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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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Anti-Israel Michigan Senate Candidate Promoted Group Behind Holocaust Memorial Protests
Former Wayne County Health Director Abdul El-Sayed, a Democrat now running for US Senate in Michigan, speaks at a “Hands Off” protest at the state Capitol in Lansing, Michigan, on April 5, 2025. Photo: Andrew Roth/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
Abdul El-Sayed, a Democratic candidate for US Senate in Michigan, is facing scrutiny over his past fundraising and public support for a political advocacy group whose affiliates organized anti-Israel protests at Holocaust memorial sites in Washington, DC, and the Detroit metro area.
El-Sayed previously recorded a fundraising video and appeared at multiple events in support of Justice, Education, Technology PAC (JET-PAC), an organization focused on expanding the political influence of Muslim Americans in US politics. In the video, posted online in 2018, El-Sayed urged viewers to donate to the group, praising its efforts to train Muslim Americans in civic engagement and advocacy.
JET-PAC later drew widespread condemnation after its medical advocacy arm, Doctors Against Genocide, helped organize protests outside the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the Zekelman Holocaust Center in Farmington Hills, Michigan. The demonstrations condemned Israel’s military campaign against the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas in Gaza and described the war as a “genocide,” language that Jewish leaders and Holocaust educators denounced as false, antisemitic, and deeply offensive.
Doctors Against Genocide (DAG) called on activists to obtain free tickets to the Holocaust Museum in Washington with the intention of protesting inside the facility before moving the demonstration to the White House. The planned protest sparked backlash from Jewish organizations and community leaders, who argued that targeting Holocaust memorial sites crossed a moral line.
The group ultimately canceled the demonstration.
“The goal of our event was to visit the Holocaust Museum to express our empathy for the horrors of that genocide. Additionally, we wanted to bring awareness to the ongoing genocide in Gaza,” the group said in a statement.
“Our initial communication did not sufficiently convey this, leading to misinterpretations and unfounded accusations,” it continued. “As DAG we stand against all hate of vulnerable people, whether that hate comes in the form of antisemitism, anti-Palestinianism, anti-Black hate, anti-White hate, or any other prejudice. Never again for all.”
In a later statement, the group apologized for a “lack of clarity” but continued to imply that the Holocaust is comparable to Israel’s military operations against Hamas, the Palestinian terrorist group that launched the war with its Oct. 7, 2023, invasion of and massacre across southern Israel.
Comparing Israel to Nazi Germany is antisemitic, according to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism, which has been adopted by dozens of governments and hundreds of civic institutions around the world.
Despite the backlash, DAG, which is a program of JET-PAC, later orchestrated a protest outside the Zekelman Holocaust Center in July 2024, once again sparking outrage from local Jewish community leaders.
Organizers of the protest explained that they targeted the museum over its purported positive portrayal of Israel and alleged unwillingness to elevate the historical displacement of Palestinian Arabs.
“The museum is not objective. They present the history that the right-wing will allow them to put on. The question we have for them is: How are you now going to portray the Nakba,” said Rene Lichtman, a Holocaust survivor and organizer of the demonstration.
“Nakba,” the Arabic term for “catastrophe,” is used by Palestinians and anti-Israel activists to refer to the establishment of the modern state of Israel in 1948.
“You end the story, and I know because I’ve been speaking here forever, with the happy ending of the Jews, the [Nazi concentration] camp survivors coming to Israel,” Lichtman continued. “But that is no longer the ending. We know that from the last eight months. What about the Palestinian people?”
Mark Jacobs, a lawyer, community activist, and co-director of the Coalition for Black and Jewish Unity, said protests at Holocaust centers amount to an attack on Jewish historical memory.
“I find it pretty grotesque that the protesters would select the Holocaust Center, a solemn and sacred place, to essentially call for the eradication of Israel, which was created as a safe harbor for the Jewish people after the world’s worst genocide,” Jacobs told Deadline Detroit in July, referring to the Zekelman protest. “But of course we have seen a steady stream of antisemitic protests, vandalism, and violence at various Jewish sites throughout the US and the world since the barbarism of Oct. 7.”
