“How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?”: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs

2. I ascribe to the term postassimilation many of the qualifications that Hirsch assigns to her notion of “postmemory,” a concept that has strongly affected my readings of all these women’s works. I have been especially influenced by Hirsch’s attention to the visual, and often to the visual collage, as a productive site of inquiry into the connections between different generations, into how the past gets read in the present. For more on Hirsch’s conception of postmemory, which she first developed in a paper published in the early 1990s on Art Spiegelman’s Maus, see The Generation of Postmemory.

3. This is, of course, only one thread of the story of contemporary Jewish American literary history as it relates to immigration. For example, a generation of writers and artists born in the Soviet Union have formed what Senderovich, in a 2014 review essay published in Tablet, calls a “full-fledged literary subgenre” of Jewish American immigration. The books, written by those born in the 1970s who were transplanted to North America, tell a new story of Jewish American immigration and assimilation. Senderovich traces this literary genealogy back to Gary Shteyngart’s The Russian Debutante’s Handbook (2002). Anya Ulinich’s fictional work, Lena Finkle’s Magic Barrel (2014), joins this generational cluster, and as a graphic novel it deftly engages with both the poetics and aesthetics of the Jewish American immigrant experience.

4. As a response to such omissions, the Ladydrawers Comics Collective, founded by Moore, is a group of cartoonists and researchers who work “to research, perform, and publish comics and texts about how economics, race, sexuality, and gender impact the comics industry, other media, and our culture at large.” See http://anneelizabethmoore.com/ladydrawers/. The cartoonist MariNaomi, driven by a similar desire to diversify visibility in the comics world, recently developed an online Cartoonists of Color Database. See http://marinaomi.com/poc/cocindex.html.

5. Another famous second-wave feminist who somewhat belatedly contemplated her Jewish roots was Betty Friedan in her 2000 memoir Life So Far. For more on the feminist ambivalence toward Jewishness and Judaism from both women who do and do not identify as secular, see Gubar’s “Eating the Bread of Affliction,” Miller’s “Hadassah Arms,” and Prell’s “Terrifying Tales of Jewish Womanhood.” See also Levitt’s Jews and Feminism, Pinsky’s Jewish Feminists, Plaskow’s Standing Again at Sinai, and Pogrebin’s Deborah, Golda, and Me.

6. See Hollinger’s Postethnic America and Magid’s American Post-Judaism for more on the postethnic.

7. Howe’s famous World of Our Fathers, for example, first published in 1976, is a more traditional history focused on Jews as a veritable independent entity. Recently, historians, including Jacobson and Brodkin, have attempted to view constructions of Jewish American identity as always inevitably intertwined with constructions of other (particularly racial and ethnic) identities. They argue that being Jewish in the early part of the twentieth century meant something very different from what it has meant since the Second World War and the passing of the G.I. Bill in 1944, which essentially converted Jews’ statuses in America to privileged and “white”—or at least able to pass. See Brodkin’s How Jews Became White Folks and Jacobson’s Whiteness of a Different Color, as well as chapter 7 of Sander Gilman’s The Jew’s Body, “The Jewish Nose: Are Jews White? or, The History of the Nose.” Gilman argues that, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, the nose came to signify, more than anything else, the Western Jew’s difference from the “other”—especially in light of the shifting categorization of Jews from “non-white” to “white” (181). Although their time lines slightly differ, Jacobson, Brodkin, and Gilman have all contributed to an understanding of Jewishness as, inevitably, entwined in a more encompassing narrative of shifting American identities.

8. For more on representations of Jewish women’s bodies, see Kleeblatt’s edited collection, Too Jewish? and especially Prell’s “Why Jewish Princesses Don’t Sweat” and Lieberman’s “Jewish Barbie.” See also Mock’s Jewish Women on Stage, Film, and Television. A 2012 special issue of the journal Nashim, edited by Harris, was recently devoted to questions of “The Jewish Woman and Her Body.” Finally, in Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art, Bloom addresses these questions from the standpoint of the ways that Jewish feminist artists from the 1970s on have or (perhaps even more often) have not responded to visual representations of Jewish American women.

9. Philip Roth’s treatment of women in his literature—in particular, his tendency to stereotype his female characters—is a problematic element of many of the male writers who compose the so-called Jewish American literary canon, including Herman Wouk, Bernard Malamud, and Saul Bellow. For more on Wouk and Roth, see chapters 4 and 5 of Antler’s You Never Call! You Never Write! Over the past several years, claims have been made that Roth’s literature in particular has “evolved” away from its misogynistic tilt—or that his works have been misconstrued to begin with as antiwomen. This argument is at the premise of a 2012 special issue of Philip Roth Studies, “Roth and Women,” edited by David Gooblar.

