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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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Pro-Palestinian rally at Buchenwald memorial is shut down by German authorities
(JTA) — German authorities have shut down a planned pro-Palestinian vigil at the Buchenwald Nazi concentration camp memorial after a fierce outcry.
The rally was slated for April 12, marking the 81st anniversary of Buchenwald’s liberation by U.S. troops. But the city of Weimar said on Monday it would ban the event on the memorial grounds and offered a square downtown as an alternate location.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald, the group behind the campaign, announced it was challenging the ban in court. The group said it aimed to “commemorate victims of genocide and fascism” and “uplift the fundamental duty to fight against all genocides, particularly the genocide currently taking place in Palestine.”
The planned event had been heavily criticized by German leaders, such as federal antisemitism czar Felix Klein. In an interview with the Jüdische Allgemeine, Klein said he viewed the rally as “disrespectful self-promotion and a perfidious attempt to relativize the murder of over 11,000 Jews in the Buchenwald concentration camp by comparing it to Israel’s actions in the recent Gaza war.”
The campaign was also protested in a joint statement by a coalition of 17 organizations, including several Jewish communal and academic groups. They accused the organizers of “instrumentalizing the Buchenwald memorial site as a platform for anti-Jewish agitation.”
Kufiyas in Buchenwald had support from the International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network and the German group Jewish Voice for a Just Peace in the Middle East.
Rachael Shapiro, an organizer with the International Jewish Anti-zionist Network, said the memorial foundation’s “insistence on the singularity and exceptionalism of the Nazi genocide of European Jews” served to “actively provide cover for Germany’s participation in and funding of the mass murder of Palestinians.”
“As Jewish, queer and other anti-fascists, many of us the children and grandchildren of survivors of and those persecuted and murdered in the Nazi genocide, we wholeheartedly reject the German state dictating conditions around commemoration,” Shapiro said in a statement.
The event originated as a protest against a German court’s decision that Buchenwald could refuse entry to visitors who wear a Palestinian keffiyeh. Kufiyas in Buchenwald also said the memorial had suppressed other voices that criticized Israel. They cited the treatment of Israeli philosopher Omri Boehm, the grandson of Holocaust survivors and a critic of the Israeli government, who was disinvited from giving a commemoration speech at Buchenwald after pressure from the Israeli embassy in Berlin.
Kufiyas in Buchenwald said it continued to call on the memorial foundation to “openly address the genocide in Gaza” and lift restrictions on pro-Palestinian symbols and speech at the site. The group said its demands honored the “Oath of Buchenwald,” a promise spoken by survivors of the camp during a memorial ceremony on April 19, 1945.
These survivors said in six languages, “We will only give up the fight when the last guilty has been judged by the tribunal of all nations. The absolute destruction of Nazism is our device. The building of a new world of peace and freedom is our ideal.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Pro-Palestinian rally at Buchenwald memorial is shut down by German authorities appeared first on The Forward.
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Argentina designates Iran’s Revolutionary Guard a terrorist organization
(JTA) — Argentina announced on Tuesday that it had designated Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps as a terrorist organization, a move that was quickly praised by Israeli Foreign Minister Gideon Saar.
The move stems from Argentina’s decades-long investigations into the 1992 bombing of the Israeli Embassy in Buenos Aires, which killed 29 and injured more than 200, and the 1994 attack on the AMIA Jewish center, which left 85 dead and 300 injured in what remains the deadliest terrorist attack on Argentine soil.
In a statement, President Javier Milei’s office described the attacks as “two of the most serious terrorist attacks in history, carried out in the 1990s by the IRGC’s operational arm in the region, the organization Hezbollah.”
With Tuesday’s decision, the Argentine government will now include the IRGC in the Public Registry of Persons and Entities Linked to Acts of Terrorism and its Financing, triggering financial sanctions and operational restrictions intended to curb its ability to operate in the country and safeguard Argentina’s financial system from illicit use.
The announcement by Milei, who has stood out as one of Israel’s staunchest international supporters, comes months after his office also designated the Quds Force, the foreign arm of the IRGC, as a terrorist organization in January. In recent years, Argentina has also designated Hamas and Hezbollah as terror groups.
Saar praised the move in a post on X Wednesday, writing that the designation “places Argentina, under [Milei’s] leadership, at the forefront of the free world in the fight against the Iranian regime of terror and its proxies.”
“With this decision, President Milei – one of the greatest leaders of our generation – has once again demonstrated moral clarity and an unwavering commitment to the values of freedom and the fight against its enemies,” Saar wrote.
