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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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Memes, mashiach and ‘Torah-cyclopedias’ put a Jewish twist on the Knicks’ title hunt
Anyone living in the five boroughs has likely seen the Chabad stickers on street corners proclaiming, alongside a photo of the Lubavitcher Rebbe, that the “Messiah Is Here!”
But this week, a different kind of redemption feels imminent in New York — and there’s a new face on the “Messiah” posters.
With the hometown Knicks two wins away from their first NBA championship in 53 years, fans mocked up a t-shirt featuring an image of star point guard Jalen Brunson superimposed on the Chabad sign, black hat, beard and all. (Including Brunson’s signature cornrows.)
The Brunson memes are just one Jewish piece of an unexpected Finals run uniting the five boroughs — and perhaps, even more astonishingly, its Jewish community. There’s been a giant dreidel spinning outside Madison Square Garden, Talmud-lined shelves displayed on sports broadcasts, and a Jewish-inclusive chant going viral. The team on the court has a Jewish aspect, too: Brunson is married to a Jewish woman — and apparently signed a ketubah at his wedding.
Home to an estimated 1 million Jews (a number that nearly doubles when including the full metro area), New York probably couldn’t have had a Finals run without Jewish undertones. After all, their last title-winning team was helmed by a Jewish head coach, Hall-of-Famer Red Holzman. The team’s Jewish history goes well beyond that.
But the Jewish presence has been unmissable — and in these times, unmissably welcomed — in the city’s sports hysteria.
“I seen Hasidic Jews break-dancing with Black kids,” the rapper Fat Joe told reporters Sunday. “This is the greatest unification of the city since 9/11.”
‘People in yarmulkes, people in turbans’
Though the first two games of the NBA Finals were played in Texas, the home of the Western Conference champion San Antonio Spurs, the center of the action for Knicks fans remained Madison Square Garden — the arena known as the basketball Mecca. (OK, that part’s not so Jewish.) The Knicks faithful assemble there after each game, Midtown descending (ascending?) into full-scale revelry.
That’s where a yarmulke-wearing teenager wearing a Brunson jersey was caught breaking it down like a 1970s b-boy, other fans encircling him and cheering him on. About as miraculously as a Brunson high-arcing fadeaway plunging through the net, the kippah stayed on.
Meanwhile, a fan’s improvised rallying cry was becoming an instant hit: “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish, my Christian Dior, Knicks in four!” (My colleague Mira Fox has written eloquently on the chant.)
Outside MSG — and at the Knicks watch party at Bryant Park — is also where Rami Even-Esh, the Jewish rapper known as Kosha Dillz, plans to bring his human-sized dreidel Monday night, when the Knicks take on the Spurs in Game 3 (8:30 p.m. ET on ABC.) He did a “Knicks Shabbat” outside the Garden during Friday night’s Game 2, serving challah to passersby, and recorded a Knicks music video that featured people of Jewish and non-Jewish backgrounds.
“There’s people in yarmulkes, people in turbans — there’s no ‘anti’ stuff, so that makes it very Jewish for me, and it feels very authentic,” Even-Esh said in an interview.
And let’s not forget that the arena — with President Donald Trump expected in attendance — now has the security infrastructure of an American mega-shul.
‘Torah-cyclopedias’
This Finals’ Jewish imprint also extends to the court. The architect of this team, Knicks team president Leon Rose, was born to a Jewish family in South New Jersey. He later became an NBA super-agent whose clients included Allen Iverson and LeBron James, before taking on the challenge of restoring the ill-fated Knicks to their former glory.
The franchise had long been a vehicle for Jewish hoopers to make their imprint on the game. The first basket in NBA history was scored by a Jew, Ossie Schectman; the late 1970s and early 1980s Knicks featured Ernie Grunfeld, the son of Holocaust survivors.
But the team became a punchline under Knicks owner James Dolan, whose verbal sparring with an elderly Jewish fan once made national headlines. Only after Rose executed a series of transactions both shrewd (like inking Brunson, then seen as a mere second-fiddle, in free agency) and bold (like big trades for Karl-Anthony Towns and Mikal Bridges), the Knicks turned the ship around.
One of their latter-day stars, meanwhile, is Amar’e Stoudemire, who converted to Judaism after playing for the Knicks in the 2010s. Stoudemire is often seen wearing a black hat and a remote hit on a Barstool Sports talk show allowed basketball fans to see bookshelves behind him lined with seforim.
The background prompted a question from the program’s hosts: Are those encyclopedias? Stoudemire explained: “Those are my Torah-cyclopedias,” adding that the one book missing from the shelf was the one he is currently working through.
