Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders

Introduction

Heike Bauer, Andrea Greenbaum, and Sarah Lightman

Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders has been edited over four years and has developed across oceans and our ill and healthy bodies. We three editors have never all met in person at the same time. With one of us living in Florida and the other two in different parts of the United Kingdom (London and the more rural environs of the Surrey Hills, respectively), we are separated by boundaries of time and place, as well as by the impact of a pandemic on our own work and personal commitments. Yet what brought us together is a shared critical interest in comics by Jewish women and the themes and issues they address. Much of the work included here is autobiographical or autobiographically inspired; it touches our own lives in different ways. Two of us, for example, are mothers and one is queer; two share their lives with dogs and cats, while the other one has an animal-free home. One is American and two are British (one of them German-born), and only two of us are Jewish. All of us, however, relate in various ways to Jewishness, through belief, family, history, politics, and cultural life. Editing Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders has taken us into ourselves, connecting to often unarticulated, uncomfortable life experiences, while also finding new connections and communities as we collected the pages of artworks, read speech bubbles, and crossed panel borders. Over the years we have worked together and paused this project as we and/or our families have suffered from illnesses, including cancer, Alzheimer’s, obesity, mental illness, and uterine fibroids. While the three of us approach comics by Jewish women from different viewpoints and life experiences, we share a deep interest in the form and the possibilities of representation that comics can uniquely accommodate.

Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders turns to comics to examine how Jewish women’s lives are constituted by, and move across, bodies, borders, and boundaries, including those demarcated by gender, sexuality, religion, history, and culture. Drawing on the history of feminist comics, and the array of women’s bodies discussed within this collection, the collection reflects on the lives, experiences, and relationships to Jewish culture, including in terms of religious background, class, sexuality, age, and politics.

This book has been structured to reflect our own unique approaches to comics. As a team of editors, we are all writers, academics, and teachers, but we also include one artist. We embraced a rich and varied approach to comics and comics scholarship and, selfishly, sought to contribute to the volume, through our own artwork, or to interview our own comics heroines. With this in mind we borrowed the structure of Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women (2014), edited by Sarah Lightman, the first book on Jewish women and comics. Our book is thus built on a tripartite structure: comics, interviews, and essays.

We begin with a direct engagement with comics, featuring pages of reproductions introduced by scholars. By reproducing these comics, some for the very first time in a printed publication, we are delighted to bring them to new audiences and provide the opportunity for more critical attention. The short written pieces by Samantha Baskind on Emily Steinberg, Tahneer Oksman on Nancy K. Miller, F. K. Schoeman on Miriam Libicki, Michael Green and MK Czerwiec on Marissa Moss and Joshua Feder, Victoria Aarons on Sarah Lightman, Véronique Sina on Helen Blejerman, Margaret Galvan on Sharon Rudahl, and Ariel Kahn on The Surreal McCoy, provide rich analysis, perspectives, and contexts.

Our next section features written interviews and one visual interview. These contributions capture the voices of the artists themselves and provide evidence of how the nuances of their lives inform their comics. Sandra Chiritescu converses with Amy Kurtzweil, Miriam Libicki draws a comic about her discussion with Rutu Modan, Dominique Agri interviews Trina Robbins, Ilana Zeffren is in conversation with Heike Bauer, Andrea Greenbaum speaks with Emil Ferris, and Oded Naaman interviews Nino Biniashvili.

Our final section of essays reflect on the critical approaches to comics in this field. Jennifer Caplan writes on Miriam Katin, Liana Finck, and Leela Corman; Megan Fowler on DC Comics’s Batwoman and Harley Quinn; Efraim Sicher on Corinne Pearlman and Sarah Lightman; Noa Lea Cohn on Efi Ungar, Batsheva Havlin and more; Sophie Hardach on Charlotte Salomon; and finally, we conclude with a collaboration between Mira Sucharov and Rebecca Katz.

Given the dynamic and variegated nature of comics, our introduction takes into account the true interdisciplinary nature of the graphic arts. We wanted to explore each aspect of our title, Bodies, Borders, Jewish Women’s Comics, as we integrate the comics of this book with comics and writings of previous art movements, art theories, and feminist and comics studies.

