Explore the vast range of titles available.

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.

Marianne Hirsch’s theory of postmemory proposes that descendants of people who have survived traumatic experiences such as war, genocide, and displacement are affected by their parents’ and grandparents’ experiences and that such memories affectively shape their individual identity and sense of belonging in society. Postmemory enhances a person’s perception of self and belonging within historical contexts and in relation to specific landscapes, cityscapes, and storied places. The search for lost histories spurs members of the postgenerations to go on heritage, or roots, journeys to experience the places where their parents or grandparents once lived in order to piece together fragmented memories and broken identities. The personal and collective aspects of postmemory in relation to World War II are key themes in three recent graphic memoirs: Jérémie Dres’ “We Won’t See Auschwitz” (2012), Nora Krug’s “Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home” (2018), and Rutu Modan’s “The Property” (2013). Dres, Krug, and Modan explore how war trauma is inherited by descendants of the people who actually experienced it: Dres from the point of view of two grandsons of a Polish-Jewish woman, and Krug from the perspective of a granddaughter of a German soldier, while Modan features an Israeli grandmother-granddaughter team, who seeks to reclaim family property in Poland. The comics medium combines images with text in these three works to show how postmemory and the search for lost World War II histories expose the lingering effects of trauma and displacement.

A common convention in comics and animation is the use of animal stand-ins to provide an access point for human experiences. Whether representing anthropomorphized characters navigating very human experiences or depicting four-legged creatures impacted by human action, this strategy has the manifest intent of fostering viewer identification and empathy. In particular, artists sometimes deploy animal avatars in representations of persecution and historical trauma to avoid depicting identity categories such as race, nationality and sexuality, which constitute the ostensible basis for persecution. In this way, the use of animals to represent human suffering universalizes experiences for which difference matters. In this essay, I explore how these animal stand-ins enable or foreclose empathy with Palestinian victims in the close reading of two primary texts, “War Rabbit” and Waltz with Bashir, which employ animal avatars in place of a direct depiction of Palestinian suffering. These illustrated narratives, one a comic and one an animated film, visually rhyme animal and human suffering and verbally lament the deaths of animals. I argue that both texts fail to unpack the analogies they construct, such that these constructions ultimately represent the actual Palestinians victims as being mute and irrational. Thus this use of animal avatars, which is meant to be foster empathy, is instead oblique, and risks further dehumanizing victims and negating their experiences.

This article analyzes the representation of Holocaust memory and its influences on present-day reality in Israel in three graphic novels: Ari Folman and David Polonsky's 2009 Waltz with Bashir, Michel Kichka's 2013 The Second Generation: Things I Did Not Tell My Father, and Rutu Modan's 2013 The Property. It shows that, through the employment of private snapshots alongside references to famous photographic images, these texts invoke the duality at the heart of Holocaust memory in Israel, comprised of private and collective memory and postmemory and their clashing points. As a major point of reference, this study explores the specific allusion in all three texts to the iconic photograph of the surrendering child in the Warsaw Ghetto, highlighting its symbolic function in Israeli discussions of intergenerational trauma transmission. At the same time it argues that Bashir's employment of this image reveals its potential to also garner sympathy toward Israel's Others. Finally, it explores the unique combination of reproduced photographs and drawn ones, especially in Bashir, which simultaneously educes and questions photography as a path to memory. By referring to both private and public photographs, these texts also explore the place of public images in that process, thus touching on a tension inherent to Israeli culture from its earliest days - that between the individual and the collective.

Stereotypes may be reductive and emotionally charged but, as shared inter-group perceptions, they are an integral part of any social interaction, especially in the history of neighboring groups such as Jews and Poles. Rutu Modan’s graphic novel The Property (2013) offers a broad range of stereotypical behaviors, characterizations, and attitudes which have informed the relationship between the two groups. The aim of this paper is to explore the nature of Polish-Jewish relations through the trope of the stereotype, revealing its persistence and ubiquity in both nations’ cultural milieus. The focus of the discussion will be on humor and irony as key discursive tools which, it will be argued, challenge the validity of stereotypes by breaking their polarity and opening up new avenues of communication. A stereotype-driven narrative, which challenges the past and invites re-readings of Holocaust discourse, facilitates cross-cultural awareness since stereotypes work both ways, revealing not only one’s prejudiced perspective of other groups, but also the perceiver’s character.

