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Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who transformed comics first as a muse and then as a feminist artist, dies at 74
(JTA) — Robert Crumb put the “x” in comix by setting to paper his basest sexual longings, including strong-legged Jewish women who were cowgirls and who went by the name Honeybunch Kaminski.
So when an actual strong-legged Jewish cowgirl named Aline Kominsky walked into his life, it was love at first sight, and never wavered.
Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who died Wednesday at 74 in France of pancreatic cancer, was late to the revolution her husband launched in comics a few years before they met, with his Zap Comix. The “x” was a signifier of what was then known as “underground” comics and referred to the unfiltered treatment of humanity that censorious publishers, politicians and public figures had all but washed out of the art.
She soon fully embraced the art form and then helped transform it.
Working with her husband and then on her own, Kominsky-Crumb brought to comics raw self-lacerating accountability and subverted crude stereotypes about Jewish women — including those peddled by her husband — by taking possession of them.
She started out as a self-acknowledged sex object reviled by second-wave feminists and became a hero of younger feminists for modeling unfettered sexual expression. She was the brassy Jewish stereotype who became the muse who guided her husband to a deeper consideration of Judaism.
Kominsky-Crumb, born Aline Ricky Goldsmith in 1948 in the Five Towns, a Jewish enclave on Long Island, had a Jewish upbringing that was in many ways conventional, horrifying and both at the same time. She wrote about the warmth of her grandparents’ home and how she sought in it succor and about the pressures her materialistic parents placed on her. She said she was named for a Five Towns clothing store, Aline Ricky, that sold French fashion knockoffs. She resisted her mother’s pressure to get a nose job.
In one autobiographical comic, she recalls seeing one Jewish girl after another coming into school after plastic surgery. “Me ‘n’ my friends developed a ‘big nose pride,’” she writes, and one of the characters says, “I could not stand to look like a carbon copy!”
She told fellow Jewish cartoonist Sarah Lightman about the ordeal. “Like, I kept my nose, but it was really a close call, because my mother had me in Doctor Diamond’s office and he measured my nose. I remember that. They took an instrument and measured your nose. And then he took a piece of paper and he said,’ look, we can make it look like this.’ And I said, ‘Oh my God.’ My mother said, ‘Oh, it’s gorgeous, gorgeous.’”
In her teens, Kominsky-Crumb fled the suburbs for Manhattan. She studied at Cooper Union, an art school, and lived on the Lower East Side, earning plaudits from her instructors for her painting, but getting bored. She had a baby and gave it up for adoption to a Jewish agency, an experience that scarred her, and later led her to become outspoken in advocating for abortion rights.
After she married Carl Kominsky, they moved to Tucson, Arizona, which she called “hippie heaven.” There, she left her husband for a cowboy who lived with two brothers and his father in what she said was “the middle of nowhere” where she helped out on horseback, albeit under the influence of hallucinogens. (She said her beau was killed in a shootout with a romantic rival after she left.)
In Tucson, she met two pioneers of underground comics, Kim Deitch and Spain Rodriguez. They encouraged her to move to San Francisco, which was the scene of the burgeoning movement.
She did and met Crumb at a party in 1971, within three years of his having created “Honeybunch Kaminski, the drug-crazed runaway” (1968) and “Dale Steinberger, the Jewish Cowgirl.” Kominsky-Crumb, who had kept her first husband’s last name because it sounded more “ethnic” than Goldsmith, was so taken with the her husband’s lustful Jewish imaginings, and how closely she physically resembled them, that when she started creating her own, she named her avatar “Bunch,” a shortened version of the character whose name most closely matched her own.
It was kismet, except it wasn’t at first. Crumb and Kominsky-Crumb got together, but maintained open relationships. Crumb endured Kominsky-Crumb’s dalliances with other men for decades, but Kominsky-Crumb was not as able (or willing) to reciprocate. When one of Crumb’s exes arrived at their commune in Mendocino, she told The Comics Journal in 1990, she was furious. “I had a total s— fit,” she said, “I was wearing these giant platform shoes. I ran out the door and I fell and broke my foot in six places.”
