Bob Mankoff, Departing New Yorker Cartoon Editor, Picks His Favorite Jewish Cartoons
Image by Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
Not everybody reads The New Yorker, but the magazine’s distinctive comic style is widely known and emulated. Bob Mankoff is largely to thank for that. Mankoff, who served as the magazine’s comic editor for 20 years, will depart his post this Sunday. During his tenure, The New Yorker cultivated a comic style marked by a dry, sardonic wit.
Recently, The Jewish Telegraph Agency reached out to Mankoff for a list of his favorite Jewish New Yorker cartoons. According to the article, Mankoff, who is Jewish himself, described the Jewish experience of assimilation as a launching point for great comedy. “Assimilation has a tension to it, to maintain who you are, but to change,” he said. “That’s a great mix for comedy because humor always has a double perspective — on what appearances are and what reality actually is.”
The list is great, though he missed some personal favorites, specifically “A Charlie Brown Bris,” and “We’re raising the children as wolves.” See the cartoons and the full Jewish Telegraph Agency article at the link above.
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you move on, I wanted to ask you to support the Forward’s award-winning journalism during our High Holiday Monthly Donor Drive.
If you’ve turned to the Forward in the past 12 months to better understand the world around you, we hope you will support us with a gift now. Your support has a direct impact, giving us the resources we need to report from Israel and around the U.S., across college campuses, and wherever there is news of importance to American Jews.
Make a monthly or one-time gift and support Jewish journalism throughout 5785. The first six months of your monthly gift will be matched for twice the investment in independent Jewish journalism.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
