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In December 2023, Taylor Swift attended a comedy show fundraiser for Palestinians in Gaza. A qualitative study was conducted with 23 11th and 12th grade students who self-identified as emotionally connected to both Israel and Swift to assess how these students understood Swift's attendance and whether it affected their parasocial relationships with her. By making use of the concepts of influencer betrayal and parasocial breakups, I demonstrate the ways in which the adolescents tried to make sense of how a celebrity with whom many felt close to could choose to attend an event whose purpose clashed strongly with their love of Israel. The study captures a moment in time and how a group of Jewish teens came to distance themselves from a parasocial relationship that had provided them great meaning when they felt that the object of their affection betrayed them by seemingly allying with a pro-Palestinian cause.

This article analyzes approaches to familial and communal memory in Carol Isaacs’s The Wolf of Baghdad and Asaf Hanuka’s Hayehudi haʿaravi, two Mizrahi graphic novels published in 2020. Both make use of comics-specific modalities to communicate the struggles of contemporary Mizrahim who feel burdened and bound to a past of which the authors possess no memories. Isaacs’s employment of wordlessness as she navigates 1930s and 1940s Jewish Baghdad facilitates an immersive sensory experience that enables her to extract meaning from the past and locate it in Mizrahi life in the present. Hanuka uses “braiding,” a concept described by Thierry Groensteen to refer to the complex interweaving of visual and linguistic narratives across a work, to link his own life story with the stories of his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather. Doing so allows him to understand the ways in which his own life has paralleled his ancestors’ choices while leading him to make changes in order to avoid repeating their mistakes. Considered together, both artists model creative approaches to navigating the Mizrahi past and present and modelling ways to create a cohesive Mizrahi identity in the twenty-first century.

This qualitative study investigates community-building and information-gathering processes among ninth-grade Canadian Jewish day school students and young adult alumni in response to the October 7 terror attack in Israel. Despite their different contexts, the two participant groups had similar needs for a sense of community and reliable information in the post-October 7 Canadian context. The data demonstrate the importance that a school and Jewish educators can play in helping its students and alumni construe meaning post-crisis, and serve as a safe space amidst growing sentiments of antisemitism and anti-Israelism.

This article considers how Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory is applicable to the grandchildren of Holocaust survivors by analyzing two graphic novels: Rutu Modan's The Property and Amy Kurzweil's Flying Couch. Postmemory emerged as a theory for understanding how traumatic memories become inherited by survivors' children. Both texts show that while the children of the survivors are burdened by their parents' memories, this is not the case for the grandchildren. Instead, it is only in the third generation that postmemories are liberated from being exclusively memories of trauma, and as a result, new approaches to the Holocaust emerge.

Originally published in the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist, Asaf Hanuka's series The Realist introduces readers to the real-life experiences that he has as an Israeli, a father, a husband, and a professional cartoonist. Each week's comic revolves around one event or experience from Hanuka's personal life during the preceding week. In many of the cartoons, Hanuka employs science fiction and fantasy motifs that provide the reader with insights into Hanuka's feelings and attitudes toward the nonfictional element. This article analyzes the series by employing a literary concept that I will call fantastical autography. I argue that Hanuka's use of the fantastical in his comics enables him to make use of complex visual metaphors that offer commentary on Israeli society and Hanuka's own place in it. More often than not, Hanuka's depictions of the “real” world are bleak and dreary, but fantasy provides a way out.

This article explores notions of belonging and home in Nora Krug's graphic memoir Belonging. Beginning with an exploration of how Krug feels disconnected from her identity as a German, the essay identifies a shift in the way that Krug comes to appreciate notions of home and homeland. Through the process of understanding her family's Nazi history, Krug comes to not only feel more connected to her past but through this, she is able to feel at home again in her familial identity. Krug's identification with history as a conduit for establishing identity is explored through the lens of postmemory and is analyzed in relation to public and private ways that Germany commemorates the legacy of the Holocaust in contemporary society.

Originally published in the Israeli business newspaper Calcalist, Asaf Hanuka's series The Realist introduces readers to the real-life experiences that he has as an Israeli, a father, a husband, and a professional cartoonist. Each week's comic revolves around one event or experience from Hanuka's personal life during the preceding week. In many of the cartoons, Hanuka employs science fiction and fantasy motifs that provide the reader with insights into Hanuka's feelings and attitudes toward the nonfictional element. This article analyzes the series by employing a literary concept that I will call fantastical autography. I argue that Hanuka's use of the fantastical in his comics enables him to make use of complex visual metaphors that offer commentary on Israeli society and Hanuka's own place in it. More often than not, Hanuka's depictions of the \"real\" world are bleak and dreary, but fantasy provides a way out.

Non-religious Jews in Israel may define themselves as secular, yet they often observe Jewish traditions. While not monolithic in their practice, they are far less secular on the whole than their counterparts in other western countries. Recent surveys have effectively demonstrated the different forms these religious practices take but not the rationale behind them. Six of Asaf Hanuka's 400 weekly comic strip “The Realist” provide insight into why he self-identifies as secular but observes Jewish traditions with his nuclear family on a regular basis. Hanuka is appreciative of ritual while observing it with his parents and children but when left on his own, he is either dismissive of it or else adapts it so that he can take part in the familial or communal framework.