10. In addition to Antler’s You Never Call! You Never Write! other books that address stereotypes of Jewish American women include her edited collection, Talking Back, and Prell’s Fighting to Become Americans.

11. See, for example, Bulkin’s “Hard Ground” (1984), as well as Beck’s “The Politics of Jewish Invisibility” (1988), for reactions to such problematic assumptions. See also Anne Roiphe’s more recent account of a panel she was on at a meeting of Artists and Writers for Peace in the Mideast sometime around Rabin’s assassination in the mid-1990s, included in a piece published on Tablet in October 2014 and titled “My Jewish Feminism: A Memoir.” In addition, Furman addresses Roiphe’s earlier fictional representations of Israel and its politics in chapter 8 of Israel Through the Jewish-American Imagination.

12. See Silberstein’s anthology, Mapping Jewish Identities. For critical texts that have employed such postmodern redefinitions of Jewish identity through readings of contemporary Jewish literature and culture, see, as examples, Berger and Cronin’s Jewish American and Holocaust Literature, Brook’s You Should See Yourself, Eichler-Levine’s Suffer the Little Children, Franco’s Race, Rights, and Recognition, Freedman’s Klezmer America, Levinson’s Exiles on Main Street, Meyers’s Identity Papers, and Wirth-Nesher’s Call It English.

13. For more on Rich’s Jewish background, see her 1982 essay, “Split at the Root.”

14. Woolf famously peppers Three Guineas with a series of photographs, inviting her (male) reader to “see then whether when we look at the same photographs we feel the same things” (10). Photographs become a common space for Woolf and her readers, a visual place that she hopes will evoke a sense of collectivity, empathy, and perhaps even a call to action. Cixous imagines that through writing she is similarly working “against the decree of blindness” (3). Like Woolf, visual imagining is a form of rebelling against the institutions that have oppressed her and others: “I will never finish fashioning the graven image for myself,” she asserts (3). Rich, too, recognizes the “spiritual power” of symbols and images, how they can link together our histories alongside our everyday realities and experiences: “The Jewish star on my neck must serve me both for reminder and as a goad to continuing and changing responsibility” (227). The symbol, the icon, the graven image—these visual frameworks appear frequently in contemporary feminist women’s literature, a literature engaged in a politics that foregrounds a visualized relationality as the key to thinking through identity and difference.

15. Comics scholar McCloud writes about this relationship between comics, time, and space in Understanding Comics, likening the division of panels on a page to the beating of time in a musical composition. See chapter 4 of Understanding Comics, “Time Frames.” Art Spiegelman has also frequently expressed this sentiment, as in his book-length interview with Chute, MetaMaus, in which he describes comics as “an essentialized form of diagramming a narrative movement through time” (168).

16. See the introduction to Pratt and Rosner’s anthology on transnational feminisms, The Global and the Intimate, in which they argue that “pairing…the intimate and the global extends a longstanding feminist tradition of challenging gender-based oppositions by upending hierarchies of space and scale” (1).

17. Founded by Dan Nadel, Patrick Smith, and Tim Hodler, The Ganzfeld was a series of books and objects containing art and art criticism, most of it related to cartooning and comics, published by PictureBox Books. Weinstein’s map was published in 2008, in its seventh and final issue.

18. Understanding Comics is often regarded as a text that helped establish a common vocabulary for such theoretical discussions of comics. McCloud owes many of his ideas and explanations about comics, and especially the interactions between words and images, to Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art, which he acknowledges in his introduction. See also Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics, and particularly his introduction.

19. Cartoons generally refer to single-panel drawn images, which often include captions instead of thought bubbles, and they were the primary format of early political satire as epitomized in the infamous British magazine, Punch. McCloud more generally differentiates between cartoons and comics by emphasizing one, cartooning, as an “approach,” and the other as a “medium which often employs that approach” (21). Theorists including Harvey have taken issue with this distinction, finding “verbal content” to be “the essential characteristic of ‘comics’” (25). For Spiegelman, the essential difference between the two is that a cartoon is meant to “emblematize” or to “find[] a representation for many moments in one image,” whereas a comic is about “creating individual moments that add up to having some overarching meaning beyond the individual moments” (MetaMaus 185). The widespread use of the term cartoonist to talk about practitioners of the form reveals how murky the division between the two can be.

