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
Shots fired in Jewish neighborhood of Montreal
(JTA) — Montreal police said an alleged shooter in a neighborhood known for its large Jewish population had been “neutralized” after killing one police officer and wounding another officer and a civilian Monday.
“A suspect has been neutralized,” the official police account posted on X after advising residents Côte-des-Neiges to stay indoors. “Two police officers and one citizen have been injured. The police operation is still underway. Continue to avoid the area. Further details to follow.”
The Montreal Gazette later reported that the suspect and the civilian also were dead.
It was not clear if the intended targets were Jewish, but a Chabad emissary in the neighborhood told Ynet, an Israeli news site, that a nearby building was targeted and that he was sheltering about 100 people.
The Yeshiva World News news site posted a video of a SWAT team swarming around a home belonging to a family affiliated with Chabad, the Orthodox Jewish movement.
Côte-des-Neiges was the scene of postwar Jewish settlement as Jewish families ascending from the working to the middle class moved west from the area of St. Laurent Boulevard. The area, with treelined streets studded with duplexes and low-rise apartment buildings, had a friendly neighborhood ambience and lacked the anti-Jewish restrictions some of the wealthier enclaves maintained at the time.
There are a number of Jewish schools and synagogues in the area, including the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, the oldest congregation in the country, established in 1768 and which moved to the neighborhood in 1947. The neighborhood is now the site of a large Chabad community and a number of Jewish restaurants and delis.
This is a developing story.
The post Shots fired in Jewish neighborhood of Montreal appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Everyone was a fan of Clive Davis — even if they didn’t know it
Last September I spent about 30 seconds with Clive Davis in a crowded elevator.
I was in the Sony Building, having just seen a press screening of Richard Linklatter’s Blue Moon. The elevator was full of mostly young people — probably Sony employees — and some press. The doors pinged open and in stepped a man with two handlers and an adorable spaniel. I turned to a fellow journalist and whispered “That’s Clive Davis.”
Someone who knew Clive — enough to call him “Clive” — told him we’d just seen a movie about the creative breakup between lyricist Lorenz Hart and musical composer Richard Rodgers.
“Didn’t you play Janis Joplin for Richard Rodgers,” he asked Davis.
Davis replied with perfect comic timing: “Yes. He hated it.”
That anecdote tells us just how much Davis, the legendary music executive and producer who died Monday June 22 at the age of 94, changed the musical landscape.
Davis had been in the music business long enough to serve as a bridge figure between the Great American Songbook and the popular music of the latter half of the 20th Century. The artists he signed at CBS, and later Arista (he was ousted from the CBS/Columbia for allegedly using company money to finance his son’s bar mitzvah), are enduring icons even, in the case of Ms. Joplin, decades after their deaths.
But what hit me in the elevator was the feeling that not everyone there knew who he was. They did, of course, know the music: Pink Floyd, P!nk, Whitney Houston, Sly and the Family Stone, Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Aerosmith, the very authors of “Love in an Elevator.”
It’s not overstating it to say that Davis’ influence across genres and his golden ear provided the soundtrack to American life. His own life was productive until the end.
He was in the Sony building because he was Chief Creative Officer at the company. A week before his death, the streets were thumping with a New York anthem from one of his late career discoveries: Alicia Keys.
Davis’ rise could be taught in Jewish Studies courses. Born in working-class Crown Heights, he — like Barba Streisand — was a graduate of Erasmus Hall High. He made good at NYU and got his law degree at Harvard.
He rose from the legal department at Columbia to become the company’s top tastemaker. Somewhere along the way he discovered Joplin — of a polar opposite disposition and background — and went from strength to strength.
Davis’ true triumph might have been just how adept he was at navigating everything the U.S. had to offer. The musicians he promoted had little in common save for his imprimatur.
In that elevator, which delivered us without much fuss to the lobby, there may have been people whose musical tastes gravitated to rock, R&B, jam bands, easy listening, guitar instrumentals and jazz.
Whether they knew it or not, Davis shepherded something they liked into existence. His genius was in recognizing genius.
The post Everyone was a fan of Clive Davis — even if they didn’t know it appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
U.S. and Iran announce direct Lebanon track without Israel
(JTA) — Following tense high-level negotiations over the weekend, mediators in Switzerland announced Monday morning that Washington and Tehran have agreed on a 60-day roadmap toward ending the war.
The joint statement released by mediating countries Qatar and Pakistan also unveiled the creation of a Lebanon deconfliction mechanism. According to the mediators, this entails a direct U.S.-Iranian track to terminate military operations in Lebanon and includes the Lebanese government but not Israel. The mediators did not explain how that would operate or resolve the current hostilities between Israel and Hezbollah.
Throughout the weekend Jerusalem, which watched the talks and the announcement from the sidelines with concern, doubled down on its hardline stance against Iran and its proxy group Hezbollah.
Speaking to reporters in Switzerland Monday before returning to Washington, U.S. Vice President JD Vance clarified that Israel had the right to self-defense, but that “every other nation in the region has the right of self-defense” as well. The mechanism was to resolve direct violations of the ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, Vance explained, indicating that it augmented the ongoing diplomatic work.
