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

In the last two decades, the graphic narrative form has taken a central place in the American literary landscape. At the same time, graphic novels and memoirs by Jewish authors and with Jewish themes have also proliferated. Perhaps this is unsurprising, as the history of comics has been inextricably tied to the Jewish experience in America, from the wartime superheroes of Siegel, Shuster, and Eisner to MAD Magazine’s transgressive comedic sensibility. Since Art Spiegelman won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Maus, his graphic memoir about his father’s Holocaust experience, the graphic narrative form has also been particularly associated with Jewish history and culture.

Likewise, scholarship on the Jewish graphic novel has also accelerated, and Samantha Baskind and Ranen Omer-Sherman’s 2010 The Jewish Graphic Novel collected a variety of contemporary scholarship on the form. However, less attention has been given to the place of women, as both authors and subjects. Tahneer Oksman’s “How Come Boys Get to Keep Their Noses?” is an important intervention in this scholarly landscape, focusing on the intersections between gender and Jewish identity in the graphic narrative format.

Oksman explores intersectional identities in the autobiographical comics of several contemporary female Jewish artists. She classifies all of these authors as “postassimilated,” a term that is meant to describe the way that assimilation and its effects are no longer central to the work of these artists, although they may be influenced by or engage with the effects of assimilation (3). The theoretical framework Oksman builds in order to read the complex and dynamic representation of postassimilated Jewish-American-female identity in these comics is centered on a concept she calls “dis-affiliation,” which is not a static condition, but rather “a process” that “entails a complex negotiation” (2).

It is through the lens of “dis-affiliation” that Oksman examines questions of Jewish and gender identity in the graphic memoirs and diaries she analyzes. In particular, the notion of dis-affiliation is useful in understanding these intersectional identities as shifting rather than fixed, and existing synchronically. The medium of the comic, or “sequential art,” is particularly well-suited to visualizing these simultaneous, sometimes conflicting, identities, and Oksman skillfully points out the ways in which these works expose the impossibility of a homogeneous Jewish identity.

The book’s chapters are structured around either individual artists or pairs of artists with thematically related works. Chapter 1 focuses on the work of Aline Kominsky Crumb, who is the only artist among those featured who belongs to an older generation that came of age in the late twentieth century. Because of Kominsky Crumb’s position as a predecessor to many of the other artists discussed in the book, this chapter also functions as a platform for introducing many of the larger themes that the younger women both make use of and rebel against. In particular Oksman focuses on the way Kominsky Crumb’s work plays with stereotypes of Jewish women and how visualizing those stereotypes exposes the constructed nature of identity itself. Her analysis here sets the stage nicely for subsequent chapters, which explore the variety of ways younger Jewish women artists use comics to exercise control over both their own self-representation and popular representations and expectations of them.

The next two chapters continue to focus on the process of identity formation as expressed in the comics of three young artists, Vanessa Davis, Miss Lasko-Gross, and Lauren Weinstein. Chapter 2 is dedicated to the autobiographical and diaristic work of Davis, while Chapter 3 focuses on memoirs of adolescence by Lasko-Gross and Weinstein. In each of these, Oksman chronicles the way that the artists use Jewishness, sometimes metaphorically, to explore the relational nature of identity. That is, their comics visualize the ways that identity is contingent on community and the subject’s sense of herself as within or outside–and...