, unlike the college students that Beinart attempts to understand in his essay who are supposedly indifferent about Israel, the personae of these texts plainly struggle with the ways such constructions affect their senses of what it means to be Jewish.2 Glidden’s 2010 graphic narrative, How to Understand Israel in Sixty Days or Less, and Libicki’s comic series, jobnik! first collectively published in 2008 and ongoing, both struggle with the discomfort that accompanies “metaphoric articulations of identity issues” (Friedman 102), especially in the case of the relationship between North American Jews and Israel as the so-called Jewish homeland.3 In their accounts of traveling to Israel as part of a tour group, in Glidden’s case, and as a dual citizen and member of the Israeli Defense Forces, in Libicki’s case, these authors’ personae recognize the importance of moving beyond language as signifier and image as icon to confront the material and historic realities of identifications that are rooted in actual places and affect people as individual bodies. In addition, they acknowledge the impossibility of establishing closed linear narratives to unite and reflect those realities. Glidden and Libicki somewhat ironically employ the medium of comics, a language premised in large part on stereotype and shorthand, to convey the importance of researching and relaying detailed and individual histories in order to locate the self and, by extension, the other. Perhaps more than any of the other cartoonists discussed here, their texts reflect dis-affiliation as an ethical posture, a way of envisioning an ethics of accountability that recognizes self-representation as inextricably connected to the ways that others come to see and be seen.
Both these cartoonists’ works can be categorized as travel narratives, a genre focused on the transitional as a way of examining and exposing the self. In his book, Travel Writing, Casey Blanton argues that “there exists in the journey pattern the possibility of a kind of narrative where inner and outer worlds collide” (3). It is the transitional moment—or movement—that educes such collisions, allowing an individual’s inner and outer worlds to fully engage in a space that is somehow “safe” because it is neither here nor there; the self in transit remains unfixed and relatively free. In that sense, travel memoirs, which “dramatize[] an engagement between self and world” (Blanton xi), are texts, much like adolescent memoirs, in which questions of identity can be expansively attended to and explored. The dramatic engagements reflected in such works, where identity issues unfold primarily in relation to space, follow what Susan Stanford Friedman pinpoints as “the new geographics.” According to Friedman’s model, identity, “constantly on the move,” is figured most aptly in spatial terms, which, as explained in my introduction, is what makes the relational language of comics such an interesting medium for its expression and analysis. Autobiographical comics focused on travel reinforce a perception of identity as, fundamentally, a function of space and movement, or of the individual’s always shifting point of view; like all of the works examined in this book, these memoirs present a spatialized graphics that depicts the self, and subjectivity, as it unravels, or the self as process.
In their travel narratives, by calling attention to the self away from “home,” the texts under discussion challenge the very notion of “home” as a fixed concept, an idea that, as Caryn Aviv and David Shneer point out in New Jews, presumes people—and, by extension, communities—to have locatable centers and peripheries. Aviv and Shneer question the notion of diaspora as a model for understanding contemporary Jewish identity because, for them, such a model “has discounted or overshadowed the extent to which people—as individuals and as groups—are creating new forms of home in a more mobile world” (18). They emphasize instead the possibility of a communal Jewish identity founded in transnational constructions of home that are based in a global world as well as in “the ways in which many Jews are remaking their sense of home and establishing new kinds of roots, not just to particular pieces of land but also to concepts, ideas, stories, and spaces” (20). Israel and jobnik! are books that establish travel, and the visualized narration of travel, as the in-between spaces where their central personae feel both most and least at home, as they too question that very concept. Through their visual-verbal experimentations with self-portraiture, these works interrogate not only the centrality of a specific locale or nationality in the establishment of a Jewish sense of self but also the very possibility of mapping out any and all spaces as home or not home. Instead, these graphic narratives reimagine home, and subsequently identity-as-home, in terms of movement rather than stasis or as expansive and elliptical in nature.
“We are A Little Bit ‘There’ Already”
Despite its origins as a minicomic tracking her two-week trip to Israel in 2007, Sarah Glidden’s Israel, spanning 206 pages, is the most linearly structured of all the graphic narratives explored in this book.4 At 6-by-9 inches, the majority of pages are divided into nine hand-drawn rectangular panels of almost identical size, with narrative remarks and speech bubbles fastidiously drawn and arranged. Glidden’s book also stands out due to her careful and delicate use of watercolor, a now characteristic element of her comics that was originally her publisher’s suggestion.5 But in spite of what appears to be a straightforward story following the evolution of a series of events presented in sequential order, Israel stealthily traverses the boundaries of its own apparent linearity by presenting various, often unexpected, points of rupture within its pages.
The work is divided into seven discrete chapters, each tracing a leg of Sarah’s journey on the guided Birthright Israel tour: “Orientation,” “The Golan Heights,” “The Kinneret,” “Tel Aviv and Environs,” “The Desert,” “Jerusalem,” and “Post-Birthright.”6 Although this arrangement conforms to the conventions of a general Birthright itinerary, Glidden’s particular shaping of the layout of her trip is telling. She names five of the chapters in terms of places traversed, whereas the first and last chapters (“Orientation” and “Post-Birthright”) disturb this arrangement. Instead of referring directly to places, these two titles point, instead, to more ambiguous figurations that simultaneously bookend and interrupt the place-as-time scheme encompassed by the structure of the memoir as a whole. In addition, in the five intermediate chapters locations are presented as comparable to one another, even though the places named represent regions with disparate geographies, topographies, and levels of historical and cultural significance. For example, the focus of an entire chapter is “The Desert,” unspecified here in name but referring to Israel’s Negev, which spans over half the country’s land area. As one of five central chapters, it is made equivalent to the city of Jerusalem, the focus of another chapter, and the Kinneret, also known as the Sea of Galilee (Israel’s largest freshwater lake) and the topic of yet another chapter. The structure of the book, which initially appears as a basic consecutive unfolding, therefore also subtly plays with notions of places as discrete, substitutable, and easily identifiable and classifiable units, a preoccupation that winds through the work as a whole.
The chapters also present travel, and especially planned travel, as an enterprise inevitably characterized by the unexpected. The titles are not presented together in a table of contents at the beginning of the book. Instead, they appear only within the span of the text itself, separate from the generally uniform multipaneled pages. Each title page, encountered by the reader as the story unfolds, is structured as a map, with the name of the chapter etched into a box at the top left corner of the page. This box also sometimes functions as the map’s legend. The individual maps are watercolor drawings, and they distinctly feature a somewhat limited variation of colors in order to foreground certain aspects of the pictured geographical locations over others. The varied depictions of the seven full-page maps incorporated into the text, which differ in the ways they illustrate the scope, scale, compass, and context of each particular place, draw attention to these representations as subjective constructions. While the maps in some ways match those of conventional Israeli tourisms, by drawing them in her own hand and style Sarah claims them as constructions connected to the experiences unfolding, from her particular point of view, in the attendant chapters.7 So, for example, in the map of “Tel Aviv and Environs,” the page is divided almost equally in two, with the Mediterranean Sea spanning the left side of the page and an intricate drawing of the streets of Tel Aviv traversing the right side (78, figure 4.1). The sea is colored pale blue, while Tel Aviv is drawn in combinations of faded oranges, browns, and pinks. The map features only five landmarks: Mike’s Place (a bar), Hotel, Rabin Square, Miri Aloni Square, and Independence Hall. Each of them indicates a place Sarah visits and a related event she recounts over the course of the chapter. By marking these sites on the page in illustrations that are slightly, but visibly, out of scale with the weblike grid of streets pictured, the image represents space as subjectively rendered by the individual mapmaker. The drawing of Tel Aviv is inflected as much by Sarah’s sensorial experiences and the material indicators she encounters externally as by her internal, sometimes even imaginary, world. Furthermore, by featuring human-made structures, like streets and a hotel, in opposition to the relatively consistent and uninterrupted blue sea, the map, like the chapter it precedes, foregrounds the two kinds of interactions—with people and with the landscape—that inform the alter ego’s journey and her subsequent understanding of Israel. As she comes to realize about the conflict in Israel in her chapter about Tel Aviv, “it seems that it’s never really been about religion but about land” (87). This particular drawing of Tel Aviv, which visualizes the city as a piece of developed land, but also part of a larger geographical topography, calls attention to various characteristics of the area in time and over time. Tel Aviv is “prime real estate,” a port city, and a tourist site with a “great view” (87). It serves all these functions, but it is not defined by any of them individually.
The map of Tel Aviv at the beginning of chapter 4 is also portrayed differently from other maps featured as chapter headings throughout the book, such as the one pictured two chapters earlier of the Golan Heights (30). This map includes a key, tacked just underneath the chapter title, and this key indicates what color lines represent the bus route, the highway, and the United Nations demilitarized zone. The maps pictured at the beginning of the “Orientation” and “The Desert” chapters similarly contain clear markers of the politically disputed and militarized boundaries within and around the country as well as the bus routes and highways that enable the persona’s journey to, from, and around this particular area. Instead of the details of streets contrasted with the wide, empty stretch of the sea, the image introducing the Golan Heights features an amorphous expanse of land, colored pale yellow and delineated by various disruptive lines painted in reds, pinks, and black. The yellow area is simply labeled “Israel,” with the bordered countries of Lebanon and Jordan rendered as white, or blank, spaces that bleed off the page. By emphasizing this part of the country as a geographical region marked by seemingly haphazard human-made boundaries and thoroughfares, but otherwise dislocated from individuals and communities, Sarah differentiates these areas, and the story lines that take place in them, from the ones, like Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, that are defined in large part in terms of her interpersonal interactions within those places. In these ways, not only is each representational map depicted as predicated on Sarah’s subjectivity at particular moments of time—the moments when she encounters the place and the moments when she reflects on and draws that place—but each is also dependent on her experience of that area within the trajectory of the narrative as a whole. As her journey unfolds, Sarah’s understanding of Israel—and especially of what, borrowing from common terminology about the subject, she terms “the situation”—transforms. Her understanding slowly and somewhat recursively shifts from the abstract and indirect, a knowledge based in large part on research and books studied from a distance, to the concrete, a knowledge based more directly on people and the personal stories they transmit. Although the transformation is never complete, as abstract knowledge has its place throughout the text, the basic movement of the book, and of Sarah’s journey, is away from theoretical, secondhand knowledge and in search of material and firsthand ways of knowing and telling.
4.1 Sarah Glidden, title page from chapter 4. In How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, p. 78. Copyright © Sarah Glidden 2010.
