H eadlines
‘Maus’ Creator Art Spiegelman Talks at Biennial
Gratz College Holocaust Teach-In
L OCA L
JESSE BERNSTEIN | JE STAFF
MORE THAN 400 students,
educators and community
members tuned in from around
the world on March 7 to attend a
Gratz College Zoom event with
cartoonist Art Spiegelman.

As part of the biennial Arnold
and Esther Tuzman Memorial
Holocaust Teach-In, Spiegelman,
creator of “Maus” and the first
cartoonist to ever win the
Pulitzer Prize, gave several talks
to different groups over the
course of the afternoon. For a few
hours, viewers heard from the
73 year-old Spiegelman on topics
like MAD magazine, American
cartooning, Donald Trump,
Zionism, Elie Wiesel, Charlie
Hebdo, “Maus” and more.

“Maus,” Spiegelman’s graphic
memoir for which he is best known,
is both the story of his father’s
experience of the Holocaust in
Poland and Spiegelman’s own
experience as the son of Holocaust
survivors. It is based on record-
ings that Spiegelman made of his
father’s testimony. The resulting
work, published serially between
1980 and 1991, won praise and
awards for Spiegelman from
across the globe.

“Maus” is well-suited to the
themes of the teach-in. The late
Arnold and Esther Tuzman, the
namesakes of the teach-in, were
both Holocaust survivors. Their
son, Marty Tuzman, and grand-
daughter, Kira Foley-Tuzman,
described the experience of
carrying on the legacy of their
forebearers for the teach-in
attendees, emphasizing the
Gary Weissman (top row, second from left) discusses the educational utility of “Maus.” Screenshot by Jesse Bernstein
responsibility that they feel to
honor their memory.

After leading VIP sponsors
on a tour of his at-home
studio, Spiegelman spoke to all
attendees for close to an hour.

Puffing on a blue-ringed
vape, Spiegelman said that he
tried to avoid talking about
“Maus” for many years, as
the same questions came up
repeatedly. He even wrote a
companion book, “MetaMaus,”
that sought to preempt many
of them. But the Trump presi-
dency, he said, compelled him
to be more vocal.

“I just got more and more
scared about the reality I was
in,” Spiegelman said, “because it
seemed to me that ... well, I never
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10 MARCH 11, 2021
JEWISH EXPONENT
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H EADLINES
From left: Rabbi
Lance J. Sussman
and Art Spiegelman
Screenshot by
Jesse Bernstein
quite thought I’d see fascism
rear its head in America.”
When a commenter expressed
dismay that Spiegelman’s discus-
sion was focusing too much
on politics, the cartoonist was
indignant. “Th is isn’t politics as some
kind of abstraction. Th is is
politics. Th e Holocaust was
politics. And we’re living
through politics now,” he said.

In conversation with Rabbi
Lance J. Sussman of Reform
Congregation Keneseth Israel,
Spiegelman discussed the
history of American cartooning
and the publication of “Maus.”
Mostly, he answered questions
about particular choices he’d
made in the creation of “Maus,”
covering everything from his
portrayal of Polish people as
pigs to a shadow on the cover.

Preregistered participants
then broke into two groups. One
session, led by Gary Weissman,
an adjunct professor at Gratz and
an associate professor of English
at the University of Cincinnati,
was intended for educators at the
high school and college levels.

Weissman discussed the various
ways in which “Maus” could be
used to teach students about
the interplay between literature,
history and memory.

In the other session,
Spiegelman addressed more than
40 Gratz students. He discussed
his relationship to Israel, the
diff erence between him and Elie
Wiesel, and a new project he’d
illustrated for the novelist Robert
Coover; he talked about fascism,
Plastic Man and the diff erence
between the Republican and
Democratic parties.

Th e work of Wiesel and some
other survivors, Spiegelman
said, felt “emotionally manipu-
lative” to him; additionally, he
had no intention of becoming
JEWISHEXPONENT.COM a writer who would be called
upon every time someone need
a pronouncement on a matter
of the Holocaust.

“I have no real problem with
his work,” Spiegelman said of
Wiesel. “But I certainly didn’t
want to spend the rest of my life
having to become a second gener-
ation explicator of something
that I put everything I could
know into this one 13-year-long
project, and live only in that.”
Spiegelman recommended
the work of younger cartoon-
ists, and plugged Astra
Quarterly, a new international
literary magazine edited by his
daughter, Nadja Spiegelman.

He answered many questions
regarding teaching techniques
when it came to “Maus”;
most were preceded by an
outpouring of gratitude for
Spiegelman’s work.

Spiegelman insisted that
education wasn’t on his mind
when he fi rst put pencil to paper.

“I never made ‘Maus’ to teach
anybody anything consciously.

I didn’t think the world could
learn,” he said. “I just knew this
was a story that people at that
time, which was 1972, barely
knew.” (Spiegelman drew the
fi rst “Maus” strip in 1972.)
Spiegelman tried
to situate “Maus” in the history
of American cartooning,
explaining that the genre wasn’t
usually considered to have any
literary merit for most of its
history. It was his work and that
of a few other cartoonists in the
late ’80s, he said, that fi nally
brought a more sympathetic
critical eye. ●
jbernstein@jewishexponent.com; 215-832-0740
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...to be continued
JEWISH EXPONENT
MARCH 11, 2021
11