Have you ever discovered an incident from your own family’s history in a famous work of art? I have. As a child, my mother would tell me stories about our family’s experiences during the Holocaust. Some of them had happened to her parents, Chaya and Mendel, who had fled to the Soviet Union after the…
It would seem counterintuitive that a graphic novel featuring mice and cats as Jews and Nazis would be a more effective Holocaust teaching tool than the diary of a young girl who died in Bergen-Belsen. Yet, after a Tennessee school district unanimously voted to ban Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” from its eighth grade curriculum due to…
Neal Kirby, the son of Captain America co-creator Jack Kirby condemned the Capitol insurrectionists for wielding symbols of his father’s iconic hero in support of President Trump, a man he says holds vastly different values. “While watching the horrific videos of the storming of the Capitol, I thought I noticed someone in a Trump/Capt. America…
Art Spiegelman just wants to be left alone. Or, rather, he would really like it if parts of his career and biography were minimized, and others celebrated more. The central tension, both in the long conversations he had with University of Chicago professor Hillary Chute, the germ and base level of “MetaMaus” (2011), and now…
Metamaus, A Look Inside a Modern Classic, Maus By Art Spiegelman Pantheon, 300 pages, $35 Sitting forlornly on my bookshelf is a dusty, book-shaped box containing an antiquated item known as a CD- ROM. Titled, “Maus,” it was produced in 1992 and epitomized the cutting edge of hypertext at that time. Containing digitized versions of…
The book trailer is out for Art Spiegelman’s much-anticipated “MetaMaus,” a look at the creation of his iconic “Maus” graphic novel, now celebrating its 25th anniversary. In the video Spiegelman says that “Maus” is more about the relationship between a father and son “trying to understand each other” than it is about the Holocaust. In…
Does the Coen Brothers’ “True Grit” draw on ancient Indo-European myth? Forward contributor Zackary Sholem Berger translates two poems, “My Pedigree” by Moyshe Nadir and “Herring Barrels” by Dvoyre Fogel, in the latest issue of Eleven Eleven. Israeli musician Avi Avital has become the first mandolinist to be nominated for a Grammy award in the…
In this, the second annual Forward Fives selection, we celebrate the year’s cultural output with a series of deliberately eclectic choices in film, music, theater, exhibitions and books. Here we present five of the most important Jewish performances of 2010. Feel free to argue with and add to our selections in the comments. Hapless Hooligan…
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