The opening chapter, “Orientation,” presages those very gaps—between theoretical or secondhand information and direct experience—that Sarah will continue to negotiate over the course of her trip, and in particular the distinction between her expectations for the visit and her actual encounters. As mentioned, she travels with the guided tour known as Birthright. On its webpage, the organization, whose full name is Taglit-Birthright Israel, describes itself as one that “provides a gift of a peer group, educational trip to Israel for Jewish young adults ages 18 to 26 from around the world.”8 In a Fall 2011 essay in the Jewish Review of Books analyzing four works written about Birthright since 2008, including Glidden’s Israel, Philip Getz argues that a central question surrounding the organization is whether or not “Birthright’s main purpose is to encourage participants to make aliya (move to Israel), or at least become Zionist activists” (24). While Getz believes this tacit agenda is “a widespread misconception,” Sarah, like many others, approaches her trip unsure of whether or not she will be offered something like an objective look at Israel. Although in the opening chapter she dutifully quotes Birthright materials that advertise the trip as one in which the group “will be exploring the history and politics of Israel in an open-minded and pluralistic manner” (9), she continually asks herself, especially at the beginning of her journey, whether or not “Birthright is trying to brainwash me” (27). This uncertain framing of the excursion is Sarah’s way of challenging Birthright’s packaged commodification of their so-called educational tours, which proclaim wide-spreading goals, generally to be achieved in the span of ten days. Many of these goals are premised on the presumption that ties to the Israeli state help establish one’s Jewish identity. The “About Us” section of the aforementioned website, for example, includes the following pronouncement: “We believe that the experience of a trip to Israel is a building block of Jewish identity, and that by providing that gift to young Jews, we can strengthen bonds with the land and people of Israel and solidarity with Jewish communities worldwide.” As Sarah shows, her education necessarily extends beyond what is officially sanctioned by Birthright and involves an experience not necessarily of “strengthening” but instead of questioning and negotiating her Jewish identity and its as yet unconfirmed connection to Israel.
Sarah’s experience of travel is therefore not relegated to a clearly delineated time or place (i.e., the ten or so days that she spends in Israel). Rather, it is characterized by a more indeterminate sense of time mirrored by a polysemous grasp of Israel as a place. The full title of the book, How to Understand Israel in Sixty Days or Less, thus satirically refers not only to the time Sarah spends abroad with Birthright but also the days leading up to and extending beyond her trip. On the second page of the travelogue, just after the inclusion of an “orientation” map depicting a stretch of Israel, she tells her boyfriend, “I’m ready to go there and discover the truth behind this whole mess once and for all. It’ll all be crystal clear by the time I come back!” (6). However, once at the airport, and only two pages later, this possibility is already called into question, as her notions of time and place—and therefore the potential of identifying a single, unifying “truth”—are disturbed. After mentioning her friend, Melissa, who accompanies her on the trip, she retrospectively recounts the effort she spent researching Israel even before she left. As she explains, “After the two of us decided to go on this trip I spent every moment reading about Israel, Palestine and the conflict” (11).9 This element of her self-education is developed in various narrative panels that picture her walking around the airport, undergoing security checks, and eventually finding her seat on the plane. The starting point of her trip is consequently hazy. Although the title of the book suggests “sixty days or less” as the span of time in which she is focused on and visiting Israel, the unfolding of this opening chapter instead collapses time, as well as space, and suggests the pursuit of “understanding” Israel as endless and indeterminate.
An unsettling interaction with airport security further prefigures the ways that conventional impressions of time and place break down throughout Sarah’s trip and influence representations of the experience in her travelogue. When she first checks in with her airline, the security clerk for El Al questions her about the reasons for her trip. He asks her to recall specific aspects of her Jewish background, such as the number of guests at her bat mitzvah and the name of her Torah portion, the weekly section of the Hebrew Bible read as part of the bat mitzvah ceremony. In response to his questions, Sarah pictures herself standing and looking isolated, shy, and scared in two consecutive panels (8, figures 4.2 and 4.3). In the first panel, drawn as the “present-day” Sarah, she is dressed in an olive-green button-down shirt and wearing a backpack, her hands clasped in front of her, and she fumbles her words in response. The next panel, which follows the first, though on a succeeding row on the page, similarly pictures her alone against a hazy mauve watercolor background; here she portrays herself as an adolescent, and she is wearing what was presumably her bat mitzvah dress. This dress matches, in color, the shirt she wears in the “present,” another detail that connects the two temporalities. In this second panel her hands clutch at her waist and her eyes look to the ground as she, once again sheepish, tells the security officer, “We didn’t have a DJ. We had a luncheon in my backyard with food and stuff.” The shuffling between Sarah’s “present” and younger selves in these consecutive panels suggests that the line of questioning about her Jewish identity and history affects the way she perceives herself in the text’s present. Although the book opens with her confidently confronting a desire to know the “truth” about Israel, an ambition that she does not at first evidently link to her Jewish identity, the clerk’s questions disorient this initial perception. As her Israel trip unfolds, she begins to recognize a connection between this tour and a much more expansive, lifelong journey of coming to terms with her Jewish identity.
Sarah’s initial sense of disorientation is also evident from her early experiences at the airport, as she finds herself already submerged in a strange mix of the familiar and the unknown before she has even left the country. While in line for the security check, she depicts two men standing behind her, one of them dressed in traditional Hasidic garb (7).10 This visual detail assumes prominence three pages later, as she passes another presumably Hasidic man, this one carrying a guitar case (10). In the first panel in which she encounters him, she looks over with a smile on her face while the narration box above her reads, “Heh! A rock n’ roll black hat.” In the following panels, the man, sweat pouring off his face, transforms from an amusing sight into a cultural progenitor, as he spies an unclaimed bag by his feet and frantically asks passersby if the bag belongs to them. The bag that is nearly invisible to Sarah in her initial encounter with the “rock n’ roll black hat” emerges as an important element symbolizing the fear of terrorism that permeates everyday life in the Middle East. Interestingly, it is pictured in all the panels in which she includes the Hasidic man, although its presence changes meaning only in retrospect, after the man panics. As Sarah reflects in a narrative box at the top of the following page, “So maybe even though I’m technically still in Newark, it does feel like we are a little bit ‘there’ already” (11). As the language and visuals here reveal, Sarah’s journey to Israel is premised from the beginning in a collapsed notion of time and place, a series of reflections that confuse the past and present, the here and there. Even before she has left the United States, she is forced to confront the complexity of a “situation” that she has underestimated: not only is she unlikely to discover the truth, as though it were a latent set of facts waiting to be unearthed, but her journey “there” inevitably forces her to confront the truth about her life “here” or the ways that her North American Jewish identity affects her perception of Israel, its inhabitants, and the region’s politics more generally.
4.2 Sarah Glidden, panel from chapter 1. In How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, p. 8. Copyright © Sarah Glidden 2010.
4.3 Sarah Glidden, panel from chapter 1. In How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, p. 8. Copyright © Sarah Glidden 2010.
Once Sarah has landed in Israel, while she is still at the airport, she undergoes yet another encounter that forces her to confront the various constructions of “us” versus “them” that also challenge problematic distinctions between here versus there. She pulls her luggage off a carousel, and another Hasidic man standing beside her shifts away from her, presumably to avoid contact (13).11 Soon after, upon being greeted by her cousin, Matt, she asks about whether “they are the same as Hasidim in New York?” As she asks this question, the man who pulled away from her is pictured on his cell phone, although there is no indication what language he is speaking or whether or not he is a native Israeli. The man’s ambiguous nationality is an integral component of this encounter, as it deconstructs the easy association that could be made between religion and nationality. His observable affiliation as a religious Jew does not necessarily place him at home in Israel, even though his presence there is not unexpected but rather an ordinary part of everyday life. In an attempt to answer her question, Matt explains, “For the most part Israel is a pretty secular state. The orthodox cause a lot of controversy though.” The possibility of Israel as a “secular Jewish state” is one of the paradoxes that Sarah, a secular American Jew, wrestles with throughout the memoir. Like all of the personae pictured in this book, her Jewish identity is not defined in any straightforward manner by her religious beliefs or even necessarily any particular cultural affiliation. Similarly, many Israelis, both Jewish and not Jewish, do not necessarily define themselves by their relationships to religion and Jewish culture, although other people’s perceptions of them—as well as, presumably, their own self-perceptions—are inevitably affected by those historical elements. Sarah’s many interactions throughout Israel, beginning at the airport, consequently reflect the difficulty of placing people into distinct categories based on nationality, religion, or other factors taken outside the context of a person’s particular life story.
The Hasid’s presence at Ben Gurion Airport in Tel Aviv also collapses Sarah’s sense of the distinction between here versus there, not only because the backgrounds throughout these Tel Aviv airport scenes are visibly indistinguishable from the earlier Newark ones but also because her conversation with Matt reminds her of an interaction with a Hasidic man back in her Brooklyn neighborhood. When she first sees all the Hasidic Jews at the airport in Tel Aviv, her narrative thought box reads, “Wow, so many Hasidic Jews! It feels like we’re in South Williamsburg!” (13). Her initial experience in Israel disrupts her feeling of being over “there” by reminding her almost immediately of home. The incident with the Hasidic man who avoids touching her as she manages her bag leads Sarah to flashback, on the following page, on an encounter she had in a Hasidic Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn when she was in her early twenties (14). In a series of seven panels bookended on the page by her conversation in the “present” with Matt at the airport, she pictures a younger self with shorter, dyed-orange hair. Setting the scene, she describes graduating from art school and looking for a place to live in the “bohemian Williamsburg neighborhood.” But she takes a wrong turn and ends up on the “ultra-Orthodox” side of town rather than the “ultra-hip” side. When a Hasidic man asks her to come help him turn on his lights because of the Sabbath, Sarah agrees to do so. In a panel picturing the two of them side by side, her hands pressing a switch in a fuse box, she lauds herself, in a thought bubble, for being a “good Samaritan” as the overt exchange between the two is both formal and friendly.12 In the following panel, as Sarah faces him, he grasps her hand and says “Thank you!” as her thought bubble now expresses confusion at his willingness to touch her. In the third and final panel picturing the two of them together, the man attempts to put his hands down her shirt as she resists. Sarah recalls this incident—her violation by a man who presumably is not “supposed to touch women”—when she comes across the Hasidic man at the airport who purposefully avoids contact with her. Just after her cousin tells her about “the rift between the Hasidic and secular Jews in Israel,” but before she pictures this flashback, she explains, “I can’t help but feel satisfied as my own prejudices are validated” (14). Recalling this past incident alongside her experience at the airport, Sarah here identifies herself with secular Jews in Israel, if only in opposition to religious Jews. In that sense her impression of being a foreigner in Israel is immediately challenged, as she finds herself joined by others who share in her bias against a particular brand of Jewish identity. Her own prejudice against Jews therefore ironically ties her to other Jews, allowing her to identify with one communal sense of Jewishness only as she completely rejects another.
Throughout the first half or so of Israel, Sarah’s Jewish identifications are most often pronounced, as in this case, when she distances herself from specific beliefs and behaviors about what it means to identify as Jewish. But, as the text develops, her interactions lead her to recognize how seemingly unwavering identifications and disidentifications break down and complicate as she meets and relates to people as individuals instead of types. Although in this case Sarah’s view of the Hasidic man as stereotype remains unchallenged, as her journey continues she is induced to confront many of her other misperceptions, especially how she regards her own Jewish identity and, in turn, how she considers “the situation” in Israel.