The Knicks’ success has presented a challenge for Jews like Stoudemire who observe Shabbat, as Game 2 of the Finals fell on Friday night.
It’s a common occurrence for Orthodox fans of teams like the Yankees and Dodgers — and one Knicks fans hope to get used to.
The post Memes, mashiach and ‘Torah-cyclopedias’ put a Jewish twist on the Knicks’ title hunt appeared first on The Forward.
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What exactly did Israel gain from striking Beirut and provoking Iran?
On Monday morning, Israelis — my family and me among them — awoke to a day of sirens, confusion and suspended normalcy.
Flights had been canceled. Schools had closed. Businesses across parts of the country had shut their doors. Once again, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had led Israel into a widening regional confrontation — and the question of what exactly Israel had gained from striking Beirut’s Dahiyeh district amid a Israel-Lebanon ceasefire suddenly stood at the center of public debate.
Iran had retaliated with airstrikes against Israel after the Sunday strikes; Israel launched strikes on Iran in response; fears of a broader regional escalation rose; and, after President Donald Trump posted warnings to both parties on social media, the conflict thankfully appeared to have halted by Monday afternoon.
In one version of events, the region had merely stumbled into another familiar spiral of action and reaction. Israeli cynics see something else entirely: a prime minister who once again appeared to need a war, and was determined to restart the conflict with Iran.
“I understand neither the strategy nor the tactics,” said Nir Dvori, the military affairs analyst of the leading Channel 12 station.
Had the strike in Dahiyeh — Hezbollah’s stronghold — fundamentally altered the strategic balance, one could at least have argued there was a cold logic behind it. Had it prevented an imminent attack, saved soldiers’ lives, or significantly degraded Hezbollah’s operational capacity, perhaps the gamble could have been justified.
Yet the attack seemed to change nothing. Hezbollah was not going to collapse because another building in Beirut had been hit. Nor did the operation appear likely to prevent the kinds of attacks that had continued killing Israeli soldiers. If anything, civilian casualties only risked providing Hezbollah with renewed legitimacy.
The strikes seemed to involve great risks and few rewards. They came at an extraordinarily delicate moment in the American negotiations with Iran, as Trump has been trying desperately to lower tensions in Lebanon — including by privately cursing at and humiliating Netanyahu over Lebanon policy last week. And they threatened one of the most important strategic assets Israel had in Lebanon in years: a broad Lebanese consensus that Hezbollah has become a disaster for Lebanon and needed to be disarmed.
The Trump-Netanyahu divergence
Israel was already in an extraordinarily delicate position vis-à-vis Washington.
Despite impressive military successes in the early days of the Iran campaign, there was no clear exit strategy, nor any serious solution for Iran’s clamp down on shipping through the Strait of Hormuz.
The war amped up political pressure on Trump, with rising energy prices and mounting public anger threatening the Republican outlook in looming midterm elections. A prolonged regional war risked transforming him within months into a weakened president facing congressional investigations and political paralysis should his party lose control of Congress.
Which means Trump and Netanyahu increasingly appear to be moving in opposite directions. Trump needs stability. Netanyahu, facing dismal polling numbers and growing public exhaustion, needs disruption.
At this point in Netanyahu’s tenure, large segments of the Israeli public no longer dismiss the possibility that political considerations influence national security decisions. As the week opened with the threat of renewed war, many openly speculated that the government had an interest in raising the temperature yet again by provoking an emergency severe enough to argue for postponing elections.
But tension between American and Israeli leaders leaves Israel’s strategic interests imperiled. Israel continues to rely on American airlifts, munitions, diplomatic protection at the United Nations, and broader strategic backing against European and international pressure. And as Trump and Netanyahu’s political interests clashed, ordinary Israelis once more found themselves in shelters, with children out of school and flights grounded.
Net strategic negatives
Meanwhile, every strike that harms Lebanese civilians or damages infrastructure risks reviving Hezbollah’s preferred narrative: that it alone stands between Lebanon and Israeli aggression.
That makes each such strike a lost strategic opportunity. Under President Joseph Aoun and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam, a new Lebanese leadership had begun cautiously presenting Hezbollah not as a defender of the state but as an obstacle to Lebanese sovereignty itself.
Rather than helping isolate Hezbollah politically inside Lebanon, Israel’s strikes risk helping it regain relevance and legitimacy.
Many Israelis are maddened by the sense that Jerusalem simply refuses to think two moves ahead.