At the protest outside the Zekelman Holocaust Center, speakers accused Israel of war crimes and criticized what they described as the influence of “Israel’s lobbyists.” Dr. Nadal Jboor, a featured speaker and member of Doctors Against Genocide, said Israel’s military actions should be stopped through international pressure, calling a ceasefire a “medical intervention.”
JET-PAC, founded by former Cambridge, Massachusetts city councilor Nadeem Mazen, has described its mission as empowering Muslim Americans politically. El-Sayed appeared at JET-PAC galas and panels alongside the group’s leadership and promoted the organization on social media over multiple years, calling it “amazing.”
In the 2018 fundraising video, El-Sayed said JET-PAC was “incredibly important for engagement, political engagement for the Muslim community,” adding that the group helped people “fight for and advocate for a more just, more equitable, more sustainable society.”
El-Sayed’s support for the organization raises questions about his policies toward the Jewish community and combating extremism in the wake of the Holocaust memorial protests, which occurred amid a historic rise in antisemitic hate crimes across the US following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel.
El-Sayed’s campaign did not respond to a request for comment for this story.
The controversy has unfolded as El-Sayed and another Michigan Senate candidate, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, have both publicly accused Israel of committing genocide, positions that have alienated some Jewish voters in the battleground state.
Just days before the anniversary of the Oct. 7 atrocities, McMorrow called Israel’s response in Gaza a “moral abomination,” saying it was “just as horrendous” as the attack carried out by Hamas-led Palestinian terrorists, who perpetrated the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.
However, McMorrow has since softened her stance on the Israel-Hamas war, recently lamenting in an interview that the term “genocide” has become a “purity test” for many progressive Democrats.
Detroit-based community activist and philanthropist Lisa Mark Lis said McMorrow’s comments echoed antisemitic tropes and amounted to political pandering.
Detroit-based community activist Lisa Mark Lis wrote in a Facebook post that McMorrow’s comment “feeds into the Jew-hatred tropes and is a lie.”
El-Sayed has not publicly addressed the Holocaust museum protests directly, but his past fundraising and advocacy for JET-PAC have drawn new attention as Jewish leaders warn that invoking genocide rhetoric at Holocaust memorials represents a dangerous normalization of antisemitism.
Jewish organizations have repeatedly stressed that criticism of Israeli policy does not justify protests at institutions dedicated to memorializing the murder of six million Jews, arguing that such actions exploit Holocaust memory and inflame anti-Jewish hostility.
The progressive champion was a prominent supporter of the “Uncommitted movement,” a coalition of Democratic officials which refused to support the 2024 Kamala Harris presidential campaign over what they characterized as her support for Israel. However, El-Sayed later clarified that he would support Harris over Donald Trump in the general election.
El-Sayed has been especially critical of Israel’s war in Gaza. On Oct. 21, 2023, two weeks after the Hamas-led slaughter of 1,200 people and kidnapping of 251 hostages in southern Israel, the progressive politician accused Israel of “genocide.” The comment came before the Israeli military launched its ground campaign in Gaza.
He also compared Israel’s defensive military operations to the Hamas terrorist group’s conduct on Oct. 7, writing, “You can both condemn Hamas terrorism AND Israel’s murder since.”
In comments to Politico, El-Sayed criticized Democrats’ handling of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, arguing that they should become the “party of peace and justice” and said that they “ought not to be the party sending bombs and money to foreign militaries to drop bombs on other people’s kids in their schools and their hospitals.” He called on Democrats to stop supporting military aid for Israel, saying, “We should be spending that money here at home.”
Recent polling has shown El-Sayed trailing both McMorrow and Democratic primary frontrunner US Rep. Haley Stevens among voters.
