 Spiegelman is a non @-@ practicing Jew and considers himself " a @-@ Zionist " — neither pro- nor anti @-@ Zionist ; he has called Israel " a sad , failed idea " . He told Charles Schulz he was not religious , but identified with the " alienated diaspora culture of Kafka and Freud ... what Stalin pejoratively called rootless cosmopolitanism " — a statement Ezra Mendelsohn interpreted as identification with " the Jewish spirit of universalism as championed by the greatest of Jewry 's creative figures " . 
