The other day I was in a kosher Chinese restaurant and I noticed an older white guy happily eating alone. He had white shaggy beard and white shaggy hair tucked under a ball cap reading “You had me at coffee.” He looked like a former New York City college professor who was thoroughly enjoying his retirement.
In other words, he looked like an Ed Koren cartoon.
Koren, who died last Friday at 87, published well over 1,000 cartoons in The New Yorker magazine, starting in 1962. His drawings were instantly recognizable, featuring fuzzy, lumpy, big-nosed people who looked vaguely like gentle animals, and fuzzy, lumpy, big-nosed animals that looked vaguely like amiable people.
His subject matter was also consistent: Middle-class, slightly neurotic characters whose challenges were as minor as they were familiar to the New Yorker’s target readers. The New York Times once called him the “poet laureate” of the Upper West Side of Manhattan, describing the neighborhood as “the home of overeducated, comfortable but not super rich liberals and the psychotherapists who treat their garden-variety neuroses.”
I hesitate to lay too much Jewish significance on artists or writers who didn’t make much of their own Jewish identities, but many of Koren’s characters seemed unmistakably Jewish, like the Upper West Side itself.
Despite the city’s changes, Koren cartoons still come alive on Amsterdam Ave. and in Riverside Park: Bearded, older dads pushing toddlers in strollers. Vaguely bohemian women walking dogs who look just like them. Precocious tots already thinking about their college essays.
All of which is to say that some people contribute to the Jews’ self-understanding without, like Koren, wearing their Jewishness on their sleeves or anywhere else.