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Here’s what Jewish New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast’s dreams are made of

(New York Jewish Week) — Cartoonist and writer Roz Chast is best known for her work at The New Yorker, where she’s been a contributor since 1978. But the Brooklyn native is also famously associated with the city from which the prestigious publication takes its name. 

Chast’s cartoons often explore the mundane hilarity of everyday life in the city, from the vagaries of the subway system to the anxieties of everyday New Yorkers. “I love living in Manhattan because everything is close together,” Chast told the New York Jewish Week. “There’s a kind of density and you don’t need a car — the city is so walkable. Even as an older person, you can have a rich life.”

As a creator, Chast said that New York City offers unlimited material. “There’s always so much going on,” she said. “It’s hard not to find something interesting or funny. Or aggravating.”

And yet, Chast’s focus is decidedly inward in her latest book: “I Must Be Dreaming” takes readers on a nighttime tour of her phantasmagorical mind. In its nearly 200 pages, Chast unpacks her dreams in all their technicolor glory — featuring birds in hats, animated fruits, human distortion (which she categorizes as “body horror”) and celebrity encounters — and includes dream theories from the likes of Carl Jung and Kabbalah. 

“I didn’t research it to come to conclusions,” Chast said of the book, which was published last month. “I’m interested in what others make of dreams.”

After all, in a city where a movie ticket can cost $25, dreams provide “free entertainment,” she added. 

Rosalind Chast, 68, grew up in a Jewish family in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn. Her parents, children of immigrants from Ukraine, Poland and Russia, spoke Yiddish to each other, their siblings and friends — but Chast never picked it up, she said, despite the occasional word or phrase that pops up in her cartoons. 

Her parents worked in the NYC school system: her mother, an assistant principal, and her dad, a Spanish/French teacher. The anxious pair would become well-known thanks to her award-winning 2014 graphic memoir, “Can We Talk About Something More Pleasant?” which the New York Times describes as “an instant classic of eldercare literature.”

Roz Chast’s latest graphic memoir unpacks her dreams. (Courtesy Bloomsbury)

An only child, Chast said she grew up fairly isolated, not maintaining much of a social life. In an interview with the New York Jewish Week, she recalls fondly how her parents would host friends and they would take turns telling jokes. They had a small apartment and she was not permitted to make a lot of noise, so she would retreat to her room, where her options were limited to reading, writing or drawing.

As it happens, to this day Chast still locks herself in her room alone for hours as she works. “Pretty solitary” is how she describes the life of a cartoonist, adding, “if you spend your childhood doing that, it feels more natural.”

Although she does not consider herself at all religious, Chast’s work typically reflects a Jewish sensibility, exploring Jewish mother stereotypes, for example, or feelings about gefilte fish. Growing up, her family celebrated Hanukkah and Passover, and her mother lit candles on Friday nights and she would return home from college to share Shabbat dinner with her family. 

Chast graduated Midwood High School and attended Kirkland College (sister school of Hamilton College) until she transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating in 1977 with a BFA in painting. She did some cartooning at RISD, but her feelings ranged from “indifference to actual dislike” of the quality of her own work. She found her classmates’ artistic abilities daunting, describing them as “the most incredibly talented people.”

“Any sense that I had that I was talented or special, by the time I left RISD, I knew that not to be the case,” she said. 

Chast’s feelings of inadequacy kept her from getting her hopes up when she submitted a cartoon to The New Yorker for the first time in 1978. Although she had been contributing to the Village Voice and National Lampoon, she had no expectation of having any work accepted by the prestigious publication, especially as she was a 23-year-old non-male, and her style was very different.

“My cartoons didn’t look anything like New Yorker cartoons,” she said. 

Chast said she was flabbergasted when they accepted her “Little Things” cartoon — a black-and-white diagram of 10 fanciful household objects straight from Chast’s imagination, including a pipe-like “kellat” and a “hackeb,” which vaguely resembles a shish kebab.  