What, exactly, was the long-term plan? Hezbollah remains deeply entrenched across Lebanon. No Israeli slogan about “relying only on ourselves” can change the basic strategic reality. Israel cannot permanently occupy large parts of Lebanon, nor sustain endless military operations. A peaceful future requires a stronger Lebanese state and a Lebanese public that views Hezbollah as a burden rather than a protector.
Perhaps the most tragic aspect of Israeli life in 2026 is that millions of citizens no longer consider suspicions that the state is acting against their interest in order to favor Netanyahu’s to be implausible. The notion of “ulterior motives” had become normalized in Israeli political discourse in a way unimaginable under earlier prime ministers. That erosion of public trust may have been the bleakest development of all.
The post What exactly did Israel gain from striking Beirut and provoking Iran? appeared first on The Forward.
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‘My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish’ — the Knicks chant capturing New York’s soul
Perhaps you, like me, have had a very specific earworm for the last week. It’s not a song, though there is a sing-song-y element to it. It’s a chant: “My mayor Muslim, my bagel Jewish. My Christian Dior — Knicks in four!”
If you hadn’t heard, the New York Knickerbockers are in the finals for the first time since 1999, on a 13-game streak and looking good to win a championship NBA title they haven’t gotten since 1973. The city is going nuts. I am not a big sports fan, but even I have been caught up in the fever, watching the first two games of the best-of-seven finals pitting the Knicks against the San Antonio Spurs at sports bars where fire codes are being flagrantly broken and attendees have brought drums to assist in leading chants.
The newest chant was born from the mouth of a rabid fan featured in a surreal supercut of fan reactions that went viral. (The video also features a dancing robot wearing a jersey emblazoned with the Kalshi logo, the online predictions market that lets users bet on the NBA, sure, but also on what day the U.S. will bomb Iran.)
It pretty much instantly caught fire; my city councilman Chi Ossé posted a video with the slogan, while watching the second game’s nail-biter of a win. Shekar Krishnan, a city councilman from Queens, walked onto the main stage at Gov Ball to lead the crowd in a rousing rendition of the chant.
Beyond the rhyme scheme — which, if we’re being honest, is a little bit difficult to nail — what made this chant catch on so fast is its ability to capture a certain ineffable quality of New Yorkiness. There’s diversity, there’s humor — I’m sorry but it is very funny to name two of the major Abrahamic religions with pride and then ignore the one practiced by the majority of Americans in favor of a fashion designer — and there’s a sense of unity as the city rallies behind its long-losing sports team.
And, at a time of rising antisemitism and just generally bad PR for the Jews, I am heartened to see the city embrace its Jewishness.
Bagels have long been a metonym for the city, and a source of great pride and snobbery for its residents, a food not incidentally rooted in Jewish history. Jews run some of the city’s most beloved neighborhood institutions. They have represented New York on the page and the screen — think Nora Ephron, Fran Drescher, Leonard Bernstein and Woody Allen (for better or for worse). Jews have imparted a Jewish humor, sensibility and even accent that have so shaped the city that they are now basically synonymous. I cannot tell you how many people I’ve met who are not Jewish, but feel as though they are by virtue of growing up in the city.
This hasn’t always been a positive thing. Sometimes equating New York with Jewishness has been used as a sort of racist dogwhistle; Mitch McConnell, for example, asked voters whether they really wanted “somebody from New York” to “set the agenda” as a way of signalling that Chuck Schumer is too Jewish, too liberal, too out of touch with real Americans — in short, the same antisemitic “rootless cosmopolitan” stereotype that has long motivated hatred against Jews.
Of course, the chant isn’t magical, and many of the now-familiar political dynamics came into play. Some communities of Jews are at odds with the way the city is shifting, particularly with the election of Zohran Mamdani, and some posts of the chant have comments from Jews annoyed at being lumped into the same cultural moment as a mayor they see as their enemy. (“Hi, we’re actually humans, not baked goods,” wrote one user. “We’re currently experiencing the highest rate of hate crime in the city. This isn’t cute.”) And, on the flip side of the political spectrum, other commenters accused those spreading the chant of doing “full on genocide rehab,” seemingly for merely mentioning Jews in a positive context.
But however online commentators want to spin the chant, the reality on the street is pure hype. As the rapper Fat Joe put it when interviewed at Madison Square Garden after the game: “I seen Hasidic Jews break dancing with Black kids. This is the greatest unification of the city since 9/11.” (Video proof bears this out.) Somehow, even the local Hare Krishna gathering got in on the Knicks mania.
That’s the true beauty of the city’s diversity — everyone lives together regardless of their political disagreements. And they can still unite in a common cause: the Knicks.
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