“We also want to make sure that, you know, when things happen, they don’t spiral into a broader escalation,” he said, adding that “there really hasn’t been a mechanism to have those discussions until basically around 4 p.m. yesterday.” He said that the U.S. had been in constant contact with Israel on Sunday.
Prior to Vance’s statement, the Israeli government delivered its first overt criticism of the diplomatic efforts taking place at the Bürgenstock resort in Switzerland.
Addressing the Jerusalem News Syndicate Conference in Jerusalem Monday, Israeli President Issac Herzog said any negotiations to end the Israel-Lebanon conflict should be done by the two countries themselves and not “by Iranian extortion.”
He added, “Tying Iran to Lebanon not only leaves Israel exposed to constant threat; it leaves the Lebanese weak and powerless, and will prevent their president and government from moving forward.”
Herzog also noted that direct talks were already taking place between Lebanon and Israel in Washington under the auspices of the State Department. The next round of negotiations is scheduled for Tuesday, which Herzog said is designed to empower the Lebanese army to be the sole military force in its country. Hezbollah and Iran are not a party to those talks.
“The disarmament of Hezbollah must be inherent to any solution in Lebanon, and Iran cannot dictate the future of Lebanon – on these fundamental points there is full agreement between Israel and Lebanon,” Herzog stated.
He also thanked President Donald Trump for his efforts on Israel’s behalf, calling him “our closest friend and ally and leader of the free world.”
The Lebanese Presidency said Monday that President Joseph Aoun had received a phone call from US Vance, senior adviser Jared Kushner and Qatari Prime Minister Sheikh Mohammed bin Abdulrahman bin Jassim Al Thani, but did not clarify when that call occurred.
According to the Lebanese statement, the discussion focused on “consolidating the ceasefire in Lebanon, halting the Israeli military escalation, and the steps that must be taken in this regard, including the possibility of forming a cell for this purpose.”
The ongoing fighting between Israel and Hezbollah and the IDF’s presence in southern Lebanon has been a point of tension throughout the ceasefire deal between the U.S. and Iran. The shaky ceasefire has been in place since April 8 after Israel and the U.S. started the war on Iran at the end of February.
In early March, Iranian proxy Hezbollah joined in by attacking northern Israel. Jerusalem has maintained that the Lebanese front needs to stay separate and has continued to take aggressive retaliatory action against Hezbollah despite the U.S. imposing a separate ceasefire in Lebanon as well.
Meanwhile, Qatar and Pakistan said the U.S.-Iran memorandum included the establishment of a “High Level Committee” to oversee negotiations aimed at a roadmap “towards reaching a final deal within 60 days, laying the foundation for the immediate commencement of further technical talks” on Iran’s nuclear program, sanctions and dispute resolution. These were the first formal discussions as part of the new U.S.-Iran Memorandum of Understanding, with Vance representing Washington.
The vice president told reporters Monday that Sunday “was a very, very good day. We made a lot of good progress; we did exactly what we wanted to do,” including securing an agreement from Iran that inspectors from the International Atomic Inspection Agency be allowed back into Iran.
Negotiators also created a mechanism to ensure that the Straits of Hormuz remain open, Vance said, downplaying reports of disputes between the American and Iranian teams.
However, Iranian media reported that members of Tehran’s delegation briefly left the room during Vance’s remarks after learning that Trump was issuing threats against Iran following Iran’s announcement on Saturday that it planned to once again close the Strait of Hormuz.
Vance said it was true the Iranians had threatened to walk out, but in the end they stayed and negotiated until the early hours of the morning.
Trump told Fox News in a phone call on Sunday morning that he had spoken with Iran overnight and said that if the country closed the Strait, he would “blow the s— out of them.” Fox News also reported that Trump had said, “You won’t even make it back to your f—— country.”
Trump also posted on his Truth Social account on Sunday that unless Iran stops supporting Hezbollah, “We’ll hit Iran very hard again, just like we did last week, only harder!!!”
Iranian officials reportedly responded to what they termed U.S. “verbal threats,” saying that “any form of threat is considered a serious violation of the agreement.”
Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said Sunday the talks had delivered “major progress to end [the] Lebanon War,” and added that discussions included oil exports, sanctions relief, frozen Iranian assets and reconstruction plans.
On Sunday, however, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu declared, “We will remain in the security zone in southern Lebanon for as long as it takes in order to protect the residents of the North.”
Vance on Monday said that Israel would have to withdraw, but only when it can do so safely. The Trump administration, he explained, hoped to reach a situation where both Lebanon’s territorial integrity and Israel’s security were protected, noting that Israel itself has said it doesn’t have permanent “territorial intentions” with regard to southern Lebanon.
In separate remarks at Sunday’s JNS International Policy Summit, Netanyahu said, “We have prevented Iran from carrying out a plan to annihilate us. We removed an existential danger.” He added, “We changed Israel’s security doctrine. We initiate. We attack. We surprise.”
Directly addressing the U.S.-Iran negotiations, he added, “No matter what happens in the talks, with an agreement, without an agreement, I pledge to you that Iran, as long as I am prime minister, will never have a nuclear weapon. Never.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post U.S. and Iran announce direct Lebanon track without Israel appeared first on The Forward.
