Uncategorized
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.”
—
The post Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who transformed comics first as a muse and then as a feminist artist, dies at 74 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
Uncategorized
Israel and the Impossible Standard of Moral Perfection
Jewish visitors gesture as Israeli security forces secure the area at the compound that houses Al-Aqsa Mosque, known to Muslims as Noble Sanctuary and to Jews as Temple Mount, in Jerusalem’s Old City, Photo: May 5, 2022. REUTERS/Ammar Awad
There is a standard applied to Israel that no other nation is expected to meet. It is not a standard of law, nor of morality as commonly understood. It is something far more rigid and far less honest. It demands perfection in the face of existential threats, and even then, it delivers condemnation.
As the conflict with Iran intensifies, Israel finds itself navigating a reality few countries have ever faced.
Iran has made its intentions unmistakably clear for decades. The destruction of Israel is not rhetoric for domestic consumption. It is official Iranian policy. It is repeated openly, consistently, and without apology.
When Iran strikes, it does not distinguish between civilian and military targets. In fact, it purposefully targets civilians. And it doesn’t only target Jews. Rockets do not ask who is religious or secular, Jewish or Muslim, Israeli or Arab. They fall where they are aimed, and often where they are not, with one purpose in mind: to kill, to terrorize, and to destabilize.
Israel, in contrast, is forced to think not only about survival, but about responsibility. This includes responsibility toward all of its citizens: Jewish, Muslim, Christian, Druze. The diversity of Israeli society is often overlooked, but in moments of crisis, it becomes impossible to ignore. Protection must extend to everyone, without exception.
That is why restrictions on public gatherings were imposed. Not as a political statement, but as a practical necessity. In wartime, large crowds are not just gatherings. They are potential mass casualty events waiting for a single missile.
Yet when Israel extended these restrictions during Ramadan, including closing access to major religious sites, the response was immediate outrage. The accusation was predictable: Religious discrimination. Oppression. A supposed targeting of Muslim worshippers.
The reality was different. The restrictions applied across the board. Muslims were not permitted at the Al-Aqsa Mosque. Christians were not permitted at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Jews were not permitted at the Western Wall or the Mount of Olives. This was not selective enforcement. It was a universal policy driven by security concerns.
But nuance rarely survives in the modern information environment.
Within hours, a simplified narrative took hold. Israel was once again cast as the aggressor, the oppressor, the state that denies religious freedom. The broader context disappeared. The ongoing threat, the indiscriminate nature of incoming attacks, the responsibility to prevent mass casualties, all of it was pushed aside.
Then, almost as if to underline the point, a rocket landed near Jerusalem’s Old City that very same day. It was a stark reminder of what was at stake. Had thousands gathered as they normally would, the consequences could have been devastating.
And yet, even that reality does not shift the narrative.
This is the dilemma Israel faces repeatedly. If it acts to prevent harm, it is accused of repression. If it refrains and harm occurs, it is blamed for negligence. There is no decision that escapes criticism, because the criticism is not rooted in the decision itself. It is rooted in a predetermined judgment against a state run by Jews.
Another example illustrates this pattern with uncomfortable clarity. A toddler was found approaching the Israeli border alone. In any other context, this would be seen for what it is. A child placed in danger, likely as part of a calculated attempt to provoke a reaction.
Israeli soldiers responded not with force, but with care. They ensured the child’s safety, provided food and water, and transferred him to the Red Cross. Evidence showed the child was unharmed at the time of transfer.
Yet the story that followed claimed abuse. Allegations of injuries surfaced, contradicting the available evidence. The facts did not matter. The narrative had already taken shape.
This is not simply misinformation. It is a pattern of interpretation that assumes guilt regardless of evidence.
As Easter approaches, restrictions on religious gatherings once again draw criticism. Clergy voice frustration. Observers condemn the limitations. But the fundamental question remains unanswered: What is the acceptable level of risk? How many lives can be gambled in the name of normalcy?
Israel does not have the luxury of abstract debates. Its decisions carry immediate consequences measured in human lives. That reality forces choices that are imperfect, often unpopular, and always scrutinized.
The tragedy is not only in the conflict itself, but in the inability of much of the world to acknowledge its complexity. Until that changes, Israel will continue to face an impossible standard, one where even its efforts to prevent tragedy are reframed as acts of injustice.
Sabine Sterk is the CEO of Time To Stand Up For Israel.
Uncategorized
Europe’s Left-Wing Is at a Crossroads — And Its Voters Are Walking Away
Anti-Israel demonstrators release smoke in the colors of the Palestinian flag as they protest to condemn the Israeli forces’ interception of some of the vessels of the Global Sumud Flotilla aiming to reach Gaza and break Israel’s naval blockade, in Barcelona, Spain, Oct. 2, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Nacho Doce
For decades, Europe’s left‑wing parties were the natural home of working‑class families, social reformers, and supporters of egalitarian economics.
Today, however, these parties face a deep identity crisis; many voters no longer know what they represent. Their decline is neither sudden nor mysterious. It stems from their failure to outline a coherent economic alternative, their reluctance to address public concerns over cultural change, and a foreign‑policy shift that alienates moderates and minority communities alike.
Economically, the left has slipped into disarray. Some parties now embrace neoliberal ideas they once opposed, while others offer vague promises disconnected from real policy. With inflation rising, industries shifting, and inequality widening, many working‑class voters feel abandoned. Rather than addressing these issues, left‑wing leaders often focus on internal ideological debates that resonate mainly in urban strongholds.
