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Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who transformed comics first as a muse and then as a feminist artist, dies at 74
(JTA) — Robert Crumb put the “x” in comix by setting to paper his basest sexual longings, including strong-legged Jewish women who were cowgirls and who went by the name Honeybunch Kaminski.
So when an actual strong-legged Jewish cowgirl named Aline Kominsky walked into his life, it was love at first sight, and never wavered.
Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who died Wednesday at 74 in France of pancreatic cancer, was late to the revolution her husband launched in comics a few years before they met, with his Zap Comix. The “x” was a signifier of what was then known as “underground” comics and referred to the unfiltered treatment of humanity that censorious publishers, politicians and public figures had all but washed out of the art.
She soon fully embraced the art form and then helped transform it.
Working with her husband and then on her own, Kominsky-Crumb brought to comics raw self-lacerating accountability and subverted crude stereotypes about Jewish women — including those peddled by her husband — by taking possession of them.
She started out as a self-acknowledged sex object reviled by second-wave feminists and became a hero of younger feminists for modeling unfettered sexual expression. She was the brassy Jewish stereotype who became the muse who guided her husband to a deeper consideration of Judaism.
Kominsky-Crumb, born Aline Ricky Goldsmith in 1948 in the Five Towns, a Jewish enclave on Long Island, had a Jewish upbringing that was in many ways conventional, horrifying and both at the same time. She wrote about the warmth of her grandparents’ home and how she sought in it succor and about the pressures her materialistic parents placed on her. She said she was named for a Five Towns clothing store, Aline Ricky, that sold French fashion knockoffs. She resisted her mother’s pressure to get a nose job.
In one autobiographical comic, she recalls seeing one Jewish girl after another coming into school after plastic surgery. “Me ‘n’ my friends developed a ‘big nose pride,’” she writes, and one of the characters says, “I could not stand to look like a carbon copy!”
She told fellow Jewish cartoonist Sarah Lightman about the ordeal. “Like, I kept my nose, but it was really a close call, because my mother had me in Doctor Diamond’s office and he measured my nose. I remember that. They took an instrument and measured your nose. And then he took a piece of paper and he said,’ look, we can make it look like this.’ And I said, ‘Oh my God.’ My mother said, ‘Oh, it’s gorgeous, gorgeous.’”
In her teens, Kominsky-Crumb fled the suburbs for Manhattan. She studied at Cooper Union, an art school, and lived on the Lower East Side, earning plaudits from her instructors for her painting, but getting bored. She had a baby and gave it up for adoption to a Jewish agency, an experience that scarred her, and later led her to become outspoken in advocating for abortion rights.
After she married Carl Kominsky, they moved to Tucson, Arizona, which she called “hippie heaven.” There, she left her husband for a cowboy who lived with two brothers and his father in what she said was “the middle of nowhere” where she helped out on horseback, albeit under the influence of hallucinogens. (She said her beau was killed in a shootout with a romantic rival after she left.)
In Tucson, she met two pioneers of underground comics, Kim Deitch and Spain Rodriguez. They encouraged her to move to San Francisco, which was the scene of the burgeoning movement.
She did and met Crumb at a party in 1971, within three years of his having created “Honeybunch Kaminski, the drug-crazed runaway” (1968) and “Dale Steinberger, the Jewish Cowgirl.” Kominsky-Crumb, who had kept her first husband’s last name because it sounded more “ethnic” than Goldsmith, was so taken with the her husband’s lustful Jewish imaginings, and how closely she physically resembled them, that when she started creating her own, she named her avatar “Bunch,” a shortened version of the character whose name most closely matched her own.
It was kismet, except it wasn’t at first. Crumb and Kominsky-Crumb got together, but maintained open relationships. Crumb endured Kominsky-Crumb’s dalliances with other men for decades, but Kominsky-Crumb was not as able (or willing) to reciprocate. When one of Crumb’s exes arrived at their commune in Mendocino, she told The Comics Journal in 1990, she was furious. “I had a total s— fit,” she said, “I was wearing these giant platform shoes. I ran out the door and I fell and broke my foot in six places.”
Crumb sent the ex on her way and entertained the recovering Kominsky with a pastime he and his brother worked out as children: They would co-create a comic.
