By Jeffrey Catalano
Assistant Editor
On Tuesday, February 17, from 7:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m., the “Jewish and Israeli Film Festival” will be screening the seventh film in its line-up, “Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse,” at the Cincinnati Art Museum. The film will be presented in partnership with JVS Careers, the Cincinnati Art Museum and the Holocaust Education Fund of the History Department at Miami University.
“Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse” is a 2024 100 minute-long documentary directed by Molly Bernstein and Phillip Dolin. The film explores the work of the famous cartoonist, Art Spiegelman, and the impact his iconic graphic novel, “Maus,” has had on the world over the past few decades. “Maus” left such an indelible impact on the culture when it was first serialized between 1980 and 1991 that Spiegelman became the first person to win a Pulitzer Prize for a graphic novel.
“Maus” is an unforgettable and unconventional memoir that tells the story Vladek Spiegelman, Art’s father, who survived the horrors of Nazi Germany. “Maus” relates Vladek’s harrowing personal story through his own memories, which his son, Art, recorded through his now classic work of comic book art. Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel charts his father’s story in the years leading up to World War II to his father’s liberation from the Nazi concentration camps.
Art Spiegelman had a difficult relationship with his deeply traumatized father, Vladek, and his mother committed suicide when he was only 20. While grieving his wife, Vladek destroyed her written accounts of Auschwitz. “Maus” gave Art and his father a much-needed opportunity to connect and a chance to try and heal their generational trauma.
The art of the “Maus” graphic novel is well-regarded for its minimalist style and Spiegelman’s inventive choice to portray the Jewish characters, like his parents, as mice, and the Nazis as cats, symbolizing the life-and-death, predatory dynamic between these two groups of people in Nazi-occupied territories.
Popular as Spiegelman’s graphic novel is, it has been banned a number of times over the years. Only recently, the book was banned by a school board in Tennessee for “inappropriate language,” among a slew of other charges. “Maus” offers an unflinching look at the Holocaust, and Spiegelman has always stood by his work and been outspoken against other book bans in the U.S.
After the screening of “Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse,” there will be an in-person post-film discussion with Ranen Omer-Sherman, who is the Jewish Heritage Fund Endowed Chair in Jewish Studies at the University of Louisville. Omer-Sherman is the author of six books including, “Israel in Exile: Jewish Writing and the Desert” (2006) and “The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches” (2008), as well as numerous essays on Jewish writers hailing from Israel and North America.
“Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse” will have a virtual screening in addition to its in-person screening, and there will be a 48-hour virtual viewing window for the film between Tuesday, February 17 and Thursday, February 19.
There is a fee for admission to both screenings, in-person and virtual, and tickets are sold separately. Please be advised that “Art Spiegelman: Disaster is My Muse” carries a content warning of antisemitism.
