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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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Far-right Israel critic James Fishback likens abortion to the Holocaust
(JTA) — James Fishback, a fierce critic of Israel and a far-right politician, offered scathing remarks about the Jewish state and likened abortion to the Holocaust during an address at the University of Mississippi on Tuesday evening.
Fishback, a former GOP gubernatorial candidate in Florida, recalled that earlier this summer the Combat Antisemitism Movement flagged as antisemitic one of his X posts describing abortion as a holocaust.
“Abortion is a holocaust, and by every single historical metric available, it was worse than the other one,” Fishback said, claiming that “61 million children have been killed in the womb since Roe v. Wade was wrongly decided in 1973.”
He also had harsh words for the state of Israel. “It is time for President Trump to call [Prime Minister] Benjamin Netanyahu and cut him off. We must decouple from Israel to save America,” he added.
Fishback was speaking at a Turn Up the Mic forum arranged by members of the University of Mississippi chapter of Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the late Charlie Kirk.
Slamming immigration policies on both sides of the aisle — Republicans for too few mass deportations and Democrats for an influx of foreign workers — Fishback declared, “It’s time to stand up and tell both parties that no, American jobs are for Americans only.”
He noted, however, that making such demands could result in a person being labeled a racist or misogynist, and that “if you’re really bad they’ll call you an antisemite.” Stressing that he condemns “all forms of religious hatred,” he maintained that “the most virulent” type is the hostility “against Christians in this country.”
Fishback blamed Israel and the inability of the U.S. to “tell them no” for drawing the country into the war with Iran. That war, he argued, has pushed gas prices and Treasury yields higher.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Far-right Israel critic James Fishback likens abortion to the Holocaust appeared first on The Forward.
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Protesters stormed Mahmoud Khalil’s book release. His Israeli editor confronted them.
Minutes before activist Mahmoud Khalil was scheduled to speak Tuesday night about his new memoir at a bookstore near the Columbia University campus where he led pro-Palestinian demonstrations, protesters stormed inside with a megaphone, a sign and a large American–Israeli flag.
“Zionist Jews are here,” announced Ross Glick over the megaphone, as he entered Book Culture. “We are against intifada.”
Glick is the former CEO of Betar US, a pro-Israel organization labeled an “extremist group” by the Anti-Defamation League for its harassment tactics. Betar previously shared names of pro-Palestinian protesters, including Khalil, with federal immigration authorities. Khalil is suing Betar along with the Heritage Foundation and the Canary Mission. Betar reached a settlement with New York state over harassment allegations and wound down its operations.
Khalil was upstairs, along with most of the book event’s attendees, when the demonstrators entered the store downstairs. Employees ushered the protesters outside, but one came back inside minutes later waving the flag and singing “Am Yisrael Chai.”
A store employee tried to grab the flag from the protester. After a brief tug-of-war, the protester appeared to hit the employee’s arm as he pulled the flag from her.
Khalil’s editor Riva Hocherman, who is Israeli, confronted the protesters in Hebrew.
“I really wanted to get a sense of whether they knew Hebrew, and they didn’t,” Hocherman told the Forward. “They just enrage me.”
Hocherman specializes in publishing books on the Middle East and previously worked with Rashid Khalidi as his editor on The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine. She said she was motivated to work with Khalid because, “His story was one that was really worth telling, and a great injustice was perpetrated.”
Khalil’s memoir, No Land to Stand on, focuses on his 2025 detention by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Khalil was held for more than 100 days and became the face of the debate over free speech on campus and when anti-Zionism crosses the line into antisemitism.
In his book, Khalil, who was born in a Palestinian refugee camp in Syria, says that pro-Palestinian protesters were peaceful, while “it was the pro-Israel students and Zionist groups that had provoked confrontations, harassed Palestinian students, and in some cases physically attacked them.”
Khalid mentions Hocherman in the acknowledgments section of his book: “Riva, my editor, is not only a champion of the book but of the cause.”
Hocherman addressed the protesters because she said they lie about Khalil, and because she wanted to show that not all Jews and Israelis think the same.
“Our opinion is not a monolith,” she said. “There is a range of opinion among Israelis and Jews. We don’t all think like they do.”
The event, only slightly delayed, carried on without further interruptions. Khalil spoke with environmental lawyer and activist Steven Donziger and answered a few questions from attendees before signing books. He received a standing ovation from the crowd of more than 85 people.
The post Protesters stormed Mahmoud Khalil’s book release. His Israeli editor confronted them. appeared first on The Forward.
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If Trump makes good on offering Canadian Jews refugee status, will they come?
(JTA) — TORONTO –- Sari Watson was too afraid to attend Yom Kippur services. Concerned by rising levels of antisemitism in Canada, she was safely at home 25 minutes away when a gunman charged at her childhood synagogue.
“My internal alarm has been going off, and you begin to think about escape routes or backup plans,” said Watson, 39, who lives in Quinte West, Ontario, about 15 miles west of Belleville, where the attack during Kol Nidre on Sept. 20 culminated in a shootout that left the gunman dead and one policeman hospitalized. “The only reason I wasn’t at synagogue was because I have been terrified of this exact situation, or worse, happening.”
Florida Sen. Rick Scott, Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt and President Donald Trump himself, all Republicans, have proposed extending refugee status to Canadian Jews who fear the spike in antisemitism in their country.
“’It’s so amazing to know that the Republicans understand the level of antisemitism we’re dealing with here,” she says. “President Trump gets the climate and the danger.”
Still, Watson has mixed emotions about the thought of leaving her home country. “I want to stay here and fight for our safety in Canada,” she said. “The option to come to the U.S. is really important, but we shouldn’t have to need it.”
