Our purpose in this course will be the study of the modern and contemporary Jewish graphic novel in its sociological, historical, and formal contexts. We will examine how modern Jewish history, memory, and story have been represented in the graphic novel. Jewish artists have been at the historical forefront of both popular comics as well as the more contemporary graphic novel. While we may take popular comics and superheroes into consideration, our predominant focus will be on the graphic novel and the way it opens to sites of conflict.

Beginning with the Jewish Holocaust and Art Spiegelman’s classic Maus, we will engage difficult ethical questions of how the graphic novel grapples with the limits of representation as well as trauma, memory, and mourning. Moving to Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, commonly regarded as the first graphic novel, we shall look into immigrant and tenement life in New York. Questions of trauma, witnessing, and self-referentiality return in Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, which deals with war in Lebanon and issues of guilt and complicity. Through the looking glass of Rutu Modan’s Tunnels, we will investigate the plot device of an archeological quest, which is used to examine contemporary Israeli life. The mischievous, irreverent, and knowing gaze of the feline narrator of Joann Sfar’s The Rabbi’s Cat gives us a picture of the life of a rabbi in North Africa and his struggles with family, community, and God. The course concludes with Amy Kurzweil’s recent graphic novel, Artificial, and the role artificial intelligence plays in a project of reanimation and preservation.