Bodies

The representation of women’s bodies by women remains central to the feminist project even as definitions of woman continue to change and evolve. Margaret Miles notes that we can alter our visual practices by learning to see and read the female body as the intimate reflection and articulation of women’s subjective experience.¹ The comics in this study reflect the changing understanding and representations of the female bodies and bodily experiences. Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders builds on the feminist art movement that began in the 1960s as a political movement challenging patriarchal art history and the representation of women in art.² Peggy Zeglin Brand explains: Feminist works are often identifiable by their female-centered subject matter, informed by a strong familiarity with and empathy for women’s lived experiences.³ The feminist art that brought women’s experiences into the public eye often used materials from life, including blood, diapers, and handicrafts, as well as more traditional art materials, and addressed overlooked and taboo experiences, such as breastfeeding, sexual abuse, menstruation, and abortion. An apt example for this collection’s themes of blood, borders, and comics would be Blood Work Diary (1972) by Carolee Schneemann, who collected her menstrual blood on pieces of tissue and then placed them in a grid. As we shall see, these areas were also developed in women’s comics at the same time and continue today, for instance, in the representations of Emily Steinberg’s unsuccessful in vitro fertilization (IVF) attempts, Bronia the abortionist in Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn, and wartime rape in Miriam Katin’s We Are on Our Own (see figs. 1–7, 10–12). But the works included here also question reproductive and heterocentric framings of women’s bodies by bringing into view lesbian experiences, such as in Ilana Zeffren’s work, or by queering the very idea of womanhood itself, as in Megan Fowler’s analysis of two DC Comics superheroines.

The volume acknowledges its debts to the first feminist comics published, for instance in an interview with Trina Robbins, the groundbreaking editor and contributor to the early women-only comics anthologies It Ain’t Me, Babe (1970), subtitled Women’s Liberation, and Wimmen’s Comix/Wimmin’s Comix (1972–92). It also includes Die Bubbeh, by Sharon Rudahl, which was featured in Wimmen’s Comix #5 (1975). Wimmen’s Comix/Wimmin’s Comix contained comics about themes also presented in this volume: sexuality, sexual trauma, religious texts, representations of women’s bodies, and motherhood. The latter was another topic addressed in other early comics by women in the 1970s. MAMA! dramas (1978) is an anthology collected by Robbins that focused on single mothers and alternative schooling and housing arrangements, in which "our goal was to show the kind of motherhood that didn’t exist in The Ladies Home Journal."⁴ The theme of motherhood continues in our study in the developing field of religious Mommy comics and the work of Efi Ungar, Batsheva Havlin, Rivka Atara Zinman, Bat-El Leviani, Adi David, Rona Mor, and Reut Bortz; Sophie Hardach’s analysis of the unheimlich home of Charlotte Salomon, haunted by maternal suicide; and the death of Fanya in childbirth in Unterzakhn.

In recent years, comics dedicated to illness and medical narratives have seen the emergence of a new genre, Graphic Medicine, and with it an explosion of related activities, such as conferences, publications, a website, and online activities.⁵ But women’s medical narratives predate the more formal constitution of Graphic Medicine. In an early comic, Abortion Eve (1973), for example, described by Robbins as one of the most important and unjustly forgotten feminist comics books, four women meet at an abortion clinic.⁶ Abortion Eve was produced by women for women to provide otherwise difficult-to-access medical and related information. More subjective experiences of illness, which nevertheless have a collective reach, are featured in Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders, through the works of Nancy K. Miller, who draws her shared chemotherapy session with her friend Aoibheann Sweeney; Marissa Moss, who traces family time, her swimming community, and loneliness as her husband declines; and Helen Blejerman, who narrates mother/daughter time that consists of eating dinner in the bathroom, as her mother becomes more mentally ill (see figs. 9, 61, 26).

