Throwing Harvey Pekar Into a Valley
By Dan Friedman
Smith — the online magazine that brought you the six word story — now brings you the 90-headed Harvey Pekar beast.
To celebrate Harvey Pekar’s 70th birthday, their “Pekar Project” was to ask a number of artists to draw his head at 70 as a surprise present. Originally there were 70, natch, but so many artists presented their interpretations that there’s nearly 100 and the “heads still keep rollin” they say. One of the heads (pictured here ) was by the Forward’s own Eli Valley.
If you want to see Eli Valley’s own elegant head in motion and his art work explained, he’s playing Joe’s Pub on Monday in a Forward-sponsored event with The Sway Machinery and Girls in Trouble. Also there to accept her prize and read will be Irina Reyn, the newly-announced winner of the Goldberg Prize for Jewish Fiction by Emerging Writers (for which I was a judge, full disclosure).
For more info about the Forward and the Foundation for Jewish Culture presenting “Eli Valley vs the Sway Machinery in the Temple of Self Hatred” With special guests Girls In Trouble click here.
To buy tickets click here.
Our Comics Don't Eat Brains
By Dan Friedman
When we at the Forward run articles the world listens carefully. When we choose not to run pieces, apparently, the world jumps to attention and blogs it.
Forward columnist Eli Valley’s biting cartoons about Evangelical Zionists, Jewish Social Entrepreneurs, Abe Foxworthy (the accidental scientific melding of Abe Foxman and Jeff Foxworthy) and the moral communal context of Bernie Madoff got some media play. But when “Dawn of the Chimpanzee! (Don’t Worry Folks, It’s Only a Metaphor)” (his satire on how American Zionist education projects fantasies of Israel) failed to run, the blogosphere went crazy.
First of all Gawker ran it in their Unspiked series provoking a range of comments underneath it.
Then Tablet caught the Eli bug and blogged the Gawker publication. Former Forward staffer Marissa Brostoff, after calling for comment to no avail as we rollercoasted towards deadline, caught the mood nicely with her “So, for now, the answer to why a Jewish newspaper refused to run a comic in which Israelis are depicted as non-brain-eating primates must remain a mystery.”
Soon Jewlicious were up on the game, proudly printing the comment despite, probably judging from the comments there, largely disagreeing with everything in the cartoon. “He Mocks Us — But We Love Him”: their magnanimous title (and who wouldn’t love him?!).
And, where Jewlicious leads, Jewschool follows. Well, not necessarily, but sandwiched in between a piece on Quaker meetings and healthcare reform, comes their “Fuel For Chimpanzee Truth.”
Finally, at least for today, the diaspora satire on diasporic educational projections of Israel have wended their way over to the land of chimpanzees itself (just kidding — not even a metaphor). Haaretz posted the cartoon in their Hot Topic section as an example of cucumber season hubbub. Cucumbers and chimpanzees seems like a mixed metaphor to me, but perhaps it’s just a new reality show.
Anyway, thanks for the attention guys. I’m thinking of spiking a 5,000 word piece on the interaction between Jewish accountants in nineteenth century Latvia — can’t wait for the blogs to get hold of that!
Eli Valley, Game-changer?
By Dan Friedman
Has Eli Valley, Forward columnist, changed the future of Israel as we know it?
This is from an article about Foxman and Avigdor Lieberman’s proposed Loyalty Oath for Israeli citizens in February:
But the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that is quick to spot instances of discrimination, says Lieberman is right to be concerned about apparent acts of disloyalty by Israeli Arabs. Abraham Foxman, the ADL’s national director, noted with concern the trips by Arab Israeli Knesset members to enemy states and expressions of solidarity with Hamas by Israeli Arabs during Israel’s recent military operation in the Gaza Strip. “There were a lot of people who said, ‘Hey, that’s disloyal,’ ” Foxman told JTA. “That’s what he’s talking about. He’s not saying expel them. He’s not saying punish them.”
Then we print Eli Valley’s Abe Foxworthy, In which a science experiment goes horribly wrong causing a genetic mixture of Foxman and comedian Jeff Foxworthy (author of “Redneck Dictionary” and “How to Stink at Work”) states that he is “here to defend ‘loyalty oaths’ for citizenship —not only in Israel but also in the confederate states of America”
And the effect is almost instantaneous. In the latest Jewish Week Foxman (not Foxworthy) is quoted as saying:
It’s odious. Zionism is something you should aspire to, but it shouldn’t be something that you get punished for if you don’t. … Americans are not comfortable with loyalty oaths — this goes back to our experience with McCarthy.
Is it too much to contemplate Foxman having an epiphany after seeing his genetically altered twin in Eli’s hall of mirrors?
December 6, 2007, 5:01pm
Hanukkah Dichotomy: Miracles vs. Maccabees
By Daniel Treiman
As I noted earlier on this blog, atheist firebrand Christopher Hitchens finds Hanukkah wholly objectionable, whether it’s the miracle or the Maccabees’ Hasmonean dynasty. The JTA’s Ami Eden takes him to task for lumping the two aspects of the holiday together:
By emphasizing the miracle of the oil, the rabbis in the Talmud were essentially attempting to write the Hasmonean rulers that Hitchens so detests out of the story. Yes, the rabbis’ narrative is still an anti-Greek one, but even from Hitchens’ perspective, this shift in emphasis should be seen as progress.
Over on Jewcy, cartoonist par excellence, Eli Valley, and his iconoclastic collaborator, David Kelsey, offer their own comic take on Hanukkah, combining the acid assessment of Hitchens with Eden’s nuance.
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