Crumb sent the ex on her way and entertained the recovering Kominsky with a pastime he and his brother worked out as children: They would co-create a comic.
That process drew the couple closer, and also became a decades-long unflinching chronicle of a relationship. A culmination, “Drawn Together,” was critically acclaimed when it came out in 2012.
In one passage in the 2012 book, she gently chides her husband for resorting to antisemitic tropes — although it was tropes about loud, slightly unhinged, sexually voracious Jewish women that drew them together.
One page depicts the couple in bed. Crumb is stung by an accusation of antisemitism from Art Spiegelman. (Spiegelman joined with Crumb to launch the underground comics scene in the 1960s, but they grew apart as Spiegelman, who would author the Holocaust chronicle “Maus,” sought to attach an overarching philosophy to the genre, while Crumb continued to crave crude authenticity.)
Crumb says that Spiegelman “seems to be taking my ruminations about the Jews as antisemitism … I certainly didn’t mean it as such.” Kominsky-Crumb draws herself into the panel, listening to her husband, as a little girl wearing tefillin, a T-shirt with “kosher” in Hebrew and a Star of David pendant. In the next panel, once again appearing as a grown woman in a negligee, she makes clear to Crumb why she feels vulnerable as a Jew in the marriage.
“Dahling, you do call the Jewish religion ‘Brand X’,” she says.. “Now I might even think that’s true in some ways … and I’m one o’ them … I’m allowed to say that!”
Crumb draws himself as wounded but also awakened. “Oh, I see … ulp.” Crumb dedicated his masterwork, “The Book of Genesis,” a searing illustrated narrative of the Bible’s first book, to Aline.
The Crumbs’ collaborative work was celebrated among aficionados, but it wasn’t until 1994’s “Crumb,” a documentary directed by Crumb’s close Jewish friend, Terry Zwigoff, that she emerged into the broader culture. A vibrant, peripatetic Kominsky-Crumb cares for their daughter, Sophie, and revels in their life in a small French village, where they had moved a few years earlier, while Crumb continues to hold back, playing the wounded, misunderstood artist.
It was an arrival of sorts for Kominsky-Crumb. She had for a time been marginalized even on the underground scene, her deceptively simple art derided as sloppy. She helped found the Wimmen’s Comix collective in 1972, and wrote about her Jewish upbringing in the first issue, a piece entitled “Goldie: A Neurotic Woman.” But she was soon frozen out because some of her colleagues thought her musings about longing to be dominated (and her tendency to dress that way to please Crumb) were denigrating to women. “The Yoko Ono of Comics,” is how the New York Times described her early years.
She left the collective and joined another Jewish woman artist, Diane Noomin, in launching “Twisted Sisters” in 1976. Its cover depicts hers seated on a toilet wondering “How many calories in a cheese enchilada.” The message to her erstwhile colleagues, who depicted women heroically, was clear: Kominsky-Crumb would indulge her full unvarnished self.
It would take decades, but a later generation of feminists would come to understand her autobiographical “Bunch” not as a self-loathing caricature but as a means of understanding ones whole self. In 2020, Lightman launched an interview with Kominsky-Crumb by reviewing a 1975 cartoon, “Bunch plays with herself” that shocked even the underground scene at the time with its graphic depictions of a woman exploring every corner of her body.
“I didn’t do it to be disgusting but it’s, like, about every horrible and fun thing you can do with your body,” Kominsky-Crumb told Lightman. “I think it’s an amazing piece of feminist art,” Lightman said in the interview, “because women are drawn to be gazed at, and [here we see] their bodily juices, and everything. … The last panel is the best. ‘My body is an endless source of entertainment’.”
In 2007, she and Crumb created a cover for the Jewish counterculture magazine Heeb, where she is cradling him in her arms. “”I feel so safe in the arms of this powerful Jewish woman!” Crumb says.