As we bring Jewish women’s bodies in comics into focus, we are aware that this is historically the opposite of their treatment within Jewish culture. Amy Milligan writes: The bodies of Jewish women have historically been marginalized and this marginalization has been compounded by any form of ‘minority’ designation.⁷ When Jewish women’s bodies are considered in religious texts they have certain associations, as Elana Bloomfield writes: Within many traditional Jewish texts, women’s bodies are portrayed as fertile vessels through which they can birth children and fulfil their nation-building roles.⁸ She continues: Women’s natural, passive fertility became a fundamental part of the nation-building endeavour and a necessity to Jewish survival.⁹ But what of the Jewish woman’s body that is not a fertile vessel either from choice or otherwise? Years after Diane Noomin’s groundbreaking Baby Talk: A Tale of 3 4 Miscarriages (1993), this collection explores loss and infertility, such as Miriam Libicki’s miscarriage, but also Sarah Lightman’s decision to use contraception and Harley Quinn’s choice to remain child-free (see figs. 1–7, 10–12, 21).

Daily Jewish religious life creates bodily borders and separations, orchestrated by religious and traditional rituals and obligations, including categories of Kosher/Traif, Clean/Unclean, Holy/Profane. In Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders, Miriam Libicki titles her comic Sheretz, after the Torah designation for a creature that, when touched, can make a person impure; Emil Ferris discusses the mourning rituals of her grandmother during the shivah week; and Marissa Moss records the changing relationship her dying husband had to Shabbat, the holy day of rest (see fig. 13). Women’s bodies are also a space where many of these boundaries occur. The menarche as a boundary between girlhood and womanhood is the moment that the religious rules of Niddah, literally translated as separated, must be observed. In Amy Kurzweil’s graphic novel, Flying Couch, the menarche is bracketed by family history and cultural traditions. This act of coming of age is backgrounded by her grandmother’s Holocaust experiences: We didn’t have Kotex in Warsaw (see fig. 34).¹⁰ The transition was greeted by an act of violence: slapping a daughter at the onset of her first period.¹¹ In Orthodox Jewish communities, after puberty, women are physically separated from men to different spaces for prayers, and this can extend to eating and socializing. In Israel, public religious areas become contentious as opposing religious groups claim sovereignty.¹² Within the comics of Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders, women may be separated into different spaces, but this can be challenged and does not necessarily serve to disempower them. In Die Bubbeh, Eva refuses to return to the kitchen when her father tells her, Girls do not need to read, and sets out to be educated. In Adi David’s comic, two Orthodox women punish a selfish date from their balcony at synagogue (see figs. 12, 69).

There is a range of underwear, unterzakhn, on show in our collection, from the bloody stains of Sheretz to The Surreal McCoy’s mother’s brand-new, shop-bought, prettily ribboned pairs, which will encase, support, and shape the bodies of her Iraqi friends and family in Deep Home. Revealing, unraveling, uncomfortable, and liberating, the comics presented here are created despite the boundaries placed on these women’s bodies; these narratives illustrate women’s bodily experiences.

Borders

If bodies are a site of intersection between the personal and political, the demarcations between different modes of being can offer productive insights into the pressures that form them. The volume uses the notion of borders to conceptualize the complex and manifold concerns and forms of Jewish women’s comics, and in doing so, emphasizes that even the most intimate and personal art is political. The word border is associated, first, with territorial demarcation. Accordingly, many discussions of borders as a critical category are concerned specifically with geopolitical boundaries and the conditions of possibility they create for or deny to those who live within, or are denied entry to (sometimes contested), nation-states.¹³ Judith Butler, for example, argues in Parting Ways, an analysis of Israel-Palestine, that the border is always a way of maintaining a relationship with what is excluded by the border.¹⁴ Meditating on the formation and effects of territorial borders, Butler puts pressure on the promise of the nation-state to explore the centrality of exile and diaspora to Jewish and Palestinian life while searching for the possibilities of a less violent cohabitation between people in the region.¹⁵ Yet, Butler’s attention to the role of political borders in shaping conditions of livability also has a wider bearing. For, as she puts it, Since there is no self without a boundary, and that boundary is always a site of multiple relations, there is no self without its relations.¹⁶ Butler’s work shows that the border has a broad critical reach that encompasses structural issues—around power, representation, inclusion/exclusion, and the histories that inform them—as well as the complexities of subjectivity and psychic life. Here and throughout this collection, the term border similarly features as a multivalent category that not only refers to geopolitical matters but also to the discursive and social bounds that forge the self on the gendered, classed, and racialized intersections of sociopolitical, religious, and historical circumstance.

