Uncategorized
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.”
—
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.
Uncategorized
Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100
The television entertainment personality Gene Shalit, who celebrated his centenary on March 25, semaphored a Jewish appearance for decades to viewers of NBC’s early morning gabfest The Today Show.
With his Jew-fro hairstyle that fascinated celebrity interviewees and his abundant mustache that outdid Groucho Marx’s mere greasepaint simulacrum, Shalit was one of a kind. Born in New York City in 1926, he clearly aimed to be recognizable even through half-opened bleary eyes of half-asleep viewers. And audible too. Shalit’s precise pronunciation, always at a vigorous decibel level, sought to be comprehensible even during voiceovers. The Canadian comedian Eugene Levy, transfixed by this persona, imitated him on SCTV roaring at high decibel levels.
In one skit, Levy embodied Shalit with haimish affection, hawking a remedy for a migraine presumably caused by his own bellowing. In another, Levy spoofed Hollywood celebrities who were notorious fressers at local restaurants, including the American Jewish actress Shelley Winters (born Shirley Schrift). In still another lampoon, Levy-as-Shalit danced and also kibitzed with the late Catherine O’Hara as the Jewish gossip columnist Rona Barrett (born Burstein).
Shalit apparently kvelled at the notion that he was prominent enough in media culture to be affectionately kidded like other Jewish noteworthies Levy imitated, including Howard Cosell, Henry Kissinger, Menachem Begin, Milton Berle, Judd Hirsch, Jack Carter, James Caan, Lorne Greene, Norman Mailer and Neil Sedaka.
Years later, Levy recalled that when the SCTV comedy troupe was invited to appear on The Today Show, before the segment was filmed, chairs were arranged so that Catherine O’Hara was seated next to Shalit. Suddenly Shalit exclaimed: “Wait a minute, shouldn’t the person who [imitates] me be sitting beside me?” Another Jewish comedian, Jon Lovitz, would likewise attempt to imitate Shalit on Saturday Night Live, but without the zest of Levy’s indelible incarnation.
Shalit once told showbiz reporter Eileen Prose that at first, his looks limited him to radio jobs in more conventional times for TV talent. By the more liberated late 1960s, when long hair and a hirsute upper lip were more common, he was hired as quasi-permanent house Jew on The Today Show. Although his mustache fit the counterculture in the mode of Jewish activist Jerry Rubin’s, Shalit as an aspiring journalist may have grown his facial hair more in tribute to earlier literati like the playwright William Saroyan or the eminent humorist Mark Twain.
At times, Shalit’s appearance could be clown-like or cartoonish, so it was natural that characters inspired by him would appear on animated series such as SpongeBob SquarePants and Family Guy as well as The Muppet Show.
Famous interviewees like Peter Sellers were plainly at ease with Shalit’s persona. A conversation filmed shortly before Sellers’ untimely death was cordial, with the sometimes tetchy actor on his best behavior, acknowledging Shalit as a fellow entertainer. And with Mel Brooks in 1987, Shalit looked to be in paradise.
A warm-hearted empathizer and enthusiast, Shalit was more suited to promoting films than criticizing them. In 1989, a tzimmes occurred when a memo drafted by Bryant Gumbel, a Today Show colleague, deemed Shalit a “specialist in gushing over actors and directors” and added that Shalit’s interviews “aren’t very good.” To his credit, Shalit minimized the controversy, telling The Los Angeles Times that Gumbel’s disses were “not big whacks.”
“Listen, I’ve been interviewing people on the show for 17 years,” Shalit said. “I must be doing something right.”
