amusing that in a week in which 90 percent of the oth-
er magazines on the stands had all these S&M covers,
because that seems to be very dominant in our culture
right now, what got people most upset weren't whips
and chains, but two people kissing. That was amusing
to me. I liked the idea that both sides were equally up-
set with me, that I'd done this mitzvah and given them
something to unite over."
The cover appeared shortly after one of the recent
flareups between blacks and Jews. In this one, blacks
in Brooklyn's Crown Heights had killed a Chasid. A
year later, the black-Jewish tension index shot off the
scale when the Anti-Defamation League publicized the
anti-Catholic, anti-white, anti-Semitic rantings of
Khalid Abdul Muhammad, a national assistant to the
Nation of Islam's Louis Farrakhan. Would Mr. Spiegel-
man have produced the same Chasid/black woman cov-
er for the New Yorker last Valentine's Day, just a few
weeks after the nation was reeling from Khalid's rav-
ings?
"Sure," he said. "This cover came after Yankel Rosen-
baum's death, which I would say is probably a more
dramatic expression of anti-Semitism than Khalid
Muhammad's gibberish, more meaningful in terms
of the life cost. Both were expressing the same dynamic,
just different aspects of it."
The New Yorker, too, is not displeased with the furor
the cover triggered.
"We were prepared for controversy — and we were
not unhappy about it," said executive editor Hendrik
Hertzberg. "But that was not the reason we put it on
the cover. It turned out to be a more thoughtful con-
troversy than we expected. And it's a cover that every-
one remembers. The image runs deep. It resonates with
all kinds of cultural stereotypes and history. What's
also memorable is the boldness and the way it was ex-
ecuted and that it has so much exuberance. To (New
Yorker editor) Tina (Brown) and me, the message was
quite clear: Love conquers all. But, of course, it was all
a fantasy."
Although Ms. Brown could not be reached for this
story, the Chasid/black woman cover clearly falls un-
der her agenda for the magazine that she took over
in 1992: To make the New Yorker the most talked about
magazine in the country. For that, she has editorially
goosed sacred cows, teased august pundits and violat-
ed venerable taboos.
If nothing else, she has succeeded in making the
magazine, once again, the talk of the town. And that
has surely not upset her. As she told media critic Ed-
win Diamond for a recent article about the New York-
er in the Nation, "What's 'buzz' but another word, a
COPYRIGHT ©1991 BY ART SPIEGELMAN
Four years after finishing Maus (above and at right, below), Mr. Spiegelman still is plagued by the demons of
the Holocaust.
pejorative, for discussion? Do we really want a maga-
zine that provokes no discussion?"
LC)
`A Ruthless Cosmopolitan'
There is a tremendous irony that the two outpourings
of Mr. Spiegelman's imagination that have made him
a semi-household name, Maus and the infamous New
Yorker cover, are both Jewish-related — and that he
has little to do with Judaism. Certainly, he had a bar
mitzvah, although, as he said, "My father had to pret-
ty much shmear the rabbi to get this to happen. I wasn't
good at the Haftarah. I was a cut-up and a wise guy in
Hebrew school."
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