Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me

A story that simultaneously blends autobiography, history, art, graphic novel, this is the story of the author Harvey Pekar's own reckoning with identity and what it meant for him to be Jewish, son of Zionists. Writing this from the foreground of his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, he talks about his upbringing and parents: how that inexorably, inevitably brought him into the world holding and supporting zionist beliefs. Both Pekar, his illustrator JT Waldman, and Pekar's wife (in the epilogue) talk about wrestling with one's own upbringing, the questioning of truths one hasn't been asked to question, the demystification of the mythologies we're handed down -- in this case about the state of Israel and of multiple childhoods relating to Jewish and Zionist upbringings.