Dear Sarah,

The letter thing works for me because, for some reason, I’ve always had strange feelings toward you, feelings I don’t usually reserve for entertainers, especially ones whose career highs include Greg the Bunny and School of Rock. That’s because ever since I first saw you play Wendy, the disgruntled new writer on The Larry Sanders Show, sometime in the mid-1990s, I thought you had a great chance of becoming one of those very rare and truly important comedians who not only deliver killer lines but also produce the sort of work that is insightful and devastating and that matures, and in special cases can even change the world. Lenny Bruce talked about race when the rest of America was terrified by it, and America laughed and passed the Civil Rights Act.

I was sure, Sarah, that you would grow up and become America’s first female comedian who was powerful as well as sexual and utterly hilarious. Lucy tried, and got spanked. Elayne Boosler tried, and wound up sad and alone in a bar in Chicago, or at least that’s how the comedy industry treated her. Roseanne tried, but being overweight and unattractive cushioned even her meanest and most meaningful blue-collar jokes. All Roseanne could do to really make us mad was grab her crotch while singing the national anthem, and we never really forgave her.

But you had another thing going. You were beautiful and intensely clever, which allowed you to construct this repulsive persona of a privileged, vile woman who distrusts anyone and anything except for her own self-worth. The critic Sam Anderson called this character a meta-bigot and placed you in the company of other mock-ignorant intolerants like Ali G and South Park’s Eric Cartman. He also noted that “unlike other meta-bigots, she doesn’t insulate herself with fictional characters: Her persona—an incestuous, genital-obsessed, racist narcissist—looks and sounds exactly like Silverman herself.”

Anderson is right. And that’s a big problem. As I watched you perform on stage, in movies, and on television these past two decades, I noticed you retreat further and further into shtick, your powers depleted, your promise gone. Jews didn’t find you funny anymore. Women never really found you funny. Post-civil-rights-era comedians are funny because they channel the forbidden Id of the group. So, whose Id are you, anyway?

Consider the following two jokes. Here’s one from earlier on in your career: “I was raped by a doctor, which is so bittersweet for a Jewish girl.” So much violence in so few words against so many sacred markers of identity politics, even if many Jewish girls of my acquaintance actually don’t find rape fantasies funny; they enjoy them.

Women didn’t like you, and you knew it. Men wanted to screw you, and you knew it. You were nasty but confused, and your act lost whatever focus it once had. In a recent comedy concert, you had this to say (I’m paraphrasing here, but only mildly): “What’s the worst thing about the Holocaust? The cost!” At best, this can pass as some weak attempt at sarcasm, but, more accurately, it’s a pun, a verbal non sequitur whose sole purpose is to convert uneasy emotions into easy laughs.

And that, I’m afraid, is your true legacy. Rather than open the door to women comics who wanted to be just as depraved as the boys, you created a new category of stereotype, one that urges the attractive and witty female comedian to retreat as far as she can into mock-cutesy unlikability, to mitigate her libido by laying on the bitterness and the bile, to abandon complex jokes that do real violence against real ills and adopt instead a sort of facile, sophomoric humor that reeks of years spent backstage smoking blunts. This is how you end up with an album filled with song titles like “Will We Eat Each Other’s Doodies?” and “Trimming Your Bush.” This is also how you end up with even blander, more put-together comics like Whitney Cummings, who currently has two network sitcoms and who seems to have begun her career already as a latter-day Silverman, all bark and no bite.

I’m not saying, of course, that you alone are to blame. You work within the system, and it’s not easy undoing decades of discrimination. But Tina Fey’s career is much, much more luminous than yours. Rather than flip the finger at Saturday Night Live for not getting her jokes, she fought uphill until she was the boss and could make cute kissy-faces at her vanquished rivals who once called her “Herman the German.” When she was offered the opportunity to write a memoir, she titled it Bossypants and produced a smart and funny and poignant essay on being a female comic in a male-dominated industry. It’s a book you can imagine may inspire real health-care reform, or at least help a few young girl comedy nerds to overcome their fears and get up on stage and maybe someday become the female Richard Pryor.

Your memoir, on the other hand, was called The Bedwetter. It included a fictional eulogy by God, who mourns your passing by saying: “She loved dogs, New York, television, children, friendship, sex, laughing, heartbreaking songs, marijuana, farts, and cuddling.” It’s the kind of book you can imagine may inspire young girl comedy nerds to say filthy things in a silly voice so that boys will think they’re hot. Daria did it first, and she was edgier and funnier than you are. And she was a cartoon.