“I Still Don’t Really Know What that Point of View is Yet”
Sarah’s early identification with secular Jews, framed in opposition to her encounters with certain religious ones, connects her to a wider imaginary community, though this affililation is continually limited and challenged. Indeed, her identifications throughout the book—as a woman, an artist, a skeptic of Israeli policies and politics, and the girlfriend of a non-Jew—often lead her to feel disconnected from this same imaginary transnational secular community, as though these other associations preclude her from ever fully identifying with any communal sense of Jewishness. From the beginning of her trip, for example, she is wary of identifying with others in her Birthright group, and she consistently pictures herself as separate or isolated from them.13 In an early set of images on the tour bus, she draws herself in a panel, once again set apart against a translucent watercolor background. Leaning over the back of her seat with a hopeful look on her face, the rectangular narrative box above her head somewhat humorously reads, “I’m sure you are all interesting and wonderful people!” (16). In the following panel, her head slumps into the back of the seat and her eyebrows furrow as she wordlessly disbelieves her own statement. As this second, silent panel suggests, Sarah is incapable of fully elucidating her sense of alienation from the rest of the group, although it often seems related to her assumption that they are not as politically progressive as she is, and especially that they are not as readily distrustful of Israel and its politics. Her sense of being an outsider thus emerges at disparate moments that are uncharacteristically not followed by self-analysis about these encounters, but are accented, instead, by silence and visible isolation. In another instance, after watching a government film about the Golan Heights and consequently declaring the trip “a regional propaganda tour,” Sarah is interrupted by an unnamed member of the group, who asks, “You guys thought it was propaganda?” (40). This woman continues the discussion with others watching and participating, while Sarah, looking on angrily, declares, “It wasn’t balanced at all!” Instead of engaging in the discussion that now involves numerous Birthright participants, the conversation that Sarah started ends with her wordlessly observing and eventually even turning her head away from the group as the conversation continues (41, figure 4.4). Over the remainder of the page, she breaks from them and approaches one of the tour guides to discuss the film, thereby further distancing herself from the others. In these and similar incidents throughout the narrative, she portrays herself as feeling different, or set apart, from the rest of the Birthright participants, a state that prevents her from being able to imagine that they might be able to enlighten her in her quest for the “truth.” This self-enforced isolation is, at least initially, generally portrayed in a positive light—she alone, it seems, is willing to face “the situation” head-on. In this particular way, Sarah is distinguished, at least in the first half of the book, from the other alter egos described in these graphic memoirs exploring Jewish identity, including The Bunch, Goldie, Vanessa, Melissa, and Lauren, who offer primarily disparaging, if comedic, self-portrayals of themselves as outsiders.
4.4 Sarah Glidden, panel from chapter 2. In How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, p. 41. Copyright © Sarah Glidden 2010.
Despite this dissimilarity, like all of the other personae explored, Sarah’s sense of self is often tied to her inability to conform, to find a space of belonging. Her singular status from the rest of the group emerges most strikingly through images that picture her by herself, as though at these moments she were traveling around the country free of anyone else’s guidance. This isolation can be read as self-imposed: she sets herself apart from the group in order to decide for herself how she feels about Israel, to avoid the biases of others. As the bus travels to the Sea of Galilee, as an example, she is drawn on her own in numerous panels, looking out at the Israeli landscape. In a sequence of such self-portraits, the only panel that features the whole group on the bus still emphasizes her difference, as she alone is awake and looking out the window (48, figure 4.5). The narrative box pictured here reads, “Inside the bus are forty tired people who are much too exhausted to ask more questions.” Although this sentence presumably includes her as part of the group, the image conversely singles her out as the lone member who, despite her exhaustion, tries to witness firsthand all she can. The chapter ends with Sarah waking up early at their rest stop near the Sea of Galilee and venturing out as soon as the first light hits (54). The final panel on this page, which brings the chapter to a close, pictures her silently looking out at a colorful landscape. In depicting Sarah alone with the land, this image mirrors most of the panels that feature her by herself throughout the text. In fact, many of the concluding panels of the chapters portray her on her own, as though to emphasize that this particular narrative about Israel belongs only to her. These self-portraits suggest that the absence of others is at least partially what enables her to feel like she can experience the region—as symbolized by the land—directly, or without anyone else’s ideological filters hindering her own vision. Setting herself apart is her way of striving to “understand” Israel, to see the land without anyone or anything else getting in the way.
4.5 Sarah Glidden, panel from chapter 2. In How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, p. 48. Copyright © Sarah Glidden 2010.
Sarah’s largely self-imposed sense of being different and isolated from others includes not only those on her trip but also Birthright alumni who have visited the country in the past. In this way, as with her general reflections about her Israel trip, her initial disidentifications are based on conflated senses of time and space. On the final page of the opening chapter, she describes having read “as many firsthand accounts of the Birthright experience as I could online” (29). In many of these accounts, she writes, the alumni described “a real connection” to Israel, and “a few even said they felt like they were ‘finally home.’” In contrast to those quoted, in this early reflection Sarah directly contradicts this narrative of Israel as “home” for all Jews. In a series of four panels included at the end of the page, she provides her own very different analogy for her journey so far, recalling not a sense of intimacy, but one of distance. She writes, “To me, it’s more like spotting a celebrity in a crowded street. / Someone whose crazy life has been splashed all over the tabloid pages for years. / And there they are…/…Right in front of you.” Underneath the boxes conveying this Israel-as-home narrative, and her own tabloid counternarrative, she pictures herself as a tourist, holding a camera and taking pictures. An Israeli gas station is visible behind her, and the panels shift from this depiction to one of various unnamed people—many or all, presumably, part of her tour group—walking into the station, as well as standing and smoking in the area that surrounds it. The last two panels on the page return to capture Sarah alone, and this time she is holding a camera with the Israeli landscape, as well as an Israeli flag, drawn behind her. The final two images render her once again on her own: separated from the group that is proximately right beside her, she looks out over the landscape with her camera no longer visible. The words right in front of you, drawn in a narrative box in the final panel, emphasize her desire to relate to Israel not by way of a metaphoric or imaginary association but rather through a direct engagement; here she gazes directly ahead with her hands deep in her pockets, looking to connect with the land as surface, not as symbol. As the visual and textual unfolding over the course of the page reflects, she has to put down her camera—to dislocate herself from her touristic vantage point—in order to break from the imaginary and/or mediated relationship with Israel that she recognizes in others and from which she consequently tries to distance herself by continually setting herself apart.
Despite this desire to isolate herself, however, Sarah eventually recognizes that to achieve such objectivity is impossible, and that considering the points of view of those around her is a necessary precondition for approaching a more balanced understanding of the world around her. In other words, approaching a so-called unfiltered look at Israel requires not isolation but connection with others. Avoiding the biases of people around her is not enough; she must explore them as well as consider them in relation to her own biases. In this way Israel confronts some of the complexities related to composing travel memoirs in general, and especially travel memoirs that relate to journalistic projects. Glidden has explicitly stated that she does not “label myself a ‘comics journalist,’” particularly since her work, especially as reflected in Israel, is so focused on “the relationship between myself and my subject” (personal communication, July 27, 2014).14 Nevertheless, she admits, like Miriam Libicki, that her projects have been strongly influenced by those of comics journalist Joe Sacco and, further, that “the definition of journalism is…not fixed and the line between what is journalism and what is memoir or travelogue or an essay is a blurry one.” In the case of both Israel and jobnik!, though these comics are not pieces of journalism in the conventional sense, the frameworks of both texts incorporate journalistic objectives and practices, particularly those related to keeping an accurate record of events and attempting to contribute to social justice using this record (Borden 49).15 Both these memoirs additionally convey how experiences of travel oblige individuals to face themselves outside the very communities, institutions, and environments that generally allow them to construct somewhat consistent notions of identity. The individual at “home” does not have the same need to question herself, as well as her connections to others, as these connections and affiliations are taken for granted in everyday life, where they remain generally uninterrupted. Once an individual has left “home,” however, these self-identifications are unsettled. Because an individual’s sense of self is based on her relationships to others, the comfort of this sense of self fades, or at least weakens, once she has left the familiarity of daily life or once she is forced to confront other kinds of transitions (like the shift, as we have seen in chapter 3, from childhood to adolescence). In leaving home, then, the individual is in the best position to examine her own always shifting subjectivity, even as the traveling memoirist, and particularly one with some journalistic objectives, is confronted by the task of observing others. Israel is a book that examines how these two undertakings inevitably overlap, even though they seem to demand conflicting ambitions. As the text reflects, in order to delve into how the self has been constructed, it is necessary to investigate that self in relation to others, to decenter the self from within that narrative. And in order to record the lives of others with any kind of accuracy, one must recognize the role that individual subjectivity always plays in such chronicling.
In many ways, then, Israel is a work focused on bringing to the surface the malleable, fragmented, and biased journalist/memoirist’s point of view. In another interview about the book, Glidden discussed how, particularly through her manipulation of the comics form, she tried to make visible what many journalists, in their attempt to remain “objective,” often hide about themselves. As she explained, “I had to put mine [my biases] out there for everyone to see…. I wanted to show that as a human being, there’s more to learning about a complex political situation than just analyzing facts. There are neuroses, prejudices and emotions involved” (“An Interview with Sarah Glidden”). These subjective and internal projections, including several outright fantasy scenes, are visualized in various ways throughout the book. Early on, for instance, Sarah portrays a courtroom that she imagines in her head, and the case under review is called “Birthright is trying to brainwash me vs. Birthright is actually pretty reasonable” (27). She depicts herself as all of the players in this courtroom: she is judge, prosecutor, defense, and members of the jury. Later in the book, about halfway through the trip, Sarah returns to this imaginary courtroom, and it is empty but for the judge and a court officer, both still drawn as versions of herself (107). What she comes to realize over the course of Israel is that she cannot fully confront her own biases without engaging with others. Identity is not figured in isolation; instead, it is a response to and reflection of real and imagined communities and interactions as well as the disparate subjectivities, including prejudices, that shape them.