The New Yorker ultimately hired Chast, and the magazine was where she met her husband of 39 years, writer Bill Franzen. The pair bonded over shared childhood memories of joke books and a love of pet birds. Chast had a series of parakeets as a child, “because on the pet ladder it’s the highest rung I could go,” she said. Nonetheless, Chast’s love for birds has endured: Her current avian residents are Eli, an 18-year-old African grey parrot, who was presumed male until she laid an egg, and Jacky, a younger female Caique, who snuggles in her hair as evidence of her affection. Chast is proud of Eli’s vocal abilities and doesn’t seem to mind when she exclaims “vanilla ice cream!” whenever she opens the freezer for a late night snack.

Much of Chast’s work is loosely autobiographical, drawing upon her experiences as a daughter, wife and mother. “When I started, graphic storytelling was not a thing,” Chast said, describing how graphic novels and memoirs evolved into an innovative “way to tell stories.”

“They weren’t just, ‘here are the words and now I’m illustrating the words,’” she said. “It was this other different art form, and that was a real breakthrough for people, for cartoonists, for publishing and now it’s kind of exploded.”

Her unique style has become recognizable to many — so much so that on the back cover of “I Must Be Dreaming,” fellow acclaimed cartoonist Alison Bechdel (“Fun Home”) describes the book as “Roz Chast at her Chastiest.” 

Her drawing has been described as “scratchy” or deploying “shaky, anxious lines.” Chast maintains that that is just how she draws — whether it’s classically acceptable or not, adding she’s not good at all at uniformity. “One thing I like about cartooning is there’s no strict rule,” she said. 

When she isn’t working, Chast loves to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Central Park, Zabar’s and the various trimming stores in the Garment District. “I just like walking around,” she said. 

Chast and her husband lived in Park Slope, Brooklyn, when their oldest child, Ian, was young. At 2 ½, he explained to his mother how her job worked, telling her “you go on the train and show your pictures to men.” Soon thereafter they moved to the suburban oasis of Ridgefield, Connecticut.

These days, Ian, 36, is a web developer, and Peter, 32, is a therapist. Chast and Franzen maintain a pied-a-terre on the Upper West Side, not far from where she lived as a young writer for nine years, when she cooked using a hot plate.

“When you live out of New York and hate to drive there’s a bit of a handicapped feeling,” she said of her time in the suburbs, adding she has “a feeling of being a complete person” when she’s back in the city.  

In recent years, she has pursued her love of painting Ukrainian pysanky eggs, and working on hook rugs, embroidery and book binding. But sharp-witted Chast gives no indication she will be putting her feet up anytime soon. 

“I do feel that things are OK right now, but I think it’s a combination of actually being realistic and maybe just an anxious person, that’s all I can commit to,” she said. “I imagine this tall stack of chairs: One thing goes wrong and the whole thing falls to the ground.”


The post Here’s what Jewish New Yorker cartoonist Roz Chast’s dreams are made of appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

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Israel to Send Delegation to Qatar for Gaza Ceasefire Talks

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu speaks during a news conference in Jerusalem, Sept. 2, 2024. Photo: Ohad Zwigenberg/Pool via REUTERS

Israel has decided to send a delegation to Qatar for talks on a possible Gaza hostage and ceasefire deal, an Israeli official said, reviving hopes of a breakthrough in negotiations to end the almost 21-month war.

Palestinian group Hamas said on Friday it had responded to a US-backed Gaza ceasefire proposal in a “positive spirit,” a few days after US President Donald Trump said Israel had agreed “to the necessary conditions to finalize” a 60-day truce.

The Israeli negotiation delegation will fly to Qatar on Sunday, the Israeli official, who declined to be named due to the sensitivity of the matter, told Reuters.

But in a sign of the potential challenges still facing the two sides, a Palestinian official from a militant group allied with Hamas said concerns remained over humanitarian aid, passage through the Rafah crossing in southern Israel to Egypt and clarity over a timetable for Israeli troop withdrawals.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who is due to meet Trump in Washington on Monday, has yet to comment on Trump’s announcement, and in their public statements Hamas and Israel remain far apart.

Netanyahu has repeatedly said Hamas must be disarmed, a position the terrorist group, which is thought to be holding 20 living hostages, has so far refused to discuss.

