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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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I helped sell Obama’s Iran deal. Its critics owe us all an explanation.
(JTA) — Neoconservatives have some ‘splainin’ to do, as Lucy’s television husband, Ricky Ricardo used to say.
The war on Iran has turned out to be a debacle of historic proportions.
After months of military escalation, tens of billions of dollars expended, critical weapons stockpiles depleted, and a region once again thrown into crisis, the United States now finds itself humiliated. The memorandum of understanding reportedly concluded last week does not represent the culmination of victory. It represents the codification of failure.
Many understood that nuclear disarmament and regime change in Iran could not be achieved through force. As I wrote in these pages a few months ago, more than a decade ago, we reached a solution designed to avert precisely the calamity that has unfolded. It was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or, in layman’s parlance, the Iran nuclear deal.
As a certified denizen of the Swamp — I served in the Clinton White House’s communications shop and later founded a Washington, DC strategic communications firm — I was at the forefront of selling the Obama administration’s agreement to the American public.
I remember those days well — and I do not miss them.
JCPOA defenders, particularly those of us in the Jewish community, were attacked in the ugliest terms imaginable. We were called appeasers, sellouts, self-hating Jews and worse. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu traveled to Washington and outrageously warned Congress that the deal might pave the way to a second Holocaust.
JCPOA advocates never argued that the agreement signed in Vienna was perfect.
Its critics pointed to the sunset provisions. They objected that the deal did not address every malign activity undertaken by the Islamic Republic throughout the Middle East. These were legitimate concerns. Politics, however, is the art of the possible; geopolitics doubly so.
That agreement nevertheless achieved something extraordinary. Iran shipped out the overwhelming majority of its enriched uranium. International inspectors gained unprecedented access. A mechanism existed to monitor and constrain Tehran’s nuclear ambitions. The prospect of military confrontation receded.
The regime’s hardliners hated the agreement. The Revolutionary Guard fought it tooth and nail. Integration into the global economy threatened entrenched interests within the Islamic Republic. A growing middle class and increasing international engagement carried risks for those whose power depended on its isolation and perpetual confrontation.
Unfortunately, hardliners were not confined to Tehran.
The maximal-pressure advocates in Washington ultimately prevailed. During the first Trump administration, the United States withdrew from the agreement. Tore it up, as the president bragged. Despite the best efforts of our European partners, who had also signed the accord, the framework collapsed beneath the weight of renewed sanctions and diplomatic abandonment.
What followed, we were promised, was supposed to vindicate the critics.
Instead, it vindicated the critics’ critics.
The maximal-pressure advocates have spent years moving the goalposts. First, we were told, sanctions would bring the regime to its knees. They did not. Then economic isolation would force Tehran to abandon its nuclear ambitions. It did not. Then military pressure would succeed where sanctions had failed. It did not. Then leadership decapitation, covert action, and military escalation would produce regime change. They did not.
Each promised but failed breakthrough gave way to another promised breakthrough.
And now comes the final indignity: the so-called memorandum of understanding.
After years of threats, sanctions, covert action, military escalation and open warfare, the United States has agreed to resume negotiations with the very regime it set out to break. The Islamic Republic remains in power. Its leadership and political system remain intact.
Nor is that all.
The agreement reportedly provides waivers for Iranian oil exports and opens the door to sanctions relief and renewed access to many billions in frozen assets. It establishes yet another negotiating process on the nuclear question rather than resolving it. It leaves unresolved many of the issues that maximal-pressure advocates once described as non-negotiable, including Iran’s missile capabilities, its regional proxy network, or the many canisters of near-bomb-grade enriched uranium — what the president calls nuclear dust.
Even the future status of the Strait of Hormuz, the critical passage for oil open before the war, and now established as a lever for Iran to exert pressure, appears destined for further negotiation rather than decisive resolution.
The advocates of maximal pressure promised a better deal than the JCPOA. They promised that Iran would be forced to make concessions unavailable through diplomacy.
Instead, after years of confrontation, Washington finds itself lifting pressure, restoring economic benefits, negotiating with a surviving regime and postponing the most difficult questions to future talks.
Hell, in Paris last week, Trump actually made the case for Iran to retain, build or buy missiles and maintain at least some nuclear power.
So, what, precisely, was achieved?