Jewish Women in Comics

The visual-verbal art of comics is an especially apt medium for examining some of these complexities. Tahneer Oksman has argued, Because comics trades in space, in the potential to shape experience as a matter of perception, scale and positioning, it is a medium well suited to the challenging task of envisioning a contiguous and relational sense of belonging and not belonging.¹⁷ The concept of the border in turn serves as a useful metaphor for thinking through the particular artistic practice of comics-making: the lines, marks, and shadows that draw life onto the page, sometimes structured into panels and gutters and other times spilling across the page. Borders in comics, whether formally drawn or materially marked by the size of the page, are spatial indicators of specific artistic practices and the various visual genres they draw on, and they direct and disrupt the reader’s engagement with the content. But they are also reminders of what lies beyond: that art is made in context(s), a product of many contingencies that feed into the creative process. By considering borders and how they are represented, we attend to what Oksman calls Jewish women’s comics, visual mapping practice based in rebellions and disorientations but nevertheless resulting in partial affiliations and identifications.¹⁸ Or, to say this differently, we attend to the relationship between life and art, especially in terms of how Jewishness inflects the work of the artists in the collection.

Contributions cover a wide range of genres from the autobiographical to the fantastic, from horror to (family) history. They address topics as diverse as nostalgia, infertility, artistic collaboration, illness, Judaism, the Holocaust, and LGBTQ+ life and representation. This work spans the breadth of comics studies, a field that first gathered momentum around the 1980s and early 1990s when questions about form and the cultural standing of comics came under sustained scrutiny in the work of influential artists and critics such as Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, and Trina Robbins.¹⁹ The rich critical vocabulary—terms such as sequential art and graphic narrative, and more genre-specific concepts such as graphic novel, graphic memoir, and Graphic Medicine—indicate some of the critical shifts and ongoing contestations about how to define verbal-visual art. Deborah Elizabeth Whaley, for instance, has recently argued that Eisner’s influential notion of sequential art is a theoretical red herring, because sequential art defies linear interpretation, since the mind must process image and text at the same time, and encode and decode the work based on a litany of extratextual factors and a larger body of intertextual grammars that the genre or title might reference.²⁰ Hillary L. Chute and Marianne DeKoven, in turn, favor the term graphic narrative [which] does the work of narration at least in part through drawing-making the question of style legible—so it is a form that also always refuses a problematic transparency, through an explicit awareness of its own surfaces.²¹ As appropriate to their writing, contributors throughout the collection work with these different terminologies. For the book title, however, we have deliberately chosen the older term comics. It, more than any other, encompasses the multiplicities of visual-verbal art and its long and complex histories. Comics is broad enough to cover both traditional and new engagements with the medium and its many genres, from superhero(ine) comics to the visual diary. At the same time, comics indexes the complex economics of the form, which has generated a multi-billion-dollar industry while also remaining a preferred medium for alternative, feminist, and LGBTQ+ countercultural art.²²

The collection includes work from well-established and emerging comics artists. It makes two significant interventions: one, it continues the project of acknowledging the significant contribution of Jewish women to comics, and two, in doing so, it contributes to efforts to challenge a form and a field that have long been dominated by (white) men. The Jewish contribution to comics and the significance of women artists have been examined, largely, separate from men. For example, in an American context, critics such as Victoria Aarons, Paul Buhle, Arie Kaplan, Derek Royal Parker, Samantha Baskind, and Ranen Omer-Sherman have charted, in different ways, the work of Jewish comics artists, while influential studies by Trina Robbins and Hillary L. Chute have documented the significant work of women cartoonists.²³ Yet, it was not until the publication of Sarah Lightman’s Graphic Details: Jewish Women’s Confessional Comics in Essays and Interviews in 2014 that the work of Jewish women’s comics artists started to receive more sustained attention as a collective as well as individual bodies of work.²⁴ Graphic Details is based on an exhibition of eighty comics artworks by Jewish women cocurated by Lightman and Michael Kaminer. It aimed to challenge the marginalization and exclusion of these artists from the comics and art industries, while, at the same time, exploring the range, breadth and depth of their work, partly with the aim of establishing a new creative family that is located outside of male comics culture.²⁵ This collection builds on the work undertaken by Graphic Details and other recent studies of Jewish women’s comics, such as our own special journal issue on Contemporary Comics by Jewish Women and Tahneer Oksman’s important How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?: Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs (2016).²⁶ It discusses some of the now more familiar American artists, alongside those working and publishing in other national contexts, including France, Georgia, Israel, and the United Kingdom.