That process drew the couple closer, and also became a decades-long unflinching chronicle of a relationship. A culmination, “Drawn Together,” was critically acclaimed when it came out in 2012.
In one passage in the 2012 book, she gently chides her husband for resorting to antisemitic tropes — although it was tropes about loud, slightly unhinged, sexually voracious Jewish women that drew them together.
One page depicts the couple in bed. Crumb is stung by an accusation of antisemitism from Art Spiegelman. (Spiegelman joined with Crumb to launch the underground comics scene in the 1960s, but they grew apart as Spiegelman, who would author the Holocaust chronicle “Maus,” sought to attach an overarching philosophy to the genre, while Crumb continued to crave crude authenticity.)
Crumb says that Spiegelman “seems to be taking my ruminations about the Jews as antisemitism … I certainly didn’t mean it as such.” Kominsky-Crumb draws herself into the panel, listening to her husband, as a little girl wearing tefillin, a T-shirt with “kosher” in Hebrew and a Star of David pendant. In the next panel, once again appearing as a grown woman in a negligee, she makes clear to Crumb why she feels vulnerable as a Jew in the marriage.
“Dahling, you do call the Jewish religion ‘Brand X’,” she says.. “Now I might even think that’s true in some ways … and I’m one o’ them … I’m allowed to say that!”
Crumb draws himself as wounded but also awakened. “Oh, I see … ulp.” Crumb dedicated his masterwork, “The Book of Genesis,” a searing illustrated narrative of the Bible’s first book, to Aline.
The Crumbs’ collaborative work was celebrated among aficionados, but it wasn’t until 1994’s “Crumb,” a documentary directed by Crumb’s close Jewish friend, Terry Zwigoff, that she emerged into the broader culture. A vibrant, peripatetic Kominsky-Crumb cares for their daughter, Sophie, and revels in their life in a small French village, where they had moved a few years earlier, while Crumb continues to hold back, playing the wounded, misunderstood artist.
It was an arrival of sorts for Kominsky-Crumb. She had for a time been marginalized even on the underground scene, her deceptively simple art derided as sloppy. She helped found the Wimmen’s Comix collective in 1972, and wrote about her Jewish upbringing in the first issue, a piece entitled “Goldie: A Neurotic Woman.” But she was soon frozen out because some of her colleagues thought her musings about longing to be dominated (and her tendency to dress that way to please Crumb) were denigrating to women. “The Yoko Ono of Comics,” is how the New York Times described her early years.
She left the collective and joined another Jewish woman artist, Diane Noomin, in launching “Twisted Sisters” in 1976. Its cover depicts hers seated on a toilet wondering “How many calories in a cheese enchilada.” The message to her erstwhile colleagues, who depicted women heroically, was clear: Kominsky-Crumb would indulge her full unvarnished self.
It would take decades, but a later generation of feminists would come to understand her autobiographical “Bunch” not as a self-loathing caricature but as a means of understanding ones whole self. In 2020, Lightman launched an interview with Kominsky-Crumb by reviewing a 1975 cartoon, “Bunch plays with herself” that shocked even the underground scene at the time with its graphic depictions of a woman exploring every corner of her body.
“I didn’t do it to be disgusting but it’s, like, about every horrible and fun thing you can do with your body,” Kominsky-Crumb told Lightman. “I think it’s an amazing piece of feminist art,” Lightman said in the interview, “because women are drawn to be gazed at, and [here we see] their bodily juices, and everything. … The last panel is the best. ‘My body is an endless source of entertainment’.”
In 2007, she and Crumb created a cover for the Jewish counterculture magazine Heeb, where she is cradling him in her arms. “”I feel so safe in the arms of this powerful Jewish woman!” Crumb says.
By 2018, she was scrolling through her phone to show a New York Times reporter pictures of Crumb cavorting with the grandkids. (Daughter Sophie in adulthood also is a comics artist.) The photos then transition to photos of women’s behinds, taken in Miami.
“I’m enabling his big butt fixation,” she said. “Well I don’t have a big butt anymore so I have to offer him something.”
“It was her energy that transformed the American Crumb family into a Southern French one, with her daughter Sophie living, marrying and having three French children there,” the official Crumb website said in announcing her death. “She will be dearly missed within that family, by the international cartooning community, but especially by Robert, who shared the last 50 years of his life with her.”
