Where I'll Be: "Graphic Jews: Negotiating Identity In Sequential Art" Panel @ Skidmore College, Thurs. 2/6/14

Panel Discussion

Graphic Jews:

Negotiating Identity In Sequential Art

 7:00 pm reception; 7:30 pm panel discussion

February 6, 2014, 7:00pm

Tang Teaching Museum

Skidmore College

Saratoga Springs, NY

I was honored to be asked to participate in this event on the campus of Skidmore College, in which I'll be co-moderating a panel discussion with three excellent cartoonists. From the press release:

Sequential artists Ben Katchor, Leela Corman, and James Sturm talk about their work in the medium of comics and discuss the ways in which their work engages with contemporary constructions of Jewish identity. Co-moderated by Dr. Gene Kannenberg Jr., historian, director of ComicsResearch.org and author of 500 Essential Graphic Novels; and Gregory Spinner, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion, Skidmore College. Sponsored by the Jacob Perlow Lecture Fund and presented in collaboration with the Office of the Dean of Special Programs, Skidmore College.

The panel is being held in conjunction with an exhibit of comic art at the Tang Teaching Museum, "Graphic Jews: Negotiating Identity in Sequential Art." As stated above, I'll be co-moderating the panel with Prof. Gregory Spinner, co-curator of the exhibit. Here's a video overview of the show, featuring an interview with Greg:


Tang Museum | Graphic Jews: Negotiating Identity in Sequential Art  from The Tang Museum on Vimeo.
And here's the full press release for the exhibit, which will be on display through April 13:

Graphic Jews presents a selection of graphic novels and original pages by contemporary Jewish artists Leela Corman, Vanessa Davis, Ben Katchor, and James Sturm that tell stories about Jewishness and explore some of the many ways Jews have figured and reconfigured their Jewish identities. These works combine words and pictures into what Will Eisner, one of the masters of the form, called “sequential art”: telling stories by putting one image after another after another.

Graphic Jews builds on a long history of Jewish Americans and comics. Jews played an outsized role in the history of American comics, creating, writing, illustrating, and publishing some of the best-known comics during the medium’s Golden Age in the 1930s and 1940s. Yet for much of the twentieth century the actual scale of Jewish involvement in the medium was not obvious, as neither the creators or their creations were marked, let alone marketed, as Jewish. Cultural shifts in American society in the 1960s and 1970s took pressure off Jewish immigrants and their children to assimilate into American society, and, as result, both long-time comics professionals and younger artists began to draw comics in which Jews and questions of Jewish identity figured more prominently. Two important graphic novels from this period signaled the transition: Will Eisner’s A Contract with God (1978), considered by many to be the first graphic novel, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980-1991). Along with copies of graphic novels by Corman, Davis, Katchor, and Sturm, Eisner’s and Spiegelman’s two novels are available for visitors to explore in the exhibition.

The artists in Graphic Jews build on the emergence of overt Jewish characters and content in comics that began in the 1970s. Taken together, the works touch on the plurality of Jewish identities and experiences: struggles with alienation and assimilation, a spectrum of religious observance and indifference, and the knotty intersections of race, gender, and class. The exhibition explores how sequential art functions to visualize narrative, wherein images and texts about the past inform our present sense of our selves, thus contributing to the narrative construction of identity. We are the stories we tell and retell, from sacred narratives inherited from tradition and passed down through the generations, to more recent histories, fictions, and fantasies.

Graphic Jews is co-curated by Gregory Spinner, Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion, Skidmore College, and Rachel Seligman, Assistant Director for Curatorial Affairs, Tang Museum.

I'll also be attending the Tang's Winter/Spring Opening Reception on Saturday, February 15, with performances by David Greenberger and A Strong Dog in One Upon. Performance from 3:00 – 6:00 pm; Reception from 6:00 – 7:30 pm. For a list of all the events at the Tang this spring, click here.

CFP: Graphic Details Symposium: Talking About Jewish Women and Comics (February 26, 2012)

Call for Papers

Graphic Details Symposium:

Talking About Jewish Women and Comics
February 26, 2012 

at the Yeshiva University Museum in New York City

We invite papers for a one-day symposium that will explore the intersections between Jewishness and gender in comics and graphic narratives.  Key questions will include:

• What are the unique characteristics common to Jewish women cartoonists’ representations of themselves and others on the page?
• How might this particular literary genre be contextualized within the various modes of Jewish literature?
• How might sequential art constitute a unique approach for investigations of identity?
• What are some helpful theoretical modes for reading these works individually and collectively?

