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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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Instagram Pushes Antisemitic Videos to Hundreds of Millions of Users, Report Finds
Silhouettes of mobile users are seen next to a screen projection of the Instagram logo in this picture illustration taken March 28, 2018. Photo: REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration
Instagram actively recommends bigoted content to its users, according to newly published research from a leading antisemitism watchdog group.
The revelation followed two high-profile losses this week in lawsuits that charged billionaire Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, which owns Instagram, with failing to protect children on its social media platforms.
On Wednesday, the Combat Antisemitism Movement (CAM) published new findings from its Antisemitism Research Center (ARC). The report, “Engineered Exposure: How Antisemitic Content Is Pushed and Amplified to Millions Across Instagram,” focused on tracking 100 antisemitic posts during a 96-hour period which Instagram directly pushed into users’ accounts through its own recommendation system.
CAM’s researchers found that these posts provoked 5.3 million likes and 3.8 million shares, which analysts estimate reached as many as 280 million users.
“Among the most disturbing findings is that the ARC researchers identified AI-generated ‘rabbi’ personas that were fabricated to push antisemitic tropes while projecting false religious authority,” CAM said in a statement announcing the report.
One bogus rabbi account CAM uncovered had collected more than 1.4 million followers. The report described how an account called Rabbi Goldman “pushes antisemitic conspiracy theories, including allegations of Jewish control of the global financial system, to a large audience, with some videos getting more than five million views.”
ARC identified 11 other fake rabbis, bringing the total followers for such accounts up to 2.1 million. According to the researchers, “each presents a distinct persona and voice, yet all promote narratives portraying Jews as obsessed with money, playing to classical antisemitic stereotypes.”
The report also documented substantial linking of Jews with occult themes including references to demons, Satan, 666, Moloch, freemasonry, the Illuminati, and especially the ancient Canaanite storm god Baal. The slander against Jews as secretly worshipping a deity who demanded child sacrifice and rivaled the God of Israel in the Bible has manifested elsewhere on social media. Far-right podcaster Candace Owens has claimed that the Star of David has “ALWAYS [sic] been associated with Canaanite cults and Baal worship.”
An important component of this new research is that rather than investigators searching for hateful content, they relied solely on “the standard use of Instagram over four days, via content actively suggested by the platform’s recommendation systems.”
“This distinction demonstrates that exposure to these narratives does not require users to seek out extremist material,” the researchers explained. “Instead, the platform itself can act as a vector, introducing and amplifying such content through its own distribution mechanisms.”
Through providing examples of the content analyzed, the researchers showed how conspiracy theories transition into calls for violence. One video discussed in the report blamed “the Rothschilds” and central banks as guilty of causing all global crises including wars, diseases, and 9/11. The video then “escalates into explicit eliminationist rhetoric, calling for their eradication as a solution. It uses the Rothschild family as a proxy for Jews and frames them as a singular, malevolent force controlling world events.”
CAM CEO Sacha Roytman said the report provided evidence “of a broad systemic failure on the part of Instagram and Meta.”
“When a platform actively recommends content that dehumanizes Jews to mass audiences, we are no longer talking about a simple oversight or a mistake in the algorithmic design. We are talking about infrastructure that normalizes hatred at scale that must be addressed immediately,” he added.
Regarding potential motivations for what might have inspired Zuckerberg to allow for such a proliferation of hate, the report noted in its introduction that Meta had been “generating substantial advertising revenue from engagement with the content in question.”
In 2025, Meta’s revenue reached $200.966 billion, an increase of 22.17 percent from 2024, when revenue hit $164.501 billion, a 21.94 percent increase from 2023’s $134.9 billion, which in turn had grown 15.69 percent from 2022.
Bloomberg currently ranks Zuckerberg as the fifth wealthiest person on the planet, with an estimated net worth of $211 billion. Earlier this month, he purchased a $170 million mansion in South Florida’s Indian Creek, noted as the most expensive sale in Miami-Dade County and listed as “the largest residence ever created on Miami’s most exclusive island.”
On Wednesday, Meta laid off 700 employees, largely those affiliated with the failed Reality Labs division, which burned through $80 billion in pursuit of creating the virtual reality platform Horizon Worlds. The platform will shut down on June 15.
Roytman said that Meta “must take a hard look at how its algorithms are promoting antisemitic content and put real, transparent safeguards in place to stop it.”
Meta may have additional motivation now to level up the safety protocols on its platforms following back-to-back decisions in a pair of lawsuits this week which, legal analysts suspect, may have now opened the floodgates for thousands of similar cases around the country.
On Tuesday in Santa Fe, jurors found Meta liable and imposed a $375 million fine for failing to prevent minors’ exposure to harmful sexual content including online solicitations, human trafficking, and explicit imagery.