Female graphic writers have been under-represented in scholarship about the emerging field. This essay argues that Marjane Satrapi, Alison Bechdel, and Rutu Modan use the genre to push in from the (literal and metaphorical) margins to challenge literary, sexual, and nationalist norms through both their storylines and their illustrations.

This thesis examines postmemory experiences in the Israeli graphic novels Second Generation: Things I Did Not Tell My Father (2012) by Michel Kichka, The Property (2013) by Rutu Modan and The Quiet Beach (2009) by Michal Tamir. Following Marianne Hirsch, postmemory is defined as a type of memory that the children of the survivors of trauma inherit from their parents not through the empirical connection to the event itself, but rather through stories, imagery and iconic symbols of trauma. This transmission proves to be so strong that it creates a “memory” of its own right, rooted in imaginative investment, projection and creative process. Operating in the framework of postmemory theory, this work applies its basic principles to the multimodal medium of graphic novels and identifies the unique artistic strategies employed by the authors, such as the use of imagery, symbolism, mirroring, colors, shading techniques, perspective and incorporation of familial and iconic pictures into the narrative. Through this analysis, the study reveals that the works in focus share common narrative themes: silence, loss, loneliness, traumatic reenactment and struggle for personal autonomy manifested through similar memory nodes, like food, bodies, objects and imagery. The interplay of visual and textual devices facilitates the expression of the authors’ relationship with the trauma of their parents, allowing to depict the elusive and often ineffable shadow of the traumatic past.This study expands the corpus of existing works on postmemory in the visual medium through offering a comparative viewpoint of the graphic novels, and gives scholarly attention to works that have not been researched so far, such as the graphic novel The Quiet Beach by Michal Tamir. While this thesis focuses on Israeli graphic novels, it also presents opportunities for future research, including the analysis of works by Western authors

In Eisner winner Modan’s Tunnels (Drawn & Quarterly, Nov.), rival archeologists search beneath the West Bank for the Ark of the Covenant.

Tracing the emergence and popularity of comic art and theorizing comics in relation to epistemological paradigms, this dissertation takes graphic narrative representations of persecution as its primary object of inquiry. In the past few decades, graphic narratives depicting persecution, from Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986) to Alison Bechdel's Fun Home (2006), have topped national bestseller lists and become standard texts in high school and university classrooms. While these works undoubtedly have been successful because their serious subject matter corresponds to conventional ideas about what makes good literature, the comics medium also affords new ways to conceptualize history. The formal properties of the medium, such as comics' spatial representation of time and visual-verbal tension, lend comics the capacity to contest dominant notions of history, both in offering counter-histories of specific events and in revealing the logics that implicitly inform the telling of history. The primary materials of my study treat topics ranging from legally sanctioned discrimination to violent genocides. The title of my study emphasizes my commitment to demonstrating how comics' formal properties explode, by which I mean both expand and upset, history. These materials include graphic novels that narrate histories of persecution in fictionalized settings and nonfiction graphic narratives that use archival research to document past events. Combining philosophies of history and theories of modernity with formal analysis, I explore how comics engage temporality, subjectivity and vision, and argue that these conceptual frameworks for apprehending history themselves participate in the violences they render legible. Due to the medium's fragmented, spatial-temporal arrangement, comics interrogate temporal boundaries, often visually associating times of past oppression with readers' present. Comics complicate universal history at the level of visual register as well, using iconographic images and anachronistic period-specific art styles to denature linear time, for instance. Comics' multi-modal use of visual and verbal signification, layered across panels and pages, animates the contest between the perspectives of historical witnesses and those of the artists who popularize their accounts. For these reasons, comics not only broaden the practice of historiography, but also challenge historical epistemology and question the status of history telling as a mode of representation.

The Israel Museum Award for illustration is given in memory of Rivi and Michael Ben-Yitzhak, who were killed in a terrorist attack in Jerusalem's Zion Square in the summer of 1975, leaving behind two young children. The chairperson of the jury gives a brief rundown of the award and an overview of some of the winners