This awareness is exemplified halfway through the book, when Sarah is pushed to associate with other members of her Birthright group and explore the relational contours of her Jewish identity. She realizes then that her lack of communication with others, stemming from her desire to fully reject a conception of Jewishness that feels foreign to her, has hindered her ability to approach a full understanding of the complexity of her identity and, by extension, of “the situation.” Sarah’s somewhat compulsory interaction with the group occurs roughly a third of the way through the narrative; it leads to her eventual dis-affiliation, a consequent partial affiliation, with her Jewish sense of self. She initially dreads the “bonding activity” scheduled for Friday evening, a night when the group cannot travel because of the Sabbath. The discussion centers on the individual participants’ Jewish identities, a topic that immediately elicits a groan from Sarah (66). The members of the group are given a single prompt, “I am a Jew because…” and asked to complete the sentence. Despite her initial antipathy, as the participants begin to talk, revealing diversely ambivalent relationships to their Jewish identities, she becomes attentive, allowing, “the discussion starts to get interesting” (67). In a series of four panels that follows her eventual engagement with others, as well as the end of her unquestioned disidentification from the group, she pictures herself, in contrast to her earlier self-portrayals, as one who belongs (figure 4.6). Although there are a total of six panels making up this page, these four can also be read independently because of the ways that they visually mirror one another, each featuring a single speaker as the focal point of the image. In the first two panels Sarah depicts herself listening intently while others around her tell their stories, as though she is finally open to the possibility that other voices can influence her. The Birthright members talking in these first two panels articulate Jewish identities that are complicated, although they echo one another. One tells the group that she was “raised Christian in Ukraine” but eventually converted. Another describes herself as having a mother who converted and growing up in Arkansas, where “we were the only Jews around.” These women relay unique backgrounds—they came from, and grew up in, very different communities—but they share important similarities too: a history of conversion and a sense of feeling at “home” as a Jew. The third panel shows Sarah telling her own narrative of her Jewish identity, which is also different from the ones described prior to hers. Having been raised in a self-identified Jewish family, she takes her Jewishness for granted or, as she puts it, primarily understands it as “inherited.” In the final panel of the four, a drawing of another participant mirrors Sarah’s own image, and his story similarly involves a Jewish identity that has been passed on to him by his family. Despite the resemblance to their backgrounds, however, Sarah and this young man also disclose important differences. The man mentions that he only “started getting to know non-Jews” after he left for college, whereas early in the book Sarah tells the reader that Melissa is one of her only Jewish friends. In addition, unlike the man, Sarah limits her identification as a Jew, emphasizing the fact that her family is culturally Jewish, rather than religious, and that she is interested in only “some” aspects of that cultural Jewishness, including “learning, eating and arguing.”
4.6 Sarah Glidden, four panels from chapter 3. In How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, p. 67. Copyright © Sarah Glidden 2010.
The four depictions here delineate Jewish identities by incorporating visual and verbal details that differentiate each individual from the other, reflecting the plurality of the subjects involved, even as these minutiae bind the stories together and reveal similarities between the individuals pictured. In the first panel Sarah is the only listener visible, whereas various group members surround the speaker in the second panel. In the third and fourth panels, Sarah and her male counterpart face one another, but the scales and shapes of their faces differ. Sarah’s face is rounder than the man’s oval-shaped one, and her hand, or possibly someone else’s, is pictured in her storytelling panel, whereas his is not visible in the following one. Even the backgrounds of the images are shaded in slightly different tints of yellow. These minor differences, which accent what otherwise would be somewhat seamless visual parallels, convey the senses of difference within sameness that emerge from the shared stories of these Birthright participants. Each individual reveals a particular history of identifying as Jewish, and each is affirmed, by participating as part of the group, in her own version of this identification. In the end, through hearing the various ways other people both do and do not affiliate as Jews, Sarah finally feels comfortable both decentering her narrative “I” and considering herself part of the group, if only because the dissimilarities between individual members who all consider themselves “Jewish” are finally so conspicuous. At this moment in the text, she maps her Jewish identity, figuring it in relational terms, and consequently recognizes that such an interweaving does not invalidate her own subjectivity, but rather enriches it. Her story becomes one of many deeply personal and individualized narratives of Jewishness.
This group activity compels Sarah to engage more directly with questions about her Jewish identity, a pursuit that leads her to recognize that her notions of what it means to identify as Jewish inevitably affect her views about Israel. Soon after the group discussion, she wonders “how many other people on this trip I’ve completely misjudged” (71). By facing her presumptions about others, she is finally forced to reexamine her entire misdirected approach to her Israel mission. Instead of a purportedly objective search for the “truth,” she must inevitably recognize her own preconceptions about Israel as deeply rooted in the way that she relates—or, more aptly, does not relate—to her Jewish identity. As the chapter closes, she finds herself discussing politics with Nadan, one of the Israeli tour guides. Incredibly, it is only here, for the first time in the book, that she explores outright the intersection between her Jewish identity and her political beliefs in relation to Israel. In two panels she relays the “confusing” contradiction that she suppressed up until then, having chosen to frame “the situation” as a set of events peripheral to her personal history. Now she makes the connection:
I’m Jewish so that means I’m supposed to support Israel no matter what, right?
But according to a lot of people, any support for the Palestinians means that you don’t support Israel.
At the same time, when it comes to politics, I’m left-wing and progressive. And if you’re progressive, you’re supposed to be anti-Israel…Any sympathy with Israel means that you don’t support the Palestinians. So see? I’m stuck!16
With this monologue, Sarah finally delineates how her political and cultural identities have been constructed as oppositional. The way she emphasizes her political identity over the course of the text, and downplays her Jewish one, can be understood retrospectively as her effort to stifle the very contradiction she verbalizes in this scene.
In their introduction to Wrestling with Zion, one of the books Sarah reads in preparation for her trip, Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon pinpoint the reasons such conflicting paradigms persevere. As they write, “a dangerous illusion persists that the Jewish-American community speaks with a single voice” (8). In this passage Sarah acknowledges her sense that her desire to criticize Israel is antithetical to the way she is “supposed” to think and behave as a Jew. As such, she suppresses her Jewish identifications and is made uncomfortable by them when they are brought up by others (as in her interaction with El Al security). Paradoxically, only in her recognition of this seemingly impossible positioning is she compelled to begin to accept, and, consequently, explore her Jewish identity, and to relate the way this sense of being Jewish affects how she has come to view Israel. Kushner and Solomon implore others to examine these very questions that Israel brings to the forefront, questions that, they argue, “increasingly—and dangerously—go unexamined.” These questions include the following: “What is at the heart of the connection between Israel and American Jews? Why should we have a connection (or not)? What is Israel’s role in shaping Jewish-American identities?” Glidden’s narrative does not take any such associations for granted. If anything, up until this moment in the text, Sarah attempts to counter the construction of Jews as inevitably affiliated with Israel. Yet her interactions with other self-identified Jews who come from disparate backgrounds drive her to confront the power of her own assumptions. She begins to question why she feels compelled to define herself primarily in terms of her opposition to Israel, without recourse to her Jewish identity, as though a person could not self-identify as Jewish and simultaneously question Israeli policies or even the existence of Israel. In the end the narrative performs, through the experience of a North American Jew encountering Israel firsthand, the ways certain prejudices about identity are transformed and challenged. While a connection exists between Sarah’s North American Jewish identity and her views about Israel, that connection is not inevitable; it necessitates continual investigation and self-reflection. As these two panels, set side by side, demonstrate, such self-analysis often unmasks the contradictions and complications that compel the individual to lead a kind of doubled existence. Sarah’s face and upper torso, in both images, are pictured similarly but for the way they are angled. Her configuration on the page provides a visual analogy for how competing narratives of the self can be housed within the same body. What Sarah comes to recognize is that both these versions of herself can represent “truth.”
4.7 Sarah Glidden, two panels from chapter 3. In How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, p. 77. Copyright © Sarah Glidden 2010.
Throughout the remainder of the book, instead of continuing to cling to a notion of herself as Jewish outsider, Sarah subsequently claims her Jewish identity by toying with the various ways she disidentifies but ultimately partially identifies with her Jewish self, her dis-affiliations. Her explorations are often reflected in the ways she portrays herself in relation to the people and places she has traveled to observe and “understand.” In certain instances she goes so far as to try on the possibility of Israel as Jewish homeland, a configuration she forcefully rejects early on in the narrative when she compares her visit to Israel to spotting a celebrity on the street. In the chapter on Tel Aviv, for example, describing her walk through a crowd of people, she writes that she unexpectedly senses “something strange missing” (82). Comparing this trip to Israel with other journeys she has taken around the world, Sarah asserts that here she feels like “I could easily be one of these people” (83). In a series of images, she pictures herself as a traveler in various other countries, and in each of these depictions she stands out. In Paris, she explains, this happens because of her “complete lack of sophistication.” In Guangzhou, China, and Övörkhangai, Mongolia, in contrast, Sarah explains that she cannot possibly fit in because of her physical differences from those around her.
This consideration of Israel as Sarah’s “natural” homeland in contrast to these other foreign communities is, upon closer inspection, tenuously laid out. What, for instance, does it mean to “lack sophistication,” and would she, based on this superficial assessment, really then stand out in Paris and not on the streets of Tel Aviv? Her overly simplistic identification with Israel and Israelis collapses easily when, at the end of the page, a man asks her in Hebrew what time the parade will start. At that point, she is forced to admit that she cannot easily or automatically belong, however much she wants to. In a single scene, then, Sarah explores, and subsequently deconstructs, the possibility of Israel as homeland through relational configurations. The sequence of the text, presented in neat boxes across and down the page, allows her to play with the ways she can superficially imagine herself in and across different spaces as an Israeli insider, even though such oversimplified external identifications—based primarily in her drawn body—ultimately collapse.
Over the course of the remainder of the book, as in this scene, Sarah’s relationship to Israel remains unresolved as she continues to experiment with various ways of relating to Israeli life and politics. Later in the Tel Aviv chapter, she hears a speech detailing the history of Israel’s declaration of itself as a state in 1948. The speech ends when the speaker tells the group, “you are here because the state of Israel belongs to the whole Jewish world” (99). Sarah finds herself accepting these words and consequently undergoing an emotional upheaval. “Are these our soldiers?” she wonders soon after, as she passes six young people dressed in uniform waiting, unarmed, by the side of the road. In the following panel, she exclaims to herself, “My God, they’re so young.” By claiming these soldiers as “our” soldiers, Sarah privileges Israel as her homeland once again, while she visualizes herself in ways that both engage and distance her from this assessment. In the first panel she draws the soldiers, “our” soldiers, without her own presence in the image. In the second panel she introduces her body as part of the illustration, but this time her words separate her from the Israelis by evoking the age differential between them, a difference visually emphasized with bold lettering. Her ability to maneuver herself on the page, as one who simultaneously observes and interacts, or as one who both does and does not belong, is what allows her to examine and challenge, from various angles, the concept of Israel as Jewish homeland. In experimenting with different ways of relating to and dissociating from the country and its citizens, she confronts the very identifications that she has, until now, unquestioningly rejected.
Sarah’s persistent examination of her relationship to Israel, even in the face of admonitions from others (as well as from the cynical parts of herself), connects her with the personae represented in the works of the other Jewish American women cartoonists discussed here who seek to rebel against the authoritative voices that attempt to fix or determine the limits and boundaries of their individual senses of what it means to be Jewish. As the narrative progresses, her questions remain explored but unanswered. The common refrain that surfaces as she continues to persistently ask others questions about Israel and its politics is that the issue is “complicated.” “We don’t xhave to agree about this,” Nadan, the Israeli tour guide, finally tells her after another conversation in which they disagree about politics (203). In this panel she is once again pictured alone, but the thought bubble floating over her head clearly belongs to another individual, reinforcing the way her sense of self is always connected to others. Her hands float in the air, somewhat aimlessly clutched in front of her, suggesting, perhaps, that the very narrative she will create with those hands is what could potentially tie these points of view together.
