a new york scholar talks graphic novels by jewish women for the national library of israel

The National Library of Israel has a YouTube channel, still relatively new but rich in good listening. This crossed my desk (for reasons I suggest in a recent longer post) after I’d taken in a good handful of lectures by Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, hosted elsehwere, on Talmud and early Christianity. For this institution Bar-Asher Siegal coordinated a ‘What Is Talmud?’ series last year that I’m still in the middle of.

The video I’m highlighting, though, is the first posted on the channel, January 2022. This is a talk by New York comics scholar Tahneer Oksman about (mainly) graphic novels by Jewish women. She draws in especially on some of the memoir-like fiction of Israeli Rutu Modan. Modan’s major work isn’t at all new, but I was unaware of her, I confess, until I watched this over the weekend. The Chicago library system has a number of her books, happily. I’ve got several on hold as of last night.