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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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Israel approves $31.5 million plan to strengthen Jewish education in North America
(JTA) — JERUSALEM – Israel’s government has approved a NIS 100 million ($31.5 million) plan, initiated by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to strengthen Jewish education in North America, a statement from his office said Wednesday.
Based on a partnership and joint investment with North American Jewish communities, the goal of the plan is to strengthen Jewish identity and ties to Israel among the next generation of Diaspora Jews in the United States.
The approval of the plan, which was developed with representatives of the Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA), follows a government decision made in June.
It comes a day after Israel’s parliament, the Knesset, was sworn in and two weeks after a national election left Netanyahu facing a battle to stay in power as his rival, Gadi Eisenkot, received the mandate to form the next government.
It also comes amid signs of growing disaffection among Diaspora Jews, particularly younger generations, toward Israel and the Netanyahu-led government. Recent polls suggest that support for Israel among Diaspora Jews, especially in response to its policies in Gaza and on matters of democracy, is slipping.
A February survey of American Jews by the Jewish Federations of North America found that only one-third of American Jews aged 18-34 identify as Zionist, even as nearly nine in 10 say they support Israel’s right to exist as a Jewish and democratic state.
A separate Pew poll in May examining American views of Israel found that Jewish attitudes have shifted since 2024. The survey found that 83% of Jews view the Israeli people favorably, down from 89% in 2024, while 47% view the Israeli government favorably, compared with 54% in 2024.
“The plan we approved today, in partnership with Jewish communities in North America, is an investment in the future generation of Diaspora Jews. Together, we will strengthen Jewish identity, deepen the connection to Israel and ensure that our heritage and values are passed proudly from generation to generation,” Netanyahu said in the statement.
“The future of the Jewish people depends on our ability to ensure that future generations know their heritage, connect to their Jewish identity and maintain their deep ties to the State of Israel,” he said, adding that Israel would not “stand idly by in the face of challenges,” such as antisemitism.
Under the framework of the plan, which will focus on increasing the number of students enrolled in Jewish educational frameworks, the Israeli government allocation will be matched 50% with funding from Jewish Federations and other non-governmental sources.
JFNA said in a statement that it welcomed the Israeli cabinet’s decision to invest in Jewish education across the U.S. and Canada, calling it an “unprecedented partnership between the Government of Israel and North American Jewish communities to strengthen Jewish identity and ensure a vibrant future for the Jewish people.”
“We are proud to launch this historic partnership with the Government of Israel to expand access and grow enrollment in Jewish day schools across North America,” said Gary Torgow, chair of the Board of Jewish Federations of North America.
Eric D. Fingerhut, JFNA’s president and CEO, said the partnership “reflected the shared commitment of Israel and North American Jewry to strengthening Jewish identity and expanding educational opportunities for more families.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Israel approves $31.5 million plan to strengthen Jewish education in North America appeared first on The Forward.
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Netanyahu called for unity. His anti-Arab speech to the Knesset may have made it impossible.
Benjamin Netanyahu stood before Israel’s newly sworn-in Knesset this week and called for a national unity government. By the time he finished speaking, he may have made such a government under his leadership all but impossible.
At an occasion associated with festivity, democratic continuity and national purpose, Netanyahu denounced members of the Israeli Arab parties as “terror supporters, haters of Israel” and declared that Ra’am and the Joint List “both agree that the Jewish state must be destroyed.” He questioned his opponents for contemplating a government dependent on their support, asking whether they were prepared to entrust the country’s fate to people bent, in his mind, on its destruction.
Neither Arab party’s platform calls for the destruction of Israel, although the Joint List certainly does challenge elements of the Zionist consensus. Netanyahu’s speech portrayed them as existential enemies, which prompted heckling from former premier Naftali Bennett, part of the leadership team forming a coalition with Gadi Eisenkot. And then Netanyahu called for national unity – as if the one-fifth of Israelis who are Arab citizens are not part of the nation.
Whatever his intentions, the effect was to remind a substantial part of the Israeli electorate why it has become so difficult to contemplate another government headed by Netanyahu.
“I sat and listened to the outrageous, divisive, hateful and disgraceful speech by the outgoing prime minister,” said Eisenkot, the former military chief who was tapped by President Isaac Herzog to form a new government after winning the recommendation of 67 out of 120 Knesset members. “I am even more convinced that he is unfit to remain in office for even one more minute … His continued rule is dividing Israel and endangering its security.”
Political history is full of speeches and interviews that acquire a significance far beyond the circumstances in which they were delivered. Sometimes they capture a leader’s finest qualities. Sometimes they expose weaknesses that opponents had long suspected. And sometimes they become defining moments precisely because they reveal a politician’s lack of self-awareness.
Hillary Clinton’s reference to Donald Trump’s supporters as a “basket of deplorables” became an enduring symbol, evidence of the liberal condescension critics suspected of her. Mitt Romney’s privately recorded remarks about the “47 percent” of Americans he regarded as dependent on government came to encapsulate perceptions of an out-of-touch plutocrat. George W. Bush’s appearance beneath a “Mission Accomplished” banner became a monument to the premature triumphalism of the first Iraq War. Margaret Thatcher’s declaration that “the lady’s not for turning” crystallized the determination that admirers celebrated and critics considered inflexibility.
