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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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After New York stabbing, Netanyahu says Mamdani is making Jews less safe
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani of “fomenting” hate and making Jews less safe through his fierce criticism of Israel. Netanyahu suggested the mayor’s rhetoric on the Gaza war contributed to the climate that led to Thursday’s stabbing of an Orthodox man outside a Manhattan synagogue.
“I don’t think it’s accidental that after he made this hate speech against Israel and against me, the next day a Jew is stabbed coming out of a synagogue,” Netanyahu said Sunday morning on Fox News.
Authorities said the suspect, Jose Morales, 51, allegedly yelled “Allahu Akbar” as he stabbed an Asian man in the back with a knife and an Orthodox man in the torso with a screwdriver before being subdued and arrested. Morales was arraigned Friday on several hate crime charges and was held without bail. Both victims were hospitalized and are expected to recover.
Investigators have not publicly linked the suspect’s motives to the mayor’s comments in a video address last week conceding he did not have the authority to arrest Netanyahu when he visits the city for the United Nations General Assembly in September, while also calling Netanyahu a war criminal and accusing him of orchestrating a genocide. Mamdani encouraged New Yorkers to protest instead.
The controversy has also been fueled by reports that members of Mamdani’s inner circle believed long before the legal review was completed that the city lacked the authority to arrest Netanyahu. Despite that, Mamdani proceeded with the review and used a mayoral address to announce the legal conclusion while renewing his criticism of the war in Gaza. Critics say the episode was a calculated political move aimed at energizing the pro-Palestinian and progressive base that helped elect him. The speech drew more than 200 million views across social media.
Speaking outside the Manhattan synagogue on Friday, Jewish leaders and some prominent rabbis expressed concern that the comments risked endangering Jewish New Yorkers, the largest concentration of Jews in the United States.
Netanyahu escalated his feud with Mamdani by directly linking the mayor’s embrace of the International Criminal Court’s case against him to the rise in antisemitism. “I speak to Jewish Americans in New York, and they’re afraid right now,” Netanyahu said. “I speak to quite a lot of my friends, and they say, ‘Look, it’s like a different world. We’re afraid to go into the streets. We certainly do not want to wear yarmulkes or any clothing that would give away that we’re Jews.’”
The Israeli leader further accused Mamdani of “basically supporting” Hamas, despite the mayor describing the Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel as a “horrific war crime” that should be opposed “with every single fiber of our being.” Asked on Thursday whether he considers the Hamas massacre a genocide, Mamdani stopped short of using that term.
“The genocide charge belongs to our enemies,” Netanyahu said in the Sunday interview. “What we are doing is try to fight this genocidal terrorist organization that embeds itself among civilians.”
Netanyahu (6 minutes ⬇️) accuses Mamdani of fueling antisemitism by embracing ICC case:
“He’s fomenting hate… I speak to Jewish Americans in New York, and they’re afraid right now. And I don’t think it’s accidental that after he made this hate speech against Israel and against… pic.twitter.com/qjb5uj4xNM
— Jacob N. Kornbluh (@jacobkornbluh) July 26, 2026
The latest clash shows how the war in Gaza has become one of the biggest political issues of Mamdani’s administration. His outspoken criticism of Israel has won support from progressives but has also deepened tensions with many Jewish leaders, who say his rhetoric has made an already difficult climate even worse. In an interview on Thursday, Mamdani suggested that New Yorkers “have been aghast at this genocide over the last few years, and not only the continued denial of that genocide but also the fact that it continues itself.”
A recent Associated Press survey conducted before Mamdani’s recent comments found that Mamdani, who won just 26% of the Jewish vote in last year’s mayoral election, is viewed more favorably by American Jews than Netanyahu, who is facing a tough reelection in October.
Netanyahu is expected to visit Washington, D.C., on Monday for a meeting with President Donald Trump and attend the funeral of Sen. Lindsey Graham, a close political ally.
Despite acknowledging he cannot arrest Netanyahu, Mamdani has vowed to continue speaking out against the Israeli leader ahead of his expected appearance at the United Nations this fall. Netanyahu said Sunday that he still intends to travel to New York “to speak the truth” and defend Israel before the international body.
The post After New York stabbing, Netanyahu says Mamdani is making Jews less safe appeared first on The Forward.
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Israel’s shameful West Bank front
Two mosques burned in the West Bank on Sunday.
One, in the village of Qusra south of Nablus, was torched and defaced with graffiti reading “Revenge for Benayahu,” referring to Benayahu Mellet, who was killed in the deadly clashes near the village of Tel two days earlier. Another mosque, in the village of Kur, was also set ablaze. Cars were burned. Fields were set on fire. Elsewhere, according to witnesses, extremist settlers blocked a major road, attacked Palestinian motorists, and allegedly did so in full view of Israeli security forces. No arrests were reported.