“Meta executives knew their products harmed children, disregarded warnings from their own employees, and lied to the public about what they knew,” New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez said in a statement following the verdict. “Today the jury joined families, educators, and child safety experts in saying enough is enough.”
Torrez vowed to go after Meta for more money and force changes to the platforms.
“New Mexico is proud to be the first state to hold Meta accountable in court for misleading parents, enabling child exploitation, and harming kids,” Torrez said. “In the next phase of this legal proceeding, we will seek additional financial penalties and court-mandated changes to Meta’s platforms that offer stronger protections for children.”
On Wednesday in Los Angeles, jurors found Meta and Alphabet (parent company of YouTube) liable for the addictive qualities of their platforms exacerbating the mental health problems of a young woman and awarded her $3 million in damages with $3 million more in punitive damages.
Omri Ben-Shahar, a law professor at the University of Chicago, told the Wall Street Journal that “what is new is the addiction element.” He warned “that could create a very broad liability. The notion of addiction, there is something very abstract about it.”
Meta and Alphabet both plan to appeal the ruling. Alphabet spokesman José Castañeda sought to distance the company from Meta (which jurors found more heavily liable at a 70-30 penalty ratio), saying “this case misunderstands YouTube, which is a responsibly built streaming platform, not a social media site.”
Previous legal challenges to social media and online video companies for failing to prevent exposure to harmful content have usually failed due to longstanding legal interpretations of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider.”
This statute has prevented plaintiffs from suing a website’s host the way they would an individual committing slander or a publisher engaged in libel. The legal innovation which allowed for success in these cases was lawyers’ decision to focus not on the content itself but on the design of the products which intended to hold users captivated, glued to their phones for hours.
“They knew,” said Mark Lanier, the lawyer for the 20-year-old plaintiff in the addiction case. “They targeted the children.”
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University of Wisconsin–Madison Denounces BDS Resolution Passed by Student Government
University of Wisconsin-Madison campus on May 1, 2024. Photo: USA TODAY Network via Reuters Connect
The University of Wisconsin–Madison’s student government on Wednesday passed a resolution which endorsed the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement and demanded the institution divest from companies involved financially with Israel, drawing a stern rebuke from the school’s administration.
As previously reported by The Algemeiner, the resolution accuses the Jewish state of “apartheid, genocide, and militarized violence … at the intersections of race, gender, religion, disability, and socioeconomic status.” It also compares Israel’s conduct in its defensive war against the terrorist group Hamas to the Rapid Support Forces of Sudan (RSF), a notorious paramilitary group responsible for a slew of war crimes and premeditated mass casualties of civilians.
After failing to reach the floor for a vote when the Associated Students of Madison (ASM) first considered it last week, it was approved during an evening session on Wednesday. The body has not yet released the final tallies of the vote, but the UW Madison administration confirmed that it passed in a statement which condemned the outcome.
The university also said it was “reviewing reports alleging that an online chat, including possibly some ASM representatives, used an antisemitic term in reference to limiting potential speakers at the March 18 ASM meeting” where the resolution was considered.
According to The Daily Cardinal, a campus newspaper, an SJP member told their contact in ASM via text message to slash the time allotted for public comment because the “proportion of Zios [sic] rises as the speaker list goes on.”
“Zio” is an antisemitic slur brought into prominence by former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. While the term, derived from “Zionist,” has generally been deployed by white supremacists and other far-right extremists, it has more recently been used as well by anti-Israel activists on the progressive far left to refer to Jews in a derogatory manner.
Noting that the resolution “issued a number of flawed, unrelated and illegal demands,” the administration said in Wednesday’s response to the vote that “Wisconsin state law prohibits state and local government agencies from adopting their own rules or policies that would involve them in a boycott of Israel” and that “ASM leadership was counseled by university attorneys on the clear illegality of that specific part of the resolution” but “nonetheless voted to pass it.”
The administration did not condemn BDS as matter of principle, however, but said that UW-Madison “condemns antisemitism in all of its forms” in regard to the “Zio” text message.
Formally launched in 2005, the BDS movement opposes Zionism — a movement supporting the Jewish people’s right to self-determination — and rejects Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish nation-state. It seeks to isolate the country with economic, political, and cultural boycotts. Official guidelines issued for the campaign’s academic boycott state that “projects with all Israeli academic institutions should come to an end,” and delineate specific restrictions that its adherents should abide by — for instance, denying letters of recommendation to students applying to study abroad in Israel.
Leaders of the BDS movement have repeatedly stated their goal is to destroy the world’s only Jewish state.
The apparent antisemitic undertones of the ASM vote at the University of Wisconsin-Madison underscore the reality of campus antisemitism and the degree to which it has changed Jewish student life.