A few words in a speech can come to define an entire political personality – and Netanyahu already has one such speech to his credit.
In March 2015, he addressed a joint session of the United States Congress to warn against the nuclear agreement the Obama administration was negotiating with Iran. It was a dramatic performance, greeted enthusiastically by Republicans and regarded by many Democrats as an extraordinary intervention in an American political dispute. The lasting significance was the deterioration of Israel’s relationship with Democrats – or at least Netanyahu’s.
Eleven years later, Netanyahu may have delivered another defining speech, this time with consequences much closer to home.
This week’s setting was the swearing-in of Israel’s 26th Knesset. Netanyahu had lost his parliamentary majority, backed by just 53 of 120 seats. Eisenkot had already begun coalition negotiations, and the possibility of a broad national unity arrangement remained part of the political conversation – until, it seems, the speech.
Netanyahu invoked Israel’s grave security challenges, particularly the threat from Iran, to argue that only a unity government could meet the moment. But he grounded that appeal with a vicious attack on the Arab parties and on those prepared to cooperate with them.
His rhetoric will undoubtedly resonate with some Israelis. Many Jewish Israelis, including some who voted for opposition parties, are uncomfortable with the prospect of a government dependent on Arab political support. That discomfort is not simply racism, it reflects a complicated history in which Jewish and Arab citizens of Israel share a country while often identifying differently with the broader Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Arab Israelis share ethnic, cultural, religious and familial ties with Palestinians and with populations across a region whose states have, at various times, fought wars against Israel. In a country that has lived with existential fears since its founding, such ties have sometimes generated suspicions of divided loyalties. Objectively, they could be suspected of being a classic potential fifth column that works covertly with Israel’s surrounding enemies, who share their religion and ethnicity.
But the actual record of Arab citizens’ participation in Israeli society tells a very different story from the one Netanyahu presented or what fear and conspiratorial thinking could suggest.
Arab Israelis are deeply embedded in the country’s institutions, professions and daily life. They constitute roughly half of Israel’s pharmacists and about a quarter of its doctors and nurses. Arab citizens have served as judges, including on the Supreme Court. Justice Salim Joubran, an Arab Christian, chaired Israel’s Central Elections Committee in 2015.
They are integral to the functioning of the Israeli state. And despite decades of conflict, the overwhelming majority of Arab citizens have pursued their lives and political aspirations through civic institutions rather than violence or subversion. Cases of terrorism or disloyalty have been extremely rare.
I am a frequent guest, interviewee and host at events run by Bokra, an NGO and news website run by Ghada Zhoabi, a champion of peace, integration and coexistence. I thought of this fine Israeli Arab leader, presently celebrating a successful get-out-the-vote campaign, besmirched by her prime minister.
There is a crucial distinction between rejecting Zionism as a political ideology, advocating a state of equal citizenship, supporting Palestinian national aspirations and seeking Israel’s violent destruction. Netanyahu’s speech erased those distinctions.
Indeed, Mansour Abbas, the leader of Ra’am, has gone further than many Arab politicians before him in seeking practical accommodation with the Israeli political system. His party joined the Bennett-Lapid coalition in 2021, an unprecedented step for an independent Arab party. Abbas has repeatedly emphasized his commitment to pursuing his constituents’ interests through Israeli politics. And he has accepted Israel as a Jewish state.
Responding to Netanyahu’s accusations, Abbas declared that his party was not seeking to establish either an Islamist or an Arab state in Israel. “We have defined ourselves within the State of Israel as citizens,” he said, reiterating his support for peace and a two-state solution. He also emphasized that his party condemns terrorism. He said the speech created danger to his life and to his family.
For a prime minister to respond to such overtures by portraying Arab political participation as a threat to the state’s very existence is to throw a grenade into a powder keg.
And that explains, in part, why the reaction to the speech was so swift and harsh.
Eisenkot’s Yashar party had scheduled a meeting with Likud representatives to explore coalition possibilities. Following Netanyahu’s speech, Eisenkot canceled it, describing the address as divisive and inappropriate for the ceremonial opening of the Knesset. Likud responded that Netanyahu stood by his remarks but remained committed to national unity.
Even Aviv Bushinsky, a former Netanyahu communications adviser, expressed bewilderment. He contrasted the performance with Netanyahu’s conciliatory appeal for unity in 2019 and recounted receiving calls from foreign ambassadors who had attended this week’s ceremony and wondered what they had just witnessed.
National unity requires something that cannot be measured in parliamentary seats: mutual legitimacy and a minimum of trust. Political adversaries must believe that cooperation will not become another instrument of their humiliation or marginalization.
For many Israelis who voted for parties opposed to Netanyahu, the central obstacle is not necessarily Likud, its voters or even its policy preferences. It is Netanyahu himself.
Years of political conflict, disputes over democratic institutions and the unresolved reckoning over Oct. 7 had already made his continued leadership unacceptable to many opposition voters. But the speech may have hardened that sentiment into something even less negotiable, offering a fresh illustration of the political behavior they had voted to end.
