David Mikics and Liel Leibovitz
Jewish Book Week: MAD Magazine: Warping America’s Brain!
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Summary
Before The Simpsons, SNL and social media memes, there was MAD. Launched by Harvey Kurtzmann in 1952, it gleefully thumbed its nose at all the postwar pieties, unfazed by lawsuits or FBI ire. The MAD Files features essays on the most subversive magazine ever to be sold on US newsstands, with contributors including Adam Gopnik, Roz Chast and Art Spiegelman, who writes “I couldn’t learn much about America from my refugee immigrant parents—but I learned all about it from MAD.” Editor David Mikics joins Liel Leibovitz, whose High Holy MAD essay delves into the Jewishness behind its hugely influential humour. Learn More
In partnership with the Jewish Literary Foundation.
David Mikics
David Mikics is Professor of English at New College of Florida. He is the author, most recently, of Stanley Kubrick: American Filmmaker and Bellow’s People: How Saul Bellow Made Life into Art, and editor of The Annotated Emerson. He is the editor for Library of America of Harold Bloom’s The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon. His writing has appeared in Tablet, The Nation, and The New York Times.
Liel Leibovitz
Liel Leibovitz is host of Tablet’s daily Talmud podcast Take One and cohost of the Unorthodox podcast. Author of A Broken Hallelujah and Stan Lee and coauthor of The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia, he lives in New York City.