Last month, just days into the ongoing U.S.-Israel war with Iran, Argentina issued an arrest warrant for Ahmad Vahidi, who was appointed as the head of the IRGC after its previous leader was killed in the first wave of U.S.-Israeli strikes.
Vahidi is currently the highest-ranking Iranian figure accused by the Argentine judiciary. An arrest warrant for him was first issued in 2006 in connection with the AMIA case.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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This isn’t Barbra Streisand’s ‘Yentl’ — it isn’t I.B. Singer’s either
There’s an FAQ on the website of the London theater where the Kadimah Yiddish Theatre of Melbourne’s production of Yentl is running through April 16. The very first item reads:
Is this a stage version of the 1983 musical film starring Barbara Streisand?
No — the London production of Yentl is a play. It is a new adaptation of Isaac Bashevis Singer’s 1962 short story,“ Yentl the Yeshiva Boy“ — just like the Streisand film was at the time.
This explanation does more than relieve box office staff of the tedious duty of informing Mrs. Lipschitz and Mrs. Rosenblatt from the sisterhood that no, they shouldn’t come expecting to sing along to “Papa, Can You Hear Me.” It argues that this theatrical “reimagining” (to use Kadimah’s own term) of Yentl is no less authentically Singerian than the musical. It also hints at how Kadimah prevailed, against considerable odds, in adapting a story whose rights Streisand still owns and fiercely guards.
As Gary Abrahams, Kadimah’s executive director and the director of the production, recently told the Jewish Telegraph, Singer’s estate gave him their approval on the condition that it be a Yiddish language, non-musical production. The London transplant, which comes on the heels of earlier stagings in Melbourne and Sydney, is enjoying a six-week run at the Marylebone Theatre, which is housed inside of an anthroposophical center. Both the limited duration of the run and the Off West End venue were critical to securing the Singer estate’s approval.
Kadimah’s production, a bilingual Yiddish-English chamber piece that has gained a certain notoriety for featuring male and female nudity, is the latest chapter in the long and unruly afterlife of Singer’s deceptively simple tale.
In “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” which first appeared, in English translation, in Commentary in September 1962, a rabbi’s daughter, shut out from the Talmud learning reserved for men, cuts her hair, dons male clothing, changes her name to Anshel, finds a chavrusa, the heartbroken Avigdor, and enters a yeshiva. But Singer’s tale is considerably stranger than both that simple summary and Streisand’s popular version suggest.
Yentl is not simply a tale of female exclusion and feminist defiance. It is also a story of impersonation, erotic confusion, spiritual hunger and metaphysical trespass. Yentl does not cross one line and stop there. Once she begins living as Anshel, all the categories meant to keep life orderly — male and female, study and desire, law and transgression — begin to blur.
That instability may explain why Yentl has proved so durable. Before Streisand made it famous on screen, Singer had already adapted it for the stage in the mid-1970s together with Leah Napolin. The show opened at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in 1974 and transferred to Broadway the next year, with Tovah Feldshuh in the title role.
“As a play it is altogether too anecdotal,” wrote Clive Barnes in the 1974 Times review. “The storyline wanders on and on like a river through a landscape, but the landscape happens to be worth looking at.” Napolin, who died in 2018 (and who claimed that Singer didn’t write a single word of the script) suggested that the second wave feminism of the time made the story and its themes feel relevant to contemporary audiences.
“This dark little gender-bending tale had an impact on many people who identified, as I did, with the heroine’s struggle to reinvent herself, to redefine herself,” Napolin once told an interviewer.
Half a century later, Kadimah’s Yentl leans heavily, and not always successfully, into our contemporary discourse about sex and gender. The story reemerges in a markedly — and overtly — queerer form than in previous versions.
Streisand’s film absorbed the title character so completely into her own star persona that for many people Yentl is now synonymous with Babs, not Singer. Her approach is expansive where Singer is compressed, ardent where he is dry-eyed, and schmaltzy where he is severe. Streisand gave the story glamor, emotional clarity and uplift. It also tilted the material away from Singer’s sharper ambiguities and toward the all-American theme of becoming oneself. The film, which Streisand also directed, produced and co-wrote, even ends with Yentl aboard a ship bound for America! (In Singer, Yentl simply ups and vanishes, an ending that has been interpreted as a reference to the legend of the Wandering Jew).
Yet Streisand’s victory over the material came with at an expense. As Linda Besner notes in an essay on Singer and Streisand and published in the Canadian arts review Arcade, the film’s feminist reclamation of Yentl also trims away some of the story’s deepest instability. Singer’s Yentl tells Avigdor, “I’m neither one nor the other,” and the story allows a degree of erotic and ontological confusion that the film flattens into a drama of self-realization.
