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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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City of Austin Enshrines ‘CAIR Day’ After Texas Designates Islamic Group as Terror Organization
CAIR officials give press conference on the Israel-Hamas war. Photo: Kyle Mazza / SOPA Images/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
The city of Austin, Texas has declared Jan. 22 as “CAIR-Austin Day,” honoring a controversial organization that has been designated by multiple US states as a terrorist group and scrutinized by federal authorities over alleged ties to Hamas.
On Thursday morning, the local holiday was announced with a proclamation at city hall acknowledging the efforts of civic and community engagement by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), a nonprofit organization that advocates on behalf of Muslim Americans.
Representatives of the group praised the decision.
“Our proclamation today, declaring Jan. 22 as CAIR-Austin Day, means a lot, not only to the CAIR-Austin staff and board members, but for the whole Muslim community in our city statewide,” CAIR said in a statement.
The proclamation came about two months after Texas Gov. Greg Abbott formally designated CAIR and the Muslim Brotherhood as terrorist organizations under state law, citing in part what officials described as longstanding ideological and operational ties with Islamist movements hostile to the US and its allies.
Abbott’s proclamation described CAIR as a “successor organization” to the Muslim Brotherhood and noted the FBI called it a “front group” for “Hamas and its support network.” The document also outlined the history of the organizations and their historical associations with figures and networks tied to Hamas, an internationally designated terrorist group.
“The Muslim Brotherhood and CAIR have long made their goals clear: to forcibly impose Sharia law and establish Islam’s ‘mastership of the world,’” Abbott said in a statement while announcing the designations last month. “These radical extremists are not welcome in our state and are now prohibited from acquiring any real property interest in Texas.”
In response, the Dallas-Fort Worth and Austin chapters of CAIR sued Abbott and the state’s attorney general, Ken Paxton, arguing the proclamation “chills” their freedom of speech and association under the First Amendment of the US Constitution and “retaliates against” them for exercising such rights. The CAIR chapters asked the court to stop the state from enforcing the designations and requested “compensatory damages,” according to the complaint.
Paxton responded by filing an affidavit defending the Texas proclamation, arguing in part that the terrorist designation is a lawful national-security measure aimed at protecting Texans from extremist influence, not a violation of free speech.
Texas Agriculture Commissioner Sid Miller lambasted Austin’s decision to honor CAIR.
“Austin’s proclamation of Jan. 22 as ‘CAIR-Austin Day’ is an outrageous disgrace and a blatant surrender to radical ideology that’s hijacked city hall. This is pure political theater, shoving left-wing activists ahead of hard-working Texas families,” he said in a statement. “CAIR isn’t some harmless community group. Gov. Abbott and Attorney General Paxton have branded it a foreign terrorist organization under Texas law, citing ironclad ties that endanger America and our allies.”
CAIR has drawn scrutiny over its alleged history of lending material support for foreign terrorist groups. In the 2000s, CAIR was named as an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation terrorism financing case. Politico noted in 2010 that “US District Court Judge Jorge Solis found that the government presented ‘ample evidence to establish the association’” of CAIR with Hamas.
According to the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), “some of CAIR’s current leadership had early connections with organizations that are or were affiliated with Hamas.” CAIR has disputed the accuracy of the ADL’s claim and asserted that it “unequivocally condemn[s] all acts of terrorism, whether carried out by al-Qa’ida, the Real IRA, FARC, Hamas, ETA, or any other group designated by the US Department of State as a ‘Foreign Terrorist Organization.’”
US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AK) has called on the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) to investigate CAIR’s status as a nonprofit organization, arguing the group has ties to Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood, two internationally designated terrorist groups.
CAIR has denied any ties to Hamas or other terrorist organizations, portraying itself as a civil rights group defending Muslim Americans.
Additionally, CAIR leaders have also found themselves embroiled in further controversy since Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, atrocities in southern Israel.
The head of CAIR, for example, said he was “happy” to witness Hamas’s rampage of rape, murder, and kidnapping of Israelis in what was the largest single-day slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust.
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What we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank hiding from ICE
Anne Frank’s story — as told in her famed diary — is about many things: Persecution of Jews, the horrors of fascism, the perseverance of the human spirit.
But one of the main messages that many have taken from her life and death is this: It is wrong for children to be forced into hiding for any reason, and certainly on the basis of their identity.
That’s the connection that Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz drew while speaking on Monday.
“We have got children in Minnesota hiding in their houses, afraid to go outside,” he said at a press conference. “Many of us grew up reading that story of Anne Frank,” he added. Someday, he thinks, someone will write a similar story about the children of Minnesota.