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Qatar, Turkey’s Expanding Roles in Gaza Could Strengthen Hamas Infrastructure, Experts Warn
Heavy machinery operates at a site where searches for deceased hostages kidnapped by Hamas during the Oct, 7, 2023, attack on Israel are underway amid a ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, in Khan Younis, southern Gaza Strip, Oct. 19, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Ramadan Abed
As the fragile ceasefire in Gaza appears to hold, experts are warning about the expanding roles of Qatar and Turkey in reconstruction and post-war efforts, amid concerns that their involvement could potentially strengthen Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure.
Last week, Qatar’s Minister of International Cooperation, Mariam bint Ali al-Misnad, announced new operations in the Gaza Strip to remove debris and restore infrastructure.
“As part of assistance to Gaza, the State of Qatar has commenced debris removal operations and opening of primary routes,” al-Misnad said in a press conference.
“The goal is to restore hope and return life to its normal course,” the Qatari official continued. “We take pride in belonging to a nation that makes humanity an obligation.”
Joining several world powers, Qatar has welcomed the US-backed peace plan aimed at ending the war between Israel and Hamas in Gaza, pledging to support reconstruction efforts in the war-torn enclave and to advance the next steps in ceasefire negotiations.
Alongside the United States and regional powers, Qatar has served as a ceasefire mediator during the two-year conflict, facilitating indirect negotiations between the Jewish state and Hamas, which has ruled Gaza for nearly two decades.
However, Doha has also backed the Palestinian terrorist group for years, providing Hamas with money and diplomatic support while hosting and sheltering its top leadership.
Amid Qatar’s ongoing reconstruction efforts in Gaza, experts have warned that the heavy mechanical equipment might do more than clear debris and build roads, potentially aiding Hamas in restoring its terrorist infrastructure.
According to Natalie Ecanow, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, Qatar’s involvement in the ceasefire plan is concerning, largely because of its decades-long relationship with Hamas.
“Qatar has long been a political and financial patron of Hamas and has previously signaled that it’s OK with the terror group surviving to rule another day. That’s incompatible with the Israeli and American position,” Ecanow told The Algemeiner.
As Doha begins debris removal operations in the enclave, Hamas has reportedly requested “specialized equipment” to recover the remains of deceased Israeli hostages, some of whom the Islamist group says cannot be retrieved without such machinery, for transfer to Israel as part of the first phase of the ceasefire deal.
Ecanow also argued that Qatar only intensified its push for reconstruction and ceasefire efforts after Israel’s Sept. 9 strike against Hamas leaders in Doha, which exposed the country’s vulnerability and prompted it to move quickly on the deal.
“The ceasefire is on shaky ground, which isn’t wholly surprising,” Ecanow told The Algemeiner. “At the end of the day, Hamas is a terrorist group that has repeatedly shown little regard for ceasefire deals.”
“It’s also important to remember that the hostage release was only one part of a multi-phase plan for Gaza. There were almost certain to be roadblocks along the way,” she continued.
Meanwhile, Israel is also concerned about Turkey’s potential influence in Gaza after the war, given its role as a major international backer of Hamas and its openly hostile stance toward the Jewish state.
On Monday, Israeli Minister of Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism Amichai Chikli rejected any possibility of Turkey playing a role in US President Donald Trump’s peace plan.
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan “is a sworn enemy of Israel and the West, a jihadist in a suit,” Chikli said.
“We will not tolerate a Turkish presence, not on our northern border and not on our southern border,” the Israeli official continued, referring to Israel’s borders with the Gaza Strip to the south and Syria to the north.
“May Allah, for the sake of His name… destroy and devastate Zionist Israel.”
This sentence was not uttered by a Hamas or Hezbollah leader, It was said in a public prayer on March 30, 2025, by the President of Turkey @RTErdogan.
Erdogan is a sworn enemy of Israel and the West,… https://t.co/cH5usZWj9Z
— עמיחי שיקלי – Amichai Chikli (@AmichaiChikli) October 20, 2025
Last week, Erdogan joined several Arab countries in pledging support for Trump’s Gaza peace plan, vowing to help manage post-war efforts in the enclave.
