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might have gone well had he not become romantically involved with the daughter of the man building the school. Fagin is tossed out, forced to survive by using his wits as a common thief and swindler. He is eventually caught and sentenced to ten years of hard labor, but after a series of misadventures, he catches the second big break of his life when he saves the life of another businessman named Jack Dawson, who subsequently hides him from the authorities, employs him, and offers to stake him enough money to start his own business. Fagin might have become respectable again, but these plans, too, fall through when Dawson dies suddenly and unexpectedly. Once again, Fagin is out on the streets, this time permanently. He meets Bill Sikes, and the two team up to run a thievery ring, carried out by a group of street urchins who, like Fagin himself, have little choice than to steal to stay alive. One of them is an orphan named Oliver Twist.

From this point on, Eisner’s story is largely an adaptation of Dickens’s Oliver Twist. When Fagin is implicated in a murder and sentenced to hang, he is visited by Oliver Twist and Charles Dickens, Oliver because he needs Fagin’s help in tracing his lineage and claiming a large sum of money left to him after his father’s death, Dickens because Fagin requested his visit. Upon completing his story, Fagin and Dickens have an exchange about Dickens having attached the word Jew to Fagin in his book. “A Jew is not Fagin any more than a Gentile is Sikes!” Fagin shouts at Dickens. Writers, he accuses Dickens, are guilty of perpetuating the hurtful stereotypes. Dickens responds by promising to amend this problem in future editions of Oliver Twist.

The meeting between a fictitious character and his creator was an interesting device, requiring a suspension of belief on the part of the reader. Not only was such a meeting literally impossible, it was also impossible within the framework of Eisner’s story, since Dickens couldn’t have written his book while Fagin was alive. The contradiction, Eisner felt, was necessary.

“This book was intended as a polemic,” he insisted. “The confrontation between Dickens and Fagin is a way of adding realism to an otherwise fictitious character. I also felt it was necessary and fair to show Dickens as he really was, not anti-Semitic.”

To ensure that readers would not miss his points, Eisner bookended Fagin the Jew with two essays addressing the topic of stereotypes. In the foreword, as if to launch a preemptive strike against the criticism he was certain to receive when the book was published, he wrote of his feelings about Ebony and his use of stereotype in creating the character. In the afterword, he supplied a brief history of Oliver Twist, the illustrations for the book, and how the stereotyping, while not intended to be anti-Semitic, played into the hands of those who wanted Jews to be perceived a certain way.

Ironically, Eisner caught some flak from the Jewish press as a result of the title of his book. To these critics, including the word Jew in the title was an invitation to trouble.

“One man, a leading editor in Jewish publishing circles, wanted to know why I had to use the word ‘Jew’ in the Fagin title,” Eisner said. “I could only point out that was the precise point I wanted to address.”

In looking for a publisher for the book, Eisner sought a large house as opposed to a small press or publisher specializing in comics. Judith Hansen was able to place Fagin the Jew with Doubleday, meaning the book would receive first-rate publicity, marketing, and distribution, not to mention serious review consideration from the nation’s biggest newspapers. As expected, Eisner was questioned about how he, as creator of a character like Ebony White, could justify criticizing Dickens for his treatment of Fagin, and just as predictably, Eisner wearily repeated his old arguments, now three decades old, about his reasons for creating Ebony. What Eisner could not—or refused to—understand was that in arguing what he felt were the pros and cons of stereotyping, he was fighting a