In response to Nadan’s assertion, Sarah recognizes that she, too, has trouble responding to the very questions she came to Israel to answer. Her narrative box several panels later conveys this acknowledgment: “I still don’t really know what [my] point of view is yet, and…maybe I never will.” This conversation, and the realization it engenders, reinforces her position as an outsider, both among North American progressive liberal Jews at large and also among the group of Jews that surround her in Israel. Instead of locating herself on any “side” of the narrative, she stubbornly refuses to assign herself a simple outlook, conjuring for herself, instead, a liminal or dis-affiliatory stance. Such an awareness of her ambivalence could be read as a renunciation of her plan to find the “truth,” a way of withdrawing from a difficult state of affairs by refusing to take sides. As Kushner and Solomon point out, one of the gravest “temptations” of those looking at the Middle East at a remove is that they will take the easy way out. This often happens, they explain, in two ways: either they leave the challenge of “rigorous analysis, studied, disciplined comprehension, and finally policy itself to the experts, the diplomats, the soldiers, and the leadership of the nations and would-be nations involved” or they “fall back on instinct, on tribal loyalties of various kinds—ethnic, religious, ideological” (1). Israel is a book about resisting such tribal loyalties, including the ones, like Sarah’s progressive politics, that are presumably formed in the pursuit of justice and subsequently do not always get questioned. Throughout the text, she comes to realize that these political affiliations exert as much pressure on her to conform as her “inherited” ones. She experiments with various identifications and disidentifications by visualizing them on the page and recognizing, inevitably, that no single image (or narrative) can tell the whole story.
But, all the same, her refusal to take a clear position at the end of the text could be read as a way of giving in to the first of the temptations outlined by Kushner and Solomon—the desire to let others deal with “overwhelming” complications instead of facing them. The book, however, does not end with this conversation, one in which she refuses to offer a particular point of view. Instead, on the following three pages, she records her last night in Israel, her departure, and her arrival in Istanbul, where she has decided to stop over on her way home. In two full pages we witness her undergoing this journey away from Israel without a single word inscribed in any of the panels. These pages potentially reinforce a problematic silence, a refusal to take sides. But, on the final page of the book, she finally breaks that silence. Having arrived at a hostel in Istanbul, she finds a group of young people gathered in a communal space, and they invite her to tea. Surrounded by strangers, they begin to ask her questions: “Where are you coming from?” “Isn’t it kind of a war zone?” Sarah, a cup of tea in her hands, begins to answer their questions: “No, no…it’s not like that at all” (206).
In the final three panels of the book, one of the strangers asks, in a thought bubble that emerges from outside the image, “What’s the deal with that place, anyway?” Sarah pictures herself alone in three consecutive panels (figure 4.8). In the first she is sipping her tea comfortably, presumably observing the person asking the question. In the second, her hand at her mouth, she looks confounded, as though unsure where to begin. This second panel represents her continued ambivalence about certain aspects of the situation, her refusal to take sides. The final panel, however, presents the beginning of Sarah’s movement beyond this potentially paralyzing ambivalence. Although she still looks somewhat nonplussed, with eyebrows raised, her hands are positioned as if she were ready to launch into a response, and her thought bubble reinforces that gesture, as she begins, “Well- -.” This concluding panel of the book visually reflects Sarah’s refusal to stop thinking about or discussing “the situation,” even in light of the many uncertainties, contradictions, and complications she faces in trying to understand it. The end of her journey to Israel is portrayed, instead, as a mere starting point, the beginning of conversations with others (and in other places), to be continued.
Israel concludes with a much less assured, and reassuring, Sarah than the one who opens the book. She closes her narrative in the midst of searching for the right words and, as her partially open hand reflects, the right images too, symbolizing the way in which her narrative circles back to the problems that opened the book. In fact, as the final illustration demonstrates, the very act of maintaining dialogue, of speaking or writing about a topic in the face of overwhelming uncertainties, is what bolsters Sarah’s initial pursuit of knowledge of self and others. Here she begins to tell a story, and it is a story that has been translated from an idea, assembled at a distance, to a reality embedded in countless conflicting realities and histories. Yet, as these final panels indicate, this story’s end is really just the beginning of the pursuit for “truth.”
4.8 Sarah Glidden, three panels from end of book. In How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, p. 206. Copyright © Sarah Glidden 2010.
“I Am Still Miriam Libicki”
Towards the end of Israel, when Sarah decides that she will not visit the West Bank after her Birthright tour as planned, she admits to her part in leaving having witnessed only one side of the story. Her decision not to go to Ramallah is based on her fear of traveling without a guide, a move she is told is too dangerous for her as a Jew and woman. “What can I say? I’m a big hypocrite, talking about how people need to move past their prejudices and fears but then I can’t take a fifteen minute taxi trip without someone holding my hand” (200). Here Sarah recognizes how her outlook has been limited by the choices she has made, from her initial decision to go on Birthright to her choice not to take a taxi into the West Bank once the formal trip is over. But Israel is ultimately a testament to the relevance and importance of such one-sided narratives. The book is about the transformation of Sarah’s subjectivity in the context of a small and distorted glimpse of Israel’s history, geography, and culture. She shows in this case an awareness of the significance of her missed opportunity to visit the Palestinian territories, which are discussed often throughout the book, though always from a distance. Instead of silencing her narrative in light of such flagrant omissions, she calls the reader’s attention to them, thereby highlighting her travel experience as one of many possible journeys and pointing to the importance of continued research, dialogue, and testimony from a variety of perspectives, even when those perspectives are limited.
Libicki similarly frames her series, which tracks her time in the Israeli army, as invested in recording her very narrow experience of what, as a North American–born Israeli soldier, was once unfamiliar to her. In a four-page comics pamphlet that she titles “jobnik manifesto” and includes with sales of her jobnik! comics, she calls her work “subjective & personal” and “as honest as possible” (3). This outlook, while part of her mission, also at times makes her feel “guilty that my comics don’t try to go beyond my own experience” (“A Conversation” 244). In each case, by stressing the limited scope of their projects and foregrounding their individual, inevitably limited, perspectives, Glidden and Libicki attempt to distance themselves from the journalistic enterprise, at least in the conventional way such an endeavor might be framed and defined.
Despite these qualifications, however, both books are clearly invested in the task of accounting for outlooks and subjectivities that are not always readily perceptible and that bind the individual to other people’s experiences and viewpoints. Through the stories they tell, and the ways they tell these stories, these cartoonists attempt to make visible the limitations and possibilities intrinsic in all narratives based on first-person reportage. This is an undertaking for which graphic narratives are especially suited. As Libicki notes of hearing Joe Sacco talk about the biased point of view in his own comics, “he said one of the best things about being a comic artist and not a reporter is that he didn’t have the specter of ‘balance’ hanging over his work. He felt it was important to get in with one group of people, and tell their story, and tell what you see, as best as possible” (“A Conversation” 244).17 This conspicuous awareness of the complexities of documenting what one sees through hand-drawn images and words characterizes one of the distinctive qualities of autobiographical comics in general. As a prime example, the body of a cartoonist, drawn repeatedly in autobiographical comics, emerges quite clearly as a depiction filtered through that particular artist’s point of view. The drawn body alters, however subtly in some cases and dramatically in others, with each rendering—a shift that, though it may be happening, for example, to the “I” of a prose narrative, is simply not as obvious. This visual subjectivity extends to all that is drawn “from life.” As Sacco writes in his preface to Journalism, a 2013 collection of his comics reportage, “Drawings are interpretive even when they are slavish renditions of photographs, which are generally perceived to capture a real moment literally. But there is nothing literal about a drawing” (xi). The journalistic genre’s claims to objectivity and factuality, however qualified and cosmetic those claims, are not as easily proffered in comics as they are in prose or photography. In other words, nonfictional comics, however they are categorized, can make more blatant and visible the subjectivity that inevitably drives every reporting impulse—specifically the desire to record what one sees in an unbiased manner—and that shapes and colors its subsequent rendering and reception.
While Libicki’s work is thus focused, like Glidden’s, on the particular ways Miriam reflects on and explores her identity over the course of the narrative, and how such reflections connect her with larger questions about Israeli life and politics, in jobnik! Miriam begins with an overt recognition that she is already a subject in limbo and that, in a sense, she always has been and likely will continue to be.18 The publication history of the ongoing series reflects this simultaneous sense of dislocation and possibility. Originally published as a serial comic, the earliest issue of jobnik! came out in 2003. The ten issues published so far recount Miriam’s time in the army in the “present” of the narrative, but they also offer diversions from the main story that reference the past.19 The first six issues have since been compiled into a thin, single book of about 10 inches by 6 1/2 inches, published in 2008 with a prelude, a glossary of terms, and author’s notes included. Individual issues are still forthcoming, and Libicki has promised that the series will most likely account for her experiences “from enlistment to discharge” (personal communication, August 13, 2014). This open-ended publication history reflects a sense of such autobiographical storytelling as both boundless and fitful, subject to forces set apart from the narrative plot in itself.
Based in large part on her journals from the time, as well as letters and e-mails, jobnik! is a series that is also invested, like Israel, in preserving experiences that took place in real life by retelling them. It opens with Miriam already immersed in army life. Unlike the subsequent individual issues (or chapters) of the comic series, which generally limit the narrative voice holding the story together and instead allow the events, for the most part, to speak for themselves, the four-page prelude is composed as a journal entry. With the date, “Monday 11 September 2000,” neatly scrawled at the top, the images on this opening page situate Miriam at rest in various beds, as though to convey her emotional and physical displacement from the narrative’s very opening (4).20 Like the series as a whole, the images are carefully drawn and shaded in pencil. This format suggests intimacy and simplicity—as though the reader is encountering a person’s private sketchbook, not intended to be shown to an audience. But the exhaustive detail apparent in the penciling and the unique architecture of each page, which does not generally follow a particular pattern, also convey the careful construction that has gone into the composition of the work. At the bottom of this first prelude page, snapshots depicting Miriam engaged in sexual acts are arranged, scattered across a dark surface. The drawings of photographs included here suggest a contrast similar to that of the penciling: the intimacy illustrated in the photographs makes looking at them feel like a violation, as though the reader has “caught” Miriam in the midst of these private acts. However, because the images are drawn as photographs, with dates carefully documented at the bottom of each drawn Polaroid, there is also the possibility that these confessions were calculated from the start, intended to be shared with others.
As with Israel, a muddled sense of time and space carries through jobnik!, reflecting in this case how the daily routines of army life, including especially its inevitable proximity to violence, have impaired the persona’s ability to “find” herself. Indeed, even though a date is so evidently attributed to the opening of the narrative, various other dates, written on the drawn photographs, preempt any linear unfolding of the story line on this opening page and predict the often confused ways time and space will be portrayed. The narrator here is pictured in beds and rooms that all look somewhat different, but there is also the potential that these are three varying perspectives of the same space. Additionally, the opening lines of the prelude, sprawled across the page in a series of short but neat handwritten fragments, complicate the time frame by beginning in the middle of the story line. “It’s been over a year since I’ve written in this,” the first line reads. “I am still Miriam Libicki, I am a citizen of the United States and Israel, and a soldier in the Israel Defense Force” (4). These words contextualize the comics that make up jobnik! and anticipate a narrative that will trace Miriam’s subjectivity in light of the three chief markers of her identity: her name (and, by extension, the self she attempts to portray on the page), her nationalities, and her decision to enlist in the Israeli military. By including the adverb still in this introductory sentence, Miriam reveals how, at the moment she is writing in her journal, her identity is already open to potential disruptions and transformations. The story becomes one, oddly enough, of attempting to track her own dislocations.
From its opening, the comic series accordingly privileges Miriam’s search for identity over and above any other potential journeys to be imparted over the course of the narrative. Even if the book provides a glimpse at what is generally inaccessible territory—that is, the day-to-day life of an Israeli soldier—it is always clearly through the eyes of a somewhat naive young woman as she comes of age. The preface to the book nevertheless anticipates readings of the narrative as cultural translation by including Hebrew words transliterated into English as well as the definitions of these words and phrases included at the bottom of the pages. These translations situate Miriam as between cultures over the course of her time in the army. As a woman who was born and raised in America but is a dual citizen living in Israel at the time the narrative takes place, she positions herself not as visitor or even tourist. Instead, she presents herself as someone embedded in Israeli life and culture, even if she is unable to ever fully assimilate.
As the narrative reflects from its outset, Miriam’s identity is premised in a desire to connect with others. Her sense of herself as an outsider is, along these lines, based in her failure to establish meaningful relationships, especially with the men around her. This alienated sense of self contrasts with her self-proclaimed allegiance to Israel, a configuration based in a concept of Israel as metaphorical homeland to all Jews. Throughout the comics, these personal and political narratives fade in and out. Only in a flashback mosaic included on a page in issue 3, for example, does Miriam begin to fully express her complex relationship to the Israeli state—a plotline that seems particularly crucial given that it drove her to enlist in the army in the first place. This final page of the issue is presented just after Miriam portrays herself at a military gathering on the fifth anniversary of Itzhak Rabin’s assassination. The commemoration is depicted in a singular, full-page spread featuring a female soldier singing to a group of soldiers, the Israeli flag waving beside her as the crowd stands at attention (72). Libicki’s jobnik! comics in general can be described as carefully focused on people’s bodies, particularly the ways these bodies, through their stances and facial expressions in particular, inhabit the spaces around them. In this image, the soldiers all stand generally attentive, and the details of their hairstyles and faces, when visible, are the central features that distinguish them. The singer’s eyes are closed, but her raised eyebrows and solemn posture reflect the strong emotions behind her words, which tie all the individuals in the scene together.
In contrast to this tailored, full-page image, in which the soldiers all seem, for the most part, united, a coherent group experiencing or at least attending to the emotions conveyed by that central figure, the flashback is conveyed in fragments, a page outline that reflects the splintering of Miriam’s individual, subjective experience (73, figure 4.9). The page is broken up into ten differently sized, curved panels that fit together like puzzle pieces, though with small white gaps of space dividing each of them. At the top left corner of the page, in a series of five smaller panels, the Israeli landscape is pictured as it pans out from another line of soldiers commemorating Rabin’s death on a local Israeli army base (as Miriam notes, the first commemoration she observed in Israel) to the Israeli state as situated within the Middle East and, finally, to Israel as a small dot on the earth drawn as a globe.
The bottom half of the page extends outward with larger panels featuring individuals caught in particular moments of time, a scope and scale that contrasts with the topographical illustrations connected above it. We see a series of close-up images labeled by year (from left to right, 2000, 1998, 1995, 1998, 1998), and each traces a moment in time that in some way informs Miriam’s relationship to those places pictured at the top of the page. These bottom panels almost all feature Miriam, as though to emphasize how her perspective has shifted over time with regard to these different spaces and perspectives. For example, in a panel that connects this flashback montage with the previous page, as it is labeled “2000,” Miriam stands at attention with a group of soldiers behind her. She observes: “I don’t belong in Israel as much as I belong to Israel. Every year on rabin’s yahrzeit I know it’s not even a choice.”21 This narrative of Israel as home is written into an illustration that transforms the previous depiction of the group commemoration into a representation where she is featured as protagonist, standing front and center with a few other soldiers pictured around her. Yet, read alongside the other close-up images on the page, which present her, or others, in regular clothes and engaged in more intimate conversations and activities, it still suggests a disconnection from the commemoration scene around her. This visual sense of isolation is ironically located in the space of her verbalized ultimate connection, her declaration of belonging. In addition, the framing of Israel as Miriam’s homeland is complicated by her assessment of herself not as belonging “in” Israel, but rather belonging “to” Israel. By emphasizing a distinction between the two, the words, in addition to the images, dispel the certainty that one’s appointed home is the place where one necessarily comes to feel at home.
The related close-up images at the bottom of the page, each tracking different moments that have informed Miriam’s “present”-day subjectivity at the commemoration ceremony, similarly unsettle any simple notion of belonging. For example, in a panel depicting her mother standing alone at prayer, she narrates her love of Rabin—a connection that ostensibly binds Miriam, too, to this Israeli political figure and all that he represents. As she relates of her mother, “She was afraid for him, for what he was trying to do” (73). In linking the story of her own journey to Israel with her mother’s love of Rabin and, by extension, Israel, Miriam situates herself as being tied to the country and its politics through a kind of inheritance. But, by leaving herself out of the image, she also conveys a distance between herself and her mother, carrier of this inheritance. That gap is reinforced by her mother’s conservative dress, which contrasts with her own. Indeed, in chapter 5 of the story, she points to her inability to dress conservatively as something that sets her apart from others in her religious community. Although she implicates her mother in this problem of fitting in, admitting that “neither my mother nor i could ever get the hang of dressing me right,” the depictions of her mother emphasize that the clothing issue belongs to Miriam alone (100). While Miriam’s clothing often seems to cling to her, revealing the shape and outline of her body, her mother’s conservative dress, in this prayer image as in other illustrations of her in the series, conceals her form. The illustration of her mother at prayer thus reflects Miriam’s simultaneous sense of connection to and distance from someone who largely influences her attachment to Israel as a metaphorical homeland. This figurative and inherited connection, translated on the page through a web of disjointed though related images, figures here as unsettled and precarious.
4.9 Miriam Libicki, final page from chapter 3. In jobnik!, p. 73. Copyright © Miriam Libicki.
Through this network of images, Miriam’s personal history is visualized as driven largely by forces outside herself even as these forces link back, in very particular ways, to her individual story. The book is invested, from its outset, in this reciprocal exchange. The day-to-day challenges that surface in Miriam’s dealings with other individuals in the army often mirror a more general sense of displacement that she experiences from the spaces around her, including her adopted country. For example, as a voluntary soldier in what is a recognizably male-dominated environment, Miriam is subject to a series of humiliations that are often based on her interactions with men. From the beginning of her time in the army, she is labeled an outsider by the male psychologist who interviews her. She depicts this event on the second page of the prologue (5, figure 4.10). The military officer lists her so-called abnormalities: “Overly emotional, disconnected from reality, possessed of anxieties (especially social), unable to form interpersonal bonds, sexually conflicted…” The page in which Miriam illustrates this diagnosis is split in two. The bottom shows her sitting silently, arms folded, across a desk from the officer as she is given her diagnosis and asked, “Sure you haven’t considered suicide a little bit?” The word bubbles that stem from this officer bleed onto the top of the page, which depicts various ink blots, arranged much like the Polaroid photographs in the opening to the prelude. Miriam is pictured alone in the bottom right corner of this part of the page, drawing on a piece of paper. Her figure is out of scale not only with the officer’s word bubbles, which press in her direction, but also with the ink blots that loom in her midst, overwhelming her sense of self. It is unclear whether this depiction is meant to reflect her participation in the mental evaluation process or is instead a solitary moment from the same time period in which she is drawing on her own, perhaps as a means of coping or reflecting. But, in any case, this self-portrait links Miriam’s abnormal diagnosis, and her isolation more generally, with her artistic personality. Her art potentially offers her the key to independence, to creating her own self-identifications, though it also links to the narrative of difference that comes to shape her sense of self throughout her time in the army. While she rarely seems to utilize art as a means of agency in the “present” as it is recorded in the issues of jobnik! that have been published so far, as reflected by this image, the potential is always there, latent. In fact, in addition to the prologue, depicted as a journal entry, each story line opens with a date scrawled at the top corner of the page. This formal detail links the unfolding narrative to the diary that shaped it, hinting at the possibility for self-representation exposed in this specific image and also connecting that possibility to the eventual project of composing the autobiographical jobnik! series itself.
4.10 Miriam Libicki, third page from the prologue. In jobnik!, p. 5. Copyright © Miriam Libicki.
As the story unfolds, the reader learns that because of these strongly gendered classifications of Miriam’s mental state, as well as her limited Hebrew speaking skills, she is prevented from being assigned a high rank in the army and is instead given the “extremely unskilled job of secretary of the infirmary” (6). In a sense, it is, ironically, her very desire to volunteer in the army—an action that symbolizes her unquestioning belief in Israel as Jewish homeland—that immediately casts her as outsider. In an interview about jobnik! and her time in the army, Libicki conveyed this paradox. As she explained, “I…think it was a bit of the catch-22: it’s sane to pretend you’re insane in order to get out of military service, but if you are volunteering for army service, odds are that you are insane” (“A Conversation” 248). As a woman and an American, Miriam is not expected to want to participate in what so many others around her view as an inescapable duty. Her decision to join the army and her notion of this act as compulsory, as part of her destiny, marks her, indelibly, as an outsider.
Miriam’s daily presence in the army consequently comes to stand for a submissiveness and naïveté that native-born Israeli soldiers, as they are depicted in jobnik!, lack. In another image presented early on in the narrative, about halfway through the first issue, Miriam’s difference from others is visualized on another carefully rendered, fragmented page that stylistically reflects disparate points of view as they coalesce in a moment of time. The image depicts her going about her daily work, which involves carrying an oversized bag of documents. She has been assigned to burn these because the base cannot afford a shredder—a minor detail that nevertheless emphasizes her expendability (16, figure 4.11). In contrast to her trivialized presence, mirrored by the formless bag of trash hanging limply behind her, she walks in earnest, her eyes downcast and two arms strongly gripping behind her. A series of small panels pictured underneath her form reflect various Israeli soldiers conversing casually with one another, even as she silently passes by on the page. The others pictured in these small, rectangular panels banter or flirt and tease each other, their casual and animate presences contrasting with Miriam’s downcast, serious, and lonely presence. This superimposed illustration captures both the distance and proximity between Miriam and these soldiers, brought together on this army base. For the Israelis, being in the army is an inevitable fact of life. Their identities as soldiers are, by necessity, integrated into their identities as young people socializing with one another. For Miriam, who grew up in Ohio, being in the Israeli army is a significant act. It represents a sacrifice she has chosen to make, however much she wants to frame that decision as predetermined.
