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Drawing on Grief in Jewish Visual Memoir (a talk at Gettysburg College)

From the Kabbalah to dybbuks, from Sholem Aleichem to Roz Chast, there is no shortage of Jewish liturgical, mythological, literary, and cultural works incorporating themes related to death and dying as it relates to Jewish life. In this talk, Tahneer Oksman will look at the now almost 100-year old genre of the Anglophone grief memoir, a genre that arguably emerged as a response to a growing need for communal spaces of, and structures for, mourning. Using the works of three contemporary graphic memoirists—Leela Corman, Roz Chast, and Judith Margolis—as her case studies, Oksman will show how visualizing grief can be a means of teaching us how to pay attention to those living in grief and to seeing the connections between individual and communal losses.