Eddy Portnoy
By Eddy Portnoy
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Culture It’s a Mad Mad MAD World
Al Jaffee’s Mad Life By Mary-Lou Weisman, illustrated by Al Jaffee It Books, 240 pages, $27.99 The biography “Al Jaffee’s Mad Life” couldn’t have a more apt title. Jaffee’s engaging tales of his mad, mad, mad childhood are even stranger than his long tenure as a cartoonist at Mad magazine. A journey through the Jewish…
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News Ab. Cahan Hates Cartoons
By the end of the first decade of the 20th century, the Forverts, aka the Jewish Daily Forward, was not only the best-selling Yiddish daily in New York, but was also a center for political action and social reform. At the helm of this project was the paper’s founder and editor, Abraham (Ab.) Cahan, a…
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Culture The Cartoons That Disappeared
The Cartoons That Shook the World By Jytte Klausen Yale University Press, 240 pages, $35.00 ‘What are you reading?” my 8-year-old daughter asked me as I sat with Jytte Klausen’s “The Cartoons That Shook the World,” on my lap. “A book about cartoons,” I said. She looked at me, puzzled, and asked: “Where are the…
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Culture Guileless in Gaza
It is difficult not to be impressed by Joe Sacco’s “Footnotes in Gaza.” A unique journalistic product, Sacco’s latest book offers an in-depth look at disputed events that took place after the Israelis occupied Gaza at the beginning of the aborted British-French-Israeli attack on Egypt in 1956. Perhaps these are neglected “footnotes” in the history…
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Books Kids Lit: More Yiddish Books Begin To Sprout
Let’s say you’re raising your children in Yiddish and you want to buy them some books. What do you do? If you walk into the children’s section of any bookstore, you’ll be deluged with a huge number of engaging, beautifully illustrated books, from board books to chapter books to beautifully rendered pop-ups. But none of…
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Culture Simple, Offensive and Out There
Cartoons and Extremism: Israel and the Jews in Arab and Western Media By Joel Kotek Vallentine Mitchell, 201 pages, $26.95. Joel Kotek’s “Cartoons and Extremism: Israel and the Jews in Arab and Western Media” is overwhelming. A portable gallery of some of the most revolting antisemitic cartoons and images available, the book traces popular antisemitic…
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Culture Jewish Mobsters Amble From Text to the Panel
With 8 million stories in the Jewish naked city, artists Joe Kubert, Neil Kleid and Jake Allen have given us two riveting ones. With the growing interest in graphic novels and the pictorial evocation of historical events, it’s not surprising that more and more Jewish tales are ending up in panels instead of in type….
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