JWST 350 - Confronting Modernity

Semester Offered: Spring
1 unit(s)

Topic for 2016/17b: Jews, Comics, and Graphic Novels. An in-depth exploration of the contributions of Jewish writers and artists to the field of comics and graphics novels from historical, regional, and topical perspectives. Issues and texts may include: Jews, Assimilation, and the Comics: the Jewish creation of the American superhero (Superman, Batman, Spiderman, the X-Men, and the Golem), Reading/Writing in Jewish: midrash meets comics (J. T. Waldman’s Magillat Esther), satire from a Jewish eye (Jules Feiffer’s Voice comics), Gender: Second Wave feminism and the rise of the Jewish woman’s graphic novel (Aline Kominsky’s Love that Bunch and Diane Noomin’s Didi Glitz), contemporary women’s graphic art (Keren Katz’s “My Skeleton Week,” Liana Finck’s A Bintel Brief, and Vanessa Davis’s Make Me a Woman), History: reimagining the great migration (Leela Corman’s Unterzakhn), comics and the Holocaust (Spiegelman’s Maus and Bernice Eisenstein’s I Was a Child of Holocaust Survivors), Place: the graphic novel in and about Israel (Rutu Modan’s The Property and Miriam Libicki’s Jobnik!), Jewish comics reimagine the urban (Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer), Jews in Europe and Northern Africa (Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat), and online Jews (Eli Valley’s “I Ran So Far Away” and “Food Fight”). Peter Antelyes.

Three 50-minute periods.