A Queer Sephardic Teenager Turns to Judaism to Fight the Zombies

October 4, 2023 | ,

Clementine began her existence as a video game character, in Telltale Games’ landmark Walking Dead series, back in 2012. There, she was an 8-year-old kid we met in Atlanta just as a zombie apocalypse chugs into motion. As sometimes happens in popular culture, Clementine’s story curiously resembled that of a character in another fictional property released at almost the exact same time: The Last of Us (TLOU), which appeared first as a video game on PlayStation 3 in 2013, and more recently as a series adapted for HBO.

Like Ellie in TLOU, Clementine contends with zombies who are never called zombies (instead Ellie has “infected” and Clem has “walkers”). Like Ellie, she connects with a morally compromised surrogate father to whom she serves as a moral compass (Ellie:Joel::Clem:Lee), travels across several U.S. cities to get to a safer place, loses friends and learns to fire a gun for self-protection. Both characters appear across media forms, too: Ellie, a comic book fan herself, also appeared in a spinoff 2013 comic called “American Dreams” drawn by Faith Erin Hicks, and now Clementine headlines a comic series written and drawn by the wonderful Tillie Walden.

If you track Ellie’s and Clementine’s stories up to the present — in The Last of Us, Part 2, which came out a few years ago and is currently being adapted for HBO, and in Walden’s newest comic, “Clementine: Book Two,” which is being published on October 3 — you find that these two teenagers have something else in common, something somewhat less predictable from the generic conventions of zombie media.

They both have Sephardic girlfriends.

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Milwaukee Blues

May 5, 2023 | ,

Part of what it means to be an American, lately, is to be a subject of curiosity and concern for people from elsewhere. Friends in Canada and Europe often ask me how I live under the threat of gun violence or accept the loss of what they consider basic human rights. Louis-Phillippe Dalembert’s 2021 novel Milwaukee Blues, out this week in Marjolijn de Jager’s English translation, makes me feel the same way those inquiries do. (more…)

Books of Sarah

May 18, 2022 | , ,

[Professor and literary critic Josh Lambert serves as a judge for two major prizes for American Jewish literature, meaning he reads as many new American novels by and about Jews as possible each year. In this annual column for Jewish Currents, he reflects on some of the previous year’s most compelling works of fiction that might be considered “Jewish” in one way or another, and what patterns emerged in this reading.]

AS IS OFTEN THE CASE, the new fiction I read over the past year seemed like a slow-motion echo of the news from half a decade ago: not ripped from the headlines, exactly, but carefully cut out, collaged in a scrapbook, meditated upon, and transformed. A number of novels and short story collections released in 2021 deal with gender and sexuality in ways that feel decidedly post-2016. Not coincidentally, this was a year in which scholars began dropping #MeToo into titles and subtitles, and a young philosopher’s exploration of “feminism in the 21st century” was a bestseller. (more…)

An Unusual Jewish Novel, Full of Blood and Incense

January 10, 2018 | , , , ,

THE RUINED HOUSE
By Ruby Namdar
Translated by Hillel Halkin
514 pp. Harper. $29.99.

It’s been a season of reckoning for our high priests, as one after another, in the film industry, journalism, politics, academia and other fields, have been judged and sometimes punished for their sins. How eerie that Ruby Namdar’s strange and exhilarating novel, “The Ruined House,” should appear in English translation just now.

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Taking It on the Nose? A Fresh Look at Cartoon Jews and Anti-Semitism

August 1, 2017 | , ,

The Implacable Urge to Defame: Cartoon Jews in the American Press, 1877-1935, by Matthew Baigell, Syracuse University Press, 240 pp., $29.95

Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in Israel and America, by Eli Valley, OR Books, 144 pp., $25

For years, I’ve been doing a little experiment with the students in my Jewish literature classes, whenever I’m about to teach a graphic novel like “Maus” or “The Rabbi’s Cat.” I ask them to take out a piece of paper and a pen or pencil. I tell them that I’m going to give them an instruction, and that they have to respond without asking any questions. Then, once they’re ready, I say: “Draw a Jew.”

Feel free to try this at home.

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Why Do We Love to Curse So Much?

September 26, 2016 | ,

WHAT THE F
What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves
By Benjamin K. Bergen
271 pp. Basic Books. $27.99.

IN PRAISE OF PROFANITY
By Michael Adams
253 pp. Oxford University Press. $17.95.

Every parent has been there, or will be there soon: the moment when your darling 5-year-old says one of the magic words that can transform a PG movie into an R, or earn an N.B.A. star a $25,000 fine.
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