More in ‘comics’

Today in Tablet Magazine, Marissa Brostoff presents 1920s cartoonist Milt Gross’s Yiddish-inflected version of “The Night Before Christmas”—“De Night in de Front from Chreesmas”—read by a Yiddish actor and accompanied by Gross’s drawings. Music columnist Alexander Gelfand profiles a klezmer quartet started by two brothers whose father lost his family in the Holocaust. David Lehman ...

For many immigrants and their children in the era of mass Jewish emigration from Eastern Europe, the ubiquitous Yiddish accent was a source of shame and a barrier to upward mobility. For the cartoonist and animator Milt Gross, that accent was the funniest thing he had ever heard.
In his cartoons, Gross, born in 1895 to ...

“Are you two here for the couples treatment?”  >>

When I went away to college, I tried going to Hillel High Holiday services, but I really hated it…>>

Bookforum offers one of the first reviews of Robert Crumb’s illustrated version of Genesis, and it sounds like a winner. Crumb’s interpretation departs from other graphic representations of the Torah by not bowdlerizing it, writes Jeet Heer; the legendary artist “doesn’t hide the fact that the holy book is filled with stories of incest (Abraham ...

They relented, and I got to go … >>

Harvey Kurtzman was one of the most important comic-book artists of all time. R. Crumb, Art Spiegelman, and the creators of Saturday Night Live and Monty Python are all in his debt. In a new gloriously comics-filled biography called The Art of Harvey Kurtzman: The Mad Genius of Comics, authors Paul Buhle and Denis Kitchen go deep inside Kurtzman’s life and art. Paul Buhle spoke with Vox Tablet host Sara Ivry about Kurtzman’s secular Jewish upbringing in the Bronx, his success at MAD, and his failures later in life.

“Overall, it was a pretty normal trip home.” >>