This, his final book, went to press two years after his death. In life and in writing, Pekar’s attitude was self-effacing and sardonic, which propelled him to the forefront of the then emerging underground comic scene. And so the critique smacks of the same tribal hypocrisy he abhors. Nor does he include a single Israeli or Palestinian voice in his chronicle of Israel’s founding and Palestine’s Nakba (catastrophe). The trouble is, Pekar has never set foot in Israel or Palestine. Waldman emphasize the authenticity of the American Jewish experience and logic of anti-Zionism by riffing on Pekar’s conservative upbringing in 1940’s Cleveland. The new graphic novel Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me is a meditation on that theme.
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