20. See also Barry’s What It Is (2008) and Syllabus (2014).

21. As critics have pointed out, the recent increased interest in Jews and comics is very likely at least in part related to the publication of Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer prize-winning book, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000), a novel that conveys the interwoven history of Jews and comics. Books about Jews and comics, and specifically, Jews and superhero comics, include several written for mainstream audiences, such as Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent (2008) and Weinstein’s Up, Up, and Oy Vey (2009). Additionally, among various others, the nonacademic Jews and American Comics (2008), edited by Buhle, provides a short but lively history of the influence of Jews in American comics. The recently published Yiddishkeit (2011), edited by Pekar and Buhle, also calls attention to the link between comics and the vernacular—in this case, the link between comics and Yiddish language and culture, and Tabachnick’s The Quest for Jewish Belief and Identity in the Graphic Novel (2014) provides a survey of Jewish-themed works. Within many of these studies, the role of women is downplayed, and most only nod at the influence women cartoonists have had on the creation and implementation of the art form. This trend is slowly being reversed. Strömberg’s nonacademic Jewish Images in the Comics (2012) includes examinations of works by a number of the Jewish American women discussed in this project, as does the anthology, The Jewish Graphic Novel (2010), edited by Baskind and Omer-Sherman. A recent exhibition, Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women, co-curated by Sarah Lightman and Michael Kaminer, showcased the works of international cartoonists. Lightman’s edited anthology, Graphic Details (2014), was published based on the exhibit. The anthology is an excellent resource for those interested in learning about a range of Jewish women cartoonists, and it features essays about and interviews with some of them, including interviews that I conducted with Lauren Weinstein and Miss Lasko-Gross. Those interested in Jewish women cartoonists might also look into the works of Julia Alekseyeva, Joyce Brabner, Roz Chast, Leela Corman, Sophie Crumb, Debbie Dreschler, Bernice Eisenstein, Miriam Engelberg, Miriam Katin, Keren Katz, Amy Kurzweil, Sarah Lazarovic, Sarah Leavitt, Rutu Modan, Diane Noomin, Corinne Pearlman, Phoebe Potts, Trina Robbins, Rebecca Roher, Racheli Rottner, Sharon Rudahl, Laurie Sandell, Ariel Schrag, Tania Schrag, Karen Sneider, Emily Steinberg, Alissa Torres, Anya Ulinich, and Ilana Zeffren. This list is by no means comprehensive.

1. Kominsky was the name that Kominsky Crumb acquired from her first husband, and not her maiden name. Interestingly, some of the ways she has been referred to in various interviews and articles include Ms. Crumb, Aline Kominsky, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb. Given the importance of naming in her works, and for the sake of consistency, in this book I use the arrangement she uses (Aline Kominsky Crumb) to sign her name to entries on the blog Crumb Newsletter, http://rcrumb.blogspot.com/, which is also the way her name is written on the cover of her memoir.

2. Shiksa is a Yiddish and Polish word that means non-Jewish female and was initially coined as a derogatory term. In its more recent North American application, it is a term generally, though not always, used satirically.

3. These descriptions of her work often come from Kominsky Crumb herself, as in this interview with Kristen Schilt that took place in 2012.

4. In addition to Chute, several other people have recently engaged with Kominsky Crumb’s comics: Gardner includes a short discussion of Kominsky Crumb in his article “Autobiography’s Biography” (2008) and in his chapter on autobiographical comics in his more recent Projections (2012); Gilman refers to “Nose Job” in his book, Making the Body Beautiful (2001); and Most briefly discusses Kominsky Crumb’s work in her essay, “Re-Imagining the Jew’s Body” (2006). More recently, two articles that examine Jewishness in Kominsky Crumb’s comics include my article, “Visualizing the Jewish Body in Aline Kominsky Crumb’s Need More Love” (2010), which is an earlier version of segments from this chapter; and Clementi’s “The JAP, the Yenta, and the Mame in Aline Kominsky Crumb’s Graphic Imagination” (2012).

5. Diane Noomin can also be considered a leading figure in the world of contemporary North American Jewish women’s comics. Like Kominsky Crumb, Noomin’s Jewish dis-affiliations take place through her evocations of Jewish and female stereotypes, and particularly as epitomized in her fictional character, Didi Glitz. Her Glitz comics were anthologized in 2012 in Glitz-2-Go. Noomin also edited two influential anthologies of women’s comics, which featured the works of many artists who have come to be recognized as key figures in the comics world, including Kominsky Crumb, Mary Fleener, Carol Lay, Carol Tyler, and Julie Doucet. Many of the cartoonists I discuss in this volume have mentioned Twisted Sisters: A Collection of Bad Girl Art (1991), edited by Noomin, and Twisted Sisters 2: Drawing the Line (1995), edited by Lay and Noomin, as early influences.

6. The collaborative comics of Kominsky Crumb and her husband—and sometimes their daughter, Sophie—were collected in a 2012 volume, Drawn Together.

7. Only three pages of this comic are republished in chapter 3 of Need More Love. Many of the republished comics in Need More Love have been excerpted, and some, like this one, do not include a title page. The inclusion of just parts of certain comics throughout Need More Love adds to the fragmentary design of the text. Since I am examining these comics in the context of the memoir as a whole, I have included page numbers indicating where the images can be found in the memoir and not in the original publications.