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IDF Reports Steep Drop in Palestinian Terrorism but Threat of West Bank Violence Remains High
Israeli soldiers walk during an operation in Tubas, in the West Bank, Nov. 26, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Mohamad Torokman
Terror attacks in the West Bank — and the number of Israelis killed by Palestinian terrorists — fell sharply in 2025 compared with the previous two years, according to a new Israel Defense Forces (IDF) report, even as security officials warn the threat remains volatile.
The IDF’s Central Command on Monday released an annual security assessment showing Palestinian-perpetrated terrorist activity in the West Bank fell significantly in 2025, with overall incidents — including stone-throwing and firebomb attacks — down 78 percent from the previous year.
According to the data, Palestinian terrorist activity spiked in 2023 with 847 attacks that killed 41 Israelis, declined in 2024 to 258 incidents with a death toll of 35, and then fell sharply in 2025 to just 57 attacks resulting in 20 Israeli fatalities.
These latest figures mark the lowest level of West Bank Palestinian terrorist attacks and fatalities since the war with Hamas began, even though violence remains far higher than in 2021, when just three Israelis were killed.
As Israeli intelligence and security forces intensified operations across the West Bank, the military said the drop in attacks followed the launch of Operation Iron Wall — a large-scale January 2025 campaign aimed at dismantling terrorist infrastructure — along with continuous operations throughout the year, including a sustained IDF presence in the Jenin and Tulkarm refugee camps.
According to the newly released report, Israeli forces confiscated over 17 million shekels intended for terrorist activity, seized more than eight tons of dual-use materials, shut down 17 weapons-manufacturing sites, and confiscated 1,370 weapons components.
During a major operation last year, the IDF dismantled a Hamas network in Hebron that was preparing attacks across the West Bank and Israel, with members trained in weapons use, improvised explosive device fabrication, and intelligence gathering on potential Israeli targets.
Even while noting positive trends, however, the military cautioned that it remains on high alert under a “war tomorrow” scenario, warning that terrorist groups could attempt to trigger a wider uprising in the West Bank.
Last month, the IDF raised alarm bells over a growing terrorist threat in the West Bank, warning that Iranian-supplied weapons in the hands of Palestinian militants could enable an Oct. 7-style attack and prompting Israeli intelligence and security forces to intensify operations across the territory.
According to Joe Truzman, a senior research analyst at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), a Washington, DC-based think tank, Israeli officials should be closely monitoring the West Bank as the Palestinian terrorist group Hamas regroups and rearms in the Gaza Strip after two years of war.
“Hamas and its allied factions understand that igniting violence in the territory would divert Israel’s attention during a critical time of rebuilding the group’s infrastructure in Gaza,” Truzman said last month.
“The release of convicted terrorists to the West Bank under the ceasefire agreement may be a factor in the resurgence of organized violence in the territory,” he continued.
The latest IDF report also highlights a surge in attacks by Jewish extremists against Palestinians in 2025, recording around 870 incidents — a roughly 27 percent increase from the previous year, with a notable rise in serious cases.
In the wake of this surge in violence, the Israeli government has formed a joint task force — comprising the IDF, police, Border Police, and Shin Bet intelligence agency — to prevent and investigate attacks against Palestinians and the wider Muslim community.
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Qatari Money Corrupting Georgetown University, New Report Says
Students, faculty, and others at Georgetown University on March 23, 2025. Photo: ZUMA Press Wire via Reuters Connect
Georgetown University’s suspect relationship with the country of Qatar is the subject of another report which raises concerns about what the Hamas-friendly monarchy is getting in exchange for the hundreds of millions of dollars it spends on the institution for ostensibly philanthropic reasons.
Titled, “Qatar’s Multidimensional Takeover of Georgetown University,” the new report, by the Middle East Forum, describes how Qatar has allegedly exploited and manipulated Georgetown since 2005 by hooking the school on money that buys influence, promotes Islamism, and degrades the curricula of one of the most recognized names in American higher education.
