Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Life

Throwing Harvey Pekar Into a Valley

Smith — the online magazine that brought you the six word story — now brings you the 90-headed Harvey Pekar beast.

To celebrate Harvey Pekar’s 70th birthday, their “Pekar Project” was to ask a number of artists to draw his head at 70 as a surprise present. Originally there were 70, natch, but so many artists presented their interpretations that there’s nearly 100 and the “heads still keep rollin” they say. One of the heads (pictured here ) was by the Forward’s own Eli Valley.

If you want to see Eli Valley’s own elegant head in motion and his art work explained, he’s playing Joe’s Pub on Monday in a Forward-sponsored event with The Sway Machinery and Girls in Trouble. Also there to accept her prize and read will be Irina Reyn, the newly-announced winner of the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers (for which I was a judge, full disclosure).

For more info about the Forward and the Foundation for Jewish Culture presenting “Eli Valley vs the Sway Machinery in the Temple of Self Hatred” With special guests Girls In Trouble click here.

To buy tickets click here.

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

We’ve set a goal to raise $260,000 by December 31. That’s an ambitious goal, but one that will give us the resources we need to invest in the high quality news, opinion, analysis and cultural coverage that isn’t available anywhere else.

If you feel inspired to make an impact, now is the time to give something back. Join us as a member at your most generous level.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

With your support, we’ll be ready for whatever 2025 brings.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.