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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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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.
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Colorado congressional race upset hinged on Israel
A democratic socialist who put condemnation of Israel front and center in her campaign defeated a long-serving member of Congress in Colorado’s congressional primary Tuesday, adding to recent upsets that are rocking the Democratic party and Jewish politics.
Melat Kiros beat U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, a 15-term incumbent first elected in 1996, just one week after two New York members of the Democratic Socialists of America movement defeated sitting congressmen targeted as supporters of military aid to Israel.
“Denver voters of all ages, of all races, of all religions sent a clear message: We will not wait!” Kiros declared in her victory speech, which took aim at U.S. aid for Israel. “We will not wait to reject corporate PACs like AIPAC. No, we will not wait to end the genocide in Palestine.”
She will face Republican Christy Peterson in the general election but is favored to win the heavily Democratic district.
Meanwhile, Colorado Attorney General Phil Weiser, the son and grandson of Holocaust survivors, won the Democratic nomination to replace the term-limited Gov. Jared Polis, who also is Jewish. David Seligman, a progressive Jewish candidate for the open attorney general seat, lost in a four-way contest to Secretary of State Jena Griswold, who gained notoriety for removing Donald Trump from Colorado’s 2024 ballot.
Kiros, who was born in 1997, the year DeGette took office, used Israel as a wedge throughout the campaign — calling for an arms embargo against Israel, including a suspension of funding for defensive weapons including the Iron Dome.
She also vows to abolish the federal Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency and pass Medicare for all.
Hasan Piker, the progressive streamer who has been accused of trafficking in antisemitism, attended Kiros’ victory party in Denver Tuesday. She also picked up endorsements from U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders and a slew of leftist groups. Some Jewish Coloradans supported her, saying that her harsh criticism of Israel is necessary and warranted.
In her victory speech on Tuesday, Kiros reminded supporters that she did not flinch when her former law firm, Sidley Austin, threatened to fire her if she didn’t take down a post on Medium addressed to law firms nationally supporting anti-Israel student protesters on college campuses — and was ultimately terminated.
Kiros’ victory on Tuesday comes on the heels of the defeat of two Democratic incumbents in New York targeted specifically for their support of aid to Israel. A former Gaza war encampment leader on Columbia University’s campus, Darializa Avila Chevalier, beat incumbent Rep. Adriano Espaillat, while former New York City Comptroller Brad Lander will replace Rep. Dan Goldman. Another candidate who campaigned on Israel, Claire Valdez, secured the nomination for another House seat being vacated by Rep. Nydia Velazquez in New York’s 7th district.
Like Kiros, both Valdez and Avila Chevalier are DSA members. Lander, who is Jewish, left DSA after Oct. 7, 2023, when DSA promoted a pro-Palestinian Times Square rally that Avila Chevalier attended.
Like Avila Chevalier, Kiros has come under scrutiny for her repudiation of Israel and its supporters.
In the final stretch of her campaign, Kiros gained national attention for declining to declare antisemitic the 2025 firebombing of a group holding a vigil in Boulder, saying in an interview: “I don’t know what was in the heart of the perpetrator. All I know is that he attacked innocent people because of what they might have believed,” adding that she could not say what they believed, either: “most of them were probably just there to ask that the people who were kidnapped on Oct. 7 be returned to their families.”
The attacker, Mohammed Soliman, was heard saying “Free Palestine” as he threw molotov cocktails and used an improvised flamethrower to burn 13 people, including an 82-year-old woman who later died of her wounds.
As a candidate, Kiros has said in interviews that weapons that defend Israeli citizens against attacks from Iran and Hezbollah “give Israel the cover” to continue policies of genocide and ethnic cleansing. (Genocide scholars have debated whether the war in Gaza rises to the level of genocide.)
And asked whether Israel “had it coming” on Oct. 7, Kiros told a local news channel “no, not at all — it’s about understanding the conditions in which violence and war happens.” She said Israel had resisted change despite decades of international frustration with its policies; her job as a member of Congress, she said, was to change those conditions.
In the gubernatorial contest, Weiser’s victory over U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet made him the likely next governor of the state. Colorado has not had a Republican governor since 2007.
