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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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European Countries Join France in Demanding Anti-Israel UN Special Rapporteur Albanese’s Resignation
Francesa Albanese, the United Nations special rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories, speaks at a conference, “A Cartography of Genocide” Israel’s Conduct in Gaza,” at the Roma Tre University, in Rome, Italy, Oct. 6, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Remo Casilli
Top diplomats from Austria, Germany, Italy, and the Czech Republic have joined France in calling for the resignation of the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the human rights situation in the Palestinian territories, Francesca Albanese, who has an extensive history of using her role to denigrate Israel and seemingly rationalize the terrorist group Hamas’s attacks against the Jewish state.
Earlier this week, French Foreign Minister Jean-Noël Barrot accused Albanese of being “a political activist who stirs up hate” after she delivered yet another inflammatory tirade against Israel, this time at an Al Jazeera forum in Doha, prompting renewed calls for her resignation.
He described Albanese’s “outrageous and reprehensible remarks” as targeting “not the Israeli government, whose policies may be criticized, but Israel as a people and as a nation, which is absolutely unacceptable.”
The top French diplomat announced that France will demand Albanese’s resignation “with firmness” at this month’s United Nations Human Rights Council session.
Despite her history of antisemitic statements, the United Nations has consistently refused to fire Albanese, citing her status as one of its “independent experts.”
Now, officials in Austria, Germany, Italy, and the Czech Republic have aligned with France in demanding Albanese’s removal, warning that she continues to spread hatred under the cover of her official role.
Italian Foreign Minister Antonio Tajani said Albanese’s “conduct, statements, and initiatives are not appropriate for the position she holds within an organization dedicated to peace and security.”
Austrian Foreign Minister Beate Meinl-Reisinger accused Albanese of “spreading incitement” in a way that “undermines the impartiality and highest standards that the role of a UN representative requires.”
German Foreign Minister Johann Wadephul called her “untenable in her position,” noting that she “has made numerous inappropriate remarks in the past.”
Albanese sparked fresh outrage after seemingly calling Israel a “common enemy of humanity,” drawing sharp condemnation from diplomats and human rights advocates worldwide.
Speaking at the Al Jazeera forum in Qatar last weekend, she accused Israel of “planning and carrying out a genocide” during the country’s defensive war against Hamas.
“It’s also true that never before has the global community seen the challenges that we all face, we who do not control large amounts of financial, algorithms, and weapons,” Albanese said, appearing to invoke a long-standing antisemitic conspiracy that Jews control wealth and technology.
She also accused Western nations of being complicit in the so-called “genocide” by supplying arms and financing Israel, while claiming that Western media helps defend the Jewish state by “amplifying the pro-apartheid, genocidal narrative.”
Facing mounting backlash and renewed calls for her resignation, Albanese defended herself, insisting that her comments targeted a “system” that allowed a “genocide” to unfold in Gaza.
In an interview with France 24, Albanese rejected the allegations against her as “completely false accusations” and “manipulation.”
“I have never, ever, ever said ‘Israel is the common enemy of humanity,’” she said.
On Thursday, Stéphane Dujarric, spokesman for UN Secretary-General António Guterres, acknowledged disagreement with Albanese’s statements, emphasizing that her language does not reflect the tone or approach of the United Nations.
“If member states are not happy with what one or more of the special rapporteurs are saying, it is their responsibility to get involved in the work of the Human Rights Council … and push for the direction they wish to push for,” Dujarric said in a statement.
On the contrary, UN human rights spokesperson Marta Hurtado defended Albanese, stressing concerns over personal attacks and misinformation targeting UN officials.
“We are very worried. We are concerned that UN officials, independent experts and judicial officials, are increasingly subjected to personal attacks, threats and misinformation that distracts from the serious human rights issues,” Hurtado said in a statement.
Since taking on the role of UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories in 2022, Albanese has been at the center of controversy due to what critics, including US and European lawmakers, have described as antisemitic and anti-Israel public remarks.
Last year, the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) faced intense pressure to block Albanese’s reappointment for another three-year term, with several countries and NGOs urging UN members to oppose the move due to her controversial remarks and alleged pro-Hamas stance.
Despite significant pressure and opposition, her mandate was confirmed to extend until 2028.
In her long history of antisemitic remarks, Albanese has referred to a “Jewish lobby” controlling the US and Europe, compared Israel to Nazi Germany, and stated that Hamas’s violence against Israelis — including rape, murder, and kidnapping — needs to be “put in context.”
Last year, the United Nations launched a probe into Albanese for allegedly accepting a trip to Australia funded by pro-Hamas organizations.
In the past, she has also celebrated the anti-Israel protesters rampaging across US college campuses, saying they represent a “revolution” and give her “hope.”