By 2018, she was scrolling through her phone to show a New York Times reporter pictures of Crumb cavorting with the grandkids. (Daughter Sophie in adulthood also is a comics artist.) The photos then transition to photos of women’s behinds, taken in Miami.
“I’m enabling his big butt fixation,” she said. “Well I don’t have a big butt anymore so I have to offer him something.”
“It was her energy that transformed the American Crumb family into a Southern French one, with her daughter Sophie living, marrying and having three French children there,” the official Crumb website said in announcing her death. “She will be dearly missed within that family, by the international cartooning community, but especially by Robert, who shared the last 50 years of his life with her.”
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The post Aline Kominsky-Crumb, who transformed comics first as a muse and then as a feminist artist, dies at 74 appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
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Invoking Torah, Minnesota Jews mobilize against ICE operations
(JTA) — The Hebrews’ flight from Egypt is on a lot of Jewish minds right now, as the annual cycle of Torah readings has reached the Book of Exodus.
But for many Jewish leaders in Minnesota, the ancient story has particular resonance.
With Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents descending on the Twin Cities in search of undocumented immigrants and stirring chaos and pushback, the story of Exodus — about a king who tries to thwart the growing number of “foreigners” in his midst, and the leader who seeks to protect them — is inspiring widespread anti-ICE actions.
“As we’re currently reading in the Torah, Moses confronts Pharoah knowing it won’t be easy, and feeling his own doubts about such an act,” Rabbi Aaron Weininger, who leads the Conservative Adath Jeshurun Congregation in the suburb of Minnetonka, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency. “And in doing so, the Israelites enslaved in Egypt are able to get unstuck. They’re able to taste freedom.”
Inspired by such teachings, and frequently invoked Jewish injunctions like “welcoming the stranger,” Jewish groups are signing on to open letters, and synagogues are actively involved in pro‑immigrant actions and advocacy. The Jewish presence at an interfaith anti-ICE rally this week is expected to be substantial.
“Our community members and staff live and work in every corner of society. There are too many stories of lives upended by what the government itself refers to as the ICE surge,” reads an open letter, issued Monday, spearheaded by the Jewish federation and signed by around two dozen Jewish groups.
Jewish groups “are deeply concerned by the current volatile situation throughout the Twin Cities and Minnesota,” according to the letter. Its signatories as of press time include 13 area congregations, ranging from Reform to Modern Orthodox; two Jewish day schools; Minnesota Hillel; the Minnesota JCC; the progressive group Jewish Community Action, and Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minnesota.
ICE’s presence — which includes masked, heavily armed officers conducting aggressive traffic stops, neighborhood raids and street patrols — has led to a lack of caregivers tending to local Jewish seniors, according to the letter.
It follows an earlier open letter from 49 Minnesota Jewish clergy, distributed on Friday, that describes “grief” and “horror” over ICE “wreaking havoc across our state.”
Quoting Deuteronomy — “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt” — the rabbis and cantors spotlight the “tragic death” of driver Renee Good at the hands of an ICE officer Jan. 7 and include a prayer to “spread a canopy of peace and protection over all those wrongfully targeted by ICE at this moment.”
Both of those letters precipitated what is turning into a larger institutional Jewish pushback to ICE. On Wednesday, leaders of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist movements issued a joint statement to “condemn, in the strongest terms, the violence with which the Department of Homeland Security is enforcing American immigration law — above all, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, as well as in cities and towns across the nation.”
“Our sages taught that the Book of Deuteronomy’s directive, ‘Justice, justice shall you pursue’ (16:20), implies that the law must be enforced through a fair process, and that one should pursue justice whether it would be to one’s advantage or to one’s loss,” the statement reads, with the Jewish leaders further calling on the Justice Department to investigate Good’s death.
Rabbi Jill Avrin, campus lead at the Jewish Community Relations Council of Minnesota and the Dakotas, said it was “unprecedented” for such a wide variety of local Jewish groups to sign onto such messages.
“We have a really diverse Jewish community here, and we felt that this is a moment that is impacting all of us,” Avrin, who helped draft the letters, told JTA.
The multiple open letters are trying to appeal to shared spiritual values as the standoffs between protesters and ICE agents become increasingly fraught. A number of prominent figures — most recently Bruce Springsteen — have compared ICE’s tactics to the Gestapo; at the same time, an anti-ICE protest that disrupted a church service over the weekend has prompted concern and controversy across the interfaith community and led at least one Republican to compare the protesters to Hamas.
Local Jewish leaders say they are not dissuaded from what they view as a Jewish imperative to respond.
“Judaism isn’t about skipping the hard parts,” Weininger said. “It’s about noticing the struggles for centuries that have led us to this point: slavery, persecution, destruction, exile, coming home.”
Rabbis have been active in local mobilizing against ICE. They attended a community vigil for Good; Weininger discussed the issue during his Shabbat sermon. He also helped draft the rabbinical open letter, and this week is one of around 80 to 90 rabbis — many others from out of town — planning to attend an interfaith march in Minneapolis with more than 600 clergy present. Around 50 of the rabbis expected to attend are part of T’ruah, a Jewish social justice network, which mobilized after local clergy put out the request.
“What’s scary is that lawful actions are being targeted,” Weininger said about the situation on the ground. “We’re talking about protest and prayer and taking action in community, and even those modes of engagement are under attack.”
Recalling how Minneapolis Jews similarly mobilized in 2020 to protest George Floyd’s murder by Minneapolis police, the rabbi described “a real sense of civil society here, and I think that is true of the Jewish clergy community in how people care for one another.”
Rabbis also spoke out at a Tuesday interfaith press conference denouncing ICE and outlining plans for this week’s march. “As people of faith, as leaders of faith communities, we are called to say, ‘Enough. Not on our watch,’” Rabbi Tamar Magill-Grimm, who leads the Conservative Beth Jacob Congregation in Mendota Heights, said while standing next to a local imam.
Some Jewish groups across the country have raised concern about ICE’s activities for months, with some synagogues posting signs identifying themselves as houses of worship that agents do not have authority to enter. Rabbis affiliated with T’ruah have participated in “ICE watch” actions in other cities.
But Minnesota’s Jews have now witnessed firsthand the effects of a sustained, targeted ICE presence on their community. Local synagogues have hosted “upstander” training seminars for congregants to learn how to react in the face of an ICE encounter. For many congregants, the experience has pushed them to action — but it’s also invoked an eerie sensation, bringing echoes of a dangerous past.
“As a Jewish parent in Minneapolis, history feels too close right now,” one Twin Cities resident told Daci Platt, a fellow Minnesotan who works at Kveller, a JTA sister publication. “The sense of safety we usually rely on feels shakier than it ever has.”
Jewish community organizations are particularly concerned about the threat the ICE raids, which have focused primarily on non-white Twin Cities residents, pose to a caregiving workforce largely composed of immigrants.
“Jewish seniors are not having their basic needs met because their caregivers are too afraid to come to work,” says the letter spearheaded by the federation.
Amy Weiss, CEO of Jewish Family and Children’s Service of Minnesota, told JTA that ICE has also affected her organization’s ability to serve its nonsectarian clients more generally. Much of their own staff are from immigrant communities, and Weiss worries about drawing attention to them by sending them out into the field to help clients.
“People are afraid to go to work. They’re afraid to leave their homes,” Weiss said. “I don’t see this as political. When you look at our mission, to support people in need, then this is very basic. These are the very basic needs of the community.”
The open letter also notes that there are Jews “who are immigrants themselves, have family members who are immigrants, or could be reasonably perceived to be immigrants. Many of these people are scared to leave their homes out of fear of being arrested and deported.”
The federation-backed letter is careful not to deride all law enforcement. It states, “We affirm our commitment to the rule of law, the lawful implementation of statutes, and the thousands of law enforcement officers charged with keeping us safe, whose efforts we deeply appreciate.”