This interdisciplinary conference will put academics and cartoonists in dialogue with one another to discuss comics by and about Jewish women. The day of panel presentations will conclude with a cartoonist roundtable open to the public.  Confirmed participants include cartoonists Miriam Katin and Leela Corman, photographic artist Professor Joanne Leonard (University of Michigan), Dr Heike Bauer (Birkbeck College, University of London), Dr. David Brauner (University of Reading), and Professor Laurence Roth (Susquehanna University). The symposium is being presented in conjunction with Yeshiva University Museum’s exhibition, Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women, which is on display from September 25, 2011 - April 8, 2012. For more information, go to www.forward.com/graphic-details/

Proposals for papers or panel presentations should be emailed by Sunday, October 23, 2011 to GraphicDetailsSymposium@gmail.com. Please include up to a 500-word proposal, as well as a short bio of the presenter. Images are welcome to supplement submissions.  Here are some suggested paper or panel topics:

• The “Jewish Body” and its transformations in comics
• Jewish comic storytelling and the traditions of Jewish literature
• Confession, memoir, and autobiographical literature
• Gender identification in changing social and artistic discourses
• Comic book writing about Israel and Palestine
• Depictions of marriage, partnerships, and interfaith relationships
• Portraying Judaism and religion in graphic detail
• Mothers, daughters, and other family dynamics reflected in graphic storytelling
• Heroes and villains

This conference is being organized by Sarah Lightman (University of Glasgow), Tahneer Oksman (CUNY Graduate Center), and Amy Feinstein, Ph.D. (Independent Scholar). Our sponsors include the Yeshiva University Museum, the Jewish Daily Forward, McFarland, the Stirling Maxwell Center at University of Glasgow, and the Center for Jewish Studies and the PhD Program in English at CUNY’s Graduate Center. Unfortunately there are no grants available.

CFP: Jewish Comics [journal issue; October 2, 2009]

[Synchronicity Dep't: I'm currently reading Danny Fingeroth's Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero.]

JEWISH COMICS:
SPECIAL ISSUE OF THE JOURNAL SHOFAR

The scholarship surrounding comics and “graphic novels” has proliferated over the past several years, as has studies focusing on particular comics themes or visual texts created by certain ethnic communities. Indeed, over the past three years alone there have been at least six critical studies investigating the links between comics and Jewishness. Given this emergent field of inquiry, Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies will devote a special issue to Jewish comics (slotted for Summer 2010). The scope of this volume will take in the theoretical, literary, and historical contexts of graphic narrative and its links to Jewish identity and discourse. Possible topics could include, but are certainly not limited to:

• The ways in which comics have articulated the American Jewish experience
• Comics and the Holocaust, as expressed in such narratives as Maus, Auschwitz, I Was a Child of the Holocaust, We Are on Our Own, Mendel’s Daughter: A Memoir, and Yossel: April 19, 1943
• The contributions of Jews in the history of comic strips and comic books
• Images of Israel in the works of Joe Sacco, Rutu Modan, Ari Folman, Miriam Libicki, and the Dimona Comix Group
• Jewish identity through superheroes and villains, from Superman to The Spirit to Shaloman
• The form of the contemporary “graphic novel” by Jewish writers/artists such as Kim Deitch, Joann Sfar, Miss Lasko-Gross, Ben Katchor, and Aline Kominisky-Crumb
• Graphic adaptations of Jewish texts and legends
• Immigration and ethnic urban landscapes in the works of comics artists such as Will Eisner and Ben Katchor
• Comics, the Diaspora, and Jewish internationalism
• Jewish identity and world conflict, from the world wars to 9/11
• Jewish autobiographic comics (e.g., Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor and Will Eisner’s autobiographic fiction) as well as graphic biographies of such figures as Franz Kafka, Emma Goldman, Houdini, and Anne Frank
• Representations of the Jewish gangster in comics
• The uses of the golem and its relation to the superhero

All essay submissions should be between 5,000 and 8,000 words, including notes. Contributors should format submissions based on the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th edition, and use footnotes. Authors will be responsible for securing copyright permission for all images used. Address all inquiries, and submit all completed manuscripts, to the guest editor, Derek Parker Royal at Derek_Royal[at]tamu-commerce.edu. Please include the words “Jewish Comics” in the subject heading.

Deadline for final manuscript submission is October 2, 2009.

Shofar is published for the Midwest Jewish Studies Association, the Western Jewish Studies Association, and the Jewish Studies Program of Purdue University by the Purdue University Press. For more information on the journal, please visit http://www.cla.purdue.edu/jewish-studies/shofar/.

Update 04/21/2009: You also can download a pdf of this call for papers.