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Al Jaffee, iconic Mad Magazine cartoonist who also inked Chabad comic, dies at 102
(JTA) — Perhaps the greatest influence on Al Jaffee, known to readers of Mad Magazine as the creator of the “Fold-In,” was the time he spent living in a Lithuanian shtetl as a child.
Jaffee had been born in Savannah, Georgia, but returned to his mother’s native country with her after she became disillusioned by the irreligious character of life in America. Living in her small town, Zarasai, from ages 6 to 12, he became steeped in both the Yiddish and the “anti-adultism” that would infuse his work. He also gained fluency in comics through strips mailed by father, who remained in the United States.
Jaffee died Monday in New York City at 102, nine decades after returning from Lithuania and less than three years after the iconic cartoonist retired from Mad, where he had inked the end-page feature since 1964.
The “Fold-In” defined Mad Magazine ever since Jaffee invented it as a cartoon satire of the centerfold in publications like Playboy. The feature allowed readers to interact with the pages to form multiple images — the first one depicted Elizabeth Taylor’s divorce from Eddie Fisher and, after a fold, her subsequent marriage to Richard Burton.
A generation of comedians credited Jaffee and his fellow Mad contributors — the self-described “usual gang of idiots” — with shaping their comic sensibilities. “RIP Al Jaffee. He had a profound influence on my mind when I was a kid. One of the greats,” the Jewish comedian and podcaster Marc Maron tweeted Monday.
For a swath of cartoon consumers — those associated with the Chabad-Lubavitch Jewish movement — Jaffee’s most important contribution came not in Mad’s pages but in a different publication, The Moshiach Times. There, Jaffee for decades inked a strip for children called “The Shpy,” depicting a rabbinic secret agent who battles the forces of evil. It was, he told a Chabad publication in 2020, shortly after his retirement at 99, a deeply personal endeavor.
“‘The Shpy’ wasn’t just some superhero. I couldn’t do that,” Jaffee said. “I had to draw a character I could get into.”
Jaffee was born Abraham Jaffee on March 13, 1921 in Savannah, where his father, an immigrant from Lithuania, had been recruited from New York City to run a dry-goods shop. His mother, who had immigrated from the same town as his father, never took to life in the South, where Orthodox Judaism was unfamiliar and kosher food hard to come by. When Jaffee, the oldest of four brothers, was 6, she bundled the children up and took them back to Lithuania for a visit that stretched for six years.
Jaffee’s biography characterizes his time in Zarasai as one of both deprivation and invention, in which he was forced to come up with entertainment because there was little provided for the children. After Adolf Hitler’s rise to power in nearby Germany in 1933, his father retrieved him and two of his brothers, later sending for the third. Jaffee never saw his mother again after he returned to the United States; the Jews of Zarasai were executed by the Nazis and their Lithuanian collaborators on Aug. 26, 1941.
Back in New York, Jaffee’s artistic prowess earned him a spot in the first class of the High School of Music & Art, where he connected with classmates who would be his partners for many years to come. He would create comics for several shops before settling in as a freelancer at Mad, where his high school friend Harvey Kurtzman was the editor and where Yiddish peppered the pages even as the humor magazine reached a wide audience. While Mad was recognizably Jewish to many Jewish readers, it did not proclaim itself as such — an approach that Jaffee told an interviewer in 2016 was intentional.
“I lived through a period when Jewish people were very nervous about flaunting their Jewishness,” Jaffee said in the interview, published in the Forward, in which he explained that he still tended to think in Yiddish. “Even after the war, you were aware that there were people out there who wanted to kill you just because you were Jewish. And it’s still around.”
His side gig as the Chabad cartoonist began in 1984, after a young rabbi recruited him and other Mad contributors to add a contemporary aesthetic to a magazine with a circulation of about 10,000. Though Jaffee had a complicated relationship with Jewish observance, he signed on quickly, according to the Chabad feature about his tenure that was published in 2020.
In the story, Jaffee recalled highlights of his life in Zarasai, which had largely been described in negative terms in his earlier biography. “My brother Harry and I would spend the whole year sketching and planning what we’d do to improve the design of lanterns,” Jaffee recalled about celebrating the fall holiday of Simchat Torah. “Then when the holiday came, we’d march around the bimah [prayer platform]. It was so much fun.” He also said that he aspired to be like the Shpy, whose wispy beard resembled his own.
Jaffee announced his retirement in June 2020, months after the death of his wife of 42 years, Joyce Revenson. A previous marriage, to Ruth Ahlquist, with whom he had two children, ended in divorce. He is survived by his children, stepchildren, grandchildren and three great-grandchildren.
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In ‘Waiting for Godot,’ the tragedy and comedy of the Jewish experience
Seventy years ago, in the Coconut Grove Playhouse in Miami, of all places, the curtain opened on the American premiere of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot. The theater had promoted the play as the “laugh sensation of two continents.” By intermission, half the audience had walked out. My guess is that few of them were laughing.
Of course, Beckett had the last laugh. His two-act play, one in which the critic Vivian Mercer famously quipped that nothing happens — twice — became arguably the most influential and iconic play of the 20th century.
Since the theatrical debacle in Coconut Grove in January 1956, the world has not only come to terms with the play, but it has literally become the play. Of course, this happens on an individual scale, where each of us, in countlessly different ways, finds there is no way forward. No less alarmingly, it unfolds on a global scale as well, one where the world seems to be waiting, with a mixture of dread and hope, for the arrival of, well…what?
Don’t ask Beckett. He almost always insisted he had nothing to say about his plays, not to mention contemporary events. This claim is reflected in stage sets as bare and bleak as the dialogue — dialogue which gradually withers into monologues, then drifts into the mute gestures of mimes. When a French radio producer who was preparing a show on the play asked what it meant, Beckett told him, “All that I have been able to understand I have shown. It is not much. But it is enough, and more than enough for me.”
This was not enough for Bert Lahr, best remembered as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, who had been cast as Estragon in the Coconut Grove production. His son, the theater critic John Lahr, recalled in a New Yorker essay that the elder Lahr was terrified not that he would forget his lines, but instead that he would never understand them. Still, the younger Lahr who, when he was 14, ran the play’s lines with his father, recalled: “If Dad was mystified by the play’s idiom, he understood all too well its psychological terrain: waiting, anguish, bewilderment.”
There are certainly clues enough to the play’s meaning in the world wracked by world wars and cold wars, genocidal regimes and totalitarian ideologies, the poisoning of our natural resources and denaturing of our political discourse. Obviously, Beckett could not fully remove himself from this world. As one of his favorite thinkers, Arthur Schopenhauer, observed, even Dante mined the material for his hell from his medieval world.
Similarly, Beckett found his hell in a modern world ever more brutalized in ever more technologically advanced ways. The play’s stage set — a bare tree, an empty road, a rocky mound — suggests the world that, a few years earlier, had been the scene of death camps and death marches. As a volunteer at a pile of rubble that was once a hospital in the liberated, and almost entirely obliterated, French city of Saint Lô, Beckett saw firsthand the unfathomable cost of total war. He was no less stricken by what the war cost European Jewry. As Germany defeated and occupied France in 1940, Beckett was among the earliest recruits to the French resistance. He was appalled by what the Nazi occupation meant for French Jews, including his friend Alfred Péron. (When Beckett’s resistance network, “Gloria,” was uncovered by the SS, he just managed to escape to southern France, but dozens of fellow résistants, including Péron, were captured and imprisoned.)
Though it is always a dicey matter to connect settings and dialogue from fiction with those from fact, there are instances in Godot that, like Estragon, beg for such attention. An early exchange between Didi and Gogo anticipates the work on antisemitism by Hannah Arendt, who managed to hide in Montauban, a city a few dozen kilometers from Roussillon, the city where Beckett was hiding.
Vladimir: Your Worship wishes to assert his prerogatives?
Estragon: We’ve no rights anymore?
[Laugh of Vladimir, stifled as before, less the smile.]
Vladimir: You’d make me laugh if it wasn’t prohibited.
Estragon: We’ve lost our rights?
Vladimir: [distinctly] We got rid of them.
Or take another exchange between the two displaced and disoriented friends, one that evokes what was revealed to the world with the liberation of Auschwitz.
Vladimir: Where are all these corpses from?
Estragon: These skeletons.
Vladimir: Tell me that.
Estragon: True.
Vladimir: A charnel-house! A charnel-house!
Estragon: You don’t have to look.
Vladimir: You can’t help looking.
There are many other clues, some so obvious that Beckett dropped them from the final draft. For example, Estragon was originally named Lévy. (More than 1,500 individuals by that name, the most common Jewish name in France before the war, were deported to the death camps.) Or that estragon, as commentators have remarked, is a bitter herb that is rooted in the practice of Passover.