The collection’s focus on Jewish women and its attempt to go beyond American contexts connects to the work of critical race scholars who have challenged the white male centrism of comics studies. Carolene Ayaka and Ian Hague have argued that comics is an inherently multicultural form, given that the modes of representation it has available to it implicate both cultures of images and cultures of words.²⁷ But in comics and comics culture and in criticism, we also find both the structural inequalities that define cultural production and the possibilities to challenge dominant narratives that exclude minorities. Pioneering studies such as Jeffrey Yang, Parry Sher, Keith Chow, and Jerry Ma’s collection Secret Identities: The Asian American Superhero Anthology (1992), Nancy Goldstein’s Jackie Ormes: The First African-American Woman Cartoonist (2008), Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González’s Graphic Borders: Latino Comic Books Past, Present, and Future (2016), Deborah Elizabeth Whaley’s Black Women in Sequence: Re-inking Comics, Graphic Novels, and Anime (2016), and Monalesia Earle’s Writing Queer Women of Color: Representation and Misdirection in Contemporary Fiction and Graphic Narratives (2019) have confronted the whiteness of comics studies and shown that the field itself has yet to reckon fully with its own critical boundaries in relation to questions of race.²⁸ Earle, for example, reveals how queer women of color remain marginalized in a mainstream comics culture that continues to privilege a white-centric norm despite the explosion of online comics and zines by queer women of color.²⁹ The whiteness of comics manifests in multiple ways, ranging from the commercial marginalization of artists of color to the perpetuation of anti-Black stereotypes, including in the work of influential figures such as Will Eisner, whose Ebony White has the exaggerated racial features that are one of the hallmarks of American popular culture’s engagement with Blackness throughout the twentieth century.

Questions about the racialization of Jewishness and its imbrications in the history of whiteness have themselves received considerable critical attention.³⁰ Some of these concerns inform the work included here. Comic artist Miriam Libicki, for example, who is represented in the collection with a meditation on (potential) pregnancy and motherhood in addition to an interview with Israeli comics artist Rutu Modan, noted in a 2017 interview that when she returned to the United States and settled in the Pacific Northwest after a period spent living in Israel, she developed a fear of disappearing as a Jew and becoming just another white person.³¹ Libicki argues that it was this fear that prompted her first forays into comics-making. In contrast, for artists such as Emil Ferris, Nino Biniashvili, and Corinne Pearlman, comics are part of a process of uncovering the hidden or submerged aspects of their Jewish family history. Ferris’s fictional work is influenced by her own American immigrant background as the child of a Maronite Lebanese father and a mother, whose own mother was a Crypto-Jew in New Mexico. Ferris was sent to a Jewish school but did not know that she herself was Jewish until adulthood. Jewishness was not hidden from Nino Biniashvili, but her upbringing was shaped by the dominant Christianity in Georgia, the Black Sea country, where she was born and grew up during the Soviet Union period. As an adult, Biniashvili moved between Georgia, the United States, and Israel. She says that her comics reflect that she is compulsively putting [herself] in a state of exile, not just geographically but in terms of a broader sense of not belonging. More humorously, Mira Sucharov and Rebecca Katz explore in their academic and artistic collaboration, how Escape From Russia became an established activity in Jewish American summer camps. This imaginary, and often ridiculous exercise, reflected on the real and dangerous emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel and was used to foster a love of Israel in the teenage campers.

