Tag Archives: judaism

Motion Comic Honors Americans Who Saved Jews

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Disney Educational Productions, the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies in Washington and the veteran comic book artist Neal Adams are teaming up for a ten part motion comic series focused on Americans who saved Jews in World War II and the Holocaust.  They Spoke Out: American Voices Against the Holocaust will include a mix of animation, traditional comic book art, period photographs and film.

The first two episodes, La Guardia’s War Against Hitler and Voyage of the Doomed, will be screened at the art festival held by the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art on Sunday at the 69th Regiment Armory in Manhattan.

The 10-episode series was written by Rafael Medoff, the director of the Wyman Institute.  The comics will also be available at theyspokeout.com beginning Friday evening.

Neal Adams They Spoke Out

Choice Quotes

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Here’s this week’s quotes showing that comics aren’t just for kids anymore.  Everything from war and abortion to free speech were touched upon.

DMZ #51

Liberty News 24/7 – A special session of Congress has convened to petition the United Nations, a body that the United States was forced to quit at the start of the war, for support in a renewed mission to not merely contain the Free States movement…. but, in the words of an unnamed source on the senior staff, “To defeat them in the fullest military sense of the term.”

Ex Machina #48

January – It skeeves me out whenever a dude tries to parlay any kind of success into a political career.  There’s only one reason guys like that get into Government.  It starts with “p” and ryhmes with “pussy.”

and

January – Then what’s his angle?  I mean, are there any issues he even cares about?  I’ve just seen that one commercial where he spouts a bunch of platitudes about building bridges.  Like, how pro-choice is he?

Journal – I don’t know actually.

January – You don’t know where he stands on abortion?

Journal – I’m not a single-issue voter January.

Green Hornet #2

Metro Staffer – Deanley just passed Scanlon in the latest poll.

Britt Reid – By how much?

Metro Staffer – Twelve points.  You sure you wanna continue to back the lame-duck Mayor in his re-election bid?

and

Britt Reid – That’s not what I’m talking about, Frank.  I’m talking about their sizable donations to your re-election campaign.

Frank Scanlon – They’re entitled to their opinion on who’d they’d like to see running this city just like everyone else, aren’t they?

Prelude to Deadpool Corps. #5

Deadpool – Dude, this is a recipe for a spaceship in the face.  No way.  Don’t you remember Tiananmen Square, that guy standing in front of the tanks?  This is our chance for the Intergalactic History Books.  A lone hero against the might of an imperial–

Unwritten #11

Lizzie – It was a novel written by a Jew from a Jewish perspective.  It became the most successful anti-semitic movie of all time.

Comic Books Meet Torah

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Artist Isaac Brynjegard-Bialik is blending comic books, art and Torah in his new exhibition Paper Midrash, on view at the Merage Jewish Community Center of Orange County from January 24 through February 27, 2010.

Brynjegard-Bialik has partaken in the traditional Jewish art of paper-cutting for 15 years.  For his latest exhibit he’s using cut up strips of comic books to make his art.

Brynjegard feels the comic books adds a different layer to the works, partially due to the comic book industries deep Jewish roots.

One of my favorite sources when preparing for a piece is Sefer HaAggadah. I also study the parashot with my wife, who is a rabbi, and when I design the papercuts I try to bring different midrash and interpretations in to the mix. Using comics as part of the work has made them even richer.

Bleeding Cool has examples of some of the art you’ll see on top of the piece below.

Dina Babbitt

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Received through Facebook from Karin Babbitt:

Today, July 29, 2009 at 2:15 PM, Dina Gottliebova Babbitt was liberated from Auschwitz.

Dina’s story

Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt was a Holocaust survivor.  She was imprisoned in the Auschwitz Concentration Camp during the Holocaust, where she drew portraits of gypsy inmates for Josef Mengele.

Following the liberation of the camp and the end of the war she emigrated to the US and became an animator. As of now, seven watercolor portraits survive, all located in the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum.  She has been fighting the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum for the return of her paintings.

In 1944, while in Auschwitz Concentration Camp, she was chosen by Josef Mengele to draw portraits of gypsy inmates. Mengele wished to capture the gypsies’ skin coloration better than he could do it with camera and film at that time. Once the portraits were complete, the gypsies were sent to their deaths.

Seven of her portraits of inmate gypsies were discovered after World War II outside the Auschwitz camp in the early 1970s and sold to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum by people who apparently did not know that Dina was still alive and living in California. The Museum asked Babbitt to make the painful trip to the Auschwitz site in 1973 to identify her work. After she did so, she was informed that the Museum would not allow her to take her paintings home. This refusal to return her work to her was a re-incarceration as a spiritual hostage of the Auschwitz death camp.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum claims that because it purchased the paintings from third parties, it does not have to return Babbitt’s works, rejecting her claims and requests to return the paintings. Dina felt that true spiritual liberation would not come until the portraits were returned to her.

