The Jewish Graphic Novel

Over the past eight years, there has been a flurry of scholarly interest in comics and Jewish identity. In that time, there have been no less than eleven studies published on this topic, including Simcha Weinstein’s Up, Up and Oy Vey! How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero (2006), Danny Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero (2007), Paul Buhle’s Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form (2008), Arie Kaplan’s From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books (2008), Joël Kotek’s Cartoons and Extremism: Israel and the Jews in Arab and Western Media (2009), Thomas Andrae and Mel Gordon’s Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman: The First Jewish Superhero, from the Creators of Superman (2010), and my own guest-edited special issue of Shofar on Jewish comics in 2011, besides the various biographies or interview collections focusing on a specific Jewish creator or group of creators. All of these texts have in common a desire to define Jewish comics through a series of critical interrogations, either explicitly stated or indirectly expressed. Are comics Jewish because of their content? Can a comic be considered Jewish even though its artists are not? Conversely, just because a writer/illustrator is Jewish, is the output necessarily defined as Jewish art or literature? And even if the creators are Jewish, what kind of experience—religious, cultural, observant, or secular—most qualifies as Jewish? These questions are posed in four recent titles, each engaging with the representation of Jewish history, identity, and cultural issues through comics.

Art · Art history · Comics · Haskalah · Jewish American literature · Jewish studies · Judaism · Literature · Theology · Comics and Graphic Narratives · History · Jewish Identity and Society · Philosophy · Religious studies