Avrin, too, praised local law enforcement, whom she called “amazing” and “not the same thing as the ICE agents who are here on the ground.” She also noted that not all of the Jewish communal leaders shared the specific goals of this week’s march, which other Jewish leaders helped plan. The march’s demands include “ICE must leave Minnesota immediately” and “ICE should be investigated for human and Constitutional violations of Americans and our neighbors.”
“This moment is a moment that calls for coalition,” she said. “We are acknowledging and naming that we might be showing up with people whom we don’t actually agree with their broader platform.”
That discomfort has also arisen in some of the language of the opposition. As ICE protests in Minnesota attract growing national attention, comparisons to Nazis and the Gestapo have also grown. Avrin said the JCRC discourages such rhetoric
During a concert in New Jersey last weekend, Springsteen decried “heavily armed, masked federal troops invading an American city and using Gestapo tactics against our fellow citizens.” He then repeated a catchphrase popularized by Jacob Frey, Minneapolis’s Jewish mayor: “ICE should get the f–k out of Minneapolis.” (On Tuesday, Frey, along with other state officials, was subpoenaed by the Justice Department for alleged obstruction of immigration agents. Some of his critics have called attention to his Jewish identity.)
The faith-based protests suffered a distraction when anti-ICE protesters disrupted a St. Paul church service. The protesters, including Black Lives Matter Minnesota, claimed that one of its pastors also works as a local ICE field office leader. The Trump administration has announced an investigation into the protest, which officials said could amount to a violation of a federal law permitting free access to any worship site.
Following the protest, Cities Church in Minnesota issued a statement saying the protesters “accosted members of our congregation, frightened children, and created a scene marked by intimidation and threat. Such conduct is shameful, unlawful, and will not be tolerated.”
The statement added, “Invading a church service to disrupt the worship of Jesus — or any other act of worship — is protected by neither the Christian Scriptures nor the laws of this nation.” A founding pastor of the church has ties to Pete Hegseth, Trump’s defense secretary.
One Republican, Rep. Will Self of Texas, said the protesters — who had livestreamed themselves from inside the church — reminded him of Hamas livestreaming on Oct. 7.
“When you livestream something, you want it to cause terror in the population,” Self told the far-right TV network Newsmax. “So when they livestreamed it, I compare them to Hamas, who livestreamed the attack in Israel that killed thousands of people.”
American Jewish leaders, for whom the freedom of worship in America has long been a key policy plank, say they disagree such a protest in a house of worship. Rabbi Jill Jacobs, who heads T’ruah, told JTA her organization “would not organize a protest of a church.”
The local JCRC also criticized the church protest, which comes in the aftermath of recent pro-Hamas synagogue protests in New York that were widely condemned by Jewish and progressive leaders alike.
“That is something we are absolutely opposed to. We would never encourage people to disrupt a worship service. That is not aligned with our values in any way,” Avrin said. “In my opinion it doesn’t reflect the broader efforts that are happening on the ground. That’s going to happen any time you have a large movement.”
Jews in that movement are focusing on injunctions drawn from the Bible. Speaking at New Birth, a historically Black Baptist church in Georgia with links to the family of Martin Luther King Jr., Georgia Democrat Sen. Jon Ossoff, who is Jewish, gave a biblically inflected anti-ICE message.
“How can it be that masked federal agents set up checkpoints in American cities, demand papers, rip Americans from their cars, and throw them to the ground? Kill? Kill? With apparent license from the very top,” Ossoff told the congregation. “There’s a wickedness to the program. I don’t know, Pastor, where it is in scripture that it says ‘deny care to the sick, take from those with the least to give to those with the most, violate the house of worship to hunt down the refugee.’ Where in the scripture are those lessons taught?”
Ossoff, who is defending his seat in a tight reelection campaign, added that he and the church’s pastor had been “texting” about the Exodus journey of Moses, and how he used his staff to rally the Israelites.
In the face of the groundswell in Minnesota, President Donald Trump again forcefully rebuked the protesters and defended ICE.