Part of his inspiration was a sincere appreciation for humor, Jewish and otherwise. His 1987 anthology, Laughing Matters featured contributions by Jewish wits such as Dorothy Parker, S. J. Perelman, Woody Allen, Fran Lebowitz, Samuel Hoffenstein, Philip Roth, Mel Brooks, George S. Kaufman, Milt Gross, Arthur Kober, Leo Rosten, Allan Sherman, Max Shulman, Calvin Trillin, Rube Goldberg, Sam Gross, Roz Chast, B. Kliban, Robert Mankoff, J. B. Handelsman, Jules Feiffer and George Burns. The volume was dedicated to, among others, the Jewish screenwriter Samson Raphaelson, who was Shalit’s instructor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
His visceral reaction to Jewish parody was such that during one commuter train ride, Shalit admitted in a preface, Perelman’s story “No Starch in the Dhoti, S’il Vous Plait” caused a conductor to lean down with concern, stating: “A passenger says you’re crying.” To which Shalit retorted, choking and rubbing away tears: “I’m laughing.”
The subliminal message of Shalit’s book was that without Jews, America would have distinctly fewer tears of laughter. And he regretted not being able to include funny Jews like Jack Benny and Ed Wynn whose performances could not be transferred to the printed page.
Shalit also reviewed books for years. Sticking firmly to the content of cultural products with a few brief hints of value judgment, Shalit seemed to have neither the time nor presumably the inclination to subject new items to analysis of Freudian intensity. He clearly preferred boosting things to panning them, and when a film displeased Shalit, he could be uncomfortable saying so.
One occasion when Shalit raised hackles was his response on The Today Show to the 2005 film Brokeback Mountain. Shalit described one of the gay characters as a “sexual predator.” The LGBTQ media group GLAAD objected to Shalit’s characterization as a homophobic stereotype. Shalit’s son Peter wrote an open letter to GLAAD, identifying himself as a gay physician with a Seattle practice helping the gay community. Peter Shalit admitted that his father “did not get” the film in question, but was “not a homophobe.” He might have added that his father had even included an excerpt from Harvey Fierstein’s Torch Song Trilogy in the aforementioned humor collection.
Shalit followed up with his own apology, stating in a mensch-like way that he did not intend to cast “aspersions on anyone in the gay community or on the community itself.” When Shalit finally retired from broadcasting at age 84, with the Yiddish-inflected declaration: “It’s enough, already,” he left behind admiring viewers and decades of bonhomie as one of morning television’s most genial protagonists.
Mazel tov, Gene Shalit. Biz hundert un tsvantsik (May you live until 120)!
The post Gene Shalit, a mensch with a personality as big as his mustache, turns 100 appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay
I’m almost positive I heard about the old lady who swallowed a fly before the father who bought a goat for two zuzim.
This occurred to me a few years ago while riding in my sister’s minivan. My niece was in her car seat fidgeting with a toy that plays a catalogue of public domain children’s songs. But unlike the version I’d grown up hearing, where the old lady’s ravenous habit of devouring ever-larger animals is met with the prognostic shrug of “perhaps she’ll die,” the refrain was changed to the more kid-friendly “oh me oh my.”
The Seder tune “Chad Gadya,” which involves a quite similar conceit, has no such timidity when it comes to the ravages of death.
Jack Black once described it as the “original heavy metal song” for the way it progresses along the chain of life from a little goat bought for two zuzim, to the cat who ate the goat, to the dog who bit the cat, all the way up to the angel of death. (“Very Black Sabbath.”)
It is pretty metal — in a kosher Kidz Bop, tot Shabbat kinda way. But why we sing it should, in Jewish circles, be as popular a seasonal question as what a bunny with a clutch of eggs has to do with Jesus’ resurrection. (Some Haggadot explain the greater significance of “Chad Gadya;” my Maxwell House does not.)
Dating the song or rooting out its precise origins is not easy.
As historian Henry Abramson wrote, scholars have noted the song’s similarities to a late Medieval German folk rhyme. While the fact that it is mostly in Aramaic, not the vernacular in Europe in the Middle Ages, suggests an earlier provenance, it is missing from extant Sephardic and Yemenite Haggadot, where one would expect to find texts originating in the language, and the Aramaic itself has many errors.
Abramson reasons that, given the surviving written versions, it was likely adapted sometime in the 14th century from a German children’s rhyme called “The Foreman that Sent Jockel Out,” about an idler named Jockel who a foreman tries to rouse to fieldwork with an escalating series of messengers, ending with a hangman. (Abramson notes the original is characterized by “some Teutonic weirdness,” like a witch sent to subdue a vulture.)
