Al Jaffee’s MAD Magazine was my personal Talmud
The late comic artist continued a grand Jewish tradition of questioning
Al Jaffee
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Art Happy 100th Birthday to Mad Magazine’s Al Jaffee
Editor’s Note: This article was published originally on February 21, 2016. We are revisiting it on the occasion of Al Jaffee’s 100th birthday. On a snowy February afternoon, Al Jaffee, my childhood hero, invited me into his well-lit studio in Midtown Manhattan. The walls were covered with his drawings, images from Mad Magazine and a…
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Culture Al Jaffee Explains How Mad Magazine Made American Humor Jewish
Editor’s note: Mad magazine will soon be coming off newsstands and will stop publishing new content. DC Entertainment announced Wednesday that starting after issue 10 there will be no new content except for year-end specials. We are republishing this article from 2016 in honor of the magazine’s legacy. On a snowy February afternoon, Al Jaffee,…
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The Schmooze Learning To Be Jewish From MAD Magazine
It was a thrill to learn recently that one of my favorite Mad magazine artists, the legendary Al Jaffee, would give his personal papers to Columbia University. Among those treasures are a massive cache of Jaffee’s much-loved Mad fold-in cartoons and notebooks of ideas Jaffee never even submitted for publication. But the most intriguing part…
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The Schmooze Will Eisner’s Hometown Spirit
“Cookalein” is Yiddish for “a modest bungalow, usually in the Catskills” where mothers would cook for their vacationing families. It’s also the title of one of the more modest but moving works in “Will Eisner’s New York: From the Spirit to the Modern Graphic Novel,” which opened last week at Soho’s Museum of Comic and…
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The Schmooze Mad’s Al Jaffee’s Little-Known Ties to Chabad
One of the more shocking revelations in Mad magazine artist Al Jaffee’s biography – reviewed in the Forward last week — is the secret identities of several contributors to The Moshiach Times, a 25-year-old kids’ magazine published by Chabad. According to a post on the New York Times’ City Room blog, Jaffee himself drew the…
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