The Trump administration has imposed stringent restrictions on immigration and is carrying out mass deportations, but is inviting South African whites – and now, potentially, Canadian Jews – refugee status. Critics accuse Trump of playing politics with refugee status, but some Canadian Jews see it as a lifeline.
Talk of Jews feeling compelled to leave Canada gained momentum last week when a well-known Jewish journalist posted publicly on social media about getting a foreign passport. Neil Herland, a newsreader for the national broadcaster, the CBC, wrote on X about his encounter with pro-Palestinian protesters outside Toronto’s Meridian Arts Centre, where Yom Kippur services were being held. Herland said that, concerned about rising antisemitism in Canada, he recently acquired his Austrian passport as a safety precaution. (Independent Press Gallery, a press freedom advocacy group, condemned the CBCfor reportedly suspending Herland after pro-Palestinian advocates lodged a complaint about his post.)
Some Jews are past the precaution stage. Sheldon Shugal, 64, and his wife are currently researching how to move to the United States.
“If I were able to claim refugee status to come to the U.S., I’d do it without hesitation,” said Shugal, who lives in Calgary. “I used to love our country … but it’s just not a place that I want to continue to live in.”
Shugal, a property manager, said he has seen increased antisemitism in Canada in the wake of the deadly Hamas raid in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023, and the war it launched. He said he and his wife have been struggling to overcome the complexity of acquiring an American visa.
“The Jew-hatred is no longer rising in Canada, it’s fully immersed here,” says Shugal. “It’s not the country I grew up in. I don’t feel affinity to Canada anymore.”
Shugal’s concerns are reflected in the findings of B’nai Brith Canada, which recently reported a 9.3% increase in antisemitic incidents from 2024-2025. According to this report, online harassment has surged dramatically, while Ontario saw the greatest total number of antisemitic incidents out of all the Canadian provinces and territories.
Antisemitic attacks have proliferated. In March of this year, Toronto synagogue Temple Emanu-El was shot at following Purim celebrations. The next week, two more Toronto synagogues were hit with gunfire over Shabbat, causing damage to the buildings, though no injuries were reported. In late April, assailants allegedly fired replica guns at “visually-identifiable” members of the city’s Jewish community, with one of the men sustaining minor injuries.
Shugal said reports of antisemitism have rattled him as well as the pro-Palestinian encampment his daughter encountered on her campus. “There hasn’t necessarily been anything I’ve personally experienced. It’s just what I’ve seen throughout the country,” Shugal said.
Lauren Cohen, an immigration lawyer based in Boca Raton, Florida, said that since the Oct. 7 attacks, about half of her Canadian clients cite antisemitism as a primary reason for wanting to leave Canada for the United States.
“In the past three months, I’ve noticed a very significant increase in the number of people between 55-70 who are contacting me,” said Cohen, who is originally from Toronto. “They have grown children or no children, and they have a little bit more money,” she said. “They want freedom.”
Antisemitism is not the only consideration for her clients, Cohen said. “The economy’s struggling. It’s not just antisemitism,” she said. “That might be the straw that broke the camel’s back, but it’s so many other factors as well.”
Cohen founded the Jewish Community Collective, an organization which helps Jewish Canadians and “displaced Jews” find connection in America. Another option for Jewish Canadians looking to make a new home in the States is Lech L’Tulsa, a program cosponsored by the Jewish Federation of Tulsa that helps settle Jewish newcomers, “designed to help Jewish Canadian citizens relocate to Tulsa.”
Some Canadian Jews do not see greener grass south of the 49th parallel, however. They point to Canada’s more expansive social safety net as one of the many reasons life in the Great White North” is better.. “Unquestionably, the answer to whether I’d consider moving to the States is emphatically ‘no,’” said Lawrence Stanleigh, a dentist in Calgary.
“I believe our country is a better place to live,” said Stanleigh, 67. “The U.S. doesn’t have a public healthcare system. Why would I want to leave our safety net for the U.S.?”
Stanleigh said the idea that the United States is a safe haven for Canadian Jews is misleading. “As bad as things are in Canada, I think they’re worse in the United States,” he said. “It’s not a better place for education or for healthcare. The whole idea of moving there for our safety is a fantasy that the Republicans believe in.”
Substituting the United States for Canada is shortsighted, Stanleigh said. “There are failures on behalf of Canadian leaders to stand firm in their support of the Jewish community,” he said. “But as bad as things are, I think they’re worse in the States. Our American cousins are blithely unaware of the problems they have at home.”
Anthony Housafather, a Jewish Canadian Member of Parliament representing a riding, or electoral district, in Montreal, is skeptical of the notion that the United States would offer Jews better protection.
“I think this idea is inspired by some right-wing Jews who have decided that their mission is to attack the Canadian government, and to make it look like somehow, Donald Trump and the Republicans are the savior of the Jewish people,” Housefather said in an interview.
Trump and Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney are at a low point in their relationship, with tensions over trade intensifying – and Trump seeks opportunities to take potshots at Carney.
Housefather also does not believe that leaving for the United States is gaining traction among Canadian Jews. “There are some people who have decided that Florida or Israel is a greener pasture,” he said. “But that does not represent a significant or a predominant view, and the idea that everybody’s leaving Canada is actually not true.”
The increase in antisemitism is universal – and should be treated holistically, he said. “What I do agree with is everywhere there’s a very serious problem with antisemitism,” he said. “Everywhere Jewish communities don’t feel safe, and all levels of government need to keep doing more.”
Housefather encourages his Jewish countrymen to remain proud Canadians. “Antisemitism has grown to an unacceptable level in this country,” he said. “It doesn’t mean that you should have less pride in being Canadian because there’s a loud, angry, small group of Canadians trying to make us scared.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post If Trump makes good on offering Canadian Jews refugee status, will they come? appeared first on The Forward.