8. Other critics have attempted their own word-image taxonomies. A useful summary of these formalist definitions can be found in El Refaie’s Autobiographical Comics, especially 22–24. Many contemporary comics theorists have built on scholarship of image-text interactions based in other media, including photography and film. Some of the most well regarded of such theories include those outlined by Barthes, especially in his collection of essays, Image-Text-Music, as well as visual theorist Mitchell’s Iconology. Many of Berger’s works similarly address formal and theoretical concerns regarding the structural principles of image-texts. See, for instance, Ways of Seeing and About Looking.

9. Photography has been theorized in many now well-known texts, including (but certainly not limited to) Barthes’s Camera Lucida, Sontag’s On Photography and her palinode Regarding the Pain of Others, and many works written by Berger (including those mentioned previously). For more on the intersection between photography and autobiography, see especially Adams’s Light Writing and Life Writing, Rugg’s Picturing Ourselves, and Willis’s edited anthology, Picturing Us.

10. For more on issues regarding contemporary receptions of autobiography, both in and out of comics, see Miller’s “The Entangled Self.”

11. Notably, Kominsky Crumb considers Need More Love to be a “guerrilla art statement” (quoted in Chute, Graphic Women 226). In fact, the night the book was released, the publisher went out of business, and she has since declined opportunities to bring the book back into publication (225–26).

12. Green’s work is generally considered to be the first full-length autobiographical comic by a North American underground cartoonist, and his book influenced countless other cartoonists, including Kominsky Crumb. See Chute’s Graphic Women 17–20.

13. For more on the relationship between comics and the archive, and a brief history of scholarship on the subject, see Chute’s “Comics as Archives.”

14. The first known published comic drawn and written by women only was It Ain’t Me Babe: Women’s Liberation (1970), co-produced by a collective of women including Trina Robbins. Two years later, Wimmin’s Comix put out their first issue. In publication from 1972–1992, Wimmen’s Comix has featured many of the most well-known underground women cartoonists, among them Phoebe Gloeckner, Dori Seda, and Roberta Gregory. For a history of women’s underground comics, see the introduction to Chute’s Graphic Women, as well as several articles written by Samantha Meier on the topic for the Hooded Utilitarian: http://www.hoodedutilitarian.com/author/samantha-meier/. Trina Robbins has written various overview histories of women and comics, including From Girls to Grrlz, The Great Women Cartoonists, and Pretty in Ink.

15. Comedian Danny Thomas, best known for his role in the mid-twentieth-century sitcom, Make Room for Daddy, had a “distinguished” nose. As a New York Times reporter described him in a profile in 1991, when he was seventy-seven years old: “He reaches up to adjust the black-rimmed eyeglasses that somewhat disguise his trademark large hook nose, a nose that three movie producers—Jack Warner, Louis B. Mayer and Harry Cohn—could not persuade him to change” (Rothstein). Marlo Thomas, his daughter, also became an actress; she is best known for her role in the television sitcom, That Girl.

16. This character is often, but not always, referred to as The Bunch, rather than just Bunch.

17. For a social history of Jews and plastic surgery in contemporary times (including, as mentioned, a brief discussion of Kominsky Crumb’s “Nose Job”), see chapter 6 of Gilman’s Making the Body Beautiful. See also Lipton’s 2014 article in the New York Review of Books, “The Invention of the Jewish Nose,” and her related 2014 book on Jewish iconography from the Middle Ages, Dark Mirror.

18. This comic also lists their daughter, Sophie Crumb, as the third collaborator. The part of the comic that I am looking at involves only her parents.

19. For more on the ethics of collaborative life writing, see chapter 3 of Couser’s Vulnerable Subjects: “Making, Taking, and Faking Lives: Voice and Vulnerability in Collaborative Life Writing.” Although Couser is writing about prose memoirs, his discussion on possible exploitations involved in collaborative life writing could also readily apply to collaborative comics.

20. Interestingly, Ronnen’s review in the Jerusalem Post of a 2005 German biography of Frida Kahlo’s father, Guillermo Kahlo, points to claims that have insubstantiated his Jewish background. Ronnen argues that “Frida herself was probably the source of the claims to her Jewish connection…. My guess is that German connections during the Nazi era were an embarrassment to her.”

21. The American pop icon Madonna, well recognized for her own experimentations with self-fashioning and branding, is also referenced in this image, along with her ethnic heritage, in another speech bubble: “Look my eyebrows are like Madonnas’. Now do I look Italian?”

22. See Bloom’s Jewish Identities in American Feminist Art. Bloom here is writing about the ways that certain Jewish women artists “reconfigure Jewish stereotypes…through a parodic rendering of these images” (3). Bloom focuses primarily on the works of Judy Chicago, Eleanor Antin, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, and Martha Rosler.