A similar pattern appears on immigration and cultural identity — central issues in European politics. The left often responds to public concerns not with solutions but with dismissal, treating working‑class worries as reactionary instead of substantive. In countries where leftist parties have merged with centrists, their message has blurred even more, creating space for right‑wing populists eager to fuse economic frustration with cultural fears.
Foreign policy has intensified these divides. After the latest Middle East conflict, parts of the European left adopted an uncompromising pro‑Palestinian stance, often aimed at courting Muslim voters. Legitimate criticism of Israeli policy is one thing, but rhetoric that blames Israelis collectively or echoes historic antisemitic themes is another.
France’s La France Insoumise (LFI), for example, has repeatedly refused to classify Hamas as a terrorist group, fueling what observers describe as a toxic climate. Similar tensions appear in Sweden, where Jewish students report rising hostility, and in Spain, where pro‑Palestinian rallies receive political backing without clear rejection of antisemitic elements.
Even smaller nations face similar issues. In Croatia, descendants of Jewish families whose property was seized under fascist and later communist regimes still encounter heavy bureaucratic barriers when seeking restitution. As Deutsche Welle reporting shows, heirs in Zagreb — governed by the green‑left coalition Možemo! — spend years navigating courts and administrative obstacles, with many properties still unrecovered despite clear historical proof of ownership. These unresolved legal complexities fuel mistrust and reveal how institutional inertia persists.
The left’s challenge is not simply to recover lost voters, but to regain a sense of political purpose. It must craft a credible economic message, engage cultural concerns without contempt, and articulate a foreign policy grounded in principle rather than posturing.
Europe needs parties capable of balancing social justice with social cohesion — and clarity with empathy. Whether the left can meet that challenge will shape the continent’s politics for years to come.
Dr. Vladimir Krulj is a political economist with Franco‑Serbian roots, educated at HEC Paris, King’s College London, and France’s elite École nationale d’administration (ENA). A Fellow at the Institute of Economic Affairs in London, he is known for his unapologetically pro‑market views and his critiques of Europe’s failing economic orthodoxies. He also teaches at ESCP Business School and the University of Tours in France.
Uncategorized
When Democracies Lose the Narrative, They Lose More Than Words
A view of a residential building damaged by a strike, amid the US-Israeli conflict with Iran, in Tehran, Iran, March 23, 2026. Photo: Majid Asgaripour/WANA (West Asia News Agency) via REUTERS
Israel is fighting a war, and being judged in real time by people who are not carrying its risks, don’t face its decisions, and aren’t responsible for its outcomes. The judgment against Israel is not forming slowly. It is forming immediately, and it is shaping what Israel is allowed to do next.
This is where the real shift happens. Public opinion is not a side effect of war. It is becoming one of its constraints.
In the months and years following October 7, 2023, Israel’s internal reality became visible to anyone willing to look. Families of hostages have spoken publicly. Military strategy has been debated in real time.The political leadership has been questioned openly. These are not cracks in the system. They are the system functioning under pressure.
Outside of Israel, those same signals are being interpreted through a different lens. They are not seen as accountability. They are seen as division, not as strength.
At the same time, Israel’s enemies project a consistent message. Their narrative is simple, repeated, and controlled. It travels easily. It feels clear. It leaves little room for visible disagreement.
When public opinion turns, it begins to influence political pressure. Allies become more cautious. Support becomes conditional. The space to act narrows.
This is how a democracy can begin to lose ground outside the battlefield while still fighting effectively within it.
In today’s information environment, visibility does not guarantee understanding. Information is selected, framed, and repeated in ways that shape perception, often reflecting how perception gets manipulated.
At the same time, controlled messaging from the other side removes internal friction from public view. What reaches the outside world is a simplified version of events: Israel as the aggressor, and anyone that tries to attack or threaten it as the heroic underdog.
People are drawn to clarity. A message that is repeated without variation feels reliable. Over time, repetition shapes belief and narrows the range of what people are willing to consider. This pattern reflects how groupthink leads to collective blindness. Once a simplified narrative settles, it becomes resistant to correction, even when it leaves out essential context.
Israel faces an additional layer of scrutiny. As a democracy, it operates within a framework of law and declared ethical standards. Its actions are measured against those standards in real time. Civilian harm is debated openly. Operational decisions are questioned publicly. This is necessary for accountability. It also places the full weight of war in public view, including the reality of acceptable damage in conflict
These discussions are often detached from the conditions in which those decisions are made. They are evaluated without the same exposure to risk, uncertainty, and consequence. The result is a gap between how decisions are made and how they are judged.
That gap is where public opinion shifts.
From a distance, consistency feels stronger than complexity. A controlled narrative feels more stable than an open one. Over time, this creates a reversal in perception. The side that exposes its internal responsibility begins to look uncertain. The side that conceals its internal dynamics begins to look resolved.
When clarity is valued more than accuracy, and repetition carries more weight than context, the advantage moves toward those who control the message, not those who expose the truth.
Israel is not only fighting to defend itself. It is operating within a system that rewards simplicity and penalizes transparency. Ignoring that reality allows others to define the terms of judgment before the outcome is even known.
Public opinion follows what is repeated and understood. Recognizing how that understanding is formed is no longer optional. It is part of the fight itself.
Do something amazing,
Tsahi Shemesh is an Israeli-American IDF veteran and the founder of Krav Maga Experts in NYC. A father and educator, he writes about Jewish identity, resilience, moral courage, and the ethics of strength in a time of rising antisemitism.