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France Marks 20th Anniversary of Ilan Halimi’s Death as Macron Condemns Rising Antisemitism
France’s President Emmanuel Macron speaks during a ceremony commemorating the 20th anniversary of the murder of Ilan Halimi, a 23-year-old French Jew who was tortured and murdered in 2006, at The Elysee Presidential Palace in Paris, France, Feb. 13, 2026. Photo: BERTRAND GUAY/Pool via REUTERS
France on Friday marked the 20th anniversary of the death of Ilan Halimi — the young Jewish man who was brutally tortured to death in 2006 — as Jewish leaders and government officials sounded the alarm over a relentless wave of antisemitism that continues to shadow the nation.
Local communities across France planted olive trees in Halimi’s memory as part of a nationwide initiative responding to the recent surge in antisemitic incidents.
“Twenty years after Ilan Halimi’s death, the situation has only worsened,” Yonathan Arfi, president of the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), the main representative body of French Jews, said during a commemorative ceremony at the Élysée Palace in Paris.
“Antisemitic prejudice is spreading, even among the youngest generations,” he continued. “Schools, once safe havens, can no longer shield children from this hatred.”
French President Emmanuel Macron also attended the ceremony, condemning what he called an “antisemitic hydra” that has spread into “every corner” of French society over the past two decades.
During the tribute, Macron called for elected officials convicted of “antisemitic, racist, or discriminatory acts and statements” to face mandatory disqualification from public office, insisting that politicians must act as “guardians of the Republic.”
“Far too often, those who commit antisemitic crimes face sentences that are shockingly light,” Macron said. “We must ensure transparency and accountability by closely monitoring every ruling and sanction.”
“The government and Parliament will take decisive action to strengthen laws against antisemitic and racist acts,” he continued, vowing a tougher, more consistent approach to combating hatred.
Halimi was abducted, held captive, and tortured in January 2006 by a gang of about 20 people in a low-income housing estate in the Paris suburb of Bagneux.
Three weeks later, he was found in Essonne, south of Paris, naked, gagged, and handcuffed, with clear signs of torture and burns. The 23-year-old died on the way to the hospital.
In 2011, an olive tree was planted in Halimi’s memory. In August, the memorial was found felled — probably with a chainsaw — in Epinay-sur-Seine.
Halimi’s memory has faced attacks before, with two other trees planted in his honor vandalized in 2019 in Essonne.
On the 20th anniversary of his death, IFOP — France’s leading pollster — released a report showing that antisemitic stereotypes about Jews, their wealth, and perceived communal solidarity remain widespread, revealing how deeply such prejudices persist in French society.
“The case of Ilan Halimi shows the deadly consequences of antisemitic prejudice,” Yossef Murciano, president of the French Union of Jewish Students (UEJF), which commissioned the study, said in a statement.
“Twenty years later, remembering him means rejecting the idea that a Jew could be attacked or killed simply for being Jewish,” he continued.
Regards sur les préjugés antisémites 20 ans après la mort d’Ilan Halimi : étude @IfopOpinion pour @uejf
20 ans après l’assassinat d’Ilan Halimi, l’Union des Étudiants Juifs de France (@uejf) publie une étude intitulée « Regards sur les préjugés antisémites 20 ans après la mort… pic.twitter.com/eHIP7B84Ti
— CRIF (@Le_CRIF) February 13, 2026
According to the newly released report, one in four French people still believe Jews are wealthier than others, while 69 percent perceive them as a closely united community.
The poll also found that 44 percent of the overall population are unaware of Halimi’s case, with 73 percent of 18–24-year-olds having never heard of it.
Even though 25 percent of young adults believe that Jews “make too much of” antisemitism, 76 percent of French citizens say a tragedy like Halimi’s could happen again today.
“The change is undeniable: antisemitism is not fading, but evolving. It shows less as overt biological hatred and more as suspicion, expressed through narratives of power, influence, and money. It is becoming diffuse, normalized, sometimes even politically justified — and now, more than ever, it often takes the shape of anti-Zionism,” Murciano said.
According to the latest statistics, 47 percent of young adults believe the existence of the State of Israel is unjustified.
The report also found that half of respondents view Zionism as a racist ideology, while 35 percent see it as an international organization aiming to influence the world for the benefit of Jews — reflecting long-standing conspiratorial stereotypes.
The data followed the French Interior Ministry’s releasing its annual report on anti-religious acts on Thursday. The report revealed a troubling rise in antisemitic incidents documented in a joint dataset compiled with the Jewish Community Protection Service.
Antisemitism in France remained at alarmingly high levels last year, with 1,320 incidents recorded nationwide, as Jews and Israelis faced several targeted attacks amid a relentlessly hostile climate despite heightened security measures, according to the published data.
