{"id":2153,"date":"2010-04-16T14:58:11","date_gmt":"2010-04-16T18:58:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=2153"},"modified":"2010-04-16T14:58:11","modified_gmt":"2010-04-16T18:58:11","slug":"jews-and-american-comics-from-another-angle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/?p=2153","title":{"rendered":"Jews and American Comics from Another Angle"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>A great deal of ink has been spilled in recent years on the subject of Jews and comics: Chabon\u2019s The Amazing<\/em> Adventures of Kavalier and Clay<\/em>, Paul Buhle\u2019s Jews and American Comics<\/em>, along with many other books and articles.<\/p>\n

Anyone interested in the topic who is Toronto will want to attend the Toronto Jewish Film Festival<\/a> next week, which has a special program on Jews and comics<\/a>. 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). \u00a0<\/p>\n

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.
\n
\nFredric Wertham was Jewish, as were many of the cartoonists whose works he targeted (you know the drill: Siegel, Shuster, Eisner, Kane, Feldstein, Kurtzman, etc.).<\/p>\n

But here\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

Throughout the late 19th<\/sup> and early 20th<\/sup> 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<\/em>: \u201cTo [Rabi Isaac Mayer] Wise, the torrent of crude, unworldly Russian Jews seemed the only major obstacle to the fifty-year goal of Americanizing Judaism.\u201d<\/p>\n

Is it too much to see the tension between German Jews such as Rabbi Wise and Russian Jews at the beginning of the 20th<\/sup> century as a precursor to Wertham\u2019s battles against the unseemly and vulgar comic book industry in the 1940s and 1950s?<\/p>\n

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\u2019t care for Jack Kirby he\u2019s 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\u2019s artistic DNA.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A great deal of ink has been spilled in recent years on the subject of Jews and comics: Chabon\u2019s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Paul Buhle\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[78,105,551,1008],"class_list":["post-2153","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-blog","tag-spiegelman","tag-katchor","tag-pekar","tag-paul-buhle"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2153","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2153"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2153\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2153"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2153"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/comicscomicsmag.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2153"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}