“The unchecked funds provided by Qatar demonstrate how foreign countries can shape scholarship, faculty recruitment, and teaching in our universities to reflect their preferences,” the report says. “At Georgetown, courses and research show growing ideological drift toward post-colonial scholarship, anti-Western critiques, and anti-Israel advocacy, with some faculty engaged in political activism related to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or anti-Western interventionism.”
Georgetown is hardly the only school to receive Qatari money. Indeed, Qatar is the single largest foreign source of funding to American colleges and universities, according to a newly launched public database from the US Department of Education that reveals the scope of overseas influence in US higher education.
The federal dashboard shows Qatar has provided $6.6 billion in gifts and contracts to US universities, more than any other foreign government or entity. Of the schools that received Qatari money, Cornell University topped the list with $2.3 billion, followed by Carnegie Mellon University ($1 billion), Texas A&M University ($992.8 million), and Georgetown ($971.1 million).
“Qatar has proved highly adept at compromising individuals and institutions with cold hard cash,” MEF Campus Watch director Winfield Myers said in a statement. “But with Georgetown, it found a recipient already eager to do Doha’s bidding to advance Islamist goals at home and abroad. It was a natural fit.”
MEF executive director Gregg Roman added, “Georgetown is Ground Zero for foreign influence peddling in American higher education. It has not only abandoned its mission to educate future generations of diplomat and scholars to represent US interests at home and abroad, but is working actively to undermine the foundations of American government and policy. No doubt they’re eager to get the money, but at base this evinces an ideological hostility to Western civilization.”
Georgetown’s ties to Qatar’s have aroused suspicion before.
In June, the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism Policy (ISGAP) released a report titled, “Foreign Infiltration: Georgetown University, Qatar, and the Muslim Brotherhood” a 132-page document which revealed dozens of examples of ways in which Georgetown’s interests are allegedly conflicted, having been divided between its foreign benefactors, the country in which it was founded in 1789, and even its Catholic heritage.
According to the report, the trouble began with Washington, DC-based Georgetown’s decision to establish a campus on Qatari soil in 2005, the GU-Q located in the country’s Doha Metropolitan Area. The campus has “become a feeder school for the Qatari bureaucracy,” the report explained, enabling a government that has disappeared dissidents, imprisoned sexual minorities without due process, and facilitated the spread of radical jihadist ideologies.
In the US, meanwhile, Georgetown’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies and the Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding “minimize the threat of Islamist extremism” while priming students to be amenable to the claims of the anti-Zionist movement, according to ISGAP. The ideological force behind this pedagogy is the Muslim Brotherhood, to which the Qatari government has supplied logistic and financial support.
Another recent Middle East Forum (MEF) report raised concerns about Northwestern University’s Qatar campus (NU-Q), accusing it of having undermined the school’s mission to foster academic excellence by functioning as a “pipeline” for the next generation of a foreign monarchy’s leadership class.
MEF found that 19 percent of NU-Q graduates carry the surnames of “either the Al-Thani family or other elite Qatari families.” Additionally, graduates from the House of Thani, the country’s royal family, are overrepresented in NU-Q by a factor of five despite being only 2 percent of the population.
The report also said that NU-Q uses its immense wealth, which includes a whopping $700 million in funding from Qatar, to influence the Evanston campus in Illinois, Northwestern’s flagship institution. “Endowed chairs, faculty exchanges, and governance links” reportedly purchase opinions which are palatable to the Qatari elite instead of investments in new NU-Q campus facilities and programs.
“The financial flows raise concerns about whether the Doha campus is a facade and whether the funding is in effect underwriting access and institutional influence rather than solely supporting the overseas campus,” the report continued. “The pattern at NU-Q mirrors the dynamic uncovered by the US Department of Justice in the 2019 Varsity Blues Case, where federal prosecutors exposed how a small group of privileged families exploited side-doors into elite universities through fraudulent athletic recruiting and exam manipulation. While the tactics differ, the structural similarity is clear: insiders repeatedly securing access that ordinary applicants could never obtain.”
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.