Art & Photography, Memoir

Many readers will be familiar with Blechman’s covers for The New Yorker magazine, more will be familiar with the countless books for children and adults he’s illustrated (or written and illustrated) since 1953, and many more will be familiar with his animated Christmas short for CBS, his commercials for Alka-Seltzer, and for his Emmy Award–winning animated presentation, The Soldier’s Tale (PBS). On The One Hand / On The Other Hand collects the best of Blechman’s writing and drawing from across the breadth of nearly his 70-year career as cartoonist, commentator, and iconoclast. It includes a portfolio of 17 of Blechman’s graphically sublime covers for the fabled Story magazine, as well as essays that offer trenchant insights ― both playful and profound ― on the state of our culture today. These include his personal perspective on film, theater (“Well, let’s be fair to Franz Kafka. Can you blame a cockroach?”), literature, history, politics, social change, and his fellow cartoonists and illustrators. Blechman shares his hard-earned insights and personal anecdotes on persisting your way to success (“Second Acts”), on growing older but not surrendering youth (“I’m Not Finished”), and on the constraints that every artist from caveman days to the present must overcome. (“Against those odds, confidence is hard to come by.”)Blechman: “I think that being born “different,” or perceiving oneself as being “different,” may promote the individuating process that is at the heart of true creativity.”

This collection of books featuring Jewish main characters is decidedly non-comprehensive. As we come across books that are described as having Jewish main characters, we add them to this database. The creators of the Jewish Genre Reading Challenge have not read all (or even most) of the books in this database. We have gathered information from many sources and not all may be accurate. Inclusion of a book in our database does not imply endorsement or approval. There is always the possibility that antisemitism may be present in a book, either written into a character's experience or through malicious or ignorant caricature or stereotypical portrayal of Jewish characters and culture. Please take care of yourselves as you read. 

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