“Chad Gadya” belongs, like its Seder companion “Echad Mi Yodea,” to a genre called “cumulative song,” where verses build with new information a la “12 Days of Christmas.” But “Chad Gadya” stands out for its strangeness and its more oblique message.
Abramson and others see the goat, small and vulnerable, standing in for the Jewish people, and the ensuing parade of antagonists corresponding to historical enemies (Assyrians, Babylonians) and periods of time (Exodus, various conquests), ending with redemption in the Messianic age when the Holy One smites death.
As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote in a commentary for his Haggadah, the song “teaches the great truth of Jewish hope: that though many nations (symbolized by the cat, the dog, and so on) attacked Israel (the goat), each in turn has vanished into oblivion.”
That this truth is conveyed in song, with much banging on the table or animal noises, speaks to the centrality of children in the Passover Seder. And, some think, its inclusion serves a practical purpose: keeping the kids awake through the last leg of a long ritual meal.
My own interpretation is admittedly less lofty. I don’t think of Israel’s tribulations. I do think of the abundance of stray cats in Jerusalem, said to have originated during the British mandate when the city had a rat problem.
And, in the years since my own days as designated Four Questions asker, I’ve been reading “Chad Gadya” into non-Jewish contexts. “The White Cat,” off of Mitski’s new album, Nothing’s About to Happen to Me, contains a lyric that recalls the song, only altered to be a metaphor for the predations of capitalism.
In it, the speaker says she must work to pay for the cat’s house and “for the bugs who drink my blood/and the birds who eat those bugs/so that white cat can kill the birds.”
These cycles speak across cultures and time because they represent a fundamental rule of nature: There’s always a bigger fish (or cat or dog or stick).
To erase death from the equation, like my niece’s toy does with that hapless, insect-ingesting pensioner, is a concession to today’s sensitivities. That’s not to say “The Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly” represents anything more homiletic than a choking hazard warning, but in the case of “Chad Gadya,” death is the story, and an end to death is the hope.
“The Haggadah ends with the death of death in eternal life,” Rabbi Sacks concluded his drash on the song, which ends when God strikes down the Angel of Death. “A fitting end for the story of a people dedicated to Moshe’s great command, ‘Choose life.’”
I know it’s a principle of faith all over the Haggadah, but I’m more agnostic as to that Messianic promise and maybe more in the camp of our old lady. My understanding of Jewishness, which accords with Moshe’s command, says life is best lived knowing that — perhaps — we’ll die.
The post How a song about the food chain became a Seder mainstay appeared first on The Forward.
Uncategorized
Katz: ‘Israel’s Goal in Lebanon is to Disarm Hezbollah’
Then-Israeli transportation minister Israel Katz attends the cabinet meeting at the Prime Minister’s office in Jerusalem, Feb. 17, 2019. Katz currently serves as the foreign minister. Photo: Sebastian Scheiner/Pool via REUTERS
i24 News – Israel’s Defense Minister Israel Katz held a situation assessment Friday with senior military and defense officials, reiterating that the country’s policy in Lebanon remains focused on disarming Hezbollah by military and political means. Katz emphasized that the goal applies “regardless of the Iran issue” and pledged continued protection for Israeli northern communities.
Katz said the Israel Defense Forces are completing ground maneuvers up to the anti-tank line to prevent direct threats to border towns. He outlined plans to demolish houses in villages near the border that serve as Hezbollah outposts, citing previous operations in Rafah and Khan Yunis in Gaza as models.
The Defense Minister added that the IDF will maintain security control over the Litani area and that the return of 600,000 residents of southern Lebanon who had evacuated north will not be permitted until northern communities’ safety is ensured. Katz also reaffirmed that the IDF will continue targeting Hezbollah leaders and operatives across Lebanon, noting that 1,000 terrorists have already been eliminated since the start of the current campaign.
“We promised security to the northern towns, and that is exactly what we will do,” Katz said. He further warned that the IDF will act decisively against rocket fire from Lebanon, stating that Hezbollah “will pay heavy prices.”