These are harsh words, Sarah, but I’m only writing because I hope that there’s a project somewhere in the future, a script or a book or a stand-up show, that would bring back that same brilliant, fearless comic I fell in love with two decades ago, and that you’ll emerge from your scatological skunk-weed haze to once again tell the kind of jokes that people remember long after the fact and that leave us happy and horny and agitated. That, after all, is what comics do, and few can do it better than you when you are on your game, which last happened sometime before George Bush invaded Iraq and Steve Martin became a writer for The New Yorker. Sarah, I still think you’re hot, but I’m begging you: Please try harder.

Love,

Liel

Phineas and Ferb, as I will endeavor to explain to those of you without a 6-to-12-year-old kid or an adult hipster in your home, is a cartoon about two young stepbrothers who spend their summer vacation coming up with insanely creative activities. They design a backyard roller coaster, create a circus, build a model of Angkor Wat out of playing cards, organize a public-awareness campaign for the shoelace aglet, take cows to the moon in a homemade rocket to discover whether low gravity produces better-tasting ice cream, help the 1980s hair band Love Händel reunite, and miniaturize a submarine for a Fantastic Voyage-esque journey into a Chihuahua. Meanwhile, unbeknownst to the boys, Phineas’ pet platypus, Perry, who seems to be a typically passive, malodorous mammal, is actually a brilliant secret agent for O.W.C.A., the Organization Without a Cool Acronym. Agent P’s assignment: to thwart the evil schemes of Dr. Doofenshmirtz, who is perpetually plotting to rule the entire tri-state area.

Every episode has at least one lyrically complex musical number referencing any of a myriad musical styles: Bollywood musical, 16th-century madrigal, Yiddish folk song, ABBA, Broadway, lounge, funk, dancehall, doo-wop, ska, sea shanty, girl-group pop-punk, rap (as in one unforgettable bit titled “S.I.M.P. Squirrels in My Pants”), and Japanese pop.

If it all sounds a bit frenetic, well, it is. It’s also very brainy. The show’s creators, Dan Povenmire and Jeff “Swampy” Marsh (who play Doofenshmirtz and Perry’s boss, Major Monogram, respectively), claim to be influenced by both Tex Avery and Woody Allen, and it shows. When my 6-year-old, Maxine, roams around the house singing about shark anatomy (“though technically vertebrates, they’re cartilaginous!”), I know she’s been watching Phineas and Ferb.

“We want to celebrate being smart,” Povenmire told me in a recent telephone interview. “A lot of media and society for kids is more interested in being cool than in anything else.”

“To us, being knowledgeable is being cool,” Marsh chimed in (the two interrupted each other and finished each other’s sentences throughout the interview). Perhaps the show’s complexity—there are multiple plot threads per episode, as in a show made for adults—and atypical sensibility explain why it took Povenmire and Marsh 16 years of steady pitching to sell the idea.

Phineas and Ferb celebrates creativity, but it also gets a kick out of pure, crystalline nerdiness, as embodied by the boys’ friend Baljeet. When Baljeet accidentally enrolls in a summertime rock camp, thinking it’s about geology, he is distressed to learn that he’s expected to shred. Though the brothers try to help him channel his inner headbanger, he’s terrified he’ll flunk. It’s not until he learns he’s not getting graded at all that he can really cut loose, screaming in fury about not being graded:

I have been burned by vague lesson plans and a free-floating curriculum!
I like my rules, baby, etched in stone, ‘cause you know I am going to stick to them!
Can I get a syllabus? A little discipline?
Judge me on a scale from A to F!
You wasted all my time learning how to rhyme, then left me hangin’ from a treble clef!

Somebody give me a grade!
I need the man keeping me down!
Somebody give me a grade!
Is there a red pen in this town?
Somebody give me a grade!
I already said it! I need that extra credit today!
And make it an A!

Oh, I am so upset!
I am stone cold honor roll!
I won’t be told how to vent!
I won’t cry or sigh; I’m here to testify,
Up with the establishment!

Phineas and Ferb never mock Baljeet. They just try to help him chill. It occurs to me that Phineas and Ferb are just the sort of kids that parents like me—Jewish, educated, progressive, upper-middle-class, anxious—dream of having. They’re curious, self-motivated, polite, kind, resourceful, productive. They’re menschy. They want to help others. They are not snide.