“They’re apprehending murderers and drug dealers and a lot of bad people,” the president said of the agents during a press conference to mark one year of his second term.
Holding up images he said were of immigrant criminals apprehended by ICE, including one who he claimed was connected to Hezbollah, Trump asked the White House press pool, “Why don’t you talk about that more?… Do you want to live with these people?”
The president also referenced the church protest. “I have such respect for that pastor. He was so calm. He was so nice. He was just accosted,” Trump said of the clergyman whose sermon was interrupted. (He was not the pastor the protesters were targeting.) “What they did in that church was horrible.”
Trump, too, has been a mobilizing force for Jews in Minnesota. Following the president’s derogatory comments last month about the Somali population in the state — which Trump said justified the ICE raids — many local Jewish leaders had held coalition meetings with interfaith partners.
For some in the room at the time, Avrin recalled, it was the first time they had come face-to-face with these partners since Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023 attack on Israel and the start of the war in Gaza, which frayed many Jewish-liberal coalitions when other communal groups denounced Israel and “Zionists.”
Such partners had “stopped speaking to us, basically,” she said.
But for the Jewish leaders in the room, the Talmudic imperative to love the stranger overcame lingering uncertainty about reconfiguring these coalitions: “We can’t walk away from that just because we’ve been hurt,” she said.
The post Invoking Torah, Minnesota Jews mobilize against ICE operations appeared first on The Forward.
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San Diego Jewish groups decry disinvitation of rabbi from MLK Day event over ‘concerns about potential disruption related to Zionism’
(JTA) — The organizers of a Martin Luther King Day event in San Diego have come under fire from local Jewish groups after a rabbi said he was disinvited from speaking at the event due to his “connection to Israel.”
Rabbi Hanan Leberman, the leader of the Conservative Tifereth Israel Synagogue in San Diego, had initially been slated to give the closing prayer at the city’s All Peoples Celebration, which was organized by a community group called Alliance San Diego.
“This year, for the 38th annual All Peoples Celebration, we invite you to Choose Courage; to decide, with intention, to do what is right even when the fear and opposition are loud,” a description of the event read. “Now more than ever, our voices must rise above hesitation. We must claim our dignity and echo the notion that any attack on one, is an attack on us all.”
But in a post on Facebook Sunday, Leberman said he was “deeply upset” to learn he had been disinvited from the ceremony, writing that the reason behind the decision was due to his “connection to Israel.”
Born in Chicago and raised in Philadelphia, Leberman moved to Israel at 20 and served for three years in the IDF’s undercover counterterrorism unit, often as its cantor. He was ordained as a rabbi in the Masorti movement in Israel and worked there before moving to San Diego in 2024.
“The decision to disinvite me is, in my view, a disservice to the legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.,” wrote Leberman. “I believe the organization would benefit from deeper education about what Zionism truly is and about what the Jewish community is facing today—from both the left and the right.”
Alliance San Diego appeared to dispute Leberman’s account in a post on Instagram Sunday. The group wrote in a statement that it had asked two speakers to give up their slots “in response to concerns about potential disruption related to Zionism and anti-Zionism” but said they had not been disinvited. The other speaker has not been publicly identified.
“Our intention was never to exclude Jewish faith leaders or Jewish voices from this space,” the statement said. “As an organization working across many communities under immense strain and confronting assaults on immigrant communities, including Jewish and Israeli immigrants at a time of rising anti-semitism and fear, we acknowledge that our decision contributed to that pain rather than alleviating it.”
The MLK Day event was sponsored by the San Diego PBS station, several local universities and the American Federation of Teachers, whose head Randi Weingarten has faced criticism from the right over her response to antisemitism and from the left over her support for Israel.
No Jewish clergy spoke at the event, now in its 38th year, according to the Times of San Diego.
The decision to disinvite Leberman was decried by nearly four dozen synagogues and Jewish groups in San Diego in a joint statement published Sunday.
