Jews and American Comics from Another Angle
by Jeet Heer
Friday, April 16, 2010
A great deal of ink has been spilled in recent years on the subject of Jews and comics: Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Paul Buhle’s Jews and American Comics, along with many other books and articles.
Anyone interested in the topic who is Toronto will want to attend the Toronto Jewish Film Festival next week, which has a special program on Jews and comics. Among the guests who will speak are Ben Katchor, Harvey Pekar, and Paul Buhle (who is that rarest of things, a goyim who is fluent in Yiddish).
Here is a new angle on the subject: I think writers have been too quick to assume that the Jewish immigrant community, which was very divided on ethnic and class lines, was monolithic.
Fredric Wertham was Jewish, as were many of the cartoonists whose works he targeted (you know the drill: Siegel, Shuster, Eisner, Kane, Feldstein, Kurtzman, etc.).
But here’s the dividing line: Wertham was a German Jew, heir to an assimilated tradition that cherished European high culture. He belonged to the same cohort of educated German Jews as T.W. Adorno, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. With a few exceptions, notably Eisner, most of the Jewish cartoonists came from East European Jewry, which was much more plebeian and less assimilated, defined by a rich Yiddish popular culture.
Throughout the late 19th and early 20th century, German Jews came into cultural conflict with their East European brethren, who were seen as embarrassingly uncouth and rowdy. As Ande Manners noted in her 1972 book Poor Cousins: “To [Rabi Isaac Mayer] Wise, the torrent of crude, unworldly Russian Jews seemed the only major obstacle to the fifty-year goal of Americanizing Judaism.”
Is it too much to see the tension between German Jews such as Rabbi Wise and Russian Jews at the beginning of the 20th century as a precursor to Wertham’s battles against the unseemly and vulgar comic book industry in the 1940s and 1950s?
It would be interesting also to situate Art Spiegelman in this inter-Jewish struggle since he belongs to neither camp. His family came from Poland, which was half-way between the ghettos of Russia and the assimilated bourgeois culture of Germany. As such, Spiegelman has a foot in both camps. While he doesn’t care for Jack Kirby he’s very much at home with the Yiddishkeit world of Milt Gross and Harvey Kurtzman, while also sharing a broader appreciation for the high culture of Mitteleuropa. These two strands of the Jewish past (the low culture of East Europe and the high culture of Mitteleuropa) define Spiegelman’s artistic DNA.
Labels: Art Spiegelman, Ben Katchor, Harvey Pekar, Paul Buhle
As a Jew who loves comics, I have to say I’m a little sick of the sort of ethno-narcissism of Jews writing about Jews and comics lately–in addition to Buhle’s book, there is also
“Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero: by Danny Fingeroth and Stan Lee, and “From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books” by Arie Kaplan, all of which have come out in the past two or three years, and that follows not just Chabon but the really great “Men of Tomorrow” by Gerard Jones.
I haven’t read any of these books other than Jones’, but just from flipping through them in stores they seem redundant and absurd.
That being said, from my non-scholarly knowledge of Jewish historical culture, I believe that Polish Jews are usually placed pretty squarely in the “ostjuden” (Eastern European Jewish) camp of dirty, vulgar orientalized “other” to the German “western” Jews.
It’s also a mistake of course, to think of those terms as monolithic within themselves— “westerness” and “easterness” were as much class characteristics as anything. Not to mention that German Jews immigrated to North America a generation or two before their Eastern counterparts, and thus were more assimilated and Americanized, and thus more likely, as every immigrant group invariably did, to turn on their late-arriving brothers as “uncouth” “uncivilized” etc. et.c, something not unique to the Jews.
P.S.- despite having just said I’m sick of hearing about Jews and comics, I do think that one area that hasn’t been written about, to my knowledge, is Zionism and American comics. As an anti-Zionist, I’m always interested in looking at how American pop culture absorbed Zionism, frequently through Jewish cultural workers (though in the case of the movie industry, also through Jewish and Israeli producers).
Another comic that deals with zionism would be Willingham’s Fables. I have to add though, I’ve only read the first three collections. And while I haven’t read the 1001 Arabian Nights-inspired The 1001 Nights of Snowfall, I would imagine that one would be a prime candidate for closer examination.