The tragedy is not merely that the war failed to accomplish its objectives. It is that we already possessed a framework that constrained Iran’s nuclear program without requiring military confrontation. The Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action was imperfect, to be sure. Its supporters never claimed otherwise. But it reduced risk, established verification mechanisms and avoided precisely the cycle of escalation that has consumed the past decade.
Its opponents insisted there was a better way.
History has now rendered its verdict.
The United States ultimately abandoned a functioning diplomatic framework in pursuit of fantasies that proved unattainable. Having exhausted sanctions, threats and military force, it has arrived back at the negotiating table poorer, weaker and in possession of less leverage than before.
I’m afraid I told you so.
The defenders of the JCPOA were mocked as appeasers. Yet the memorandum of understanding now before us amounts to an admission of the very proposition we advanced all along: However distasteful it may be, the Islamic Republic is not a problem that can be bombed or sanctioned out of existence.
Diplomacy could have spared us the war.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post I helped sell Obama’s Iran deal. Its critics owe us all an explanation. appeared first on The Forward.
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Lander unseats Goldman on winning congressional election night for Mamdani
Former City Comptroller Brad Lander handily defeated incumbent Rep. Dan Goldman in the New York Democratic primary Tuesday night, while lesser-known Assemblymember Claire Valdez secured the nomination for another House seat — both after campaigning as sharp critics of Israel and with the endorsement of Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Preliminary results showed Lander with about 66% of the vote to Goldman’s 34%. Valdez won with 56% of the vote for the open seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velazquez. Both are virtually assured of winning the general election in November in their heavily Democratic districts.
A third candidate whom Mamdani had endorsed, former Columbia Gaza war encampment organizer Darializa Avila Chevalier, held a slight lead over Rep. Adriano Espaillat on Tuesday night.
Representing a spectrum ranging from liberal Zionist critic (Lander) to longtime activist for the Palestinian cause (Avila Chevalier), the strong results for Mamdani’s chosen candidates is being closely watched nationally in a Democratic Party where many voters say they want the U.S. to distance itself from Israel. All three candidates say they will support cutting off U.S. military aid to Israel, including for the Iron Dome defense system.
At a campaign rally last week, Mamdani compared the American Israel Public Affairs Committee to “monsters” who “move millions in dark money to accomplish a single goal — to preserve their power, so that they can turn us against one another.” The remarks drew widespread condemnation from Jewish leaders, including some Mamdani supporters.
Lander is a high-profile Jewish politician allied with Mamdani, who this election cycle threw his weight behind a slate of progressive candidates who have critiqued hardline pro-Israel money and use the terms “genocide” and “apartheid” to describe Israel’s actions in Gaza and the West Bank.
Setting out to challenge the incumbent, Lander zeroed in on Goldman’s support for U.S. military aid to Israel and his past ties to the campaign fundraising group AIPAC during the campaign.
Lander told the New York Times that criticizing AIPAC makes him “queasy” given “the antisemitic tropes at play,” but that he feels an obligation to call out its funding nonetheless as he promises to curtail U.S. military aid to Israel.
In NY-7, another candidate backed by Mamdani defeated the incumbent’s handpicked successor. democratic socialist Valdez won against Brooklyn Borough President Antonio Reynoso, who had the endorsement of outgoing Rep. Velázquez.
But Mamdani’s brand of Israel politics didn’t succeed everywhere: In the Bronx, Rep. Ritchie Torres — one of the Democratic party’s most staunch supporters of Israel — handily defeated Michael Blake, a former state assemblyman who allied with Mamdani during the mayoral primary last year.
For state comptroller, incumbent Thomas DiNapoli — who made additional purchases of Israel bonds in the aftermath of Oct. 7 — won over Jewish challenger Drew Warshaw, who argued that the state should divest from Israel bonds because they help “finance Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s wars.”
State Assemblymember Micah Lasher won the race to succeed Rep. Jerry Nadler, who retired after 33 years in the House and served as one of Congress’ leading voices for liberal Jews. In that race, the leading candidates Lasher and Alex Bores had broad agreement in their support of Israel.
The other candidate in the race, Kennedy political scion Jack Schlossberg, had called for conditioning aid to Israel and attempted to draw contrast with Bores and Lasher on the issue. But Schlossberg’s campaign struggled to gain traction amid questions about his lack of political experience.
The post Lander unseats Goldman on winning congressional election night for Mamdani appeared first on The Forward.