Among other initiatives, Turkey has committed to deploying search and rescue teams to Gaza to recover the bodies of slain hostages, who are to be returned to Israel as part of the first phase of the ceasefire deal, and to support reconstruction across the enclave.
Under Trump’s plan, Turkey is also expected to join a multinational task force responsible for overseeing the ceasefire and training local security forces.
However, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has reportedly rejected Turkey’s participation in the International Stabilization Force, calling it a “red line.”
Turkey, a longtime backer of Hamas, has been one of the most outspoken critics of Israel on the international stage, even going so far as to threaten an invasion of the Jewish state and calling on the United Nations to use force if Jerusalem failed to halt its military campaign against Hamas in Gaza.
Erdogan has frequently defended Hamas terrorists as “resistance fighters” against what he describes as Israeli occupation of Palestinian land, while erroneously accusing Israel of committing genocide.
As part of his long history of anti-Israel rhetoric, Erdogan has also falsely accused the Jewish state of running “Nazi” concentration camps and compared Netanyahu to Hitler multiple times before.
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Federal judge allows Northwestern to block enrollment for students who boycotted antisemitism training
A federal judge in Chicago allowed Northwestern University to discipline students who refused to watch an antisemitism training video.
Judge Georgia Alexakis declined Monday to issue a restraining order in a lawsuit filed by Northwestern Graduate Workers for Palestine and two graduate students. The plaintiffs claimed that an antisemitism training required by the school for enrollment was biased and discriminatory toward Palestinian and Arab students.
“Northwestern University’s Training is not intended to foster a civil and collaborative workplace or remedy discrimination but rather is aimed at suppressing political anti-Zionist speech and speech critical of Israel,” the complaint read.
The “Antisemitism Here/Now” training video, produced by the Jewish United Fund of Chicago, the city’s Jewish federation, did not ask students to agree with its contents. Fewer than three dozen students declined to watch it in protest.
Attorneys for Northwestern said that 16 students currently face enrollment holds for failing to watch the training, though they added that they were unsure if all students affected did so out of protest.
In her ruling, Alexakis acknowledged that the graduate students affected by the holds face “irreparable harm,” but said that the student’s lawyers had failed to prove Northwestern had a discriminatory motive in requiring the video.
“Because the plaintiffs have failed to meet their burden in this threshold inquiry, we do not move on to conduct a balancing of the harms,” Alexakis said in her ruling, according to the school’s student newspaper, The Daily Northwestern. “For that reason, I have to deny the motion.”
The complaint also criticized the school for adopting the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, which the complaint said “effectively limits Arab students, and particularly Palestinian students, in their expressions of nationalist aspirations and protest against mistreatment of their ethnic group.”
The antisemitism training was announced by Northwestern in March in an email to the student body that cited President Donald Trump’s Jan. 29 executive order, “Additional Measures to Combat Anti-Semitism.”
“The truth is that Northwestern’s antisemitism training discriminates against Jewish students who are anti-Zionist, against Palestinian students, and against all people of good conscience, and it has nothing to do with Jewish safety,” said Jonah Rubin, the manager for campus organizing for Jewish Voice for Peace, at a press conference. “It’s about Northwestern trying to cozy up to an increasingly authoritarian administration.”
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Judge Denies CAIR’s Challenge to Campus Antisemitism Prevention Training
Pro-Hamas activists on the grounds of Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, United States, on April 25, 2024. Photo: Kyle Mazza/NurPhoto via Reuters Connect
A US federal judge on Monday rejected an anti-Israel group’s motion to pause an antisemitism prevention course being held at Northwestern University to prevent further harassment of and discrimination against Jewish students, citing the plaintiff’s failing to provide sufficient evidence that it is harming anyone.
“Because the plaintiffs have failed to meet their burden in this threshold inquiry, we do not move on to conduct a balancing of harms,” Judge Georgia Alexis, an alumnus of Northwestern University Pritzker School of Law, said in court. “For that reason, I have to deny the motion.”
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) — an organization that has been scrutinized by US authorities over alleged ties to the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas — sued Northwestern University, arguing that the course in question violates Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and that it serves as a “pretense” for censoring “expressions of Palestinian identity, culture, and advocacy for self-determination.”