23. This definition can be found under “temperament, n.” in the OED Online.

1. I use the phrase narrative comics to describe the often previously published comics that Davis includes in the text. I use this term to differentiate these from Davis’s diary comics, which are generally marked with dates, and her one- or two-page sketches, which do not include any text.

2. Unlike in Kominsky Crumb’s comics, the personae in Davis’s comics share the same name as the author, Vanessa Davis. In order to distinguish between the two, I will refer, throughout this chapter, to Davis’s alter ego on the page as Vanessa, while Davis or Vanessa Davis will refer to the cartoonist herself.

3. Buenaventura Press was a well-respected publisher of independent comics and anthologies. The press closed down in 2010 because of financial difficulties.

4. The history behind the creation and publication of Anne Frank’s diary has been an especially enlightening case that highlights the difficulty of ever truly unraveling the transition between the original work and its later manifestations, especially when that work has passed through many hands on its way to publication. See Bunkers’s “Whose Diary Is It Anyway?” and Lejeune’s “How Anne Frank Rewrote the Diary of Anne Frank.”

5. Genette divides his conception of the paratext into the peritext, elements inside the covers of a book, and the epitext, elements outside the book but somehow related to the book (like interviews or reviews).

6. See also Cardell’s Dear World, a book that looks at contemporary diary practices in order, in part, to dispel the notion of diaries as private and unconstructed documents.

7. For more on the paratactic format of diaries, see Hogan’s “Engendered Autobiographies” (103).

8. In this passage I invite an oversimplified reading of images in opposition to words, as though Davis’s beautifully hand-drawn letters could not also be read as images in and of themselves.

9. Cates provides a striking example of this occurrence in his essay, “The Diary Comic,” which focuses on the works of cartoonist James Kochalka, who published a daily diary online for over fourteen years. See http://www.americanelf.com/. Cates writes about Kochalka’s comic from September 10, 2001, which, he explains, “preserves a moment of easy innocence before terrible events rang in a new national temper” (213). This ability to depict innocence without “self consciousness about that innocence” is what Cates argues distinguishes the diary, and especially the daily diary, from the autobiographical narrative.

10. For more, see McCloud’s “A Word About Color” in Understanding Comics.

11. See also Garb, who describes Neel’s portraiture generally as a “means of…rebellion” and her self-portrait in particular as “revolutionary” (31, 30). As she notes, “Very few precedents for naked female self-portraits exist” (30).

12. In an interview about her father’s posthumously published book of photographs, Strange Stories, Davis attributed her interest in color to “him,” Gerald Davis. See “Affectionate yet Arch” for her take on the book, which was edited by Todd Oldham.

13. The exception is an image on the page succeeding the short comic “Make Me a Woman,” and preceding the slightly longer comic “Big Fun,” of a young woman wearing a Hard Rock Café T-shirt and doing sit-ups. Since the subsequent comic is about Vanessa’s experiences at “Fat Camp,” the image could be read as prefiguring the narrative that follows.

14. Davis’s interest in fashion, and her understanding of it as a political tool, comes across in the narrative comic “Money Can’t Buy Jappiness,” in which she traces the history of Vanessa’s slow coming into consciousness about the politics of fashion and consumerism. In a recent interview Davis described her introduction, as a teenager, to the world of thrift shopping as “a change in perspective” (“Affectionate yet Arch”). She is also the illustrator of a 2010 book written by Leora Tanenbaum, entitled Bad Shoes and the Women Who Love Them, about the history of shoe fashions for women. The book is an attempt at recording and recognizing the political significance of such a history, as well as an effort to persuade those who wear uncomfortable shoes to think about the physical consequences. As Tanenbaum explains in her introduction, “My fervent hope is that when you finish reading this book, you will choose to reduce the amount of time you spend standing and walking in them…. Be smart about how often you wear them and for how long. If you wear them too much, you will end up with disfigured feet” (7).

15. These full-colored diary entries were originally included in the 2006 comics anthology Kramers Ergot #6, also published by Buenaventura Press and edited by Buenaventura and Harkham. Their incorporation in this anthology, which showcases mostly full-colored comics, might also explain why these particular diary comics were so carefully colored.

16. For a meditation on home, or, in Hebrew, bayit, specifically in relation to Jewish religious practices and beliefs over various historical time periods, see chapter 5 of Mann’s Space and Place in Jewish Studies. Mann’s work more generally engages in textual readings that examine “spaces that often mark, or are marked by, Jewishness in relation to difference” (2).

17. Her comic, “Talkin’ ’bout my Generation,” included toward the end of the book, reflects the ways in which Vanessa experiences many of the same conflicted feelings about the works of Robert Crumb and how they have influenced her as a female cartoonist.