They also have a great deal of freedom. Unlike our over-programmed kids, they’re not spending their summer in a high-priced sleep-away camp or a Mandarin-immersion robotics program. Yet they’re never bored; every day they come up with some astonishing project. (One of the show’s taglines is “Ferb! I know what we’re gonna do today!”) While we want our kids to be sweet self-starters like these boys, we’re also freaked out by the notion of allowing them unstructured time. We live in a morass of Tiger Mom talk, “dangerized” perceptions of childhood, and anxiety about letting kids be free-range. Heart-rending stories about abducted children don’t seem the tragic aberrations they are but rather like part and parcel of growing up. The national crime rate is actually significantly lower than it was in the 1970s, 1980s, or 1990s, when we grew up, but our level of anxiety seems about a million times greater than that of our own parents.

And we sort of want our kids to heed Ms. Frizzle, the teacher in the Magic School Bus books who cries, “Take chances! Make mistakes! Get messy!” But we also sort of don’t. Messiness is messy. Mistakes and chances sound OK in theory, but not if they don’t work out. What if, God forbid, you get hurt or look stupid or torpedo your chances of getting into a good college? Phineas and Ferb are the antidote to that overthink-y angst. As Marsh said, “Phineas is my parenting role model: relax, be creative.”

I asked Marsh and Povenmire about the show’s lack of snippy snark—the tone is so different from most tween TV. “It’s easier to write comedy when you go to the mean place,” Povenmire said. “But it’s more rewarding when you keep it nice. I have a good friend who said he wouldn’t let his daughter watch anything on the Disney channel. She was too young to get the positive messages at the end; she was just aping the way the characters talked. I thought OK, how do I write a show my friend would let his daughter watch?”

Marsh, who met Povenmire when both were working as layout artists on The Simpsons, continued: “We had to bring in a team of writers and storyboard artists and retrain them, because they’d been writing mean-based comedy for so long. Not making fun of people just means using different comedic tools.”

Typical of the show’s humor is a song called “The Mexican-Jewish Cultural Festival“:

There is kreplach on tostadas
A pupik on our pinata
We kibbitz when we lambada
How are things in Ensenada?
We put bottles on cabezas
We do mitzvahs up on mesas
And we’re coming to your places
With big smiles upon our faces!
Oy-lé!

Oy-lé! 
Maxine’s idol, the character Isabella Garcia-Shapiro, is Jewish, but her creators aren’t. Still, the show’s super-verbal yet super-schtick-y Borscht Belt sensibility feels Jewish. Povenmire says that’s because unlike most cartoons, which create scripts first and then do storyboards, he and Marsh do both simultaneously. “That way there are more visual gags going on, but we can also go over the words really carefully.” Suddenly remembering he’s talking to a Jewish journalist, he exclaimed: “We futz over the words until we’re shpritzing!”

An indication of the show’s—and its creators—love of words: Dr. Doofenshmirtz’s name was originally Mittelshmerz, the abdominal pain women experience when an egg is released from the ovaries. Disney put the kibosh on that. Provenmire recalled: “I said, ‘It’s not a dirty word!’ But they said, ‘If it has to do with procreation, you stay away from it.’ ”

Another thing I love about the show is its casual, warm treatment of blended families—Phineas and Ferb are stepbrothers. “I am really passionate about this subject,” Marsh said. “All my brothers are half- or stepbrothers, and growing up, I always felt that being in a state of divorce or a blended family was never spoken about or had to come with a big elaborate explanation—it wasn’t just treated as the state of things. But 50 percent of American kids are growing up in blended families; they should see their experience represented.” Povenmire added: “I’m told we were the first people on the Disney Channel to say the words ‘divorce’ or ‘alimony.’ ” Marsh summed up: “I told Disney that hearing the word ‘divorce’ will make kids feel more normal; it won’t make them start crying. And to their credit, they said OK.” Povenmire added: “It just took five meetings.”

Not everyone loves the show. Common Sense Media, a family-oriented watchdog, loathes the boys’ sister, Candace, calling her “a screechy, whiny stereotype of a girl.” This is sort of true. But Maxie’s beloved Isabella Garcia-Shapiro is a fine counterpoint to Candace. She leads her own troop of Fireside Girls and is as creative and self-motivated as Phineas and Ferb. (Povenmire and Marsh both have daughters.)

