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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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Benjamin Disraeli once saved Britain’s monarchy — the current one may be beyond repair
Not a bad send-off for a commoner whose family’s religion still prevented them from holding political office or attending Oxford or Cambridge up until the second half of the century.
This was the reason why the young Disraeli was baptized in the Church of England. His father, a prominent literary scribbler, thought this would ease his son’s way in society. Little did he know how far and fast this would happen.
Starting in his early twenties, Disraeli began to write wildly romantic (and self-promoting) novels, several of which star a brilliant and, predictably, mysterious hero named Sidonia, who prides himself, as did his (possibly mistakenly) creator, on his Sephardic ancestry. Disraeli uses Sidonia to turn the era’s racial prejudices inside out, having him wax on the brilliance of his race’s civilization while the ancestors of the British aristocracy were still mucking about as “Baltic pirates” and “tattooed savages.”
Similarly, when the Irish politician Daniel O’Connell made an antisemitic slur against the twenty-something Disraeli, the latter — in a fashion worthy of Sidonia — declared “Yes, I am a Jew. And when the ancestors of the right honorable gentlemen were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.” He then challenged O’Connell to a duel, which was happily quashed by the police.
With the same alchemical genius that transmuted the alleged dross of Jewishness into the gold of racial superiority, Disraeli launched his political career, making his way to become leader, rather remarkably, of the Tory conservatives rather than the liberal Whigs. He persuaded his party’s mostly well-born and dull-witted members to embrace both political reform — the Torys pushed through the Second Reform Bill of 1867, which dramatically extended voting rights — and progressive social and economic reforms during his second term as prime minister.
But Disraeli’s most remarkable achievement was not a matter of political or social reform but of monarchical reinvention. It was, quite literally, spectacular and starred the woman now known as the “widow of Windsor.” Following the premature death of her beloved Prince Albert, the stricken Victoria withdrew from public life and turned inward. Grieving and always garbed in black, she ignored her ceremonial duties, often seeking refuge in distant Scotland at her Balmoral estate.
In an echo of the British Crown’s current crisis, republican voices in Parliament began to question the immense sums spent on the monarchy while those on the street began to ridicule the queen. On a sign pinned to the gate at Buckingham Palace, one wag had written: “These premises to be let or sold, the late occupant having retired from business.” For the British public, it felt increasingly as if they were paying a lifelong subscription to a show that had permanently closed.
As a result, when Disraeli reached “the top of the greasy pole” upon becoming prime minister in 1868, his overriding concern was to cultivate his ties with the sovereign. As he confided to the poet Mathew Arnold, “everyone likes flattery; and when you come to royalty you should lay it on with a trowel.”
The newly arrived prime minister was as good as his word. As he wrote in his first message to the queen, “Mr. Disraeli with his humble duty to Your Majesty. He ventures to express his sense of Your Majesty’s most gracious kindness to him and of the high honour which Your Majesty has been graciously pleased to confer on him. He can offer only devotion.”
Swept off her feet by such declarations of devotion, Victoria described her new prime minister as “her kind, good, considerate friend.” She allowed her friend unprecedented privileges, such as front row seats for him and his wife for the wedding of the Prince of Wales, and even more shockingly, the permission to sit during their frequent private audiences, though he insisted on standing.
Disraeli continued to lay it on thick over the course of their relationship. “If your Majesty is ill,” he wrote in the third person during a political crisis, “he is sure he will himself break down. All, really, depends upon your Majesty.”
“He lives for Her,” he continued, “works only for Her, and without Her all is lost.”
Okay, even “thick” fails to describe Disraeli’s flattery. But here is the vital point: his conversations and correspondence with Victoria, while over-the-top, were also sincere. He was impressed by her character and her capacity to represent the nation. The future of Great Britain, he believed, depended on a vibrant and visible monarchy, one in which Victoria would of course play the starring role.
Deeply moved by Disraeli’s attention, the queen was drawn out of her shell of mourning. “After the long gloom of her bereavement,” Lytton Strachey wrote in his biography of Victoria, “she expanded to the rays of Disraeli’s devotion like a flower in the sun.” Gradually, this expansion was not just private and emotional, but also political and ceremonial.