18. Gornick brought attention to the problematic depictions of women culled by these Jewish male writers in a 1976 article published in the Village Voice, “Why Do These Men Hate Women?” Her 2008 book, The Men in My Life, revisits this question, particularly chapter 6, “Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and the End of the Jew as Metaphor.” See also Gooblar’s introduction to the “Roth and Women” special issue.

19. For a compelling recent historical study on the topic, see McGinity’s Still Jewish. See also Fishman’s Double or Nothing? which includes a discussion of representations of intermarriage in popular culture.

20. These include, for example, early twentieth-century writer Anzia Yezierska, as well as more contemporary writers like Allegra Goodman, Erica Jong, Cynthia Ozick, Grace Paley, Susan Fromberg Schaeffer, and Lore Segal.

21. For a “survey of Jewish-American literature on Israel, 1928–1995,” see Furman’s Israel Through the Jewish-American Imagination.

22. Trevor Alixopulos is a cartoonist whose work can be viewed at http://www.alixopulos.com/.

23. Davis and Alixopulos did publish a collaborative comic in O’Leary’s anthology, The Big Feminist But. Titled “Pillowtalk,” the two-page work, also documenting their two personae in bed, involved each cartoonist drawing roughly half the panels on the page, rather than sharing individual panel space as Kominsky Crumb and Crumb do in their collaborative works.

1. Sendak’s sentiment is echoed by Cart in chapter 8 of Young Adult Literature, “So, How Adult Is Young Adult? The Crossover Conundrum.”

2. For a history of comics and youth culture in twentieth-century America, see Wright’s Comic Book Nation.

3. Hatfield also references Peter Schjeldahl’s October 17, 2005 article for the New Yorker, “Words and Pictures: Graphic Novels Come of Age,” which reinforces many of McGrath’s mistaken notions of comics as a medium most suited for young people. For more on this issue, see Baetens’s and Frey’s The Graphic Novel, particularly chapter 4, “‘Not Just for Kids’: Clever Comics and the New Graphic Novels.”

4. For the sake of simplicity, I do not differentiate between the concepts of “children,” “young adults,” “teenagers,” and “adolescents” throughout this chapter. For a detailed history of these terms, see Cart, chapter 1, “From Sue Barton to the Sixties: What’s in a Name? and Other Uncertainties.” See also Driscoll’s introduction to Girls, in which she points out how the concept of adolescence has often been “gendered and sexed” (6).

5. A fifty-four-page collection of Miss Lasko-Gross’s “rarely seen short stories,” Miss Lasko-Gross, 1994–2014, is also available on the digital comics platform www.comixology.com.

6. As Miss Lasko-Gross explains in interviews, while her given name is Melissa, she generally goes by the name Miss with everyone besides her immediate family. Any reference to Melissa throughout this chapter refers to her persona, while Miss Lasko-Gross or Lasko-Gross refers to the author of the text.

7. Martens discusses how the roles of places and objects in human development have generally been slighted, although she cites two well-known sources that have engaged the topic: Winnicot’s Playing and Reality and Brown’s edited anthology Things.

8. For more on the subjectivity of the mother, see especially Benjamin’s “The Omnipotent Mother” as well as Kaplan’s Motherhood and Representation.

9. For more on the distinction between childhood and adolescent literature, as well as a discussion of how these genres relate to and overlap with other categories of literature, including the Entwicklungsroman and the Bildungsroman, see chapter 1 in Trites, Disturbing the Universe, “‘Do I dare disturb the universe?’: Adolescent Literature in the Postmodern Era.”

10. See Sedgwick’s Epistemology of the Closet and Muñoz’s Disidentifications.

11. Lasko-Gross’s interest in questions of conformity and rebellion, particularly in relation to institutionalized religion, is also evident in her most recent work, Henni, a mythical coming-of-age adventure story. For more, see her interview, “The Unintentional Rebel.”

12. In “Psychosomatic Refusal,” for example, Melissa’s aversion to attending synagogue with her parents culminates in an episode in which she vomits in the parking lot and is allowed to wait in the car (54–56). Brauner discusses this and other “visceral” reactions conveying what he describes as Melissa’s “hostility toward Judaism” in his article, “The Turd That Won’t Flush” (136).

13. Weinstein’s persona has the same name as the author, so, for the purposes of clarification, Lauren refers to the persona in the book, whereas Weinstein or Lauren Weinstein refers to the author.

14. Weinstein is currently at work on a sequel to Girl Stories, tentatively titled “Calamity.” She has also published The Goddess of War (2008), a 9-by-15 1/2-inch science fiction epic, and Inside Vineyland (2003), a thin, roughly 6-by-8-inch collection of one-page comics, many of which were originally published in Seattle’s alternative newspaper, the Stranger.

15. For more on girls’ diaries, see also Bunkers’s introduction to Diaries of Girls and Women.

16. In another comic, “The Dysfunctional Family Thanksgiving,” Lauren’s cousin introduces his girlfriend at the dining room table, and his mother responds, “She’s not Jewish, is she?” (138). This overt reference to Jewishness in the context of a romantic affiliation reinforces the way in which the theme of intermarriage is often the space, in contemporary American literature, where anxieties related to Jewishness surface. Similarly, the name of a character in the memoir, Glenn Schwartz, suggests a Jewish identity, although in an interview Weinstein admitted that this character was “an amalgam of people and maybe some of those people were Jewish and some were not” (“Thinking Panoramically” 190).

17. Many of the singe-page cartoons from Inside Vineyland can be viewed on Weinstein’s website: http://www.laurenweinstein.com/. This site also features Weinstein’s more recent works, including humorous and insightful reflections on being a parent as well as the moving five-part web comic series “Carriers,” which was first published on Nautilus and powerfully recounts the experience of being tested as a carrier for cystic fibrosis during early pregnancy.

1. For a discussion of the distinctive historical uses of the terms exile and diaspora, see Wettstein’s introduction to his edited anthology, Diasporas and Exiles and Zeitlin’s Jews.

2. Beinart points to polls conducted by Frank Luntz, as well as separate studies conducted by Steven M. Cohen and Ari Y. Kelman, purportedly reflecting that a large majority of young Jewish college students, and particularly those who are not religiously affiliated, have little interest in discussing Israel. See, for example, Cohen and Kelman’s 2007 report for the Jewish Identity Project of Reboot, available on the Berman Jewish Policy Archive website: http://www.bjpa.org/Publications/details.cfm?PublicationID=326.

3. For the sake of brevity, the full title of Glidden’s book, How to Understand Israel in Sixty Days or Less, will hereafter be referred to as Israel.

4. Glidden’s self-published minicomic won the Ignatz Award for Promising New Talent at the Small Press Expo in Bethesda, Maryland in 2008. In several interviews, she recounts the experience of being approached by an editor from DC Comics at a New York indie comics festival, the MoCCA Arts Festival, and soon after signing with Vertigo, an imprint of DC Comics, for a book-length version of the minicomic. See Glidden’s interview with Alex Dueben on Comic Book Resources.

5. As Glidden noted, “when [Vertigo] asked me to do the book with them, they told me they would prefer it if I would do it in full-color. I hadn’t really ever done color comics before and wasn’t sure if I could do it, but I figured I would just say ‘yes’ and figure out how to do it later on” (personal communication, July 27, 2014).

6. Sarah refers to the author’s persona throughout Israel, whereas Glidden or Sarah Glidden refers to the author of the text.

7. As chapter headings, these could be considered part of the paratext as well as of the text. For the sake of simplicity, I attribute them here to the persona of the book, rather than the author of the book or both author and persona.

8. See the Birthright Israel website, accessed May 4, 2015: http://www.birthrightisrael.com/visitingisrael/Pages/default.aspx.

9. The bibliography at the end of the book lists nine sources in all, including, for example, The Masada Myth, by Nachman Ben-Yehuda, the collection of essays and reflections Wrestling with Zion: Progressive Jewish-American Responses to the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, edited by Tony Kushner and Alisa Solomon, and A History of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, by Mark A. Tessler.

10. Within the Hasidic world, there are various styles of dress. For the purposes of this discussion, I am collapsing such distinctions and using Hasidim to refer generally to the men that Sarah pictures on her trip who are dressed in dark suits and black hats and either wear traditional earlocks (peyes in Yiddish) or have long, uncut sideburns.

11. Often, observant Jews who follow the laws of modesty, or shomer negia, refrain from purposefully touching members of the opposite sex. Levels of observance vary, but strict Jews might try not to even stand or sit next to a member of the opposite sex in order to avoid accidental contact.

12. The Sabbath, or Shabbat, is the Jewish day of rest and, as such, a range of activities that are considered “work” are prohibited, including cooking and lighting a fire (or pressing or flipping a light switch). An observant Jew might ask someone she presumes or knows to be nonobservant or not Jewish to turn on her light for her on the Sabbath if she has forgotten to leave it on.

13. Although at times she identifies with her friend, Melissa, whom she invited on the trip, she generally singles herself out as different from everyone else in the group, including Melissa.

14. Glidden added that her new project, Rolling Blackouts, which is forthcoming from Drawn and Quarterly in 2016, would be different despite some “surface similarities” to Israel. Rolling Blackouts is a book in which she follows journalists, in 2010, on a reporting trip to Turkey, Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon. As she explained, while both books are told from her perspective and follow trips to the Middle East, “This time, my own feelings about [the journey] aren’t really part of the story.”

