AMSTERDAM — From the simple sketches in America’s turn-of-the-century Yiddish newspapers to Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust narrative Maus 70 years on, comic-strip art has long been used as a way to depict Jewish experience.
Jewish artists, as an exhibition at Amsterdam’s Jewish Historical Museum shows, also played a special role in the development of the genre, creating figures such as Superman, Batman and the Hulk, before pioneering the graphic novel.
Early Jewish immigrants expressed their struggles to integrate in the United States in the short comic-strip format, which began to appear in East Coast newspapers from around 1900.
In a strip on show from 1914 in a Chicago evening newspaper, just after the outbreak of the First World War, a youngster looks at a map of Europe and asks his father where Belgium is.
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