But to over-emphasize these possible meanings of Beckett’s play is to underestimate a broader and deeper meaning. Didi and Gogo offer something of immeasurable value — apart, that is, from uneasy laughter. They embody the virtues of solidarity and compassion — virtues that, paradoxically, go hand in hand with Beckett’s pessimism. In this tragicomedy, there are luminous moments of goodness, as when Didi cares for Gogo by offering him carrots, calming him with a song, and covering his shoulders with his own coat while Gogo sleeps.
For Beckett, this was and remains, as Pozzo declares in the play, “a bitch of a world.” And yet, Gogo and Didi, who always threaten to go, nevertheless always fail to do so. Of course, this offers a very dim prospect. But the image of these friends reminds us that Beckett never gave up on humanity. We must not, either.
The post In ‘Waiting for Godot,’ the tragedy and comedy of the Jewish experience appeared first on The Forward.
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Rep. Jared Moskowitz becomes latest Jewish lawmaker to reveal antisemitic threats
(JTA) — The messages that Rep. Jared Moskowitz said he received at his office were filled with obscenities, calls to “kill Jews” and warnings that the Florida Democrat would be “going down.”
Moskowitz played the voicemails during an interview with CNN’s Sara Sidner on Friday as he described a sharp rise in antisemitic hostility against Jewish lawmakers since Oct. 7, a trend he said reflected a broader normalization of antisemitic rhetoric in American public life.
“We seem, Sara, to have passed a Rubicon now with these antisemitic threats,” Moskowitz said. “It used to be once in a while you’d see a swastika on a building, once in a while, you know, someone would say something online. Now it’s every day, all the time, on podcasts, online, in the media, in the halls of Congress, and they’re trying to get Jews.”
CNN played multiple messages that illustrated Moskowitz’s point, with Sidner warning viewers that what they would hear was “deeply disturbing.”
Moskowitz, who is Jewish, said the spate of threats had caused him to need a police officer stationed outside his home 24 hours a day, since a man was sentenced to prison for plotting to kill him in November 2024.
“The U.S. government needs to kill Jews, you kill these f–cking nasty Jews, kill every single f-cking Zionist scumbag,” a caller said in one of the voicemails. “Zionism is treason to ‘we the people’ in our U.S. Constitution. Kill Israel.”
Another caller left this message: “Hey you Zionist Jew f-cking pig. How about no more money for Israel? Funding Israel, stealing more of our money for Israel. F-ck Israel, let them f-cking burn to the ground. You’re going down too, sir.”
Moskowitz is far from the only Jewish lawmaker to report a rapidly increasing number of antisemitic threats and harassment in recent weeks. The shift comes as both parties grapple with internal tensions about how to handle antisemitism within their ranks, and as anger about Israel and the Iran war funnels more attention to U.S. Jews. It also comes amid rising political violence in the United States.
“It’s no longer a Republican and a Democrat [issue],” Rep. Max Miller, a Jewish Ohio Republican, told Axios this week. “Both ends of our parties are wackadoos who hate Jews.”
Miller received a message warning that “antisemitism is on the rise because you guys think you own the f-cking world,” according to Axios, which said the caller added, “You guys are going to be shot dead every f-cking day.”
Among the messages highlighted by a recent Axios report on the phenomenon was a letter sent to New York Democratic Rep. Jerry Nadler, in which one constituent wrote that “Hitler was spot-on, 100% right about the filth that you Jew-bastards, you kikes are.” In a voicemail left for Ohio Democratic Rep. Greg Landsman’s office, one caller said, “I don’t like Jewish people, and the congressman should just go die.”
The lawmakers say the phenomenon is new. “Across the board, we have never seen anything like this in my lifetime in public office,” Jewish California Rep. Brad Sherman told the New York Times last month. “It’s like you turned the volume up from two to 10.”
The volley of antisemitic threats has also spilled into the real world, with Miller reporting last year that a man had attempted to run him off the road while calling him a “dirty Jew.” Last year, a man set fire to the residence of Jewish Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro hours after his family hosted a Passover seder there.
“We need good people to not be quiet,” Moskowitz said when Sidner asked him what message should be sent in response to the rise in antisemitic rhetoric targeting lawmakers.
“There are people out there, they may disagree with U.S. policy, they may not like the leader of a country, but they shouldn’t be allowing antisemites into their movement,” Moskowitz said. “They should not be embracing this sort of behavior, because they’re trying to win some sort of political point. It should be obvious.”