4.11 Miriam Libicki, half a page from chapter 1. In jobnik!, p. 16. Copyright © Miriam Libicki.
Miriam’s unquestioning affiliation to Israel and the Israeli army therefore actually distances her from those around her. Her blind faith gets translated by others as a kind of willful obedience. This submissiveness extends not only to the tasks she takes on as a soldier, but also to the ways she interacts with men, as she is repeatedly portrayed as sexually submissive and naive. In addition, the first few issues in the series in particular establish a correlation between Miriam’s loss of sexual innocence and her gradual introduction to political violence and terror as a part of daily life. These two areas of army life inevitably intersect and reinforce Miriam’s sense of dislocation, as her so-called private life gets continually intruded upon by the political terrors around her.
In the second chapter, for example, Miriam records her budding relationship with a fellow soldier, Shahar. This is the first of many confusing relationships with men in the army. Their initial friendship is slow moving. In a series of panels depicted on two adjoining pages and reminiscent of Lauren’s movie date in Girl Stories, the couple is pictured, somewhat innocently, sharing a bus ride together (28–29). Miriam is often drawn in jobnik! sitting on the bus as she rides to and from her army base. These illustrations almost always feature a series of words on the page reflecting radio broadcasts that transmit current events, and especially stories of violence in and around Israel. In these two pages, however, only a conversation between the couple fills the spaces between them, and the last four panels depict the two of them in total silence (29, figure 4.12). The images focus, instead, on the couple’s bodies as they weave through sleep and consciousness, eventually collapsing together between the two seats. Miriam’s large, expressive eyes in the first and final panels here additionally hint at the emotional upheaval—her excitement, perhaps, or anticipation—that remains otherwise undisclosed. Thus her budding romantic relationship is portrayed, in this initial encounter, as separate from her awareness of Israeli political life or as powerful enough to detach her from it, at least temporarily.
This disconnect does not, however, last. Several pages later the couple is pictured once again on the bus together. This time, the panel that depicts them is crowded in by words emerging from a news broadcast discussing army policy (31, figure 4.13). In this illustration the couple appears divided from one another. The radio broadcast takes up a large part of the image, and Miriam looks out the window gloomily as Shahar holds onto headphones that presumably block him from the sound of the broadcast as well as from her. The distance between the two is enhanced in the following scene, which recounts Shahar’s declaration that “I really don’t think I can have a girlfriend right now,” followed by a sexual advance that depicts Miriam being groped by him, his head invisible to the reader, as she looks wide-eyed up at the sky (33). Miriam’s loss of sexual innocence unravels alongside her slow but steady reintroduction into political turmoil, and its attendant violence, as an unavoidable part of daily life. Her isolated configuration in the depiction of her sexual encounter with Shahar, which pictures her as detached from the event, is representative of the many disempowering sexual and political experiences that she undergoes throughout the narrative. She seems to have as much of an inability to control her interpersonal relationships as she does the bloodshed occurring around her.
4.12 Miriam Libicki, four panels in chapter 2. In jobnik!, p. 29. Copyright © Miriam Libicki.
Over time, then, as in this chapter’s story line, Miriam’s gradual dissociation from the daily military violence that surrounds her runs parallel to a passivity in relation to her sexual interactions. This disengagement is figured, throughout jobnik!, in images that convey her increasing confusion and defeat in relation to the spaces around her. In a powerful full-page drawing positioned toward the end of this second chapter, Miriam looks up at a sky full of stars and military jets (45, figure 4.14).22 She is illustrated as a tiny and faceless figure at the bottom of the page as the brightness overwhelms her and she thinks to herself, “Dear god, where am I?” For Miriam, the sense of displacement she experiences in relation to her peers, locally, extends to her global surroundings. Her inability to feel at home among other Israeli soldiers is mirrored in her discomfort as witness to daily political life and violence in Israel. The physical disorientation illustrated in this image mirrors the many other disorientations hinted at over the course of the series, which she experiences in relation to her identities as a woman, an American, an Israeli, a soldier, and a religious Jew, as much as the very narrative of Israel as Jewish homeland that has transported her across the globe. While, at times, she might attempt to highlight this tie to Israel as inherited, her powerfully visualized sense of displacement throughout jobnik! continually unsettles that presumed automatic connection.
4.13 Miriam Libicki, panel in chapter 2 In jobnik!, p. 31. Copyright © Miriam Libicki.
“I’m Mostly an Outsider Who Can’t Really Understand”
Miriam’s dislocations throughout jobnik! recall Sarah’s confused sense of time and place in Israel, as each persona’s account demonstrates the wide gap between her ideas about Israel and the realities she faces over the course of her time there. In a sense jobnik! can be read as a narrative that maps a journey counter to what is presented in Israel. Miriam’s consideration of herself as innately belonging to Israel contrasts strongly with Sarah’s sense, especially at the beginning of Israel, that, just because she is a Jew, she does not necessarily identify with Israel or feel as if she belongs there. Sarah thus opens with a strong disidentification with being Jewish and with what she initially views as a subsequent disidentification with Israel. By the end of her narrative, she recognizes the inaccuracy of her unquestioned connection between the two. In contrast, Miriam presumes an Israeli affiliation from the beginning of her comic series, an association related to her (and her mother’s) religious beliefs and, consequently, to her Jewish roots.
4.14 Miriam Libicki, page in chapter 2. In jobnik!, p. 45. Copyright © Miriam Libicki.
Yet, unlike Sarah, over the course of the narrative Miriam never voices (at least thus far in the series) a revelation regarding the ways that her identifications do not match up in reality. Even though her daily experiences in the army reflect her isolation, she does not overtly question her presumed connection, and obligation, to the country. This lack of self-consciousness about the meaning behind her sense of alienation is, in part, a function of the way jobnik! is presented. As a memoir connected, through dated sections, to a real diary, the series tracks the narrator’s subjectivity in the “present” of her time in the army. In contrast, written as a travelogue, Israel is presumably a book composed after Sarah returns from her trip and assesses the meanings behind her journey. In each case the framework of the text reinforces the way the alter ego’s subjectivity undergoes its transformations. For Miriam, the shift in her personal point of view is presented as a slow process that deepens over the course of several years of daily life in the army, even if in reality the series is being composed by a cartoonist looking back in time; for Sarah, her transforming subjectivity is something that can be portrayed as playing out over her ten-day trip, but also bleeding outside of that particular time frame. The structures of both texts, then, however disparate, reinforce the idea that the formation of a person’s subjectivity is a lifelong process. While that process is often easier to scrutinize during the transitional phases of an individual’s life, its conversions and effects can never be seamlessly pinned down.
Even though the transformation of Miriam’s viewpoint is never made explicit in the ten issues of jobnik! that have been published so far, Miriam Libicki has written several visual autobiographical essays that calculatedly explore the very questions that her persona avoids explicitly asking herself throughout the series. As stated, Libicki started work on jobnik! as early as 2003, though her time in the army took place from August 2000 to May 2002. The autobiographical essays she has written, which she has described as “reveries,” overlap, in time, with her composition of the comic series (personal communication, August 13, 2014). In a sense these shorter pieces may be considered countertexts or texts that potentially intersect with, broaden, and overtly challenge some of the issues of identity laid out in jobnik!
In 2005 Libicki published the short visual essay, Towards a Hot Jew: The Israeli Soldier as Fetish Object; in 2006, she published the travelogue Ceasefire, about the second war in Lebanon; in 2008, she published the essay, Fierce Ease, subtitled Portraits of Israel; and, most recently, in 2012, she published Strangers, an essay about Israel composed “long-distance.”23 In each of these works Miriam presents herself more certainly in the role of journalist, as she seeks to ask, sort out, and visualize some of the very questions left unanswered in jobnik! without foregrounding her own presence. Yet these corollary texts also proffer continued insights into Libicki’s ever changing subjectivity, a limited but pronounced self-consciousness that is perhaps what differentiates these works from jobnik! over and above anything else and ultimately frames them as conjuring a dis-affiliatory outlook.
The cover of Towards a Hot Jew, a twelve-page-long pamphlet sketched in pencil and sized at about 8 1/2 by 11 inches, pictures seven Israeli soldiers lined up in uniform, their bodies and clothing drawn in watercolors against a white background. The people represented present as male and female, and they encompass the various ethnicities that, Libicki writes, in part explains why members of the Israeli army are so often fetishized. “Israeli Jews are more multiethnic than North American Jews, ingathering the exiles from Europe, North Africa, Ethiopia, the former Soviet Union, India, etc.,” she writes. “Being more varied, they are more exotic and less like the kids you grew up with.”24 With these words, Libicki presumes her reader (and fetishizer) to be a North American Jew. The aim of her essay is to convey—as well as deconstruct—the stereotypical visions that North American Jews have presumably constructed about Israeli soldiers. From its onset, then, this picture essay is an exploration of an idea about Israel and its people that is too often left unarticulated. It investigates the metaphorical depiction of Israel as homeland by considering one of many possible threads that emerges from such an ideational outlook. In this way the essay takes up one of the many tacit associations between North Americans and Israelis as they are proposed in jobnik!
On each page of this essay, beside narrative text conveying Libicki’s assessment of an Israeli soldier stereotype, a North American Jew stereotype, or quotes from often academic sources related to the topic, Libicki includes images of Israeli soldiers in various settings.25 As she explained in a 2012 interview, these are mostly drawings of photographs that she took over the course of her time in the army and on “research trips” afterward (“Miriam Libicki Talks Comics”). In one image a couple in uniform kisses as the male soldier carries a duffel bag over his arm, an M-16 slung across his other shoulder. In another, a young soldier in uniform listens to music on earphones while staring at a cell phone clasped in her hand (figure 4.15). These early scenes humanize the soldiers, isolating their experiences and capturing, however partially, their subjectivities. Nevertheless, several portrayals at the end of the essay picture Israeli soldiers in relation to Palestinian civilians, and these images disorient readings of the earlier, innocent ones. On these final three pages, set beside civilians, the soldiers loom large. These images emphasize their prowess in relation to the powerless, including a blindfolded man, a child, and several unarmed men and women. In one full-page illustration, a young boy stands with a silhouette of an older woman behind him, her head covered in a hijab and her face tilted downward and hence not visible. He holds his backpack open as one soldier looms over him with a large gun and another crouches in front of him, searching the bag (figure 4.16). The young boy and crouching soldier eye each other, the end of the gun hanging threateningly between them. As in all the visual depictions in Towards a Hot Jew, there are no speech or thought bubbles. The reader must figure out what the individuals are thinking or feeling based mainly on these visual cues as well as the ways that the drawing interacts with the words that surround it. In this illustration the words ironically penciled in at the top of the page read, “By the quirks of history, propaganda, and the voyeuristic urge, we have arrived at the New Jew: an adorable oppressor for every persuasion.” The scorching words included reinforce the sense of violence, inequity, and injustice conveyed in the illustration, collapsing any potential misreading of silence as compliance.