For those who do love the show, next week is a big one: Friday, August 5 marks the premiere of “Phineas and Ferb, The Movie: Across the 2nd Dimension,” a film-length super-episode. The Disney Channel is promoting this milestone with a customized 27-foot Airstream trailer called “Perry the Platy-bus,” designed to look like the boys’ pet. It’s currently traveling cross-country, making stops to do song-and-dance performances at landmark sites. (Much like Sarah Palin, only mammalian.)

In the movie, the alternate-dimension Doofenshmirtz succeeds in his evil plots. I hope new viewers will familiarize themselves with the usual nebbishy Doofenshmirtz first. His more typical attempts at evil: plotting to release termites to eat all the wood in the area so he can launch an aluminum-siding business; hovering over his girlfriend’s house with a huge magnet so he can erase embarrassing messages he’s left on her voicemail; inventing a device to make people’s voices higher so his own voice will sound more manly; trying to rid the area of mimes; and planning to shrink national monuments to use with his model train set.

Doofenshmirtz’s hilariously schlemiel-esque approach to wrongdoing is just one more element that makes this show great. A program the whole family can laugh at, one that applauds inventiveness and resourcefulness and offers up clever music and lyrics? Only a doof would resist.

Museum exhibits are often about visuals, but the first thing you notice when you walk into the Oregon Jewish Museum’s current show celebrating Mel Blanc’s life and career is his voice. That manic patter is familiar and unmistakable: It’s the voice of Bugs Bunny and Porky Pig, Sylvester the Cat and Tweety Bird, Barney Rubble and Dino and so many other beloved cartoon characters. Blanc, in fact, voiced so many different characters—over 400—that Jack Benny once remarked, “There’s only five real people in Hollywood. Everyone else is Mel Blanc.” And all of Blanc’s characters, as the new exhibit deftly reveals, owe a part of their existence to his upbringing as a young Jewish boy in Portland, Ore., performing in the city’s vaudeville houses and mixing with its various ethnic populations.

Born in San Francisco in 1909 as Melvin Jerome Blank, he moved north with his family at the age of 6. His father owned several apparel businesses, and young Melvin spent his days running around south Portland, observing its residents, many of them Jews. Among the first people he befriended were the elderly Jewish couple who ran the local grocery; they spoke Yiddish, and the boy became fascinated with the strange dialect and its intonations. He learned to imitate it. It was, by his own admission, the first voice he ever performed.

There were plenty of other patois for young Melvin to pick up. The neighborhood offered a lot to a kid with a good ear: Russian Jews lived alongside Italians, Germans, Mexicans, and Japanese. All of these dialects would one day come in handy. But words weren’t enough to satisfy his appetite for art: He studied the violin and the banjo, the ukulele and the sousaphone, and spent as much time as he could in theaters or at silent movies. “On a weekday afternoon, words were superfluous, put in the actors’ mouths by the other wise-cracking truants scattered through the house,” he wrote of skipping school for the movies in his autobiography That’s Not All Folks: My Life in the Golden Age of Cartoons and Radio.

He would know—he was one of those wisecracking truants. He soon began telling jokes at school assemblies, telling stories in different voices. “I remember receiving cheers for the first time,” he wrote. “As I bowed deeply from the waist, flushed with pride, I thought, this is definitely for me.” A poor student, he used the high-school hallways as an echo chamber for a shrill, cackling laugh. A teacher once scolded him, he recalled. “’You’ll never amount to anything,’ she said. ‘You’re just like your last name: Blank.’ ” He changed the spelling of his name soon afterward. And that laugh? It ended up belonging to a bird named Woody Woodpecker.

First chance he got, Blanc began performing. Some of his earliest gigs were with the South Parkway Minstrels, an amateur vaudeville club in Portland. The Minstrels were part of Neighborhood House, founded by the local chapter of the National Council of Jewish Women to help South Portland’s immigrants. Blanc never forgot Neighborhood House, visiting it often throughout the years and serving as the Master of Ceremonies at its 50th-anniversary gala in 1955.

By age 16, though, Blanc had already outgrown the confines of his neighborhood. In a recent lecture on Blanc’s Jewish roots, Judith Margles, director of the Oregon Jewish Museum, noted that Blanc’s life “mirrored the life of the Jewish community Portland at the time, spanning tradition and assimilation. He was like his friends. They wanted to get out. They wanted to be part of the larger world.”