Israeli media said on Friday that Israel had received and was reviewing Hamas’ response to the ceasefire proposal.

The post Israel to Send Delegation to Qatar for Gaza Ceasefire Talks first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Tucker Carlson Says to Air Interview with President of Iran

Tucker Carlson speaks on July 18, 2024 during the final day of the Republican National Convention at the Fiserv Forum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Photo: Jasper Colt-USA TODAY via Reuters Connect

US conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson said in an online post on Saturday that he had conducted an interview with Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian, which would air in the next day or two.

Carlson said the interview was conducted remotely through a translator, and would be published as soon as it was edited, which “should be in a day or two.”

Carlson said he had stuck to simple questions in the interview, such as, “What is your goal? Do you seek war with the United States? Do you seek war with Israel?”

“There are all kinds of questions that I didn’t ask the president of Iran, particularly questions to which I knew I could get an not get an honest answer, such as, ‘was your nuclear program totally disabled by the bombing campaign by the US government a week and a half ago?’” he said.

Carlson also said he had made a third request in the past several months to interview Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who will be visiting Washington next week for talks with US President Donald Trump.

Trump said on Friday he would discuss Iran with Netanyahu at the White House on Monday.

Trump said he believed Tehran’s nuclear program had been set back permanently by recent US strikes that followed Israel’s attacks on the country last month, although Iran could restart it at a different location.

Trump also said Iran had not agreed to inspections of its nuclear program or to give up enriching uranium. He said he would not allow Tehran to resume its nuclear program, adding that Iran did want to meet with him.

Pezeshkian said last month Iran does not intend to develop nuclear weapons but will pursue its right to nuclear energy and research.

The post Tucker Carlson Says to Air Interview with President of Iran first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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Hostage Families Reject Partial Gaza Seal, Demand Release of All Hostages

Demonstrators hold signs and pictures of hostages, as relatives and supporters of Israeli hostages kidnapped during the Oct. 7, 2023 attack by Hamas protest demanding the release of all hostages in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 13, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Itai Ron

i24 NewsAs Israeli leaders weigh the contours of a possible partial ceasefire deal with Hamas, the families of the 50 hostages still held in Gaza issued an impassioned public statement this weekend, condemning any agreement that would return only some of the abductees.

In a powerful message released Saturday, the Families Forum for the Return of Hostages denounced what they call the “beating system” and “cruel selection process,” which, they say, has left families trapped in unbearable uncertainty for 638 days—not knowing whether to hope for reunion or prepare for mourning.

The group warned that a phased or selective deal—rumored to be under discussion—would deepen their suffering and perpetuate injustice. Among the 50 hostages, 22 are believed to be alive, and 28 are presumed dead.

“Every family deserves answers and closure,” the Forum said. “Whether it is a return to embrace or a grave to mourn over—each is sacred.”

They accused the Israeli government of allowing political considerations to prevent a full agreement that could have brought all hostages—living and fallen—home long ago. “It is forbidden to conform to the dictates of Schindler-style lists,” the statement read, invoking a painful historical parallel.

“All of the abductees could have returned for rehabilitation or burial months ago, had the government chosen to act with courage.”

The call for a comprehensive deal comes just as Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu prepares for high-stakes talks in Washington and as indirect negotiations between Israel and Hamas are expected to resume in Doha within the next 24 hours, according to regional media reports.

Hamas, for its part, issued a statement Friday confirming its readiness to begin immediate negotiations on the implementation of a ceasefire and hostage release framework.

The Forum emphasized that every day in captivity poses a mortal risk to the living hostages, and for the deceased, a danger of being lost forever. “The horror of selection does not spare any of us,” the statement said. “Enough with the separation and categories that deepen the pain of the families.”

In a planned public address near Begin Gate in Tel Aviv, families are gathering Saturday evening to demand that the Israeli government accept a full-release deal—what they describe as the only “moral and Zionist” path forward.

“We will return. We will avenge,” the Forum concluded. “This is the time to complete the mission.”

As of now, the Israeli government has not formally responded to Hamas’s latest statement.

The post Hostage Families Reject Partial Gaza Seal, Demand Release of All Hostages first appeared on Algemeiner.com.

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