De Superman au Chat du Rabbin

Miriam just sent us this picture of her "wall" at the The Musee d'art et d'histoire du Judaisme in Paris, up for De Superman au Chat du Rabbin, an exhbition on Jewish cartoons and graphic novels illustrating how the comic strip contributed to the construction of contemporary Jewish collective memory. The exhibition is up in Paris from October 16, 2007 to January 27, 2008, then it moves to Amsterdam, where it will be exhibited from 6 March to mid-June 2008; it features D+Q's Miriam Katin and James Sturm, as well as many other Jewish cartoonists.

Here's little excerpt from the museum's website:

With time and successive generations, authors ceased to describe the Jewish world they once know or their daily reality. They pictured a bygone world as they remembered it but also the vision of it they received from former tales. Literature, theatre and movies were also leaving their mark on the visions of those who had no direct experience of this world. They eagerly sought out traces and documents, vestiges of this past and the changes in urban areas and buildings in immigrants' quarters, old photographs and commercial leaflets depicting workshops, shops and delicatessens. They delved into the history of these changes, digging out every available trace of the epos of self-made men, their languages and cultural backgrounds. Eventually, these sons of immigrants recalled the life story of their fathers to root out their own political convictions. In doing so, they constructed a narration associating the collective memory of former generations and their own contemporary questioning of the problems of their own generations

Be sure to check it out in you're in Paris sometime during the next few months!

Posted in: