Raised in a religious home in Ohio, Miriam immigrated to Israel as a teenager and volunteered for service in the IDF. Classified by the army as excessively emotional and sexually ambivalent, and possessing poor Hebrew skills, she was not considered suitable for a job in Intelligence or as a medic, so instead she was sent to do clerical work at a base in the middle of nowhere. "The service was unbelievably boring, but I don't regret it, mostly because that experience was the inspiration for my comics. Army service exposed me to an aspect of Israeli society that I wouldn't have experienced otherwise."
The comics series is called Jobnik!, which is Israeli slang for someone
who did their mandatory army service in a low-prestige job - like clerk or a truck
driver. You can read the first five pages of each comic book on
Libicki's site, Realgonegirl.
As the Time Out reporter wrote, "'[Libicki] touches on some types of
sexual harrassment, but focuses primarily on her personal experiences
in the army...and she tries to provide for non-Israelis a picture of
our soldiers that is a little less superficial and cliched."...
The Time Out reporter goes on:
"Libicki describes accurately the aggressiveness of Israeli men, especially the macho-macho men of the IDF."
"I don't have anything against Israeli men," responds Libicki. "Some of my best friends are Israeli men. But in the army they encourage them to be terribly macho. Perhaps they behave differently at home, but my experience was of men who had a really hard time with emotional intimacy. When a lot of young guys live together, it's not an environment that really encourages emotional intimacy in a relationship. Women in the army know that their sexuality is one of the things that they can use. They always told us in the army, 'Open another button and you'll get everything you want.' I didn't personally experience sexual harassment from someone who was more powerful than me, but it was definitely common."
For me, though, the most touching and interesting of the Jobnik series is on the pages where Miriam uses intimate experiences to engage in painful self examination and apply them to the complexities of Israeli society and politics.
Take a look at the first three pages of Jobnik Manifesto, for example:
If you like the series, you can order them via the Realgonegirl website, or buy them at this shop if you live in the Tel Aviv area.
In the end, I think the Time Out reporter was reaching a bit too far in trying to use the Jobnik! series as an example of sexual harassment. It is definitely a problem in the IDF (and I can line up my women friends to tell you stories for days on end), but that's not the point of these comic books. For me, the series is simply a deeply intelligent, thought-provoking window into an aspect of real life, Israeli style.
