There was only one book for sale on Miriam Libicki’s table at the Vancouver Comic Arts Festival (VanCAF) last month. But I Live: Three Stories of Child Survivors of the Holocaust is a collaborative project pairing graphic novelists with survivors, telling their stories in poignant detail.
Days after the event, VanCAF announced it was banning Ms. Libicki in a statement referencing “important public safety concerns” about an exhibitor’s prior role in the Israeli army. The board apologized “for the harm we have caused by our negligence” in allowing her to participate.
While Ms. Libicki was not named in the post, it was clearly about her. The U.S.-Israeli artist, now a permanent Canadian resident, volunteered for the Israeli army in 2000. Two months into her service (as a secretary), the Second Intifada began. She tells the story in her autobiographical comic jobnik!
VanCAF’s statement came out on a Friday, as Ms. Libicki was preparing Shabbat dinner for family and friends who had travelled to the Vancouver area for her daughter’s bat mitzvah, taking place the next day.
After that weekend, Ms. Libicki’s lawyer sent a cease-and-desist letter to VanCAF, claiming defamation and human-rights violations. The statement disappeared from the website. Then on June 2, VanCAF issued a formal apology.
VanCAF did not respond to several e-mails; it does not list its board members on its website and neither statement was signed by an actual name. I attempted to contact VanCAF director Jarrett Evan Samson, who has reportedly stepped down, but was unsuccessful.
But here, briefly, is what happened, according to Ms. Libicki: In 2022, two young women dropped by her table, where she was selling her work, including jobnik! and another autobiographical book with IDF content, Toward a Hot Jew. The women asked if the books were anti-Zionist. Ms. Libicki answered that they were not. Before she could say anything else, the women left.
Ms. Libicki later learned that the women aggressively expressed their concerns about her to a volunteer.
Fast-forward two years to 2024 and Ms. Libicki was told by VanCAF not to sell those books or display IDF imagery at her table. “It is definitely a double-standard,” she said in an interview. “They’re not checking the national origin of other cartoonists.”
She sold But I Live, some zines and T-shirts. But the same two women, according to Ms. Libicki, complained about her and things escalated.
The following Friday, VanCAF issued its “accountability post,” unsigned, criticizing itself for “the oversight and ignorance to allow this exhibitor in the festival,” and saying that having the artist attend the event disregarded “all of our exhibiting artists, attendees and staff, especially those who are directly affected by the ongoing genocide in Palestine and Indigenous community members alike.”
“I’m dangerous to Indigenous people also?” Ms. Libicki says. “It was super, super upsetting to see that announcement. And it was really hard to have it not colour my whole weekend and focus on my daughter. She worked so hard, working for months to prepare for her bat mitzvah.”
Ms. Libicki had been a VanCAF exhibitor since 2012, when she attended with that same daughter, then not quite two weeks old. She has a lot of friends and admirers in the comics community, and many made their displeasure known to VanCAF. Members of the Jewish community also chimed in.
With little information, it appeared that Ms. Libicki was being banned for serving in the Israeli army. She did so voluntarily, but military service is compulsory for most Israelis – so such a ban would effectively discriminate against Israelis based on nationality.
Following the backlash, VanCAF’s subsequent “formal apology” explained that the safety concerns were instigated by “activists protesting the individual’s presence at the festival” and that Ms. Libicki (unnamed) posed no security threat. “We should never have allowed this individual to be scapegoated like this.”
It is vindication for Ms. Libicki, but not enough. “Once you defamed somebody, you can’t really take it back and I won’t really know the long-term consequences.”
Ms. Libicki would like some sort of formal and public reconciliation process to take place with VanCAF, whoever they are. And sensitivity training.
Just imagine if the unnamed organizers of VanCAF had taken a breath, given things some thought, reached out to Ms. Libicki before publicly shaming her.
With Israel and Hamas at war, there has been so much screaming at one another, across a widening divide. What could be accomplished by having actual conversations?
This isn’t the only instance of selective targeting of Israeli, Jewish or Palestinian artists by arts organizations. With festival and awards season approaching in the fall, there is reason to fear more exclusions to come.