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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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Security Warning to Israelis Vacationing Abroad Ahead of holidays

A passenger arrives to a terminal at Ben Gurion international airport before Israel bans international flights, January 25, 2021. REUTERS/Ronen Zvulun

i24 NewsAhead of the Jewish High Holidays, Israel’s National Security Council (NSC) published the latest threat assessment to Israelis abroad from terrorist groups to the public on Sunday, in order to increase the Israeli public’s awareness of the existing terrorist threats around the world and encourage individuals to take preventive action accordingly.

The NSC specified that the warning is an up-to-date reflection of the main trends in the activities of terrorist groups around the world and their impact on the level of threat posed to Israelis abroad during these times, but the travel warnings and restrictions themselves are not new.

“As the Gaza war continues and in parallel with the increasing threat of terrorism, the National Security Headquarters stated it has recognized a trend of worsening and increasing violent antisemitic incidents and escalating steps by anti-Israel groups, to the point of physically harming Israelis and Jews abroad. This is in light of, among other things, the anti-Israel narrative and the negative media campaign by pro-Palestinian elements — a trend that may encourage and motivate extremist elements to carry out terrorist activities against Israelis or Jews abroad,” the statement read.

“Therefore, the National Security Bureau is reinforcing its recommendation to the Israeli public to act with responsibility during this time when traveling abroad, to check the status of the National Security Bureau’s travel warnings (before purchasing tickets to the destination,) and to act in accordance with the travel warning recommendations and the level of risk in the country they are visiting,” it listed, adding that, as illustrated in the past year, these warnings are well-founded and reflect a tangible and valid threat potential.

The statement also emphasized the risk of sharing content on social media networks indicating current or past service in the Israeli security forces, as these posts increase the risk of being marked by various parties as a target. “Therefore, the National Security Council recommends that you do not upload to social networks, in any way, content that indicates service in the security forces, operational activity, or similar content, as well as real-time locations.”

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Israel Intensifies Gaza City Bombing as Rubio Arrives

Displaced Palestinians, fleeing northern Gaza due to an Israeli military operation, move southward after Israeli forces ordered residents of Gaza City to evacuate to the south, in the central Gaza Strip September 14, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mahmoud Issa

Israeli forces destroyed at least 30 residential buildings in Gaza City and forced thousands of people from their homes, Palestinian officials said, as US Secretary of State Marco Rubio arrived on Sunday to discuss the future of the conflict.

Israel has said it plans to seize the city, where about a million Palestinians have been sheltering, as part of its declared aim of eliminating the terrorist group Hamas, and has intensified attacks on what it has called Hamas’ last bastion.

The group’s political leadership, which has engaged in on-and-off negotiations on a possible ceasefire and hostage release deal, was targeted by Israel in an airstrike in Doha on Tuesday in an attack that drew widespread condemnation.

Qatar will host an emergency Arab-Islamic summit on Monday to discuss the next moves. Rubio said Washington wanted to talk about how to free the 48 hostages – of whom 20 are believed to be still alive – still held by Hamas in Gaza and rebuild the coastal strip.

“What’s happened, has happened,” he said. “We’re gonna meet with them (the Israeli leadership). We’re gonna talk about what the future holds,” Rubio said before heading to Israel where he will stay until Tuesday.

ABRAHAM ACCORDS AT RISK

He was expected to visit the Western Wall Jewish prayer site in Jerusalem on Sunday with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and hold talks with him during the visit.

US officials described Tuesday’s strike on the territory of a close US ally as a unilateral escalation that did not serve American or Israeli interests. Rubio and US President Donald Trump both met Qatar’s Prime Minister Mohammed bin Abdulrahman Al-Thani on Friday.

Netanyahu signed an agreement on Thursday to push ahead with a settlement expansion plan that would cut across West Bank land that the Palestinians seek for a state – a move the United Arab Emirates warned would undermine the US-brokered Abraham accords that normalized UAE relations with Israel.

Israel, which blocked all food from entering Gaza for 11 weeks earlier this year, has been allowing more aid into the enclave since late July to prevent further food shortages, though the United Nations says far more is needed.

It says it wants civilians to leave Gaza City before it sends more ground forces in. Tens of thousands of people are estimated to have left but hundreds of thousands remain in the area. Hamas has called on people not to leave.

Israeli army forces have been operating inside at least four eastern suburbs for weeks, turning most of at least three of them into wastelands. It is closing in on the center and the western areas of the territory, where most of the displaced people are taking shelter.

Many are reluctant to leave, saying there is not enough space or safety in the south, where Israel has told them to go to what it has designated as a humanitarian zone.

Some say they cannot afford to leave while others say they were hoping the Arab leaders meeting on Monday in Qatar would pressure Israel to scrap its planned offensive.

“The bombardment intensified everywhere and we took down the tents, more than twenty families, we do not know where to go,” said Musbah Al-Kafarna, displaced in Gaza City.

Israel said it had completed five waves of air strikes on Gaza City over the past week, targeting more than 500 sites, including Hamas reconnaissance and sniper sites, buildings containing tunnel openings and weapons depots.

Local officials, who do not distinguish between militant and civilian casualties, say at least 40 people were killed by Israeli fire across the enclave, a least 28 in Gaza City alone.

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Turkey Warns of Escalation as Israel Expands Strikes Beyond Gaza

Turkey’s President Tayyip Erdogan speaks during a press conference with Greek Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis (not seen) at the Presidential Palace in Ankara, Turkey, May 13, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Umit Bektas

i24 NewsAn Israeli strike targeting Hamas officials in Qatar has sparked unease among several Middle Eastern countries that host leaders of the group, with Turkey among the most alarmed.

Officials in Ankara are increasingly worried about how far Israel might go in pursuing those it holds responsible for the October 7 attacks.

Israel’s prime minister effectively acknowledged that the Qatar operation failed to eliminate the Hamas leadership, while stressing the broader point the strike was meant to make: “They enjoy no immunity,” the government said.

On X, Prime Minister Netanyahu went further, writing that “the elimination of Hamas leaders would put an end to the war.”

A senior Turkish official, speaking on condition of anonymity, summed up Ankara’s reaction: “The attack in Qatar showed that the Israeli government is ready to do anything.”

Legally and diplomatically, Turkey occupies a delicate position. As a NATO member, any military operation or targeted killing on its soil could inflame tensions within the alliance and challenge mutual security commitments.

Analysts caution, however, that Israel could opt for covert measures, operations carried out without public acknowledgement, a prospect that has increased anxiety in governments across the region.

Israeli officials remain defiant. In an interview with Ynet, Minister Ze’ev Elkin said: “As long as we have not stopped them, we will pursue them everywhere in the world and settle our accounts with them.” The episode underscores growing fears that efforts to hunt Hamas figures beyond Gaza could widen regional friction and complicate diplomatic relationships.

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