For Blanc, this meant dropping out of high school and becoming a regular on a local ensemble radio show. Eventually, like any ambitious entertainer, Blanc decided to try his luck in Los Angeles. He didn’t find a job, but he did fall in love: He married Estelle Rosenbaum in a secret civil ceremony before finally having a Jewish wedding on Lag B’Omer. The newlyweds returned to Portland, where they worked together for a daily radio show called Cobweb and Nuts. Blanc voiced all of the male roles, and Estelle voiced the women.

In 1936, Blanc’s career finally gained traction. After minor success voicing a drunken bull for Warner Bros., he was summoned for a more important audition. Leon Schlesinger, Warner’s head of animation, asked him to try and find a voice for a one of the studio’s newest animated stars, a bow-tie wearing pig named Porky.

“You want me to be the voice of a pig?” Blanc replied. “That’s some job for a nice Jewish boy.”

Blanc was joking; Schlesinger wasn’t. As soon as he heard Blanc’s rendition, he was sold: While the actor who had originally played Porky, Joe Dougherty, had a severe stuttering problem, Blanc kept the stutter but made it sharper, using the expert sense of timing he had picked up as a radio comic. He was hired on the spot and paid $200 a week.

As Schlesinger was soon delighted to discover, Blanc had a rare ability to voice multiple characters, from an amorous skunk to a Mexican mouse, and his work soon earned him great acclaim. He appeared alongside nearly every major radio star in the ’40s and ’50s, from Abbott and Costello to Jack Benny to Red Skelton. And he helped Warner Bros. shape its most admired animated character, Bugs Bunny.

When Blanc came on board, the famous hare was named “Happy Rabbit.” That, Blanc believed, was too bland. The bunny needed personality, and that personality, in Blanc’s mind, took the shape of a fast-talking tough Jew from Flatbush Avenue. Bugs would become Blanc’s biggest hit, the character with whom he most closely identified.

In 1961, Blanc was nearly killed in a car accident. For weeks, he lay in the hospital in a coma. He wouldn’t respond when his wife and his son spoke to him. Then his surgeon came into his room one day. Instead of addressing Blanc directly, he stood over the patient and said, “How are you feeling, Bugs Bunny?” Feebly, Blanc replied: “Eh, just fine, Doc. How’re you?”

The accident left Blanc bedridden for months, and the studio that relied on him set up the necessary recording equipment in his house. He recorded more than 40 “Flintstones” episodes from his bedroom, with Alan Reed, who voiced Fred, Jean Vander Pyl (Wilma), and Bea Benaderet (Betty) gathering round.

Blanc died in 1989. His gravestone at the Hollywood Forever cemetery reads simply, “That’s All, Folks.” But that’s not all: Later this fall, Blanc’s voice—remastered and sampled from archived recordings—will once again emerge to give voice to his signature characters in three new cartoons, scheduled for screenings before the Warner Bros. feature Happy Feet 2.

In the meantime, those who want to hear Blanc’s voice can head to the Portland museum. There, alongside a copy of Blanc’s ketubah and a page from a short story he titled “Jooish,” one can immerse oneself in the cartoons that made Blanc famous and listen to his voices, the voices that shaped so much of American popular culture.

“That’s All Folks! The Mel Blanc Story” will be on display in Portland’s Oregon Jewish Museum until September 11.

Katie Schneider is a freelance writer, teacher and mother of two living in Portland, Ore. Her current novel-in-progress is about the Siege of Budapest during World War II. She was raised on a steady diet of Warner Bros. cartoons.

It’s not that there aren’t some on the Israeli side who see, say, the West Bank as rightfully Israel’s. But this is the government putting this stuff out. Maybe educating children that part of the land between the river and the sea belongs to Israel should be one thing that emerges out of the new indirect peace talks?

P.A. Incitement Targets Arab-Israeli Children [Arutz Sheva]
Earlier: Stewart Mocks Hamas TV

The clip is worth watching, particularly for Stewart’s own cartoon, “Jewby Doo.” And also for this advice, regarding the A Special Mission’s cheap production value: “Hey Hamas, two words—MacBook Pro!”

