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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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Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor, Josh Shapiro, faces Trump-backed challenger in reelection bid
(JTA) — The stage is officially set for Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor, Josh Shapiro, to vie for reelection against GOP opponent Stacy Garrity in November.
The matchup comes as no surprise, as the two candidates won their respective primaries uncontested on Tuesday.
Shapiro is seen as the strong favorite to win. But Garrity, who is popular among Republicans and endorsed by President Donald Trump, could mount a competitive challenge. She became the only person to earn more votes than Shapiro in Pennsylvania history when she was reelected as state treasurer in 2024.
The matchup could pose a hurdle for Shapiro’s potential 2028 presidential ambitions even if Garrity loses in November. A hard-fought race in a purple state will allow Republicans to test attack strategies against Shapiro.
Shapiro is a pro-Israel Democrat in a party where supporting Israel is an increasing liability. Garrity, too, has gone to bat for Israel. As state treasurer, she has more than tripled Pennsylvania’s investment in Israel bonds. She invested $20 million following Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, and another $25 million in July 2025.
“Israel is our greatest ally in the Middle East, and I will continue to stand by them in their fight to achieve peace,” Garrity said when announcing the $25 million investment last year.
“Israel bonds are a smart, dependable investment with a proven track record — and it’s especially important to show our support at a time when Israelis and Jews — both abroad and here in the United States — continue to face horrific acts of antisemitism,” she wrote. “I’m proud to announce this significant new investment, continuing the strong relationship between Pennsylvania, Israel, and the Jewish Community.”
Garrity is embracing her endorsement from Trump, whom she has said she believes won in her state and nationally in 2020, when President Joe Biden prevailed.
Garrity’s early attacks on Shapiro have implicated his record on Jewish issues. Last year, she took a shot at Shapiro in response to an article by politically conservative website the Washington Free Beacon. In the story, a group of Philadelphia parents said Shapiro had “completely ignored” their pleas for help addressing antisemitism in public schools during the war in Gaza.
“I know Josh Shapiro understands the evils of antisemitism — he’s lived it,” Garrity wrote on X. “That’s why it’s painful to see him turn away from Jewish parents begging for help as their kids face N*zi salutes and teachers praising Hamas.”
Shapiro’s team denied that the governor had neglected parental concerns. He is widely regarded as being outspoken against antisemitism, and has maintained a pro-Israel outlook that includes support for U.S. military aid to Israel. The man who confessed to committing an arson attack on Shapiro’s residence in 2025 said he thought Shapiro was contributing to violence against the Palestinian people.
The post Pennsylvania’s Jewish governor, Josh Shapiro, faces Trump-backed challenger in reelection bid appeared first on The Forward.
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Massie Ousted From Congress, Makes Antisemitic Jab in Concession Speech
US Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) leaves a meeting of the House Republican Conference in the US Capitol on Wednesday, June 4, 2025. Photo: Tom Williams/CQ Roll Call/Sipa USA via Reuters Connect
US Rep. Thomas Massie was defeated in Tuesday’s Republican primary by Trump-backed challenger Ed Gallrein in a closely watched race in Kentucky widely viewed as a referendum on party loyalty and US support for Israel.
In his concession remarks, Massie drew immediate attention when he said he had to “find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv” to concede, a remark widely interpreted as a reference to what he and his supporters have described as substantial pro-Israel backing for Gallrein’s campaign.
“I would’ve come out sooner, but I had to call my opponent and concede. And it took a while to find Ed Gallrein in Tel Aviv,” Massie said.
Gallrein, a retired Navy SEAL and political newcomer, garnered approximately 54.9 percent of the vote compared to Massie’s 45.1 percent, emerging victorious by nearly a 10-point margin. With the defeat, Massie will depart Congress at the conclusion of his 7th term.
Gallrein was endorsed by US President Donald Trump and benefited from significant support from pro-Israel donors and aligned advocacy networks. The race attracted national attention, with Trump-aligned groups and conservative super PACs spending roughly $19 million in support of Gallrein’s campaign. For many observers, Gallrein’s victory underscores both Trump’s continued influence in Republican primaries and the party’s generally unified stance on Israel policy.
