The AJS Honors Its Authors program is pleased to recognize 2022 co-editor Sarah Lightman for Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies & Borders published by Syracuse University Press
The book is now ready to pre-order, and is edited by Sarah Lightman, Heike Bauer, and Andrea Greenbaum.
It features an exceptional array of comics creators, comics scholars, and their artwork, interviews and essays.
Reviews by eminent scholars:
Frederick Luis Aldama, Sid Dobrin, Jennifer Dowling, Kevin Haworth, and Jodi Eichler-Levine
“This Dream Team of critical creative editors usher in a vital new phase in Comics Studies. This series of kaleidoscopic chapters Virgil-to-Dante-like, celebrate the nuanced complexities of experiences that ripple across a sweeping spectrum of ethnoracial, gender, class, and sexuality experiences and identities. This is comics studies—no, Critical Graphics Studies—at its best!”—Frederick Luis Aldama, University of Texas at Austin
“It is about time for the team up of feminism and Judaism to emerge in comics studies, to take up the powerful conversations of body, identity, and Judaism circulated in comic form. This collection surfaces as a compelling and necessary new direction for comics studies, one that vividly brings to light the role of Jewish women in comics, both mainstream and underground.”—Sid Dobrin, University of Florida
“The design concept is enticing, as are the interviews and the essays, the scholarship sound. I found the book very readable, with the first two thirds ‘chunked’ into easily devoured bits.”—Jennifer Dowling, The University of Sydney
“This book presents work that is diverse and incredibly valuable to anyone invested in the comics field. I felt my knowledge of marginalized artists expand, and that is a great service to readers.”—Kevin Haworth, Carnegie Mellon University
“Jewish Women in Comics: Bodies and Borders brings together a veritable “who’s who” of the best artists and scholars working in the field. This incisive collection provides an insightful prism of reflections on memory, embodiment, illness, trauma, and the multigenerational richness of Jewish women’s lives– a graphic, honest account of pain, pleasure, most powerfully, wrestling with the meaning of it all. It’s a must-read for anyone who wants to understand comics, Jews, or gender.”—Jodi Eichler-Levine, Lehigh University