John Stewart Takes Aim at Hamas’s Anti-Semitic Cartoons [HuffPo]

Earlier: Hamas’s Charming New TV Show

In his cartoons, Gross, born in 1895 to a couple from Russia who’d moved to the Bronx, created a cast of tenement dwellers who spoke a heavily accented English, full of malapropisms and Yiddish grammatical constructions, which Gross rendered in inimitable, and sometimes almost indecipherable, phonetic spelling. His work, which included large helpings of the ethnic caricature and vaudeville-style slapstick popular in the 1920s and ’30s, had a popular following, and he ultimately published several collections of his comics and book-length cartoons. The journalist H.L. Mencken was a fan, and The New York Times ran glowing reviews of his work.

Some Yiddish-speakers who wanted to present their community in a more respectable light—including Gertrude Berg, creator of the radio show The Goldbergs—found Gross’s hapless greenhorns offensive. It’s easy to see why. Here’s a recurring character, Mrs. Feitlebaum, complaining about a quarrelsome couple in her building: “By dem is going on a lengwidge?? I tut wot dey lookin to be sotch a idill copple!” The Feitlebaums aren’t so perfect either; in the next scene, her husband, Mr. Mow-riss Feitlebaum is beating their son Isadore again.

Gross also parodied a number of American classics, including Poe’s poem “The Raven” and Longfellow’s poem “Hiawatha,” in the diction of the Feitelbaums. (The Yiddish-accented Native Americans in his “Hiawatta” predate Mel Brooks’ version of the same joke by almost 50 years.) Much of his work has now been reissued in Is Diss a System?: A Milt Gross Reader edited by Gross enthusiast Ari Y. Kelman, who wrote the book’s introduction. Here, we present Gross’s take on “The Night Before Christmas”—“De Night in de Front from Chreesmas” (1927)—narrated by the New Yiddish Repertory’s Allen Lewis Rickman.

I guess I just wondered why he did this project. >>

Lois’s husband, the loudobese blowhard Peter, is ecstatic at first about his wife’s newfound status as a member of the chosen people—briefly, he’s an enthusiastic attendee at synagogue, and puts the kids in Jewish day school—but he soon remembers his Catholicism and confronts his wife. “I’m a Catholic,” he tells her, “and I want to live in a Catholic house.”

“Well, I’m Jewish,” Lois responds, “and I want to live in a nicer house.” Spoken like a real Jew.

Family Goy [Hulu.com]

I grew up in Israel, which meant that, as a kid, I idolized soldiers. How could I not? My homeland, after all, gained its independence thanks to the sheer bravery of a few armed men, an army, we were told repeatedly, dedicated to self-defense and deeply beholden to ethical standards.

But I grew up in the 1980s, which meant that the objects of my infatuation shifted, along with popular culture, from the Israel Defense Forces to the crafty commandoes of that most awesome military outfit, G.I. Joe. How could they not? The action figures were the ultimate status symbols for every self-aware 10-year-old out to make a good impression at recess, and the cartoons they inspired were followed and analyzed more closely than most reality-based events.

And although we didn’t know it at the time, there might have been one more element drawing me and my friends to the world of Joe: known stateside as real American heroes, the cartoon characters, dubbed into Hebrew, sounded suspiciously like native sons of the IDF.

Consider this: in 1987, at the peak of the G.I. Joe craze, Hasbro produced a feature-length animated film to promote its miniscule plastic warriors. Far from a towering cinematic achievement, the film relied heavily on a musical credit sequence, which showed Cobra, the evil organization bent on world domination, trying to blow up the Statue of Liberty.

In its original English, the sequence sounded like this. By the time the film made it to Israel, however, the significantly altered theme song instead sounded like this.

Some changes are immediately evident. As the notion of G.I.’s made little sense outside the United States, some international editions of the popular cartoon went by the more universal title Action Force. Similarly, the Israeli theme song presents Joe not as America’s saviors but rather as the world’s top-secret, top-notch counter-terrorism team.

But Joe’s conversion into the particular world of Israeli military lore didn’t end there. Here’s how the theme song, in its Hebrew version, begins:

Action Force fights a just war for mankind
For peace!

There are no equivalent lines in the English version. In America, G.I. Joe is

Fighting for freedom
Wherever there’s trouble
Over land and sea and air

The Hebrew version includes a direct translation of these lines, but they appear much later in the sequence. For us Israelis, the important concepts were always these: a just war, a fight for peace.