Thus started one of the most vicious recent battles over what, exactly, Frank’s memory should mean. And in that battle, we can see what we risk by questioning whether it’s reasonable to draw any comparisons, ever, between those who lived in terror of the Nazis, and those who live in terror of other inhumane regimes.
The United States Holocaust Museum responded to Walz by posting on social media that “Anne Frank was targeted and murdered solely because she was Jewish. Leaders making false equivalencies to her experience for political purposes is never acceptable.”
“Despite tensions in Minneapolis,” they added, “exploiting the Holocaust is deeply offensive, especially as antisemitism surges.”
There are good reasons to be protective of Anne Frank’s story as a specifically Jewish one. The instinct to treat her experience as one of universal relevance has sometimes been taken too far, as in the case of a 2017 Dutch play about her that didn’t mention Jews or the Nazis.
But there are also good reasons to lean into the belief that Frank’s story is about humanity at large, as well as Jews, specifically. Frank’s father, Otto Frank, who edited her diary after her death during the Holocaust and pushed for its publication, was among those who said he wanted it to have universal appeal.
“I always said that Anne’s book is not a war-book,” he wrote in a letter in 1952. “War is the background. It is not a Jewish book either, though Jewish sphere, sentiment and surrounding is the background.” He wanted his daughter’s story to reach as many people as possible.
That’s the same instinct, I think, that motivated Walz to make his comparison: the drive to force people to confront the truth that children are suffering inhumanity, and to feel that truth must not be tolerated.
Consider just two of the stories of children in Minnesota over these past few weeks.
Liam Ramos, a 5-year-old, was detained along with his father and sent to a facility in Texas. A photo of Ramos wearing a Spiderman backpack while being forced into an SUV by federal agents went viral, in part, I think because of the profound human urge to protect children from the worst of existence — and the desperation provoked by seeing a child fall prey to it anyway.
Or think about a 2-year-old who was detained and flown to Texas along with her father. She was returned to her mother the next day, but it is impossible not to think that this experience of forced separation from her parents will mark her for life.
These two children were from Ecuador. But I do not see how it erases Frank’s Jewishness to show a parallel. It is wrong that she was forced into hiding because of her identity, and it is similarly wrong to force children in Minnesota into hiding because of theirs.
Far more concerning, I think, is the fact that misinformation about Frank’s story is being spread by some who argue that invoking her in this context is inappropriate.
Ambassador Rabbi Yehuda Kaploun, the U.S. State Department’s special envoy to monitor and combat antisemitism, posted in response to Walz that “ignorance like this cheapens the horror of the Holocaust. Anne Frank was in Amsterdam legally and abided by Dutch law. She was hauled off to a death camp because of her race and religion. Her story has nothing to do with the illegal immigration.”
That’s a terrible rewriting of history. It’s true that Frank was hauled off to a death camp because of her race and religion. But it is not true that she and her family were abiding by the law.
They went into hiding after Frank’s sister, Margot Frank, received and ignored a summons to go to a labor camp. They were hiding precisely because their existence in Amsterdam had become illegal the second that Margo failed to show up; they were all defying orders.
Frank and her family were quite literally breaking the law. It was the Nazis, and the people who turned in the Frank family, who were following it.
Questions of legality do not provide an excuse to force children into hiding because of their race, religion, or where they were born, nor a reason to scar or harm them.
For my own part, I think we are less at risk of forgetting that the Holocaust was carried out against Jews than of being so concerned about losing Jewish specificity that we miss that there are unspeakable harms being carried out against children today. Many of those harms are happening legally.
People can learn from what happened from Anne Frank, or not. People can disagree about exactly what we ought to learn from what happened to her, too.
But if insisting on the specific Jewishness of that story seems more important to you than recounting the history accurately, I think it’s only fair to ask: Are you actually upset about how people tell this story, or just upset that listeners might take away a different moral than you think they should?
The post What we talk about when we talk about Anne Frank hiding from ICE appeared first on The Forward.
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81 Years After the Holocaust, Antisemitism Pervasive in Germany, Poland
A demonstration in Schwerin, Germany under the slogan “All together to protect democracy”, with a banner reading “Against Nazis”. They want to demonstrate against new borders in Europe and protest against cooperation with right-wing extremists. Photo: Bernd Wüstneck/dpa via Reuters Connect.
Eighty-one years after the Holocaust, antisemitism remains rampant in the heart of the former Third Reich, with rising antisemitic hate crimes in Germany and incidents targeting Jewish communities in Poland drawing widespread condemnation.