The personal as political and the political as personal are intertwined threads running throughout the collection. Some contributors, such as Sharon Rudahl, tackle the impact of antisemitism, including in relation to the cross-generational reach of the Holocaust, which is the subject of Amy Kurzweil’s The Flying Couch (2016). Similarly, Jennifer Caplan’s chapter explores how nostalgia and memory function in the work of Miriam Katin, Liana Finck, and Leela Corman. These narratives, Caplan suggests, express the frailty of memory in the dreamscapes of Jewish women’s lives. Noa Lea Cohn examines the rise of what she calls religious Mommy comics by Orthodox women, while other contributors focus on sexual politics, including Trina Robbins in her feminist comics and criticism, Emily Steinberg in her work on desire, Ilana Zeffren in her comics about lesbian life and wider politics in Israel, and Megan Fowler in her analysis of Batwoman and Harley Quinn, which explores how mainstream comics allow for queer forms of (Jewish) dis/identification. In many contributions, the artistic process of comics-making is a self-reflexive part of the psychic process and is explored in Nancy K. Miller’s account of the realities of her cancer diagnosis. Further, Charlotte Salomon, Sarah Lightman, and Helen Blejerman delve into the intricacies of their artistic lives with keen insight as she in turn, focuses on the temporal and spatial binds of family ties. The Surreal McCoy reflects on the familial deep home in Baghdad that is lost to, yet alive in, her suburban London childhood home.

Together the contributions gathered illustrate a wide range of experiences and various modes of (dis)identification around Jewishness. Whilst many of them directly reflect, in some way, on the lives of those who produced them, they all carry mimetic traces of life, scratches, however faint, of the experiential and affective concerns that shaped them and their reception. According to Oksman, "Jewish identification begins with intraethnic difference, the very detail or details that separate one self-proclaimed Jew from another—not, as has been the norm in canonized Jewish American literary culture as well as traditional histories of Jewish American culture and identity, with the differences based in the oversimplified binary of Jew versus non-Jew."³² The original artwork by, interviews with, and critical essays about comics artists from a wide range of backgrounds in this collection further problematizes the notion of a stable Jewish identity, exploring multiple sites of (dis)identification to (re)draw the boundaries of Jewishness, gender, and comics.

A creative and apt example of redrawing the boundaries in the field of Jewish women and comics can be seen in the final contribution to this volume. We end our book with a collaboration between academic Mira Sucharov and artist Rebecca Katz, Escape from Russia, which is published here for the first time. We did not know exactly where to place this piece. What section does it fall under? we wondered. Neither essay, nor interview, it is a joint project, not an independent text alongside a comic. Our own uncertainty in placing the work is exactly the dynamic of the growing field, where new definitions need to be found, new categories created. It fills us with delight to conclude our volume with this exciting addition, reflecting how the topic of Jewish Women and Comics is constantly evolving, and how those bodies that write and draw in these spheres, those bodies that are drawn and animated, continue to break new boundaries and, especially suitably for our book, new borders.

1. Margaret R. Miles, Carnal Knowing: Female Nakedness and Religious Meaning in the Christian West (Tunbridge Wells: Burnes & Oates, 1992), 18.

2. This is a huge topic but the following readings reflect how women’s bodies have been portrayed in different centuries and decades: Linda Nochlin, Women Art Power and Other Essays (Oxford: Westview Press, 1989); Madeline H. Caviness, Visualizing Women in the Middle Ages: Sight, Spectacle and Scopic Economy (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2001); Rosemary Betterton, An Intimate Distance: Women, Artists and the Body (London: Routledge, 1996); Kathy Battista, Renegotiating the Body: Feminist Art in 1970s London (London: I. B. Tauris, 2013).

3. Peggy Zeglin Brand, Feminist Art Epistemologies: Understanding Feminist Art, Hypatia 21, no. 3 (2006): 166–89. https://muse.jhu.edu/. Accessed November 21, 2018.

4. Trina Robbins, From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines (San Francisco, CA: Chronicle, 1999), 99.

5. For more details on Graphic Medicine, see their website: https://www.graphicmedicine.org, and publication, MK Czerwiec et al., Graphic Medicine Manifesto (Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State Univ. Press, 2015).

6. Robbins, Feminism, in Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels, ed. M. Keith Booker (Oxford: Greenwood Publishing, 2010), 214.

7. Amy K. Milligan, Embodying Herself: A Jewish Feminist Approach To Body Liberation, Perspectives: The