In the incident on Friday, villagers had confronted armed settlers who had entered the village in a provocation, triggering a gun battle that left two Israelis and four Palestinians dead. The clash was the latest in an escalating wave of settler-Palestinian violence that has killed dozens of Palestinians and wounded hundreds this year, according to the United Nations and the Palestinian Authority — and not denied by Israel.
The images should horrify every Israeli and Jew. Not because they will generate another round of hostile headlines abroad, though they certainly will. Not because Hamas or Iran will exploit them for propaganda, though they will. They should horrify Israelis because they reveal a sickness that has been growing inside the Jewish state for years — one that the Netanyahu government has failed to confront, and some would say abetted.
For all the disasters that have befallen Israel in recent years, few have been as shameful as the tolerance of violent Jewish extremism in the West Bank. This is no longer a matter of isolated “price tag” attacks or a handful of hooligans. It has become a persistent phenomenon that includes the burning of places of worship, attacks on civilians, destruction of homes and farmland, vigilante raids into Palestinian villages, and organized acts of intimidation designed to terrorize entire communities. Sometimes it results in deaths, almost always in material damage, and without exception in reputational damage. Whatever political cause its perpetrators imagine they are serving, they are inflicting immense damage on Israel itself.
Two arrests were reported by Israeli police for the latest widespread mayhem – far from a crackdown; if past is prologue, those detained will soon be released. There have been no known convictions for the murder of Palestinians by radical settlers; a security apparatus that knew the exact location of Iranian leaders could not, apparently, find the perpetrators.
This is a moral failure and a national security disaster. At the very moment Israel is preparing for the possibility of renewed confrontation with Iran, remains engaged against Hamas, and continues to try to deter Hezbollah, it is simultaneously forced to contend with Jewish extremists opening yet another front. Every burned mosque, every unauthorized raid into a Palestinian village, every revenge attack requires soldiers, commanders, intelligence assets, and police resources. Every incident inflames the West Bank precisely when Israel can least afford another arena of instability.
The latest violence illustrates the pattern. And every burned mosque and vigilante actions helps Hamas and strengthens Iranian propaganda. Every assault on innocent Palestinians makes Israel’s diplomatic task immeasurably harder. Israel’s enemies could scarcely invent a more effective narrative than the one Jewish extremists hand them themselves.
Israel’s security establishment understands this better than anyone.
Reserve Major General Gadi Shamni, who commanded the IDF’s Central Command and served as the army’s top officer in the West Bank, warned on Israel Radio that the military has too often looked the other way while influential members of the government have effectively encouraged the radical fringe.
Shamni also described what he sees as the strategic vision animating the most extreme elements of the settler movement: gradually forcing Palestinians into disconnected islands of “Area A” autonomous zones while emptying much of the rest of the West Bank in preparation for eventual annexation.
If that assessment is correct, it represents one of the most cynical political projects imaginable.
Apart from its profound moral implications, it would guarantee perpetual conflict. It would invite international isolation, deepen Israel’s demographic and diplomatic dilemmas, and condemn another generation of Israelis to policing an endless insurgency. It is a blueprint for permanent instability.
Defenders of the government cry foul when settlers are criticized, claiming that the vast majority of them reject violence and are not responsible for the crimes committed by a handful of extremists. This is a misleading presentation.
Sure, most of the half million “settlers” are living in communities close to the pre-1967 border which Israel expects to receive in border swaps as part of any future two-state deal. But the 20% or so living well beyond the “security fence” line, deep inside the West Bank, are another matter.
Many of them are deeply committed ideologues who, in the best-case scenario, envision a future of permanent subjugation of the Palestinians. Moreover, those who dream of the Palestinians leaving altogether, one way or another, are not a handful, as I know very well from countless off-the-record conversations. And the radicals who commit actual crimes are quietly backed by a massive infrastructure that is run by radical Cabinet ministers with real political power. So the violent fringe has acquired influence wildly disproportionate to its numbers — and is serving a vile cause with real support.
That influence is visible not only in the attacks themselves but also in the willingness of prominent politicians to minimize them, excuse them, or rally publicly behind individuals accused of serious violence against Palestinians. Such gestures send a devastating message: that political loyalty may matter more than the rule of law.
It is a tragic indication of the foresight of the late Israeli philosopher Yishayahu Leibowitz, who warned over a half century ago that the occupation will eat away at Israel’s decency and democratic character.
The ideological ancestry of much of this movement leads back to Rabbi Meir Kahane, whose Kach movement was eventually banned from the Knesset because of its openly racist platform. Even former Prime Minister Yitzhak Shamir — a career Likud politician, former underground fighter, and hardly a man of the political left — refused to remain in the Knesset chamber while Kahane spoke.