Netanyahu’s speech did not make a unity government under his leadership more plausible. It made it harder to imagine.
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Pope praises the bond uniting the Catholic Church with the people of Israel
(JTA) — BUENOS AIRES – Pope Leo XIV reaffirmed the Catholic Church’s spiritual bond with the people of Israel during an interfaith gathering in Buenos Aires, a statement that drew particular attention from Jewish leaders amid growing antisemitism in Europe and elsewhere.
“Following the teachings of the Second Vatican Council, I wish to reaffirm the spiritual bond that unites the Church with the people of Israel,” and “our sincere respect for what is holy and true in the different religious traditions,” the Pope said Nov. 9 during a meeting with representatives of various religious communities at San Martín Palace, Argentina’s Foreign Ministry headquarters. The Second Vatican Council, from 1962 to 1965, shaped the church’s strategies for dealing with the modern era.
“The statement was a pleasant surprise to us, especially at a time when antisemitism is resurfacing, as it is in Europe,” Isaac Sacca, chief rabbi of the Sephardic Community of Buenos Aires, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “That is very meaningful to our people,” he said.
“The meeting was moving on several levels,” added Sacca, who also is the president of Menora, a Jewish youth organization. “All the different religious communities that coexist in harmony and peace in Argentina came together and showed themselves as they truly are before the pope.”
Addressing around 100 religious leaders, Leo highlighted Argentina’s history of religious and cultural diversity, describing the country as a meeting point of different peoples and traditions.
“Hearing those words from Pope Leo himself, just a few meters away, was very comforting,” Rabbi Marcelo Polakoff, commissioner for interreligious dialogue of the World Jewish Congress in Latin America, told JTA. “Moreover, his use of language about honoring the People of Israel struck me as significant, since I don’t think that terminology is commonly used in Church documents. It gives his approach an even greater sense of closeness. He is clearly continuing the strong legacy of interreligious dialogue established by Pope Francis, Benedict XVI, and especially John Paul II.”
Leo praised Argentina’s tradition of welcoming immigrants. “Argentina’s national identity has taken shape as a melting pot of races, cultures and religions, formed by its Indigenous peoples and the many immigrants from different parts of the world who arrived in this land over the centuries, bringing with them their dreams and their faith,” Leo said.
“At first, they were Catholics, Protestants and Jews, and later many others. Despite their differences, they all learned to work together, to form families and communities, and to build settlements and villages, in an admirable blending of their traditions with local customs,” he added.
Rabbi Ariel Stofenmacher, rector of the Latin American Rabbinical Seminary, drew a connection between Nostra Aetate, the historic 1965 Vatican recalibration of the church’s relations with other religions, and Leo’s speech.
“The pope emphasized the need to strengthen relations with the people of Israel and with Judaism. He revisited the ideas behind Nostra Aetate, particularly the relationship between the Church and Judaism. He also expressed his gratitude for the spirit of brotherhood,” Stofenmacher said.
“I think Pope Leo is showing that he is a leader on a global scale, someone who is not afraid to address difficult issues and who puts social and family issues at the forefront,” added Stofenmacher, who is also rector of the Isaac Abarbanel University Institute.
In addition to religious authorities and leaders of rabbinical institutions, the pope also invited prominent representatives of Argentina’s Jewish community. Among those present were representatives of AMIA, the main Jewish community center in Buenos Aires, and DAIA, the political umbrella organization representing Argentina’s Jewish community.
“The pope emphasized at the meeting that religions are guardians of human integrity — that is, each person’s dignity in its spiritual, social, and communal dimensions,” AMIA chief rabbi Eliahu Hamra said. “We are united in defending that dignity and in upholding the value of every human being.” The interfaith gathering opened with a live orchestra playing a tango song from iconic composer Astor Piazzolla as religious leaders assembled and waited for the pope. It was a distinctly Argentine musical choice, rather than music associated with any particular religious tradition.
“There was a tango performance at the beginning, so there were no religious elements in the ceremony, precisely out of respect for all faiths, as I understand it. The whole event was a real pleasure, ” Rabbi Sacca told JTA.
“I believe we must remain engaged in this effort,” said Rabbi Polakoff. “At the World Jewish Congress, we presented the document Kishreinu, which was conceived as a Jewish response to Nostra Aetate. That was in November 2022. I believe we must continue working along those lines, and I think we have an exceptional partner in Leo XIV to do so.” The meeting concluded with a minute of silence for world peace and the victims of violence.
Monday’s meeting followed two earlier events in Buenos Aires. Pope Leo XIV first visited a residential care facility for people with disabilities on the outskirts of the city. He then celebrated Mass at Palermo Park, drawing an estimated crowd of more than 2 million people.
The pope’s four-day visit to Argentina began Sunday, Nov. 8, following his visit to Uruguay. It continued Tuesday in Córdoba province, where he celebrated Mass before returning to Buenos Aires. On Wednesday, he plans to visit the city of Luján for another Mass before departing for Lima, Peru, the final stop of his South American tour.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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