A little googling tells me that Willingham has actually been pretty explicit with it in the later stories.
@EH. Maybe the topic has been written about too much, although there is room for a deeper discussion (as I tried to indicate with my brief response) that focuses on ethnic and class divisions within the Jewish community.
About Zionism in comics, the only thing that comes to mind is a story “Raid On Entebbe” by Jessica Steinberg and Spain Rodriguez from The New Two-Fisted Tales (1993). But other than that I’m drawing a blank, which is interesting.
There’s also Waltzing with Bashir (which, actually, I think was an animated film before it was a graphic novel). Highly recommended.
Sorry for some belated pedantry, but one shouldn’t praise someone’s fluent Yiddish while calling him a “goyim” (plural).
As the son of a Jewish Viennese father whose parents (my grandparents) came from further east, I share eh’s understanding of how Polish Jews were regarded. Chelm, in the humorous stories of the Wise Men of Chelm, is in (eastern) Poland.
@”o” the humanatee! Right, Paul Buhle also corrected me on that point. This is my week for making mistakes about Yiddish. When I introduced the Katchor/Pekar/Buhle talk. I heard a gasp from the audience when I noticed that when I mentioned that the Forward was now an English language paper, not a Yiddish one. I knew I had blundered and sure enough after the talk a very elderly lady (she talked about her comic book collector son — “my boy” — who is 61) came up to me and repremanded me because the Forward does still in fact come out in Yiddish every week, in addition to having an English and a Russian edition. In fact, the Yiddish Forward isn’t even a translation of the English newspaper but a completely separate publication. She was slightly mollified when I introducted her to Ben Katchor (who of course knows some of the people at the Yiddish Forward). She also got to meet a comic collector who had a rare, prized edition of the Yiddish version of Eisner’s A Contract With God — so far as I know the only Yiddish graphic novel.
Jeet, so that was you! I was in the audience and heard your name, but it didn’t really register to me that it was the same guy whose writings I bump into regularly online.
Paul and Harvey seem to have an interesting relationship…there’s sort of a love-hate dynamic going on there.
I find it very difficult to believe that the German Jew/Ostjuden tension had anything to do with Frederic Wertham’s objection to comics. That clash was primarily between German Jews who’d come to the States in the mid-nineteenth century and the “Russians”–a broad category including Poles (who were, as EH correctly points out, very much considered Ostjuden), Lithuanians, Romanians, Ukrainians, etc.–who arrived in the U.S. in great numbers in 1881.
Wertham, like Strauss and Arendt, was himself an immigrant–a refugee from fascism. Hardly one of the old-line German Jewish families (like the Loebs, Schiffs, Warburgs, Seligmans, and others) who disdained their Eastern European coreligionists.
Moreover, the Polish Jews, far from being a middle ground between the Germans and the other Ostjuden, were at the bottom of the barrel. Many of them came from a region called Galicia, which was one of the most backward and poverty-stricken regions of Europe. Galicia made Albania look good. The Russians and LIthuanians scorned the Poles as much as the Germans scorned them.
A far more likely candidate for Jews who straddled the German/Ostjud divide would be the Czechs or the Viennese, many of whom had origins in the East, but who gravitated to Mitteleuropean high culture upon arriving in Prague or Vienna.
At the end of the day, Wertham was a decent and well-meaning man who was, I think, mistaken when it came to comic books. He never argued for censorship–merely for self-restraint on the part of the creators. And what a lot of people forget is that he also fought racial segregation, and was cited in Brown v. Board of Education, arguing that segregation was harmful. His war on comics, and his subsequent demonization by comics fans, overshadowed his broader concern that kids were being subjected to a lot of pernicious and dangerous influences from all over the media. Having seen some of the appalling stuff that passes for children’s entertainment–including toy and candy advertising thinly disguised as cartoons–it’s tough to argue with his broader point.
But reading his objection to violence in comics as a manifestation of the German Jews’ disdain for the Ostjuden is a mistake. Interesting article, though.
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