Every year, more than 200,000 fanboys and fangirls surge into Manhattan’s Jacob K. Javits Convention Center for the East Coast’s biggest ode to pop culture: New York Comic Con. When comic creator Julian Voloj accepted a position at the Jewish diversity nonprofit Be’chol Lashon in 2017, he had an idea in the back of his mind — a comic anthology showcasing diverse Jewish stories. He was yearning for the right moment to release the project. Last weekend’s NYCC was it.

All the biggest publishers were on hand: Marvel, DC, Image, along with the top names in anime, gaming and video games. Millions of comics were bagged, boarded and hauled in for sale — some priced over six figures — along with enough graphic novels to fill the Avenger’s Tower. Among the books on display was Hyphen — an anthology of 12 stories co-curated by Voloj, including ones by a Laotian-born refugee, an Ethiopian-Israeli woman and a Midwestern trans person, among other tales portraying the diversity of the Jewish world.

The comic serves as a catalyst for what Voloj is calling Be’chol Lashon 2.0, a reinvention of the nonprofit, whose name is Hebrew for “in every language.” Originally launched in California in 2000, Be’chol Lashon is known for its multicultural summer camp, which will continue, along with studies in Jewish diversity. But the new iteration will add an emphasis on storytelling as a way to celebrate and uplift diverse Jewish voices. Releasing Hyphen was a full-circle moment for Voloj, because his connection with Be’chol Lashon all began with a comic. 

After Voloj published his first graphic novel in 2015 — the award-winning Ghetto Brother: Warrior to Peacemaker, which told the true tale of Bronx crypto-Jewish gang-banger turned peacenik Benjamin “Benjy” Melendez — he was asked to join Be’chol Lashon’s speakers bureau. He quickly climbed the ranks into leadership, becoming interim CEO in 2021, chief operating officer in 2022 and executive director in 2024. “It’s very fitting,” he told eJewishPhilanthropy about his journey back to the beginning, to comics. 

The new iteration of Be’chol Lashon was prompted partly by logistics — Voloj is New York-based while the organization was based in California’s Bay Area. When you work for a nonprofit, he said, the pay rarely is enough to facilitate a move unless it’s absolutely needed, so he began holding East Coast programming. Then the pandemic hit and the organization’s digital reach proliferated in the snap of Thanos’ fingers.  

For what he called the organization’s “second evolution,” Be’chol Lashon leaned into storytelling as a way to tap into his experience in arts and culture and spread the organization’s mission. Through Hyphen, Voloj plans to hold panel discussions and create education resources and discussion guides.

“Storytelling in general is a wonderful tool for education and connection,” Voloj said. “Art is something most people, hopefully, can agree on, and that really creates connection. And I think [the comic is] non-threatening, so these stories we’re telling are slice-of-life stories.”

The entire modern comic book medium was birthed in the minds of Jewish storytellers, mostly the children of Ashkenazi immigrants who had been frozen out of their chosen fields of newspapers and advertising due to antisemitism. The barriers to entry were also helpfully low: all you need to create a comic is a pen and paper.

It’s a medium that everyone understands, Voloj said, from children who can barely read to academics with multiple degrees. Voloj often finds himself in meetings with mega-donors or heads of Jewish federations who “become children again” the moment he mentions that he writes comics. They love sharing their memories of the first Superman comic they read.

Even though he co-curated Hyphen, his name is minuscule on the cover. Be’chol Lashon 2.0 is not only about him, even though sometimes the board would prefer it that way, he said. In “the old style of leadership the organization is a person” but younger Jews relate more to organizations that work together to uplift everyone involved.

“Ninety percent of the stories you see in Hyphen, these are all friends of mine,” Voloj said. The book was released through the Jewish immigrant-owned comics company FairSquare Graphics. While all the writers are Jewish, many of the professional artists aren’t, so you will find a story written by the first female rabbi of the Abayudaya Jewish community in Uganda being drawn by a African Italian artist, allowing the artist to learn about Jewish diversity, too.

Another core Be’chol Lashon 2.0 program is its artist incubator, which offers fiscal support and mentorship to creatives, including Yemenite-Jewish American filmmaker Dana Schneider, whose short film Nice Jewish Girl was selected for the Chelsea Film Festival and who has a chapter in Hyphen.

