Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
“I certainly feel Jewish. I grew up in a traditional Polish-Jewish immigrant family and it’s part of my culture, but what that means is hard to say. My humor could be women’s humor, too. But humor is definitely part of my worldview, how I experience things. It’s an absolutely necessary spice or – more than that – a magnifying glass through which to see the world.”--Rutu Modan
Rutu Modan believes there is an Israeli identity. It’s what you learn in school, what you read in the paper, what your friends tell you, what your parents tell you, and what being Jewish is. She comes from an educated family: both parents were doctors, one sibling is an actor, and another is a doctor. She graduated cum laude from Bezalel Academy of Art and Design and currently teaches a class there. Her next graphic novel, which should be on the shelves by 2013, is about a young girl who goes back to Poland with a grandmother who left Poland before the second world war. Her grandmother wants the property, confiscated by the Nazis during the war, back. Rutu sees irony in this “right of return,” but she doesn’t want her books to be allegorical or didactic. Also, she is not writing a graphic novel that is “holocaust” literature, but she does want to reflect Isareli Jewish identity in all of its complexity.
Whether writing short pieces "Mixed Emotions" for the New York Times, founding Israel’s edition of Mad Magazine, contributing to the collaborative Actus Tragicus, or illustrating her graphic novels, humor is key to the complicated modern world of Israel Rutu’s characters inhabit. Her Eisner award –winning graphic novel, Exit Wounds, which the writer of this piece has read and highly recommends to American high school teachers and students for its portrait of contemporary Israel set against a background of suicide bombings and its universal themes of family relationships and friendship, uses humor to alleviate the otherwise serious nature of life during and right after the Second Intifada.