Moskowitz’s comments echoed a growing debate over the normalization of antisemitic rhetoric within American politics on both the left and the right, with Jewish lawmakers and watchdog groups warning that language once relegated to the fringes has increasingly become mainstream.
Last week, Texas U.S. Senate candidate James Talarico told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that he would not campaign with Maureen Galindo, a Democratic congressional candidate in Texas who says she wants to open a “prison for American Zionists” among other incendiary remarks. Talarico said in a statement that “antisemitic rhetoric has no place in our politics.”
On Wednesday, Sen. Rand Paul’s son William apologized after he made repeated antisemitic comments directed at New York Republican Rep. Mike Lawler, who is not Jewish, including calling Jews “anti-American.”
Moskowitz told CNN that, while people may criticize the Israeli government and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, the voicemails left at his office illustrated “how quickly, you know, they go from Zionism to Jews, Israel to Jews.”
“Listen, if you don’t like Netanyahu, great, go out and criticize him all day long,” Moskowitz said. “But don’t let people into your tent that you know are threatening to kill my family or my kids.”
The post Rep. Jared Moskowitz becomes latest Jewish lawmaker to reveal antisemitic threats appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish groups denounce fatal shooting at San Diego mosque, say it proves need for security funding
(JTA) — Jewish groups are denouncing a fatal shooting at a mosque in San Diego in which three people, including a security guard, were killed. They are also saying the incident, which follows attacks on synagogues, underscores a need for more federal funding for security at houses of worship.
Police in San Diego said they are investigating the attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego as a hate crime. San Diego Police Chief Scott Wahl said two teenagers, ages 17 and 19, who appeared to have carried out the attack were found dead of self-inflicted gunshot wounds in a car nearby.
“We are heartbroken by today’s attack on the Islamic Center of San Diego. Islamophobia has no place in California or anywhere in this country,” Jesse Gabriel, chair of the California Legislative Jewish Caucus, said in a statement. He added, “We are committed to working with our colleagues to strengthen protections for houses of worship and combat hate-motivated violence.”
The attack, which occurred at about 12:30 p.m. local time, sent five area schools into lockdown, including a Hebrew charter school.
“We’re safe and we’re following the direction of the police,” a representative for Kavod Hebrew Charter School told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency by phone on Monday afternoon. Kavod is a non-religious bilingual K-8 school that employs a number of Jewish and Israeli educators.
A synagogue that houses a school in an adjacent neighborhood also said it was briefly locked down in the immediate aftermath of the shooting.
The mosque attack comes two months after a man rammed an explosives-laden truck into one of the largest synagogues in the United States, Temple Israel in Michigan. There, the synagogue’s robust security training was credited with halting the attack. Children were inside the adjacent preschool at the time.
“The images coming from San Diego are all too familiar to us,” Temple Israel said in a message to its community that it posted to social media. It said that one of its rabbis, Jen Lader, was in Washington, D.C., to lobby for $1 billion in federal security funding for houses of worship.
Jewish Federations of North America said it had more than 400 local Jewish leaders in Washington to lobby for the security funding, which it said was necessary to protect religious communities from threats that are “real, urgent, and growing.” The $1 billion ask is a centerpiece of JFNA’s response to growing security concerns and would represent more than a doubling of federal spending on security needs for houses of worship.
“To anyone who feels this is excessive, what happened to Temple Israel two months ago, and now, the Islamic Center of San Diego, proves that it is not optional funding,” Temple Israel said. “Every dollar will be necessary to protect houses of worship all over the country.”
Imam Taha Hassane of the Islamic Center of San Diego, which includes a mosque and the adjacent Al Rashid School, said teachers, students and school staff were safe.
“At this moment, all that I can say is sending our prayers and standing in solidarity with all the families in our community here, and also the other mosques and all the places of worship in our beautiful city,” Hassane said during a press conference Monday afternoon. “They should always be protected. It is extremely outrageous to target a place of worship. Our Islamic Center is a place of worship. People come to the Islamic Center to pray, to celebrate, to learn.”
Law enforcement across the country are tightening security measures in response to the attack in San Diego.
“While there is currently no known nexus to NYC or specific threats to NYC houses of worship, out of an abundance of caution, the NYPD is increasing deployments to mosques across the city,” the New York Police Department said in a statement.
The post Jewish groups denounce fatal shooting at San Diego mosque, say it proves need for security funding appeared first on The Forward.