The Graphic Novel from Diaspora to Diaspora: James Strum's the Golem's Mighty Swing and JT Waldman's Megillat Esther in the Tree of Contexts

By:
Dr Ori Z. Soltes
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Strum's The Golem's Mighty Swing and Waldman's Megillat Esther would at first seem to have little in common beyond being graphic novels contrived by a pair of Jewish males. The one is an original tale, the other a recasting of an entire biblical book with original commentaries; the one is simple in style, the other complex. But the two works are connected by underlying foci that include the issue of salvation effected through divine versus human instrumentation; the conundrum of defining the messianic idea within the Jewish tradition; the question of revealed and hidden identity across the history and geography of the Jewish experience--the complex layering of the concept of crypto-Judaism, or marranism. These and other issues, such as that of physicality and of beauty, and that of acceptance and rejection of the "other", interweave both works in different ways, as they share diversely common ground within both the history of the novel and the history of the Jewish relationship with the word and the image.


Keywords: Graphic Novel, Messianism, Marranism, Crypto-Judaism, Identity
Stream: Books, Writing and Reading
Presentation Type: 30 minute Paper Presentation in English
Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

Dr Ori Z. Soltes

Professorial Lecturer, Departments of Theology and Art History, Georgetown University
Washington, DC, UNITED STATES

Soltes is the author of over 135 books, articles and essays on topics ranging from language, literature and history to art history, theology and philosophy. He has taught and lectured throughout the United States, in Europe and ISrael and is also the curator of more than 80 exhibitions in the United States and at the Bermuda National Gallery. Recent books include Fixing the World: Jewish American Painters in the Twentieth Century; Our Sacred Signs: How Jewish, Christian and Muslim Art Draw from the Same Source; The Ashen Rainbow: Essays on the Arts and the Holocaust; and the Problem of Plato's Cratylus: the Relation of Language to Truth in the History of Philosophy.

Ref: B07P0158