Massie, long one of the most independent voices in the House Republican Conference, had frequently broken with GOP leadership on foreign policy issues, including US military aid to Israel, funding for the Iron Dome missile defense system, and the Iran war. Massie also drew criticism from pro-Israel groups for opposing aid packages, skipping Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress, and accusing Israel of targeting civilian infrastructure during military operations in Gaza and Lebanon while omitting that terrorist organizations such as Hamas and Hezbollah embed military infrastructure within civilian areas.
Beyond issues of foreign policy, Massie also drew sharp criticism from Trump after he co-sponsored and pushed for legislation to release the Justice Department’s files related to the late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein alongside prominent House Democrats, leading the president to frame Massie as a party disruptor and disloyal Republican.
The race unfolded amid growing tensions within the Republican Party over antisemitism, foreign policy, and support for Israel. Though older Republican voters continue to support Israel in substantial numbers, a growing number of polls indicate that younger Republican voters are far more skeptical of the US-Israel alliance, with many wanting to end aid to Israel and cease foreign military campaigns. Critics accused Massie of amplifying antisemitic rhetoric within segments of the Republican coalition by engaging in certain behaviors, such as making repeated appearances on the podcast of Tucker Carlson, a political pundit frequently accused by critics of promoting antisemitism.
In the days leading up to the election, Massie faced mounting criticism over a series of remarks and associations that Jewish organizations and pro-Israel activists condemned as antisemitic.
On Friday, he declared the election “a referendum on whether Israel gets to buy seats in Congress.”
Over the weekend, he invited antisemitic social media personality Ryan Matta to his home for a meet-and-greet event. He posed for a photo with Matta wearing a shirt emblazoned with the phrase “American Reich,” a direct reference to the Nazi regime. Massie has not commented on the incident or distanced himself from Matta.
Massie also came under fire over an advertisement released by a pro-Massie super PAC targeting billionaire Republican donor Paul Singer, a prominent Jewish supporter of pro-Israel causes who has backed efforts to defeat the incumbent. The ad characterized Singer as a “pro-trans billionaire” and displayed a rainbow-colored Star of David behind his image — imagery critics condemned as antisemitic.
Further, on Sunday, Massie lambasted the Republican Jewish Coalition (RJC), an organization that aims to increase the number of Jews within the Republican Party, accusing the group of using Gallrein as a “puppet” and claiming they are “running his race.”
Gallrein campaigned on a platform aligned closely with Trump’s foreign policy approach, emphasizing continued US security assistance to Israel and a more traditional Republican posture on Middle East policy. His campaign was boosted by outside groups and donors supportive of a strongly pro-Israel agenda.
The outcome reinforced the increasingly narrow political space within the GOP for lawmakers who break with Trump and the party’s dominant pro-Israel posture.
Once known for his libertarian-leaning independence, Massie increasingly found himself isolated as GOP voters and donors coalesced around candidates aligned with both Trump and pro-Israel priorities. The race also reflects a broader trend in Republican primaries, where alignment with Trump and with pro-Israel policy positions has become a key predictor for viability in many competitive districts.
In a statement, the RJC congratulated Gallrein and accused Massie of “trafficking in antisemitism and bottom-of-the-barrel nativism at a time when Jew-hatred is on the rise,” calling Massie’s conduct “wildly unacceptable and outrageous from an elected member of Congress.”
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Jewish Groups Call on US Congress to Combat Union Antisemitism in Health Care
Anti-Israel demonstration at Johns Hopkins University, which has one of the best medical schools in the world, in Baltimore, Maryland, US, April 30, 2024. Photo: Robyn Stevens Brody/SIPA USA via Reuters Connect
Jewish community advocates on Wednesday called on the US Congress to use its lawmaking power to stop health care unions from spreading antisemitism in the workplace through anti-Zionist advocacy, arguing unions have wasted resources and countenanced flagrant discrimination of Jews throughout the field of medicine.
Addressing the House Education and Workforce Subcommittee on Health, Employment, Labor, and Pensions, lawyers, health workers, and civil rights activists shared a stream of claims alleging that union bosses have effectively converted labor unions into political action committees for the anti-Zionist movement. The consequence, they argued, has been to embolden those who mistreat Jews as a “proxy” for Israel, leading to incidents of bigotry which would be decried were they perpetrated against other minority groups.