Bennet’s mother, like Weiser’s, survived the Holocaust. She was smuggled out of the Warsaw Ghetto as a child before her family immigrated to New York. But Bennet was raised Christian and does not identify as Jewish.
Estare Weiser was born in Buchenwald the day before the camp was liberated. Now 81, she was photographed celebrating with Weiser, 58, at his victory party Tuesday.
Weiser’s platform focuses on expanding the state’s universal preschool program, defending LGBTQ+ and women’s rights and countering Republican gerrymandering efforts in other states. He entered the race as an underdog, but successfully attacked Bennet for backing several Trump cabinet nominees.
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Survey: Jews in smaller communities feel less heard when raising concerns about antisemitism
(JTA) — Jews living in smaller communities are less likely than those in large communities to feel their concerns about antisemitism are taken seriously by law enforcement and would-be allies, a new survey from the Jewish Federations of North America has found.
Jews in smaller communities were “lacking a sense of allyship in the communities around them,” said Mimi Kravetz, the chief impact and growth officer for JFNA.
“Jews in small communities tell us that they feel deeply concerned that they’re looking for support, that their leadership is looking for network and resources, because it can feel like they’re on their own,” Kravetz told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
The JFNA survey, which was compiled from its March 2025 study of Jewish Life in North America, found that 22% of Jews live in small communities. Defined as Jewish communities with fewer than 5,000 Jews living within five miles of their zip code, small Jewish communities are also more likely to be found in the South or in rural or suburban areas.
Although the survey found no statistically significant difference in the antisemitism experienced by Jews in smaller and larger communities, it found that Jews in small communities are more likely to feel that antisemitism is invalidated or dismissed.
Among respondents, 58% of Jews in small communities reported feeling more likely to be invalidated, compared with 48% of Jews overall.
Jews in small communities were also less likely to express confidence in local law enforcement’s responses to antisemitism. Just 39% of Jews in small communities say local law enforcement takes antisemitism seriously, compared with 47% of Jews in larger communities.
Leaders of small Jewish communities also feel less physically safe in Jewish spaces than their big city counterparts: 60% of those small-community leaders said they feel safe, compared to 86% of community leaders overall.
While the survey found that 50% of Jews in smaller communities report being unengaged in Jewish life, compared to 36% of Jewish respondents overall, they were just as likely to say they wanted greater connection to Jewish life.
The survey suggested that geographic constraints and limited availability of Jewish life likely caused the disparity in engagement, even as Jews sought out Jewish connections in the wake of the Oct. 7 attacks in Israel.
Kravetz said Jews in small communities were just as likely as Jews in big communities to crave those connections.
“What’s needed in small Jewish communities is more leadership infrastructure and support for Jewish life,” Kravetz said.
The survey was conducted before the January arson attack on Beth Israel Congregation, the only synagogue in Jackson, Mississippi, which drew renewed attention to the security challenges facing smaller Jewish communities.
Michele Schipper, the CEO of the Goldring/Woldenberg Institute of Southern Jewish Life, a nonprofit that supports Jewish communities across the South and was housed inside Beth Israel Congregation prior to the arson attack, said security remains a challenge for some smaller congregations.
“For some of those smaller communities, they may not be able to have personnel on site every time they’re open,” Schipper said. “It may be an older building. Not everyone is able to get one of the secure community grants,” she said, referring to federal and state government grants to nonprofits seen as vulnerable to attack.
Earlier this month leaders from Jewish communities across the South convened at the ISJL’s annual conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, where Schipper said they discussed strategies for keeping smaller communities safe.
“One of the things we really did share is how important it is not to isolate ourselves in these communities, but to continually build relationships with the local community, with local law enforcement, so that when, God forbid, something happens, you’re not starting to reach out or wait for somebody to contact you,” Schipper said.
Looking ahead, Schipper said her message to Jews in small communities was to “continue to build relationships in your own local community, and just continue to participate in the Jewish community and stay strong and positive.”
The study, which was conducted online by JFNA from March 5-25, 2025, surveyed 5,798 total U.S. adults, of which 1,877 identified as Jewish. The margin of error for Jewish adults was ± 2.26%, and samples were weighted to be representative of the U.S. population and Jewish community.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Survey: Jews in smaller communities feel less heard when raising concerns about antisemitism appeared first on The Forward.