In fact, Disraeli did not distinguish between the two. The imperial and spectacle were one and the same. In 1876, this conviction led him, with the Queen’s delighted complicity, to push a bill through Parliament that bestowed upon Victoria the title of Empress of India. Rather than pause her ceremonial ambitions in the years following Disraeli’s death, Victoria doubled down on her mentor’s playbook. She orchestrated her Golden Jubilee in 1887 and then years later, her Diamond Jubilee.
With these earlier spectacles in mind, Victoria’s great-great-granddaughter continued the tradition, with stunning success, not just with the first two jubilees, but adding, shortly before her death, the Platinum Jubilee in 2022. And yet, that triumph was soon followed by Elizabeth’s death and the diminishment if not death of the monarchy, in part thanks to Andrew’s abhorrent antics.
“A man’s fate,” Disraeli once remarked, “is his own temper.” But now, the fate of the very monarchy Disraeli helped build hangs in the balance — a turn of events that perhaps even he could not solve.
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Israeli bobsled squad is disqualified from Olympics after trying to swap in Druze teammate
(JTA) — The Israeli bobsled team’s historic journey to the 2026 Winter Olympics ended in anything but storybook fashion on Sunday, as Israel’s own Olympic committee withdrew it from competition after learning that the team had lied about a member’s health.
The withdrawal meant that Israel did not compete in the four-man race on Sunday, the final day of competition in Milan and Cortina.
After finishing the first two heats of the four-man bobsled race as the slowest team, Israel planned to swap out Uri Zisman for team alternate Ward Farwasy, who would have become Israel’s first-ever Druze Olympian had he taken the ice.
But bobsled substitutions are only permitted in the event of an athlete’s injury or illness, so Zisman had agreed to lie and tell officials he was sick. He had reportedly obtained a medical certification for the false story.
In a statement, Israel’s Olympic committee said it had learned of the team’s plan to substitute in Farwasy “in an improper manner that does not meet the standards expected of Olympic athletes and is not in line with Olympic values,” and chose to withdraw the team from the race.
“The Olympic Committee of Israel views any deviation from the Olympic values as unacceptable and cannot accept inappropriate behavior,” the statement said. “It should be emphasized that, up to this point, the participation of the bobsleigh delegation has taken place in the spirit of sport and without any violations by the athletes.”
David Greaves, the president of the Israeli Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation, told the Times of Israel that he was “deeply disappointed in the actions of the team.”
AJ Edelman, the team’s captain and main driver of its existence, took responsibility for the scheme.
“I apologize profusely for the disappointment,” Edelman posted on X. “But I will always remain proud that the team looked at their Druze brother, who had earned his place on the team, and unanimously said ‘we want this for you.’ I signed off on it and I take responsibility.”
Later, fending off criticism that he had compromised the very Olympic program he had sought to build up, Edelman appeared to blame Zisman’s mother for calling foul on the switch and said he did not regret it.
“I make no apologies for the decision. At all. The switch is not only common in our sport, we did it believing it was good for the country and to honor our teammate. We thought we were putting country first,” he wrote. “The end effect was not intended but I am proud of the team’s consensus in that moment. It was only an issue because the mother of the athlete replaced was upset it was her child, not another athlete. The decision itself was not in question and I remain okay with it.”
The disqualification ignited criticism of the team from both pro-Israel sports fans and those who had protested Israel’s inclusion in the Olympics in the first place. Edelman and Menachem Chen’s last-place finish in the two-man bobsled event last week was overshadowed by a Swiss broadcaster’s criticism of Israel and Edelman during the race. The broadcaster later removed the clip from its website.
On Saturday, Italy’s public broadcaster apologized for a commentator’s off-camera remark calling to “avoid” the Israeli team. The network’s director issued an apology for what he said was an “unacceptable expression that in no way represents the values of public service broadcasting or of RAI Sport.”
The controversies came after the bobsled team’s apartment was broken into while it trained in the Czech Republic. Israel was competing in Olympic bobsled for the first time, in what Edelman and some fans dubbed “Shul Runnings,” a reference to the Jamaican bobsled team’s similarly improbable run in 1988.