It’s hard to overstate the centrality of these ideas, at least in theory, to the IDF’s understanding of itself. Even as children, we could all effortlessly parrot our parents, teachers, and older relatives in reciting what many Israelis still take to be the army’s mantra: we never fight if there’s another way. We adhere to the just war theory, picking our battles carefully. The ultimate goal of conflict is to bring about peace. Israeli Joe expressed these values elegantly and succinctly. The animated soldiers might’ve been named Gung Ho, Hardball, and Backblust, but we saw in them every Ariel, Ehud, and Yitzhak we ever revered. In the American-exported action figures, we saw the best of ourselves.

This verse, however, wasn’t Israeli Joe’s sole departure from the American original. An even more daring feat of cultural conversion occurred regarding that dastardly nemesis, Cobra. Both the American and the Israeli versions present Cobra as an evil terrorist organization trying to take over the world. But whereas the American version begins with a menacing montage of Cobra’s faceless soldiers parachuting over New York (“Armies of the night / Evil taking flight / Cobra! Cobra!”), the Israeli version eliminates nearly every mention of the enemy.

This, again, was art imitating life: in the 1980s, mere mention of the PLO, Israel’s most bitter foe at the time, was considered taboo. Israel’s soldiers, therefore, were brave men who fought against a shadowy rival best left unmentioned, and Israeli children watching G.I. Joe were immersed in a similar reality, a world of concrete heroes and amorphous villains with unclear goals and aspirations.

When Cobra was mentioned, however, the Israeli translators chose a telling adjective to describe the organization. It wasn’t simply an evil terrorist organization: it was nifsha, a Hebrew word connoting criminality that is still reserved, in the national vocabulary, for describing terrorists and other villains posing an existential threat to the Jewish state.

Unsurprisingly, the word has biblical origins. It is first mentioned in the book of Proverbs, chapter 18, verse 19, translated into English as rebellious. “A nifsha [rebellious] brother,” the book tells us, “is deprived of a strong city.”

By describing Cobra not only as evil but as rebellious, the theme song’s translators assigned Destro, the Baroness and their cabal of no-goodniks not only worldly malice but celestial blame. Because they rebelled against justice, and waged war on God’s chosen people, they’re forever doomed. It’s a potent theology for a cartoon, and even more so in real life.

Silver Jew David Berman’s Book of Cartoons, Revealed [Pitchfork]
Book Review: David Berman’s “The Portable February”
[Magnet Magazine]
The Pure Products of America Go Crazy [Poetry Foundation]
Previously: Silver Lining [Tablet]

Aboard Noah’s ark, some of God’s creatures won’t get with the program.

Written by Stephen Levinson and Joel Moss Levinson. Animation by Ed Mundy. Illustration by Mike Herrod. Music by Craig Hillelson. Sound engineering by Jesse Novak. Featuring the voices of Bob Balaban, Aaron Bleyaert, Jonathan Katz, Jess Lane, Jesse Novak, and Tami Sagher.

After forty years in the desert, Moses has had enough.

Coming in December: Episode IV.

Written by Stephen Levinson and Joel Moss Levinson. Animation by Ed Mundy. Illustration by Mike Herrod. Music by Craig Hillelson. Sound engineering by Jesse Novak. Featuring the voices of Shek Baker, Todd Barry, Joe DeRosa, Jonathan Katz, and Livia Scott.

“Reality is more grotesque and strange than anything you can invent,” says the Israeli cartoonist Rutu Modan. “Sometimes life is too much, you have to tone it down to make art.” Modan’s own work has evolved over the past fifteen years from rather strange and grotesque fables into some of the strongest graphic fiction on the planet. Like the novelists David Grossman and A. B. Yehoshua, and young filmmakers such as Hilla Medalia, Modan has found ways to tell stories that use the flood of bad news in Israel as the backdrop to subtle stories about ordinary people learning how to live.

Modan, who moved to England last year when her husband accepted a post-doc position there, has recently been cultivating an international following. Last year her graphic novel Exit Wounds was released in English to widespread acclaim. This year she drew two very different series of comics for The New York Times. Her memoir blog, “Mixed Emotions,” ventured into the realm of autobiography with illustrated stories about her family, such as the fallout from her youngest son’s obsession with a pink tutu, in an ingenious vertical format that would have been cumbersome on paper but worked perfectly online. Her serial mystery “The Murder of the Terminal Patient,” which follows an underemployed Russian doctor as he navigates the hierarchy of an Israeli hospital to investigate a suspicious death, is one of the best comics to have appeared in The New York Times Magazine.

