Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women by Michael Kaminer and Sarah Lightman (review)

Yeshiva University Museum's exhibit "Graphic Details: Confessional Comics by Jewish Women" is deceptively simple. A single large room houses the exhibit and above each selection is the artist's name and self-portrait. The works themselves, however, represent an amazingly rich selection of comics. They depict a range of concerns, from love and family to experiences in Israel to explorations of anxiety. Their styles and preoccupations vary to create a pastiche of the concerns that Jewish women face in matters of faith, love, children, identity, and homeland.

An introductory note to the section "The Whole Mispocha" explains that "Confessional women's comics emerged in response to depictions of women as two dimensional objects of male-adolescent fantasies in mainstream and underground comics. In revisiting the bonds of mishpocha (family) and friendship, or the tumult of romantic relationships, the artists portray themselves with emotional nuance and biting naturalism." Aline Kominsky-Crumb, arguably the most famous of the authors represented at the show, offers "Wise Guys," a meditation on her family's connections to the mob, including unexpected yacht outings and the discovery of a stockpile of small appliances, and her difficulties relating these incidents to her husband in later life. There is no "reveal"—the work is devoted to her confusion in early life and in reflection. In a similarly ambivalent offering, Sharon Rudahl's "The Star Sapphire" surveys her ill-fated marriage through the single day she and her ex-husband spent attempting to track down a member of the clergy, any clergy, to officiate their marriage. In losing the stone from her wedding ring, Rudahl is reminded of the familial tensions that led her into—and the problems that led her out of—a relationship with a non-Jew.

Lauren Weinstein explores a positive example of intermarriage in a work that glosses her and her husband's different backgrounds. More powerful, however, are her sketches, which express the tension between fear and joy in pregnancy. She writes that "I feel the most transcendent I have ever felt," a sentiment juxtaposed with a list of worries, including C-sections, farting, and spirituality. These sketches could stand alone, but are interesting in part because they are placed between her more "finished" works, one dealing with her relationship with her parents and the other depicting some of the fears arising during birthing class, the word "pain" scrawled throughout.

Vanessa Davis's hilarious contribution reveals the awkward marriage of religious identity and sexual pleasure. Her comic depicts a trip that she and a friend made to "Toys in Babeland," a sex toy shop in San Francisco. When the two women find a Hassidic man observing them, Vanessa writes, "I wanted to tell my mom about seeing him there, but I didn't want to tell her about me being there," which neatly articulates some of the intergenerational problems that women must navigate. Miss Lasko-Gross's The Gruswerks' Sabbath presents a different locus of strain, between Orthodox and non-Orthodox practice. It depicts a scene of her inability to control her fidgeting during an Orthodox Sabbath observation.

These inter- and intra-familial tensions become starker in the work of Noomin and Eisenstein. The section "Facing Down Trauma, or There Must Be Some Divine Plan" explores how women comic artists have contributed to Jewish literature of trauma, and it includes wonderful selections such as Diane Noomin's Baby Talk. Noomin repeatedly emphasizes the disruptive potential of comics, and blurs the lines between fiction and autobiography in a metameditation on what it means to depict her own story as that of another. In recounting her miscarriages, she attempts to distance herself from the story by beginning to tell it as the autobiography of a fictional character, but one of her other fictional characters bursts through the page and drags her into it, demanding that she own her own story.

Bernice Eisenstein's animated film "I...