How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses? Women and Jewish American Identity in Contemporary Graphic Memoirs by Tahneer Oksman (review)

Tahneer Oksman's engaging monograph explores the ways in which Jewish American women cartoonists express sexual difference in autobiographical forms that combine word and image. Her focus is on identity construction, drawing upon Stuart Charmé's anti-essentialist formulations of Jewishness to examine how contemporary artists reflexively map their journeys of self-revelation both diachronically and synchronically. The first chapter discusses the career to date of Aline Kominsky Crumb, the self-proclaimed "great-grandmother" of women's autobiographical comics (18). Kominsky Crumb began publishing in the early 1970s and is married to (non-Jewish) countercultural cartoonist, Robert Crumb, with whom she has occasionally collaborated. Chapter Two concentrates on Vanessa Davis, whose first book (a graphic journal entitled Spaniel Rage) was published in 2005, and who echoes and furthers Kominsky Crumb's project by consciously reframing her own sense of Jewishness in relation to normativity and place. The book's third chapter compares two autobiographical texts written and illustrated from an adolescent perspective, both published in 2006, by Miss (Melissa) Lasko-Gross and Lauren Weinstein. The final chapter examines graphic memoirs by Sarah Glidden and Miriam Libicki, who each use the form to reflect upon and negotiate their complex relationships with the state of Israel. Oksman demonstrates how these brave texts de-center the presentation of self by confronting stereotypes, challenging dominant narratives of Israel as "Jewish homeland," and taking responsibility for the locations and forces that have shaped their authors' identities (220).

The repurposing of a quote from Kominsky Crumb's 1989 Need More Love as the title of this book is—however striking—perhaps somewhat misleading. What is almost entirely absent from the autobiographical accounts that it presents and analyzes is direct comparison of the gendered experiences of Jewish men and women. Indeed, when Oksman considers the synecdochal function of the nose in Lauren Weinstein's 2006 Girl Stories, she distinguishes it from the less shnozzy—that is, "Jewish-looking"—nose of her Jewish friend, Diana. What Oksman underscores (unremarkably, perhaps, given the visuality of the genre in and with which Weinstein works) is "looking," both as verb and adverb. The nose—as for many of the other artists discussed in this book—symbolizes both difference and alienation and self-fashioning and empowerment (160). It is a metonym for the complexity of Jewish identity: "a space of not belonging that ironically and powerfully fortifies her personal rebellions, her moments of potential imaginative revisions" (163).

In Kominsky Crumb's comic, "Nose Job" (which was included in Need More Love), her alter ego, The Bunch, agonizes about whether she should succumb to cosmetic surgery like all the other girls in her "upwardly mobile" Jewish community of the 1960s. Her choice not to do so—to look like Danny Thomas instead of Marlo Thomas, as she frames it—signals the way in which The Bunch stands as a Jew outside the expectations of other Jews, regardless of their gender. This positioning resonates with the views of radical Jewish secular feminists of the time, such as Ruth Balser, who states that, "In the United States, being different is a crime. Therefore we get nose jobs, we straighten our hair. … We hate ourselves to fulfil the American Dream" (qtd. in Antler n.p.). Oksman notes that the insider/outsider status Kominsky Crumb recognizes and represents for herself as a young woman offers her a degree of agency that "crystallizes later in life in her identity as an artist" (52).

There is a pervasive sense that Jewishness is not so much the subject of the graphic memoirs Oksman discusses, but that which drives their creators to produce them. This Jewishness, in an America that she describes as "post-assimilated" (at least, for those born after Kominsky Crumb), is often either allusive or elusive, both for Oksman's subjects and their readers. In common with the use of terms...