The Tradition of no Tradition

This chapter explores the origins of Israeli comics, with a particular focus on three early women comics creators: Leah Goldberg, Friedel Stern, and Elisheva Nadal. It then explores the work of three influential artists from the 1970s-1980s: Dudu Geva, Uri Fink, and Michel Kichka. It then describes Modan's entry into comics, including her army service, her training at Bezalel Academy of Art and Design, her first newspaper comics, and her short-lived editorship of Israeli Mad magazine.

From the Nightclub to the Living Room: Gender, Ethnicity, and Upward Mobility in the 1950s Party Records of Three Jewish Women Comics

This chapter addresses mass-media culture, as the Jewish home-based value of laughing at oneself goes public with the rise of the recording of Jewish comedy acts. It explores the bawdy humour of Belle Barth, Pearl Williams, and Patsy Abbott — three working-class, Jewish, stand-up comics who were hugely popular in the United States in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It looks at how this group of entertainers positioned themselves at the intersection of gender, Jewish ethnicity, class, and whiteness in the 1950s, as well as the significance that their humour had for both Jewish and non-Jewish audiences. With their earthy, shtetl sensibility and their smatterings of Yiddish, these performers, who attained their greatest popularity in their middle years, railed against societal mores that told them to be quiet, well-behaved, and sexually passive. That some of the prominent comedy recordings brought into living-rooms across America were by Jewish women brandishing a racy, Yiddish-tinged humour becomes significant in the context of the middle-class suburbanization that Jews were experiencing during the 1950s.