In this groundbreaking collection of essays, interviews, and artwork, contributors draw upon a rich treasure trove of Jewish women’s comics to explore the representation of Jewish women’s bodies and bodily experience in pictorial narratives. Spanning national, cultural, and artistic borders, the essays shine a light on the significant contributions of Jewish women to comics. The volume features established figures including Emil Ferris, Amy Kurzweil, Miriam Libicki, Trina Robbins, Sharon Rudahl, and Ilana Zeffren, alongside works by artists translated for the first time into English, such as artist Rona Mor. Exploring topics of family, motherhood, miscarriages, queerness, gender and Judaism, illness, war, Haredi and Orthodox family life, and the lingering impact of the Holocaust, the contributors present unique, at times intensely personal, insights into how Jewishness intersects with other forms of identity and identification. In doing so, the volume deepens our understanding of Jewish women’s experiences.

The comics within capture in intimate, often awkward, but always relatable detail the tribulations and triumphs of life. In particular, the lives of 18 Jewish women artists who bare all in their work, which appeared in the internationally acclaimed exhibition "Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women." The comics are enhanced by original essays and interviews with the artists that provide further insight into the creation of autobiographical comics that resonate beyond self, beyond gender, and beyond ethnicity.

In her first collection of graphic essays, Miriam Libicki investigates what it means globally and culturally to be Jewish, dating from her time in the Israeli military to her tenure as an art professor. Toward a Hot Jew is a new high watermark in autobiographical comics and shows Miriam Libicki as a powerful witness to history in the tradition of Martjane Satrapi and Joe Sacco.

Jews created the first comic book, the first graphic novel, the first comic book convention, the first comic book specialty store, and they helped create the underground comics (or "Comix") movement of the late '60s and early '70s. Many of the creators of the most famous comic books, such as Superman, Spiderman, X-Men, and Batman, as well as the founders of MAD Magazine, were Jewish. From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books tells their stories and demonstrates how they brought a uniquely Jewish perspective to their work and to the comics industry as a whole. Over-sized and in full color, From Krakow to Krypton is filled with sidebars, cartoon bubbles, comic book graphics, original design sketches, and photographs. It is a visually stunning and exhilarating history.

American comics reflect the distinct sensibilities and experiences of the Jewish American men who played an outsized role in creating them, but what about the contributions of Jewish women? Focusing on the visionary work of seven contemporary female Jewish cartoonists, Tahneer Oksman draws a remarkable connection between innovations in modes of graphic storytelling and the unstable, contradictory, and ambiguous figurations of the Jewish self in the postmodern era. Oksman isolates the dynamic Jewishness that connects each frame in the autobiographical comics of Aline Kominsky Crumb, Vanessa Davis, Miss Lasko-Gross, Lauren Weinstein, Sarah Glidden, Miriam Libicki, and Liana Finck. Rooted in a conception of identity based as much on rebellion as identification and belonging, these artists' representations of Jewishness take shape in the spaces between how we see ourselves and how others see us. They experiment with different representations and affiliations without forgetting that identity ties the self to others. Stemming from Kominsky Crumb's iconic 1989 comic "Nose Job," in which her alter ego refuses to assimilate through cosmetic surgery, Oksman's study is an arresting exploration of invention in the face of the pressure to disappear.

Maus I: A Survivor's Tale and Maus II - the complete story of Vladek Spiegelman and his wife, living and surviving in Hitler's Europe. By addressing the horror of the Holocaust through cartoons, the author captures the everyday reality of fear and is able to explore the guilt, relief and extraordinary sensation of survival - and how the children of survivors are in their own way affected by the trials of their parents. A contemporary classic of immeasurable significance.

Superman is the original superhero, an American icon, and arguably the most famous character in the world--and he's Jewish! Introduced in June 1938, the Man of Steel was created by two Jewish teens, Jerry Siegel, the son of immigrants from Eastern Europe, and Joe Shuster, an immigrant. They based their hero's origin story on Moses, his strength on Samson, his mission on the golem, and his nebbish secret identity on themselves. They made him a refugee fleeing catastrophe on the eve of World War II and sent him to tear Nazi tanks apart nearly two years before the US joined the war. In the following decades, Superman's mostly Jewish writers, artists, and editors continued to borrow Jewish motifs for their stories, basing Krypton's past on Genesis and Exodus, its society on Jewish culture, the trial of Lex Luthor on Adolf Eichmann's, and a future holiday celebrating Superman on Passover. A fascinating journey through comic book lore, American history, and Jewish tradition, this book examines the entirety of Superman's career from 1938 to date, and is sure to give readers a newfound appreciation for the Mensch of Steel!

The Jerusalem Bible, Ellerdale Road, St Paul's Girls School and a baby monitor: books and streets, buildings and objects fill this bildungsroman set in Hampstead, North West London. Sarah Lightman has been drawing her life since she was a 22-year-old undergraduate at The Slade School of Art. The Book of Sarah traces her journey from modern Jewish orthodoxy to a feminist Judaism, as she searches between the complex layers of family and family history that she inherited and inhabited. While the act of drawing came easily, the letting go of past failures, attachments and expectations did not. It is these that form the focus of Sarah's astonishingly beautiful pages, as we bear witness to her making the world her own.

This study examines the representations of Jewish women in comic books and graphic novels, starting with a discussion of common stereotypes about Jewish women in American popular culture. The primary sources under investigation include Gilbert Hernandez's Love and Rockets X, Aline Kominsky-Crumb's autobiographical works, the X-Men comic books, Art Spiegelman's Maus and Portrait of the artist as a young %@&*!, Joann Sfar's The Rabbi's cat, and J.T. Waldman's Megillat Esther.

The early work of the pioneering feminist cartoonist plus her acclaimed new story “Dream House" Aline Kominsky-Crumb immediately made her mark in the Bay Area’s underground comix scene with unabashedly raw, dirty, unfiltered comics chronicling the thoughts and desires of a woman coming of age in the 1960s. Kominsky-Crumb didn’t worry about self-flattery. In fact, her darkest secrets and deepest insecurities were all the more fodder for groundbreaking stories. Her exaggerated comix alter ego, Bunch, is self-destructive and grotesque but crackles with the self-deprecating humor and honesty of a cartoonist confident in the story she wants to tell. Collecting comics from the 1970s through today, Love That Bunch is shockingly prescient while still being an authentic story of its era. Kominsky-Crumb was ahead of her time in juxtaposing the contradictory nature of female sexuality with a proud, complicated feminism. Most important, she does so without apology. One of the most famous and idiosyncratic cartoonists of our time, Kominsky-Crumb traces her steps from a Beatles-loving fangirl, an East Village groupie, an adult grappling with her childhood, and a 1980s housewife and mother, to a new thirty-page story, “Dream House,” that looks back on her childhood forty years later. Love That Bunch will be Kominsky-Crumb’s only solo-authored book in print. Originally published as a book in 1990, this new expanded edition follows her to the present, including an afterword penned by the noted comics scholar Hillary Chute.