Both the United States House of Representatives and United States Senate have passed resolutions in support of Dina Babbitt.

In collaboration with Rafael Medoff, director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies, comic book industry legend Neal Adams has championed Babbitt’s efforts. Using text from Medoff, Adams illustrated a six-page graphic documentary about Babbitt that was inked by Joe Kubert and contains an introduction by Stan Lee. A reprint of the graphic documentary and an account of Babbitt’s plight were included in the final issue of the comic X-Men: Magneto Testament.

Dina Gottliebova-Babbitt was diagnosed with an aggressive form of abdominal cancer.  Over the past few days her condition deteriorated and on July 29 at 2:15 pm she passed away.  She did not live to see her paintings liberated.

You can learn more about Dina Babbitt at http://www.dinababbitt.com/

Choice Quotes

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X-Men: Legacy #225

Xavier – Exodus–

Exodus – I renounce that name.  Moses led his people to a land flowing with milk and honey.  I presided over a retreat.

Xavier – That’s not what this is.  It was way past time.  That’s all.  To declare an armistice on wars we already lost.  Not to forget the past but to make our peace with it — and live at last in the present.

Exodus – The present?  It’s a wilderness where wounded animals spit at heaven.  And devour each other, even as they die.

Xavier – Then change it.

Choice Quotes

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Big Hero Six #1

In the history of the world, only one nation has ever suffered a direct nuclear attack — the island monarchy of Japan.  The attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War 2 inflicted scars on the national memory that last to this day.  Like any nation, Japan needs to defend itself, but unlike the other great powers, it has forsworn the use of nuclear weapons.  They’ve found another way.

Secret Invasion: Runaways/Young Avengers #3

Some gender politics:

Leave my fiancee alone.  Do you hear me?!  And I am not a tramp you chauvinistic $*@!!

And, is this an Obama reference?

To not believe in you, the savior, the uniter… is to not believe in hope.  I choose to believe in hope.

Ex-Machina #38

The Great Machine – Effective immediately, I am retiring from volunteer community crimefighting.  And running as your independent candidate for Mayor of the great city of New York.  I’m hoping to be part of a truly grassroots campaign, one that will finally utilize the internet’s true potential to reach all voters.  Starting today, contributions as small as one dollar can be made directly to my new website at http://www.hundred4mayor.net.  That’s the word hundred and the number four, so please don’t–

And on speaking to the 2004 Republican National Convention in New York City:

Deputy Mayor – You’ve officially lost your mind.  You’re really going to deliver a speech from the same stage where the worst President in my lifetime is about to ask this country to give him another shot?

Mayor Hundred – I’m just being a good host, Dave.  Now which one of my stupid old “trophies” do you think I should present to the Vice President tomorrow?

Deputy Mayor – You’re letting Cheney inside Gracie Mansion?

Mayor Hundred – Believe it or not, New York doesn’t belong to the Democrats.

Deputy Mayor – And 9/11 doesn’t belong to the Republicans, no matter what the out-of-towners they’re busing into Madison Square Garden think.  Are you at least going to tell these people to start allocating more antiterrorism funds to the cities that actually need it?

And on Mayor Hundred running for Governor:

Deputy Mayor – You mean… you’re thinking about running for Governor?  Because, no offense, once that seat opens, everyone knows it’s going to Spitzer, unless somebody catches Mr. Clean in bed with a dead girl or a live boy.

X-Men: Magneto Testament #1

From the writer Greg Pak

In the three years editor Warren Simons and I have been developing “Magneto: Testament,” we’ve struggled with the complicated, rich, and contradictory information the comics give us about Magneto’s life during the Nazi rise to power and World War II.  Different comics give different accounts of Magneto’s name, his age, his ethnicity and religion, his hair color, and even his Auschwitz tattoo number.  But as dedicated Magneto fans have documented, the most compelling and essential material indicates that Magneto was a Jewish boy in Europe during the Nazi ascendancy and provides several key details about the fate of his family and his experiences in Auschwitz.

We’ve done our best to remain true to these elements while fleshing out the rest of our hero’s experiences based on research into the actual historical record.  Longtime readers will notice a wealth of surprising new details — for example, for the firs time, we’re revealing Magneto’s birth name.  And sometimes, because the comics record is contradictory or conflicts with historical fact, we’ve had to choose one detail over another.  But at every step, we’ve done our best to remain true to the key moments that have contributed so much towards making Magneto the deeply compelling character we know today.

But most importantly, in an age in which Holocaust deniers still spread their lies, we’ve done our best to ensure that the real-world history we explore in the series is entirely accurate and that we deal with this unfathomably harrowing material in a way that’s honest, unflinching, human, and humane.  In later issues, we’ll provide citations and suggestions for future reading.  For now, we offer a thousand thanks to Mark Weitzman of the Simon Wiesenthal Center for his expert advice and historical fact-checking.

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