Two Jewish Cartoonists Walk Into…A Conversation with Bob Mankoff and Liana Finck

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Bob Mankoff has shaped comedy and satire through his cartoons for the past half-century. Liana Finck is defining a new era in cartoons and illustrations. Eddy Portnoy moderates this conversation between two of the most interesting cartoon artists and illustrators working today.  

Liana Finck is the author of Let There Be Light, Passing for Human, and Excuse Me and is a regular contributor to The New Yorker. She is a recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, and a Six Points Fellowship for Emerging Jewish Artists. She has had artist residencies with the MacDowell Colony, Yaddo, the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, Headlands Center for the Arts, and Willapa Bay. 

For over 40 years, Bob Mankoff has been the driving force of comedy and satire at some of the most honored publications in America, including The New Yorker and Esquire. He is currently the cartoon editor at the weekly online newsletter Air Mail and runs Botnik Studios, a network of writers, artists, and programmers who create software that augments human creativity with big data analytics. Mankoff is the author of numerous books, including his New York Times bestselling memoir How About Never – Is Never Good For You?: My Life in Cartoons. His story was the focus of the 2015 HBO documentary Very Semi-Serious. 

Eddy Portnoy is the Academic Advisor and Director of Exhibitions at the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research. A specialist in Jewish mass culture, his work has appeared in numerous academic journals, and the exhibitions he has curated have won plaudits from The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and VICE, among others. He is the author of Bad Rabbi and Other Strange but True Stories from the Yiddish Press (Stanford University Press, 2017). 

Liana Finck © Jorge Colombo.