“Calling this gathering the All Peoples Celebration is difficult to reconcile with the exclusion of a Jewish leader for holding beliefs that are held by a strong majority of the Jewish community globally and here in San Diego,” the groups wrote. “Many now see this decision as turning the event into an ‘All Peoples (except for Jews) Celebration.’ That outcome should give everyone involved pause.”
Over the summer, all of the participating Jewish organizations in San Diego’s annual Pride festival pulled out of the celebration over the inclusion of a performance by anti-Israel R&B artist Kehlani. At the time, the Jewish groups cited “serious safety concerns” as the reason behind their withdrawal.
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Longtime dean of Ziegler School retiring as Conservative seminary plots new course
Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, the longtime dean of Ziegler School of Rabbinical Studies, will retire at the end of the school year, the president of Ziegler’s parent institution said Wednesday, in what may signal a broader transformation of the Los Angeles Conservative seminary.
Jay Sanderson, president of American Jewish University, confirmed the news in a phone interview with the Forward.
“He has served the Jewish world admirably, honorably for more than 25 years, leading an upstanding rabbinical school and making his mark on hundreds of Jewish leaders across the country,” Sanderson said.
Artson, who is also a vice president at AJU, is not leaving the school entirely. Sanderson said he will take on a “more senior role” in the administration of AJU, which also includes graduate schools for education and business. He will also continue teaching as the newly inaugurated Mordecai Kaplan Chair.
Artson did not reply to inquiries Wednesday night.
Sanderson, who became president in May 2025, has been making noise about bigger changes ahead at Ziegler since his arrival. In a podcast interview posted Jan. 15, he said he wanted AJU — which is already nondenominational other than Ziegler — to be “less denominationally driven.”
“What I was alluding to is an idea that has been talked about in the Jewish world for 15 years, that no one, frankly, has the courage to do, which is to create a multi-denominational rabbinical school, teaching 21st century skills, and bringing people across denominations to learn together,” Sanderson told the Forward. (Trans-denominational rabbinical schools do exist, including one in Los Angeles — the Academy for Jewish Religion, California.)
AJU sold its 22-acre hilltop campus prior to Sanderson’s arrival to a neighboring Jewish day school for terms that were undisclosed at the time. Sanderson said Wednesday that while he hadn’t seen the exact documentation, he thought it was between $55 million and $60 million. He said AJU netted very little of that, however, because most of the proceeds went to pay off debt on the campus.
Ziegler has since moved to LA’s Westside, and AJU’s administration — which had planned to stay on campus until 2027 — moved out 18 months early.
Artson, a leading intellectual in the Conservative movement, helped spearhead the push to legalize gay marriage under halacha, or Jewish law. He argued that “committed, permanent, exclusive homosexual relationships between equals” could not have been biblically prohibited because they were unknown until the modern era. The responsa he published in the 1990s making that case is still taught in rabbinical schools today; the Conservative movement did not formally sanction gay marriage until 2012.
And at a time when Jewish Theological Seminary, the Conservative flagship, was seen as cloistered, his arrival at AJU in 1999 — it was then known as the University of Judaism — helped shape its brand of Conservative Judaism as a movement that could be both compassionate and capable of interfacing with the public.
Rabbi Adam Kligfeld, head of Temple Beth Am, a Conservative synagogue in Los Angeles, said hundreds of Ziegler-ordained rabbis and untold numbers of people in their communities have benefited from Artson’s “visionary leadership.”
“His impact is wide and deep and will be felt for a very long time,” Kligfeld said.
In 2024, Artson and Ziegler Vice Dean Rabbi Cheryl Peretz were investigated and cleared by the Conservative movement after they were accused by former students of enabling a toxic culture at the school. A letter from AJU responding to the complaint acknowledged it and pledged “to do better.”
Sanderson, who did not say what the plan was to replace Artson, said that Ziegler students’ response to the news of the dean’s impending departure was mixed.
“I am signaling that we’re going to be looking at things and potentially changing things going forward,” Sanderson said. “So naturally, some of the students were excited, and some of the students were anxious.”
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