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Hitler appears in the baby photos section of a New Jersey middle school
(JTA) — Adolf Hitler cropped up in the student baby photos section of a New Jersey middle school yearbook, prompting condemnation from school officials and local Jewish leaders.
In a letter sent last Thursday to the school community, East Brook Middle School Principal Ryan Aupperlee said that the school in Paramus had launched an investigation into the incident in “coordination with law enforcement.”
“Adolf Hitler represents hatred, antisemitism, and the horrors of the Holocaust, including the murder of six million Jews,” Aupperlee wrote in the letter obtained by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “An image of him has no place in a yearbook created for our students. It does not reflect who we are or what East Brook stands for, and we condemn its inclusion without reservation.”
Sean Adams, the superintendent of Paramus Public Schools, told JTA in an emailed statement that the yearbooks were taken back from the students “the same day they were distributed, before the students left school for the day.”
“We are working with the yearbook company to develop a solution that will allow us to redistribute the yearbooks after removing the offensive content while still allowing students to retain the handwritten, personalized messages their classmates and teachers had already written in their yearbooks,” Adams said.
Adams said that an investigation into the incident was “ongoing,” and that “any details related to students must remain confidential.”
The incident comes amid a spate of allegations of antisemitism in New Jersey schools in recent years. In 2024, the U.S. Department of Education opened an investigation into Teaneck Public Schools after parents alleged the system had fostered an antisemitic climate since the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas massacres in Israel. The same year, teachers at Fort Lee High School presented a lesson that described Hamas as a “Palestinian political party and armed resistance movement.”
A high school yearbook in East Brunswick, New Jersey, also drew condemnation and was recalled in 2024 after a photo of the “Jewish Student Association” was replaced with one of a Muslim student group.
Jason Shames, the president and CEO of the Jewish Federation of Northern New Jersey, said that the incident was “shocking people to the core.”
“I’m not rushing to judgment, but again, if I know that it’s a minor, I want consequences. If I know that’s an adult, I want consequences,” Shames said, adding that the Jewish community “demands” to see accountability.
On Friday, Paramus Mayor Chris DiPiazza condemned the incident in a post on Facebook, writing that, “Any examples, like yesterday’s, does not reflect Paramus.”
Shames said that while he felt the school “handled it right,” he was still looking to other state leaders for a statement condemning the incident.
“There should be global condemnation,” Shames said. “If the school has already done it, and the mayor’s already done it, where’s the uproar?”
He said the incident reflected a broader normalization of antisemitism.
“It’s infuriating that it’s come to this. There’s a bigger statement about the illness in American society today, and the antisemitism, and the hate that’s involved in this,” Shames said. “Even if it winds up being two middle school kids who thought it was funny, we have a problem now with people thinking Hitler and Nazi jokes are funny.”
Rabbi Arthur Weiner, the leader of the Conservative Congregation Beth Tikvah in Paramus, said that he was first alerted to the yearbook by a congregant whose child attends the school.
On Monday, Weiner sent a letter to congregants saying that he was “angered by this blatant antisemitic incident,” and had been in contact with the school district and local elected leaders about their response.
“Events like these are of great concern to us both personally and as a community,” Weiner wrote. “Incidents involving Nazi imagery or references to Hitler are not merely offensive. They touch deep historical wounds and remind us why vigilance remains so important.”
Weiner said that the local Jewish community could “take heart in the reaction of the authorities to this particular event.”
“We have not always seen that clear and unambiguous response from school districts when similar incidents of antisemitism and bias have occurred,” Weiner told JTA. “I think we’ve been very, very proud of the response.”
Rabbi Shmuel Goldstein of the Modern Orthodox Congregation Beth Tefillah in Paramus said that while many parents at his congregation had expressed “frustration,” “hurt,” and “concern” over the incident, they also felt “supported by the local government.”
Goldstein said that he nonetheless did “not feel that there’s nearly enough proactive measures in the local school systems.”
“These incidents don’t happen in a vacuum,” Goldstein said. “They happen because someone is taught at home on social media or informally amongst peers at schools, that it is okay to hurt Jewish people, that has to be made clear, that that is unacceptable.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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