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Pro-Israel Democrats battle to take on vulnerable Republican Rep. Mike Lawler
(New York Jewish Week) — Voters in New York’s Hudson Valley on Tuesday are choosing a Democrat to challenge the staunchly pro-Israel Republican Rep. Mike Lawler in a heavily Jewish swing district.
Two candidates have emerged as frontrunners in the Democratic primary in New York’s 17th Congressional District, a suburb of New York City that includes about 30,000 Orthodox Jews.
Cait Conley, a military veteran and former national security adviser, leads by double digits in polls this month and prediction markets over Beth Davidson, a member of the Rockland County Legislature who has highlighted her Jewish identity. A poll from Tavern Research last week found that 28% of voters were still undecided as the election approached.
Both are appealing to residents anxious about the cost of living, housing, healthcare and foreign conflicts. The winner will also aim to claw back moderate voters who supported Lawler, one of the most vocally pro-Israel members of Congress and a representative who has forged close ties with Orthodox Jewish voters.
Davidson and Conley have both said they support the United States alliance with Israel while opposing actions by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government. During a candidate forum in April, they distanced themselves from Democratic efforts in the Senate to block certain military sales to Israel.
Polling far behind Conley and Davidson is Effie Phillips-Staley, a progressive who says Israel is an apartheid state that has committed genocide in Gaza.
Conley and Davidson say they are marrying pro-Israel views with a liberal agenda, including fighting President Donald Trump. Davidson told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that she wants to create a political home for “Jews that have felt lost in the Democratic party.” She previously served on the board of her White Plains synagogue, Beth Am Shalom, and has touted Jewish values as driving her public service, including tikkun olam, or repairing the world, and welcoming the stranger.
Conley has presented her military experience as an advantage. A former national security adviser in the Biden administration, she has said that she supports a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and views Israel as a critical national security ally.
The winner will face off with Lawler, who has become so closely identified with the district’s Jewish community that he was recently attacked in comments by Sen. Rand Paul’s son, William Paul, who accused the lawmaker of being one of “you people,” although Lawler is not Jewish.
Often working with Democrats, Lawler has proposed a spate of legislation aimed at supporting Israel since he entered Congress in 2023. He co-sponsored the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, which would require the Department of Education to codify the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance’s definition of antisemitism, a move championed by major Jewish groups and criticized by progressives for classifying some forms of Israel criticism as antisemitic. The bill passed in the House in 2024 but stalled in the Senate amid free speech concerns and was reintroduced in the House last year.
Lawler also introduced in 2024 the bipartisan Stand with Israel Act, which seeks to halt funding for United Nations agencies that “expel, downgrade, suspend, or otherwise restrict the participation of the State of Israel.” His bipartisan 2025 Bunker Buster Act seeks to equip Israel with massive bombs to target Iran’s nuclear infrastructure.
This year, Lawler has partnered with Democrats on two new measures that he says will combat antisemitism. The Jewish American Security Act introduced this month proposes expanding federal security support for Jewish institutions, and a House resolution from April condemns leftist streamer Hasan Piker and far-right podcaster Candace Owens for “antisemitic hate-filled rhetoric and content.”
Phillips-Staley represents the rising progressive wing of the Democratic party that is sharply critical of Israel, differentiating herself from Lawler as well as Conley and Davidson. Phillips-Staley has said that her views solidified after she traveled to Israel and the West Bank in February. She was criticized by some Democratic officials for doing an interview with Piker.
She told JTA in March that many Jewish residents supported her belief that Israel has committed genocide and the United States should sever military aid.
“I get the most encouragement, from lots of people, but a lot of encouragement from Jews who really challenged me, especially in the beginning, to be brave and say it like it is,” said Philips-Staley.
Republicans are suspected of jumping into the late stage of the race by funding a shadowy new group called Progressive Champions PAC, which mirrors GOP efforts to influence other Democratic primaries nationwide. Davidson publicly disavowed the PAC, which has spent $1.5 million on ads attacking Conley for her contract work for an AI company that works with the Department of Homeland Security, according to the Cook Political Report.
The primary winner will quickly rocket to national prominence in the general election, as Lawler’s seat is considered one of the most likely to flip in November. Democrats outnumber Republicans in the district, which former presidential candidate Kamala Harris won by less than one percentage point in 2024.
The post Pro-Israel Democrats battle to take on vulnerable Republican Rep. Mike Lawler appeared first on The Forward.