Filed on behalf of the Northwestern Graduate Workers for Palestine (GW4P) group, the suit arrived in federal dockets with a request for a temporary restraining order to halt the course, which the university mandated as a prerequisite for fall registration, and the rescission of disciplinary measures imposed on nine students who refused to complete it.
The suit primarily takes aim at Northwestern’s adoption of the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s (IHRA) definition of antisemitism and its application to the training course, which, at its conclusion, calls on students to pledge not to be antisemitic.
Used by governments and other entities across the world, the IHRA definition describes antisemitism as a “certain perception of Jews, which may be expressed as hatred toward Jews. Rhetorical and physical manifestations of antisemitism are directed toward Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, toward Jewish community institutions and religious facilities.” It provides 11 specific, contemporary examples of antisemitism in public life, the media, schools, the workplace, and in the religious sphere.
Beyond classic antisemitic behavior associated with the likes of the medieval period and Nazi Germany, the examples include denial of the Holocaust and newer forms of antisemitism targeting Israel such as demonizing the Jewish state, denying its right to exist, and holding it to standards not expected of any other democratic state.
CAIR argues that the definition is anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian, discriminating against both cultures while being hostile to CAIR’s vision of Palestinian self-determination.
“Northwestern requires students to complete a training course elaborating on that definition and requires them to attest that they to abide by conduct policies that incorporate that discriminatory definition,” CAIR’s complaint says. “The training course and attestations discriminate against Arab students whose racial and national origin identities are fundamentally incompatible with this definition.”
Several lawsuits have challenged universities’ quelling of riotous anti-Zionist activity on other grounds, such as Students for Justice in Palestine’s (SJP) unsuccessful lawsuit against Columbia University last year, but none have argued that allowing antisemitism to thrive is inclusive of Muslim, Arab, and Palestinian identities and that fighting it is discriminatory.
This is the latest CAIR activity in a long line of initiatives that have prompted a storm of controversy, as previously reported by The Algemeiner. In September, US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR) exposed materials which CAIR distributes in its local activism — notably its “American Jews and Political Power” course — to spread its beliefs. Some of it attempts to revise the history of Sharia law, which severely restricts the rights of women and is opposed to other core features of liberal societies.
Additionally, since the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel, CAIR’s chapter in Philadelphia has lobbied the state government to enact anti-Israel policies and accused Gov. Josh Shapiro of ignoring the plight of Palestinians. In a 2023 speech following Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities, CAIR’s national executive director, Nihad Awad, said he was “happy to see” Palestinians “breaking the siege and throwing down the shackles of their own land.”
CAIR’s attempt to undermine antisemitism prevention at Northwestern deflects from its own links to Jihadist groups which suppress freedom and promote hate, according to some experts.
“CAIR itself has a long history of terrorist ties in particular to the Muslim Brotherhood, illustrated by the fact that in the Holy Land Foundation (HLF) terrorism financing trial, CAIR was named an unindicted co-conspirator, and evidence showed direct financial interactions between CAIR and the now-defunct Hamas-linked charity,” Asaf Romirowsky, a Middle East expert and executive director of Scholars for Peace in the Middle East (SPME), told The Algemeiner. “This tactic of trying to turn antisemitism on its head in order to deflect from the nefarious activities of groups who have actual ties to terrorism is part of a larger strategy we see employed by Palestinian groups on campus such as the SJP. All of the above validates why the State Department is considering designating CAIR as a foreign terrorist organization.”
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said in August that the United States is actively working to designate the Muslim Brotherhood, a key ideological backer of Hamas that has been linked to CAIR, as a foreign terrorist organization.
CAIR, which is not a designated terrorist group, has said that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
The Coalition Against Antisemitism at Northwestern (CAAN), a group founded by concerned parents of Northwestern students, said in a statement on Tuesday that CAIR’s prevailing in court would have “set a harmful precedent, redefining civil rights training itself as discriminatory and weakening the very protections [Title VI of the Civil Rights Act] was designed to uphold. The court made clear that America’s civil rights laws continue to stand guard over the equality and safety of Jewish students.”
CAAN added, “Judge Alexakis questioned how a neutral, campus-wide program could constitute discrimination. The training simply requires students to acknowledge nondiscrimination policies incorporation the IHRA definition of antisemitism — the same international standard recognized by democratic governments and civil rights authorities around the world.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.