15. As Borden explains in Journalism as Practice, a definition of journalism is difficult to pin down, but a “framework” that connects “the practice’s product and purpose” might include these five factors: “a link to human flourishing, commitment to the common good, reporting as the defining activity of journalism, a desire to make a difference, and a way to make a living” (49).

16. For a compelling delineation of this argument by another self-identified left-wing progressive, see Willis’s “Is There Still a Jewish Question?” Willis argues that the apparent inconsistencies in her own political beliefs, and in particular her approach to Israel, stem from her “struggling to make sense of a situation that has multiple and at times contradictory dimensions” (227). Her essay was first published in the Wrestling with Zion collection.

17. See also Libicki’s essay, published in 2008 in The Jewish Graphic Novel, “Jewish Memoir Goes Pow! Zap! Oy!” In it she links her brand of comics journalism to a Hunter S. Thompson-style “gonzo ethics,” which she argues is a genre, in its iteration as comics, that was “almost certainly established more recently by a handful of Jews and Jew-sympathizers” (254).

18. The full title of the book is jobnik! an american girl’s adventures in the israeli army. Miriam refers to the author’s persona throughout jobnik!, whereas Libicki or Miriam Libicki refers to the author of the text.

19. At the time this chapter was written, the tenth issue was the most recent publication, released in December 2012. All Libicki’s works have been self-published by Real Gone Girl Studios: www.realgonegirl.com.

20. Any page references included hereafter for jobnik! will refer to the collected book.

21. Yahrzeit, which Miriam describes on the page as a “death anniversary,” is the Yiddishword for the commemoration of the death of a loved one (usually in one’s immediate family) on the day of the year that she has died. Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated by a right-wing Israeli conservative in 1995 while at a rally in support of a peace initiative, between the Israeli government and the Palestine Liberation Organization, called the Oslo Accords.

22. Libicki has attributed her inspiration for this image to the Zionist illustrator Ephraim Moses Lilien’s 1908 drawing “The Covenant of Abraham” (Hajdu 50).

23. Strangers was recently republished in the Ilanot Review’s Winter 2015 issue: https://ilanot.wordpress.com/strangers/. Libicki is currently at work on what she called a “mess of a 44-page memoir/cultural theory/humanist philosophy tract” about “Jewishness and Black Jews, in the U.S. and Israel” (personal communication, August 22, 2014). The essay will appear in the Journal of Jewish Identities in 2016.

24. Libicki’s essays do not include page numbers.

25. She cites a variety of sources. These include academics Riv-Ellen Prell and Maurice Berger, cartoonist Joe Sacco, an Israel trip participant, a blog called Peacepalestine, and an Israeli online message board.

26. I thank Naomi Kramer for first making me aware of this comics essay.

27. Libicki here is referring to an incident that occurred in Israel, during which a Molotov cocktail was thrown into the front courtyard of a day care center housing African asylum seekers.

1. Over the last few years, a number of critics have focused on this “rereading” of Antin’s work. See, for example, Dayton-Wood’s “The Limits of Language,” Sillin’s “Heroine, Reformer, Citizen,” and Winter’s “Mary Antin and Assimilation.”

2. See Kellman’s “Lost in the Promised Land” for a reading of Hoffman as a revision of Antin.

3. These two lines from Antin are only part of a longer passage that Hoffman quotes in her book (163).

4. Finck has attributed some of her stylistic influences for the book to the works of Marc Chagall, old Yiddish illustrations and prints, Molly Picon films, and the 1937 Yiddish classic The Dybbuk (personal communication, September 27, 2013).

5. See Nakhimovsky’s “The Moral Evolution of the Russian-Yiddish-English Writer Abraham Cahan” for an early history of Bintel Brief, particularly Cahan’s role in it. See also Cassedy’s “A Bintel brief,” which discusses, in part, its precursors in women’s advice columns; as well as Greenberg and Greenberg’s “‘A Bintel Brief’”; and pp. 91–95 in Lipsky’s biography of Cahan.

6. Finck’s process of putting the book together involved selecting already translated letters from Isaac Metzker’s A Bintel Brief and then finding the original letters and having them translated from Yiddish and back to English again (personal communication, September 27, 2013).

7. See, for example, Baskin’s Women of the Word for examinations of Jewish women writers’ marginalized status in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Pratt writes of Yiddish women writers of that time period, “[they] were considered by literary critics to be rare phenomena” (119–20). Cassedy relatedly writes about the Bintel Brief’s editor’s “implicit acceptance of a traditional role for women” on the pages of the Forward. Leela Corman’s fictional graphic narrative Unterzakhn (2012) is another text that looks back in order to reimagine and recapture some of the lost histories of women from the time. See my “Not a word for little girls!”