Modan’s visual style may at first appear somewhat plain, but she has a masterful skill for pacing and perspective, a keen eye for postures and facial expressions, and a command of composition and color that rivals the old masters of Sunday comics. Her illustrations recall the whimsical work of Little Nemo creator Winsor McKay, or, as Douglas Wolk has suggested, the “clear line” style of Tintin creator Hergé, where simple characters stand out against finely drawn landscapes to make for an oddly affecting sense of reality. One might wonder how such talent was incubated. Part of the answer arrives this month in the form of Jamilti and Other Stories, a collection of Modan’s early comics released by the Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly. Over a decade’s worth of genre experiments veering from fairy tales to crime fiction, Modan emerges in its pages as a storyteller of rare insight and restraint.

Born in Tel Aviv in 1966, Modan’s career has run parallel to the rise of a serious independent comics scene in Israel, which in the past fifteen years has grown large enough to provide a decent market for domestic graphic fiction. Months after first seeing Art Spiegelman’s outlandish magazine RAW as a student at the Belazel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem, Modan began to publish comic strips that ranged from the absurd to the macabre in local papers. “Since there was no comics tradition” in Israel at the time, she says, “I could do anything I wanted.” In 1993 she was hired to edit the Israeli edition of MAD magazine, along with artist Uri Pinkus. When it folded, Modan and Pinkus decided to start their own comics collective. “If we were going to lose money, better to do exactly what we like,” she says.

The first meeting of the Actus Tragicus collective was convened, as chance would have it, on the evening in 1995 that Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin was assassinated. The group stayed up all night concocting conspiracy theories in which Rabin survived the shooting. It would be too simple, though, to conclude that this founding trauma set the artists on a path to darker or more cynical work. “This event didn’t change our art,” Modan says. “Israeli reality gives you so many opportunities to be macabre.” Her story-length comics, published in a series of Actus anthologies over the past decade, appeared to seize as many of these opportunities as possible. An early one reminiscent of the Brothers Grimm features a forlorn plastic surgeon who tries to rearrange his patients’ faces in the image of his lost love. In a later story, as hardboiled as it is preposterous, a series of dead bodies turn up bearing the signature of a new serial killer: a pair of panties on the head.

In recent years Modan’s work has become more understated and more revealing as she has grown to engage more fully with contemporary life in Israel. Refusing to shy away from the catastrophes in the headlines, she also refrains from commenting directly on pressing issues like war and terrorism. Instead, Modan tells stories about ordinary people who are confronting their own emotional weaknesses, even as they project strong exteriors to the rest of the world. “In Israel we try to live like political events have no influence on our lives, and most of the time we succeed,” Modan explains. “But it’s a delusion, even if we are not at the center of the drama.”

How thick a skin must you have when you live in a society under siege? This question lies at the heart of Exit Wounds. It follows a bitter young taxi driver as he searches for his deadbeat father, with the help of his father’s wealthy, estranged girlfriend. Its earth tones and mellow pace have a lulling effect on the reader, even as the prickly dialogue reveals enough emotional damage to leave a metal tinge in the throat. The book draws much of its power from the particularly Israeli confusions that drive the story. Was the father tragically ripped away from his son by a suicide bomber before they could reconcile, as it might first appear? Or does the bombing merely give him an alibi to escape from the demands of his own loved ones? In refusing to uncover the truth about what became of his father, is the son succumbing to the fantasy that his life is immune from political events? Or is he simply refusing to give in to the terror-induced hysteria around him? The book offers no clear answers.

The threat of suicide bombings, and the unexpected ways they can twist the mind and the heart, are also central to a pair of the most haunting stories in Modan’s collection. Both are based on real events. In “Jamilti,” the new collection’s title story, an Israeli woman, on the eve of her wedding, rushes to the aid of a man wounded in a suicide bombing. She later learns that the handsome man to whom she gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation was the bomber himself, his own sole victim. Though the plot may sound contrived, Modan has adapted it from a true story, in which a medic found himself questioning his conservative beliefs after reviving a man who turned out to be terrorist.

God holds Abraham to his word. Isaac goes along for the ride.

Written by Jonathan Katz, Stephen Levinson, and Joel Moss Levinson. Animation by Ed Mundy. Illustration by Mike Herrod. Music by Craig Hillelson.