“The issue is not whether health care workers may hold political views,” Deena Margolies, litigation staff attorney for the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, told the committee. “The problem arises when health care unions use their authority and resources to promote antisemitic campaigns outside their labor mission. Jewish and Israeli health care professionals are then placed in an impossible position: The union that is supposed to represent them is also helping to create the hostile work environment they must endure.”
Anti-Zionist union activity even affects patient care, Margolies added, noting that some mental health practitioners now offer services which they say can “decolonize” patients of pro-Zionist viewpoints. The enterprise is predicated on the idea that Zionism, which an overwhelming majority of Jews say is central to Jewish identity, is a pathology.
“Congress can and should act,” she said.
Dr. Jacob Agronin, a cardiology fellow at Temple University Hospital, told Congress that Jewish workers should have the right to permanently suspend payment of union dues.
“What I would hope for is the option for those that disagree with this union on a fundamental level not be compelled to pay dues to this union,” Agronin said. “I think it’s absurd that the union can call for blatant discrimination against Israeli colleagues and then compel those same colleagues to pay them.”
The Algemeiner has reported extensively on how a wave of antisemitism swept health care following Hamas’s Oct. 7, 2023, massacre across southern Israel. So widespread was the problem that it became the subject of a 2025 study which found that 62.8 percent of Jewish health care professionals employed by campus-based medical center reported experiencing antisemitism, a far higher rate than those working in private practice and community hospitals. Fueling the rise in hate, the study noted, were repeated failures of DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) initiatives to educate workers about antisemitism, increasing the likelihood of antisemitic discrimination.
Months earlier, the StandWithUs Data & Analytics Department found through its own survey that nearly 40 percent of Jewish American health care professionals have encountered antisemitism in the workplace, either as witnesses or victims. A substantial number of the 645 Jewish health workers who responded to its questions also said they were subject to “social and professional isolation,” and 26.4 percent felt “unsafe or threatened.”
Outside the US, the crisis of antisemitism in health care has manifested in medical settings around the world, including in South America, Australia, and across Europe.
As for union antisemitism, the subject continues to be a focus of Jewish civil rights activism.
Earlier this month, the Brandeis Center filed a civil rights complaint alleging that the National Education Association proliferated antisemitism across its interstate network of chapters, offices, and K-12 schools by systemically enacting policies which resulted in Jews being blocked from promotions, mentorship opportunities, and participation in social justice initiatives. The disturbing document went further, arguing that antisemitic discrimination at the NEA is more than an invisible, bureaucratic force which disappears Jews from governance roles. According to the complaint, it is a force applied by anti-Zionists who lead mobs against Jewish delegates attending union conferences; perpetrate acts of physical intimidation; and delete guidance on teaching students about the Holocaust from official documents.
“The NEA’s conduct is both completely illegal and morally unjustifiable,” Brandeis Center chairman and founder Kenneth Marcus said in a statement announcing the action. “This is exactly the type of discrimination against which Title VII was designed to protect.”
In New York City, the federal government is investigating reports that members of the United Federation of Teachers (UFT) are procuring students for membership in anti-Zionist study groups teaching that Israelis are “genocidal white supremacists” and that Hamas terrorists are “martyrs.” The initiative there is funded by a nonprofit titled “Rethinking Schools,” which itself has been a recipient of exorbitant financial gifts from the NEA.
Meanwhile, students at Columbia University recently escalated their fight against a graduate workers union dominated by anti-Israel advocates by filing a federal complaint with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB).
The students allege that the bosses who run Student Workers of Columbia (SWC), an affiliate of United Auto Workers (UAW), devote more energy and resources to pursuing “radical policy proposals” than improving occupational conditions. In collective bargaining negotiations, it allegedly pressures the university to adopt the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (BDS) movement against Israel and to enact other measures, such as ending its partnership with the New York City Police Department (NYPD) and closing a dual-degree program with Tel Aviv University.
“All of this adds up to a union that is out of control, and I note that they don’t have an agenda against the mullahs in Iran, against the dictator who runs Turkey, against the Chinese communists who oppress their citizens or the North Koreans. But they have an agenda against Israel, the one democracy in the Middle East,” Glenn Taubman, staff attorney for the National Right to Work Foundation (NRTW), told The Algemeiner during an interview at the time.
Follow Dion J. Pierre @DionJPierre.