Taken as a whole, Libicki’s essay is interested in the disparate ways various communities of Jews have come to be represented, particularly in the eyes of other Jews. She explores stereotypes of North American Jews and how they differ from and influence the ways Israeli soldiers are stereotyped as well. By revealing that each group of people constructs or is constructed by others, the essay explores the link between Israeli and North American Jews without presuming an automatic or inherited connection. In fact, if anything, in Towards a Hot Jew Libicki responds to the very assumptions Miriam takes for granted throughout jobnik! revealing their bases in historical movements and discussions. The image of the strong or “muscular” Jew, for example, is linked to contemporary figurations of Israeli military aggression and tactical “success.” In contrast, as she notes, North American Jews are often depicted in American media as emasculated (the men) and passive though excessive (the women). By reading stereotypes of American and Israeli Jews in dialogue with one another, and with respect to Israeli-Palestinian interactions, Libicki shows the very real and violent implications and ramifications of underexplored Jewish identifications.
4.15 Miriam Libicki, page in “Towards a Hot Jew,” n.p. Copyright © Miriam Libicki.
4.16 Miriam Libicki, page in “Towards a Hot Jew,” n.p. Copyright © Miriam Libicki.
The essay ends by invoking Israel as the “ultimate post-colonial/neo-colonial villain,” and, as we have seen, the images included here, involving representations of Israeli soldiers interacting with Palestinians, reinforce this conception. These soldiers are pictured in positions of power, illustrations that dispel whatever sense of seclusion, and consequent blamelessness, the earlier images conveyed. Taken in conjunction with the complex exchange of how representations of and notions about North American Jews and Israelis have unfolded over time, the essay links together disparate regions as well as groups of people to reflect on the way in which the story, the “truth,” is always bigger than any single representation of it. In other words, introducing the Israeli soldier as a potential villain, rather than a definite victim, establishes a counternarrative, or counter-representation, to the “obsession with victimhood” that Beinart’s young college students find so alienating. But this counter-representation is also presented here as part of a larger, more complex story that implicates even those outside the picture—and in this case, North American Jews, including Libicki herself. Just as ties between different groups of people cannot be automatically assumed, absolute rejections of those connections are equally problematic and damaging.
Published two years later, Fierce Ease is composed of watercolor drawings in which Libicki continues to scrutinize the relationship between North American Jews and Israelis, reflecting, once again, her dis-affiliation from the notion of Israel as Jewish homeland. This essay, however, is based in the project of recording the voices of Israelis, rather than examining static depictions of what Israelis look like to North Americans. By exploring the mind-set of various people who live in Israel, Libicki presents herself, in Fierce Ease, as an outsider looking into a world now foreign to her. Although her narrative ties the many individual stories of Israelis together, the essay is presented, first and foremost, not as a way of “understanding” Israel, but rather as a way of looking at the actuality of the lives lived there, of listening to, and recording, individual stories. Like Joe Sacco, Libicki here allows the words of the people she interviews to speak for themselves, although she is clearly the one who frames this narrative of Israeli life and politics.
The people Libicki interviews are all revealed to have some kind of association with her, and she makes these affiliations clear as she introduces them. For example, her first interview is with Ronnen, “a good friend” from when she was an Israeli citizen. Another interviewee is “Lisa, a Canadian-Israeli reporter and a newer friend.” In each case, she draws on her connections with others in order to contextualize her narrative, which is framed more generally as an attempt to figure out what has changed since she was living in Israel from 1998–2002. “Are things much worse here now than they were two years ago?” she asks. She structures her journalistic mission in a way that relates to her personally; the time frame is based on the last time she lived in Israel, and in that way her essay is meant to help fill in her own personal gaps. The project, in more general terms, is invested in what it means to transform from one reporting on Israel from the inside to one reporting from the outside. A visiting reporter, Libicki’s essay seems to argue, is not allowed to form definitive conclusions on anything but her own relationship to the story. The images depicting Israelis in Fierce Ease are consequently accompanied by oversized speech bubbles that display the words of the person pictured, with little text from the narrator or outside sources included in the images. Unlike in Towards a Hot Jew, in this later essay Libicki allows Israelis to speak for themselves.
Despite her increased attention to what Israelis have to say, in Fierce Ease Libicki continues to present herself as both an insider and outsider Israeli, as she inevitably does in all of her works, however implicitly. Even as she confronts the sense Israelis have that the climate of the country is much worse than the last time she visited, that “everyone just feels hopeless,” she also recognizes the limitations of her own reflections on what is happening. As she explains of the transformation since her last visit, in which she witnessed and wrote about the second war in Lebanon: “During the war, all eyes were upon Israel as it apparently plunged the Middle East into the beginnings of World War III, but visiting, life here seemed its usual abnormal-normal. In the meantime, the world has moved on as if the small summer war never happened, while Israeli society is quaking from the impact.” Libicki here implicates herself as part of the “world” that has “moved on” and forgotten about Israel, even as she has returned as a way to confront this ignorance. Her early affiliation with Israel is what makes this narrative possible—since she is interviewing people she met through her time in the army—although it is also what highlights the fact that she never “belonged” to or in Israel in the first place. As Libicki states, at the very end of the essay, “The only conclusion I have is that no matter how I try to relate to Israel—tourist, former resident, or journalist—I’m mostly an outsider who can’t really understand” (figure 4.17). Libicki ends her narrative by proclaiming a disidentification with Israel. But it is this very disidentification that allows her to maintain a connection—that paints the backdrop for her dis-affiliatory sensibility, one that in the end connects her with events that have unfolded and are still unfolding across the world.
4.17 Miriam Libicki, page in “Fierce Ease,” n.p. Copyright © Miriam Libicki.
Below this statement, in this final image, she pictures herself standing in a doorway, with several suitcases resting beside her and a backpack strapped on her back. It is unclear, based on this shimmering watercolor drawing, if Libicki is leaving or returning from her trip, and in this way she emphasizes how travel has informed her sense of home. While she admits that “I don’t know when I’ll go back,” her posture and the baggage set beside her suggest that she is always, somehow, situated between various worlds—her past as an American, her time as an Israeli, and her current life as a Canadian. By ending her visit to Israel picturing herself in this in-between state, she reflects a continually shifting perspective. Here, as this illustration reflects, she assumes the transitional as home.
“But You Don’t Live Here, So What’s The Dilemma?”
Strangers is Miriam Libicki’s most recently published essay, and she subtitles it, A Long Distance View of Israel.26 The essay explores the influx of Sudanese into Israel (and mostly into southern Tel Aviv) between 2005 to 2012, the racist attacks that followed in the wake of these migrations, and the recent policies implemented to cast these refugees out of Israel. In this watercolor visual essay, only two pages in, Libicki depicts herself sitting, with a baby on her lap, in front of a computer, as she explains that she is “home with my first baby now, she’s a couple weeks old.” Here she shows herself firmly at a distance from the “situation” in Israel, observing from the comfort of her home in Canada. On the following pages, as the story line painfully unfolds, recapping news stories and events from a variety of perspectives, she also pictures drawings of computer screens displaying written posts on various sites on the Internet, including the popular social media sites Facebook and Twitter, as well as her e-mail inbox on gmail. With these images, as well as with her drawings of photographs of protests and other events related to the topic, Libicki pieces together a fragmented picture clearly assembled from afar. Her essay thus represents the impossibility of capturing a linear, straightforward narrative of the events being portrayed, while it also conveys a culture of connectedness that has allowed her to feel somewhat involved, if only as a distant witness, in events unfolding across the globe.
In “Strangers,” Libicki exposes a transnational online community that is bound to the goings on of a particular place—Israel—although it is housed in the spaceless realm of the “world wide web.” In this way, the essay, like her others, continues to counter the conception of place (real or metaphorical) as a straightforward marker of identity, favoring, instead, indeterminate and transitional spaces as the ultimate hallmark of postmodern contemporary identities, including Jewish ones. Libicki’s assessment of the treatment of the Sudanese refugees further leads her to ruminate on her own identity as an outsider who finds herself continually invested in Israeli life and politics. On the final page of the essay she pictures herself, once again at her computer. Her hair is much shorter now and the once tiny baby has plumped up, reflecting the time passed since she initially started digging into this particular “situation.” At the top of the page, but also bleeding into the space between her body and the computer, the words, composed in careful black handwritten lettering, in part read:
I left a life of luxury in Israel for a life of even more luxury in Canada. My Israeli passport is burning a hole in my purse. These “infiltrators” walked half a continent for the privilege of living in a dirty city, taking under-the-table jobs if they find jobs at all, sending their children to schools upstanding citizens sometimes throw molotov cocktails through, but some have lived there eight years, and now they hang up posters to try to convince the citizenry to let them stay.
Who’s the Israeli here?
Here Libicki connects her own conflicted relationship to Israel with the often unquestioned declarations that people make to place, referencing Israelis and Jews who pronounce Israel as their birthright to the exclusion of unwanted others. How can one claim a place, Libicki wonders, from afar? How can an identity based on a metaphorical conception hold up in the real world?
Despite her recognition, however, that she is a “stranger” to and in Israel, she nevertheless continues to involve herself in its life and politics, attempting to understand, for example, the “horrifying irony” of events recorded in recent Israeli history such as those related to the Sudanese refugees. Her connection to Israel is based on a series of complex questions and contradictions reflecting a desire to counter the tenuous construction of Israel as “Jewish homeland” and to begin to imagine, instead, new ways of relating to Israel and its politics as a North American Jew. In Israel Sarah is asked a question by an Israeli that undoubtedly surfaces for many Jews, like Libicki, who have spent a great deal, if not all, of their lives living outside Israel. “But you don’t live here, so what’s the dilemma?” (Israel 77). Rather than quietly assent to the implication of that question—that one is responsible only for the goings-on in one’s immediate environment—Libicki’s and Glidden’s works challenge that conception, reinforcing the notion that “home” and “not home” are not clear-cut places or ideas. In their works these cartoonists struggle to reflect an ethics of accountability rooted in visualizations that unsettle, that decenter conventional notions of the self in relation to the world around it. Even if the authors of these texts and their personae do not fully understand “the situation” in Israel, or feel at “home” there, each takes responsibility for the real and imagined places and spaces that have both directly and indirectly shaped their identities.