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Leaked DNC autopsy found Biden’s Israel backing cost Harris votes for president
Senior Democrats who reviewed the party’s 2024 presidential election autopsy concluded that the Biden administration’s handling of the Israel-Hamas war was a “net negative” for Democrats and cost Vice President Kamala Harris critical support among younger and progressive voters, according to a new report published Sunday. The Democratic National Committee has so far withheld the findings from public release.
Activists affiliated with the Institute for Middle East Understanding Policy Project, a progressive research group, told Axios that in post-election discussions with DNC representatives, party officials acknowledged that the Biden administration’s support for Israel during the war in Gaza was a factor in former Vice President Kamala Harris’ loss to Donald Trump.
The war loomed large in the campaign before Biden withdrew from the race. Anxious Democrats reportedly pressured former President Biden to “take a tougher stance on Israel” as one way to recover from his catastrophic debate performance in June 2024. Some advisers floated the idea of conditioning or halting certain arms transfers to shift the campaign’s direction and appeal to disaffected progressives and voters in Michigan — a swing state with a substantial Arab American community — who had cast “uncommitted” protest ballots in the primary.
Harris, who was more forceful in her call for an immediate ceasefire to address the dire humanitarian situation in Gaza, lost Michigan and Pennsylvania by almost 2 points.
“We should have done more as an administration,” Harris said in November. “We should have spoken publicly about our criticism” of how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government “were executing this war.”
The DNC claimed it has shared the internal findings with party leaders and candidates. Progressive activists are pushing for them to be made public ahead of the midterm elections.
Kamala Harris’ conclusions
In her book about the election, titled 107 Days, Harris addressed what she described as the political fallout from Biden’s statements and her own stance on the war, writing that it hurt Democrats with key constituencies.
“The issue was not binary, but the outcome of this election certainly was,” Harris wrote, adding that she wished that those who protested her understood that “sitting out the election or voting for a third candidate would elect Trump and kill any effort for a just peace, any hope for a two-state solution.”
In her own defense, Harris wrote that she “wanted to acknowledge the complexity, nuance and history of the region, but it seemed very few people had the appetite for that or the willingness to hold two tragic narratives in their mind at the same time, to grieve for human suffering both Israeli and Palestinian.”
In her rushed vetting of running mates, Harris pushed Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro to apologize for criticizing pro-Palestinian campus protests, which he refused to do, according to his recent memoir.
Harris wrote that she discussed with Shapiro how his selection might affect the campaign, including the risk of protests tied to Gaza at the Democratic National Convention and “what effect it might have on the enthusiasm we were trying to build.” She wrote that Shapiro responded by saying he had clarified that earlier views he held were misguided and that he was firmly committed to a two-state solution. Harris ultimately selected Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz as her running mate, but protests over Gaza still roiled the Democratic convention. Uncommitted delegates staged a sit-in outside the venue after the DNC declined to allow a Palestinian American to address the main stage.
The path forward
Palestinian rights have increasingly become a litmus test for Democrats.
Recent national polls show Democratic voters have as a group become more sympathetic to Palestinians. The IMEU Policy Project conducted a poll after the Democratic primary for New York City Mayor last year, which showed that Zohran Mamdani’s sharp criticism of Israel attracted new voters and energized parts of the Democratic electorate that contributed to his victory. The post-primary survey showed that 78% agreed with his belief that Israel was committing genocide in Gaza, and 79% support restricting weapons to Israel.
Last August, the Democratic National Committee withdrew a resolution reaffirming the party’s support for Israel and a two-state solution to avoid a clash with younger and progressive activists who were pressing sharper opposition to Israel.
In July, a record 27 Senate Democrats, a majority of the caucus, supported a pair of resolutions calling for the blocking of weapons transfers to Israel.
Even national Jewish Democrats, like Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker and former Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel — both considered possible presidential candidates in 2028 — have publicly challenged Israeli policy. Shapiro has repeatedly been critical of Netanyahu and, last year, criticized the Israeli government’s rejection of international reports on hunger in Gaza, calling it “abhorrent” and “wrong.”
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