How far Israel has fallen that ideas once considered beyond the pale increasingly receive sympathy, protection or political indulgence.
The irony is, of course, that those who proclaim themselves the fiercest defenders of Israel are among those inflicting some of its deepest wounds. They weaken Israel’s international standing, strengthen its enemies, undermine society’s resolve, force young Israeli soldiers into impossible situations and stain Judaism itself.
The burned mosques of Qusra and Kur are another indication of what is at stake in the Oct. 27 election. If the opposition comes to power, this will not be tolerated any more.
The post Israel’s shameful West Bank front appeared first on The Forward.
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Troy Jackson wins Maine Democratic Senate nomination, keeps mum on Israel, AIPAC
(JTA) — BANGOR, Maine – Troy Jackson accepted the Democratic nomination for Maine’s U.S. Senate race on Saturday with no mention of Israel, sidestepping an issue that has become a focal point for many Maine Jews as they assess the party’s new standard-bearer.
Jackson secured the nomination in a landslide 566 to 5 vote by delegates at the nominating convention. Saundra Pelletier, the only remaining challenger after the rest of the field dropped out in the days leading up to the gathering, picked up the handful of votes that didn’t go to the winner.
While Jackson took several shots during his acceptance address at Sen. Susan Collins, the incumbent Republican he will now face in the general election, it was Pelletier who used her remarks to specifically malign Collins’ voting record on Israel.
“She voted to increase federal funding in defensive arms for Iran, and did not vote to take moderate measures to hold Netanyahu accountable,” Pelletier said, receiving a chorus from the crowd.
The victory for Jackson came after the state’s former Democratic nominee, Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic, left the race earlier this month amid a sexual assault allegation, which he has denied. The resulting scramble to replace him upended the Democratic primary and prompted fresh scrutiny from Jewish Mainers of Jackson’s recent evolution on Israel.
Jackson, a former state lawmaker and union advocate, had previously said little publicly about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict during his two-decade career in state legislature. However, during the race to replace Platner, he has embraced the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza and called for an end to U.S. military aid to Israel on his campaign website, both positions championed by Platner before his exit. Jackson also has said he wouldn’t accept any funding from AIPAC.
But on Saturday, as a sea of supporters sporting his campaign’s blue and yellow “Troy Jackson” t-shirts cheered their new nominee, Jackson omitted any mention of Israel from his remarks. Instead, Jackson reaffirmed his commitments to passing Medicare for all, supporting union rights and restoring abortion rights nationwide, among other issues.
During his address following the decisive victory, Jackson also offered a message to Maine voters who remain on the fence:
“Whether you supported me from the beginning, supported another candidate, or are still deciding what you think of this fifth-generation logger from Allagash,” Jackson said. “I’ve always known this, that your trust has to be earned, and so I want you to hear this directly from me. There is a place in this campaign for all of you. There is work for you in this movement, and I will spend every day, now through November, earning that trust because today we turn the page.”
Amy Fried, a professor emerita of political science at the University of Maine who attended Saturday’s conference as an alternate delegate but did not cast a ballot, said that while she believed Jackson had addressed Israel in the lead-up to Saturday because “a lot of people are interested in the topic,” his speech reflected the issues he had been “concerned about his whole political career.”
“Obviously, he’d have to take votes on foreign policy and funding when he’s in the Senate,” Fried said. “But I think that his main interest is always in issues that have to do with housing and healthcare, you know, all of the matters that are sort of more day-to-day kitchen table issues.”
While Jackson avoided revisiting his recent stances on Israel, which have raised concern among some Jewish voters in Maine, about a dozen pro-Palestinian protesters rallied outside the convention hall in support of his candidacy.
“It’s a really positive step that you have nominated Troy Jackson,” one protester shouted through a megaphone. “I think he’s going to be a strong voice for the kind of values that I believe in and the people of Palestine, the children of Iran, and all the other places the U.S. bombed.”
Ronna Lugosch, a 71-year-old Jewish grandmother and delegate from Round Pond, Maine, said that she was “more excited now than I was before” about Jackson’s candidacy.
Lugosch, who supports Jackson’s stances on Israel, said she hadn’t noticed he had left the topic out of his remarks. “Unfortunately, it’s a sensitive topic, so that’s my guess that maybe he didn’t bring that up because it was just too much,” Lugosch said. “You know, he was being careful.”
Still, Lugosch said that she was “really impressed with all his comments about working people and organizing.”
“I’m going to campaign for him because we need to get rid of Susan Collins,” Lugosch said. “Before it was more of a sort of a defensive stance, but now I’m supportive, and so I feel better about going out into the community.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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