Although the total number of antisemitic outrages in 2025 fell by 16 percent compared to 2024’s second highest ever total of 1,570 cases, the newly released report warned that antisemitism remained “historically high,” with more than 3.5 attacks occurring every day.
Over the past 25 years, antisemitic acts “have never been as numerous as in the past three years,” the report said, noting a dramatic spike following the Hamas-led invasion of and massacre across southern Israel on Oct. 7, 2023.
Even though Jews make up less than 1 percent of France’s population, they accounted for 53 percent of all religiously motivated crimes last year.
Between 2022 and 2025, antisemitic attacks across France quadrupled, leaving the Jewish community more exposed than ever.
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Princeton University Anti-Zionist Group Cancels Norman Finkelstein Lecture, School Says He’s ‘Welcome’ to Come Back
Norman Finkelstein participating in pro-Hamas demonstration in New York City in April 2024. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Princeton University’s Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) chapter has canceled this year’s annual lecture by Norman Finkelstein, a stridently anti-Israel activist and political scientist who for years has been one of the West’s most outspoken critics of the Jewish state.
“We regret having to inform you on such short notice, but due to unforeseen circumstances involving new university policy, this event has been canceled. There are no confirmed plans at this stage for a rescheduled date,” SJP said in a statement. “Please help share this to all who were planning to attend.”
Finkelstein, who has been criticized for reprising antisemitic conspiracies of Jewish influence and power, has remained a regular on Princeton University’s speaking circuit thanks to SJP. As previously reported by The Algemeiner, SJP chapters across the US have been involved in assaulting Jewish students, stalking Jewish and Israeli faculty, and destroying university property during illegal occupations of school grounds.
Princeton University, which at one time had notoriously imposed disciplinary sanctions on conservatives and Zionists that are generally reserved for alleged sexual predators, has not stopped Finkelstein, who was born to Jewish Holocaust survivors, from coming to campus.
Writing in 2000 that the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews were murdered by the Nazi regime, has become an “industry” for Jews and Israelis to exploit, Finkelstein charged that a “handful of American Jews have effectively hijacked the Nazi Holocaust to blackmail Europe” and “divert attention from what is being done to the Palestinians,” whom he describes as unwilling subjects of an “apartheid” country. Meanwhile, he derided advocates of Holocaust commemoration as a “repellant gang of plutocrats, hoodlums, and hucksters.”
Finkelstein, according to The Princeton Tory, is also on record calling a Princeton student who served in the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) a “concentration camp guard” during a campus event, an allusion to false accusations that Israel is committing a genocide against a Palestinian people whose population, according to the Palestinian Bureau of Statistics has “doubled about ten times since” Israel’s founding in 1948.
In other Princeton events, Finkelstein has said it is acceptable to “shoot them dead,” referring to Israelis,” and said that Israeli Jews are “drinking the blood of those children.”
Writing to The Algemeiner on Friday, Princeton University noted that the institution did not disinvite Finkelstein and that SJP is “welcome” to have him back.
“Princeton University did not disinvite Norman Finkelstein,” a university spokesperson said. “The event could not take place as scheduled because the student organizers did not register it with the required advance notice. We require advance notice for logistical planning, a requirement that is unrelated to the content of this or any event.”
Princeton University has long been a hub of antisemitism on campus, often propagated by anti-Zionist activists who present their call for the destruction of Israel as being consistent with progressive values.
In 2023, week before Hamas’s Oct. 7 massacre in southern Israel, Princeton appeared to defend a professor’s assigning his students a book which accuses the Israel Defense Forces of “maiming” Palestinians and harvesting their organs. The book, Rutgers University professor Jasbir Puar’s The Right to Maim, is widely denounced as “pseudo-scholarship” for trafficking in antisemitic blood libels rooted in medieval conspiracies charging that Jews murdered Christian children and drank their blood during the holiday of Passover.
Princeton University President Christopher L. Eisgruber addressed the issue at a faculty meeting at the time, defending the work’s inclusion in Princeton’s curriculum as a routine of academic freedom.
“It has unfortunately become common for university faculty members here and elsewhere to become the target of viral social media storms focused on controversial materials that they assign or teach,” Eisgruber said during a faculty meeting. “That has sometimes extended to demands that the university should ban or condemn a book, cancel a course, or discipline a professor.”
He continued, “We, of course, will not do that. Academic freedom protects your right to decide what to teach and how to teach it. That right, like the right to free speech on campus, is very broad indeed, and we will protect it.”
One year later, students marked the first anniversary of the Oct. 7 massacre by vandalizing the Princeton University Investment Company (PRINCO), splattering red paint on the entrance door and graffitiing the perimeter of the building with the slogan “$4genocide.”
Since March 2025, Princeton remains under federal investigation for allegedly ignoring campus antisemitism.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.