“Artists are really good at being creative, not necessarily good at selling themselves and their project,” Schneider told eJP. “Julian really opened my eyes to the nonprofit world as an artist.”

As a child, she never “saw a Yemenite cartoon of anything” she said. “It’s special seeing something that started in your head as a picture, as a thought, ends up on a piece of paper, and Julian made that happen.”

Born in Germany to Colombian parents, Voloj grew up on Tintin and Lucky Luke, and later, modern classics including Dark Knight Returns, Watchmen, Akira and Maus, which expanded what a comic could be. Moving to America in 2004 was a revelatory experience.

“I grew up in a Jewish community of 80 people,” he said. “And you come to New York and you see all that is possible.”

In 2004, the freshly launched Joshua Venture was reshaping New York Jewish cool through initiatives such as Heeb Magazine, JDub Records and Storahtelling.

“I experienced a really great cultural moment,” he said, “and became pretty quickly embedded in the art scene.”

Like the art that inspired him, Voloj wants Hyphen to be appreciated by anyone, Jewish or not. Post-Oct. 7, Voloj feels a similar artistic energy to the early aughts, when young Jews were bursting with creativity.

He fell into comics at a later age, in his late 30s. After befriending Melendez, whom he had photographed for an exhibit at the German consulate in 2012, he and another comic-loving buddy decided to give comics a shot. “It was really meant to be a one-off,”

Now, 20 graphic novels later, including ones about Joe Shuster, Bobby Fischer, Jean-Michel Basquiat and the Statue of Liberty, and stints working for the Rothschild Foundation and the American Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, comics are his escape. “You deal with so much [working in philanthropy leadership.] You have so much responsibility from making sure payroll is there, you’re in compliance. There’s always something happening, and most of this stuff is not fun. So having something that I just do for myself, like my writing, is something that’s kept me sane.”

Though Hyphen is serving as the launch for Be’chol Lashon 2.0, storytelling has always been an aspect of the agency, Tani Prell, director of communications and marketing for Be’chol Lashon, told eJP, pointing to the online publication, Jewish&, which was launched by the organization in 2013. But Voloj is bringing storytelling into new mediums and making it more accessible.

A self-identifying former “little mixed-artsy weirdo,” the Star Trek and Firefly-loving Prell discovered comic cons in 2018 and fell dead over heels. “It was the most welcoming place I’d ever been,” she said.

Comics, she said, can be about everyday people living normal lives or can span galaxies. “There’s any possibility.” There’s even talk that one day Be’chol Lashon will publish an Afrofuturistic anthology. “One of Julian’s many strengths is his ability to think about what the possibilities could be.”

Conventions are places to “Come as you are, find your place, find your people,” she said. “To have a celebration of Jewish comics at New York Comic Con is just so wonderful and uplifting.”

Prior to NYCC, 120 people had already preordered copies of Hyphen. Fabrice Sapolsky, the publisher of FairSquare Graphics and co-curator of Hyphen, brought 50 copies to the convention, carefully displayed at his table in the convention’s Artist Alley, alongside other FairSquare Graphics books by creators spanning the world, their works seeped in mysticism and noir. Voloj wasn’t able to be at the convention in person because he was on a book tour of Germany for another release though he will be at a launch event at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan on Oct. 30. The show began Thursday and by Friday evening, several copies of Hyphen had already sold, mostly to Jewish attendees seeking their stories. 

Even though Hyphen has all Jewish tales, there is no overarching theme, Sapolsky told eJP as a crew of cosplayers painted like purple and green aliens strolled past. (On Sundays, the day most Orthodox Jews attend, these aliens sprout tzitzit out the bottom of their shirts.) Each chapter is “very different stories from each other,” he said. “You have stories of resilience. You have stories where you have a little bit more challenges. You have stories of hope.”

Together with Voloj, he’s worked for over three years to bring Hyphen into the world.

“Which other book can you find an Ethiopian Jew, an Indian Jew, North African, Japanese — Jewpanese, as they call themselves — or German or Israeli, everyone in the same book?” he said, beaming. “For the only reason that we are part of this beautiful people that is so diverse.”