According to a recent survey commissioned by the American Jewish Committee (AJC) and Hillel International, a striking 42 percent of Jewish students reported experiencing antisemitism during their time on campus, and of that group, 55 percent said they felt that being Jewish at a campus event threatened their safety. The survey also found that 34 percent of Jewish students avoid being detected as Jews, hiding their Jewish identity due to fear of antisemitism.
Meanwhile, 38 percent of Jewish students said they decline to utter pro-Israel viewpoints on campus, including in class, for fear of being targeted by anti-Zionists. The rate of self-censorship is significantly higher for Jewish students who have already been subjected to antisemitism, registering at 68 percent.
The survey, included in AJC’s new “The State of Antisemitism in America” report, added that 32 percent of Jewish students feel that campus groups promote antisemitism or a learning environment that is hostile to Jews, while 25 percent said that antisemitism was the basis of their being “excluded from a group or an event on campus.”
Jewish students endure these indignities while preserving their overwhelming support for Israel. Sixty-nine percent of those surveyed identified caring about Israel as a central component of Jewish identity and 76 percent agreed that calling for its destruction or describing it as an illegitimate state is antisemitic.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.
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Iran Lowers Minimum Age for War Roles to 12, Sparking Outcry Over Child Soldier Use
Kids hold up an Iranian flag and chant slogans during a protest against the Israeli airstrikes on Iran, in Sana a, Yemen, June 20, 2025. Photo: IMAGO/Hamza Ali via Reuters Connect
The Iranian regime has lowered the minimum age for participation in war-related activities to just 12 years old, a move that will likely fuel the concerns of human rights groups, which have condemned Iran’s treatment of children.
In a televised interview with state media, Rahim Nadali, a cultural with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) in Tehran, announced that the new initiative “For Iran” is recruiting participants to assist with patrols, checkpoints, and logistics.
“Since children are increasingly volunteering to take part, we have lowered the minimum age to 12,” Nadali said, urging young children to join the war effort if they wish.
Rahim Nadali, Cultural Deputy of the IRGC’s Tehran branch (Mar 26, 2026):
“12 and 13-year-old children wanted to participate in Basij checkpoints across the cities. We have lowered the age limit to 12 and above.” pic.twitter.com/lLZy9pU5xm— حافظه تاریخی (@hafezeh_tarikhi) March 26, 2026
Iran International first reported Nadali’s statement, which has since circulated on social media.
As part of the regime’s state media coverage of the US-Israeli war against Iran, this latest announcement has ignited mounting backlash over the use of minors in security‑related roles — a practice that is not new in Iran.
“Recruiting children into military activity is a violation of international laws and the international community must not stay silent,” Iranian-American activist Masih Alinejad posted on social media, along with video of Nadali’s comments. “This is the same regime that lectures the world about morality. But when it comes to survival? They’re willing to send children into danger.”
In the past, widely circulated social media images and videos have repeatedly shown children and teenagers in military-style uniforms cracking down on protests, including during the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising, which erupted nationwide after Mahsa Amini, a young Kurdish woman, died in a Tehran police station following her arrest for allegedly violating hijab rules.
Under international law, Iran’s move flagrantly violates the Convention on the Rights of the Child, which explicitly prohibits the use of children in military activities, marking a dramatic breach of its global obligations.
Human rights groups have also repeatedly accused Iranian security forces of killing child protesters during past crackdowns.
According to the Center for Human Rights in Iran, more than 200 children were killed during the nationwide anti‑government protests earlier this year, which security forces violently crushed, leaving thousands of demonstrators tortured or killed.
Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch have also documented cases of children being shot, detained, and abused during these latest demonstrations, noting that government forces have repeatedly targeted minors in ways that breach international law.
Iran has a long track record of widespread human rights abuses, including crackdowns on protesters, harassment of activists, threats to minorities, executions of children, violations of women’s rights, and dire prison conditions.
During the January uprising, at least 6,724 protesters, including 236 children, were killed, with another 11,744 cases still under verification, according to the Human Rights Activists News Agency (HRANA). Multiple other reports have estimated that the overall death toll may exceed 30,000.
As in past years, executions remain one of the starkest manifestations of human rights abuses in Iran, with at least 2,488 people executed last year, including 63 women and two children, 13 of them carried out publicly.
Tehran’s latest controversial move comes as Iran has reportedly slammed a US proposal to end the war as “one‑sided and unfair,” a rebuff that has cast doubt on the prospects for a negotiated ceasefire.
US President Donald Trump has warned the Islamist regime it must reach a deal or face a continued onslaught.
“They now have the chance, that is Iran, to permanently abandon their nuclear ambitions and to join a new path forward,” Trump said during a Cabinet meeting at the White House.
“We’ll see if they want to do it. If they don’t, we’re their worst nightmare. In the meantime, we’ll just keep blowing them away.”