Kadimah’s production, adapted by Abrahams, Elise Esther Hearst and Galit Klas, starts from dissatisfaction with that inheritance. Hearst has said the team wanted to get back to the story’s darker, more transgressive roots. In an interview with The Times of London, Abrahams said he had been struck by how unlike the movie Singer’s story really was, and described the original as a work about spirituality, identity, gender, sexuality, as well as plain old sex.
Those ambitions are evident from the outset. This is not a shy Yentl. It foregrounds the body, goes hard on the story’s sexual unease and sharpens its queer implications. Amy Hack is alluringly androgynous in the title role, both attracted by and attractive to Avigdor and Hodes (Genevieve Kingsford in a very stiff performance), Avigdor’s erstwhile fiancée, who Yentl marries in bad faith. As in the film, she casts a prurient gaze at the bathing Avigdor (Ashley Margolis bares all onstage, one-upping Mandy Patinkin, whose naked tush is one of the film’s most memorable sights). Singer’s story can accommodate plenty of sexual discomfort and frustration, but Abrahams’ production lays it on too thick. Did he really need to make Avigdor a mikveh peeper?
The production also never settles on a convincing tone and register. The one-set production, with its vaguely Expressionist look, goes for too much shtetl schlock. The acting keeps sliding between modes without enough control to make the shifts meaningful: naturalistic for a few minutes, then suddenly pitched into something like Yiddish melodrama. Additionally, there isn’t any discernible logic to why certain passages are spoken in English while others are in Yiddish (with subtitles projected onto the set). The result is less daring than uncertain. No performance fully steadies the evening, although Evelyn Krape comes the closest. As the spectral “Figure,” she hovers, narrates, inhabits minor roles and hangs over the proceedings like a comic dybbuk. The device of a spectral conferencier does not entirely cohere, but Krape — hammy in a grotesque-vulgar-goofy way — almost pulls it off.
Kadimah’s production was lauded in Melbourne and Sydney but has met with a very different reception in London, which is, of course, a no-nonsense theater town. Despite the tepid and sometimes outright negative reviews (“Even with nude scenes, this is a schlep,” The Times of London’s critic wrote), the Thursday evening performance I attended was nearly full. And, the mostly grey-haired audience members, several of whom I recognized, from a nearby kosher deli where I wolfed down a pastrami sandwich before the show, were enthusiastic. A Yiddish Yentl in London now is enough of an event to draw not only the usual suspects but the theatrically adventurous — and, no doubt, some Streisand fans who should know to check their expectations at the door.
Kadimah Yiddish Theater, which recently passed its centenary, is, by some counts, Australia’s oldest theater company. This Yentl might well be the biggest hit they’ve had in their long history. Despite its shortcomings — and there any many, both in concept and execution — the production shows that the company understands the need to strive for more than nostalgia and sentimentality, à la Streisand, and to be a little impious and even impish.
Today’s most interesting Yiddish theater (and also film, to an extent) inscribes itself within tradition while treating that heritage as unstable, literate and vulgar. That is what makes the Yiddish work of another Australian director, Barrie Kosky, so refreshing and bracingly alive.
Earlier this season, Kosky directed K., a “Talmudic vaudeville” inspired by Kafka’s “The Trial” at the Berliner Ensemble. In interviews, Kosky has spoke of the polyglot, code-switching, cross-dressing Yiddish theater that formed part of Kafka’s world. His haunting and unsettling production moves between German, Hebrew and Yiddish (including a gorgeous translation of Schumann’s Dicherliebe into mamaloschen) and injects intellectual seriousness with showbiz energy.
There’s another reason I bring up Kosky, a prolific, influential, and deeply Jewish theater and opera director. In summer 2027, he will present a fresh musical version of Yentl at the Fisher Center for the Arts at Bard College, created together with Lisa Kron (the Tony-winning writer and lyricist of Broadway’s Fun Home) and Adam Benzwi, one of the director’s regular musical collaborators in Berlin. According to Bard’s announcement, Benzwi’s score will draw on American and European Yiddish theater, music hall and Hasidic choral traditions. That sounds less like an attempt to strip Yentl back to some pristine original than like an effort to push through the whole layered history of the piece and make something gloriously heterodox.
By this point Yentl exists not as a single work. Singer gave it severity, mischief and danger. Streisand gave it melody and yearning. Kadimah has tried, admirably if unsuccessful, to restore taboo, Yiddish abrasion and folkloric unease, sometimes vividly, sometimes crudely. Kosky may prove better placed than most to let those elements collide without trying to reconcile them too neatly.
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