On Tuesday, as the world marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day, a group of Orthodox Israelis waiting to board a flight to Israel at Krakow Airport in Poland were physically and verbally assaulted by an airport employee, in the latest antisemitic incident drawing condemnation from officials and community leaders.
The travelers were praying before boarding their flight when the employee noticed them and began shouting antisemitic slurs while demanding that they stop.
When the group members explained they were nearly finished, the assailant became even more aggressive, reportedly spitting on one person and pushing another.
As the situation escalated and the assailant grew more hostile, airport police intervened to control the scene, with the incident captured and widely shared online.
In videos circulating on social media, the airport employee is seen approaching the group aggressively, shouting, “Why are you in Poland? Go back to Israel.”
The group members are seen speaking in English, asking him to stop, as he persists in claiming that Poland is “his country.”
Go back to Israel, what are you doing coming to Poland”:
A group of Israeli ultra-Orthodox Jews who traveled to Poland were attacked by a local airport employee – but they didn’t stay silent: “Be quiet.” | video pic.twitter.com/vu0Iz3rSy6— daniel amram – דניאל עמרם (@danielamram3) January 27, 2026
According to local media, airport officials have yet to release a public statement, confirm whether the employee has been suspended or disciplined, or clarify if an investigation into the incident is underway.
The airport workers’ remarks were reminiscent of comments made by Polish lawmaker Grzegorz Braun, a far-right politician notorious for his repeated antisemitic statements and outspoken criticism of Israel.
“Poland is for Poles. Other nations have their own countries, including the Jews,” Braun said during a press conference in November in Oświęcim, a town in southern Poland that is home to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp memorial and museum. International Holocaust Remembrance Day is observed annually on Jan. 27, the date when Auschwitz, the largest and most notorious of the Nazi death camps, was liberated.
“Jews want to be super-humans in Poland, entitled to a better status, and the Polish police dance to their tune,” Braun continued.
Poland, like most countries across Europe and the broader Western world, has seen a rise in antisemitic incidents over the last two years, in the wake of Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
Germany has been one such country to experience a surge in antisemitism.
Most recently, unknown individuals vandalized the memorial at a local synagogue in Kiel, a city in the northwestern part of the country, destroying items left by people honoring the victims of the Holocaust — including a Star of David, candles, and a photograph.
“This attack is an utterly unacceptable act of antisemitic hatred and an affront to the memory of the crimes committed under National Socialism,” Daniel Günther, the minister-president of Schleswig-Holstein, a state in northern Germany, said in a statement. “Anyone who desecrates a memorial site like this violates historical responsibility and the core values of the state.”
“We are witnessing a growing number of antisemitic incidents. Ninety years ago, that hatred marked the beginning of the end,” he continued. “That is precisely why we cannot tolerate a single incident today. Every act must be investigated and punished under the rule of law.”
This latest antisemitic attack comes as the local Jewish community rallies to defend democracy and protest against antisemitism on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
Observed each year on Jan. 27, the day honors the six million Jews and other victims killed by the Nazis and commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz in 1945.
“Holocaust survivors around the world are asking whether democracies and their citizens are sufficiently aware of the dangers posed by the hateful rhetoric of far-right and populist politicians and parties,” Christoph Heubner, vice president of the International Auschwitz Committee from Berlin, said in a statement.
“Antisemitism has an unfortunate characteristic: it serves as an ideological bridge between right-wing extremists, left-wing extremists, and Islamists alike,” he continued. “These forces will continue to grow stronger if, as a society, we do not stop these threatening developments.”
According to newly released figures from the German Ministry of the Interior obtained by the newspaper BILD, antisemitic incidents continued to rise last year, with 2,122 offenses reported in Berlin alome, including 60 violent attacks.
This represents a significant increase of 80 percent compared with the already high number of incidents in previous years, with Berlin police recording 901 such offenses in 2023 and 1,622 in 2024, BILD reported.
“The rise in these figures is alarming, but not surprising. When politicians allow antisemitic demonstrations to go unchallenged, it emboldens certain groups and reinforces their antisemitic attitudes and attacks,” Timur Husein, a member of Parliament from the CDU, Germany’s center-right Christian Democratic Union, who requested the data, told the German newspaper.
Husein also said that the CDU is looking to strengthen Germany’s assembly laws to ban antisemitic demonstrations, which he says are responsible for a significant share of these crimes.
Earlier this month, the commissioner to combat antisemitism in the German state of Hesse sounded the alarm after an arson attack on a local synagogue in the town of Giessen, warning that it reflects a “growing pogrom-like atmosphere” threatening Jewish life across Germany as Jews and Israelis continue to face an increasingly hostile climate.