It’s an unlikely origin story for a comic-book superhero: standing at the front of a boardroom in a snazzy blazer, delivering an important presentation until it’s derailed by … a hot flash. That’s when she begins to discover her superpower.

Meet Mina, the star of Holy Menopause: Adventures of a Middle-Aged Superheroine, a new comic book published by Bunny Gonopolskaya, the pen name of Elana Broitman, a former Jewish communal executive. The comic book tells the story of Mina, “an ordinary executive,” a “mom in her 50s,” who was confidently climbing the career ladder until she hit that third rail of women’s health — menopause — and became invisible at work and to her family. 

After one particularly bad day, where Mina has to leave a meeting in the throes of a sweaty hot flash and gets home only to find her adult son counting on her to make dinner, she finds herself transformed. She is sent on a rescue mission with two superpowers: invisibility and burning-hot hands (a result of the hot flashes) to rescue a group of children abducted by crooks. 

Broitman, a government affairs consultant, is most familiar to Jewish communal leaders not as an artist or a writer, but as the former senior vice president of public affairs at Jewish Federations of North America until September 2023. (Gonopolskaya is the maiden name of her grandmother, who escaped the Bolsheviks and the Nazis and came to America when she was in her 50s.) 

Broitman, 58, has held senior roles in the private sector, on Capitol Hill and at nonprofits. She never felt like sexism held her back in her career until she hit menopause — and sexism combined with more subtle ageism to make a potent, toxic combination.

“I felt gaslighted and ignored,” Broitman told Jewish Insider in an interview last week. “My way of working through emotions was always to just do some art. I started with a painting of an elderly Wonder Woman, because my whole concept was, ‘Hey, we’re pretty badass, right? We’ve made it here. We have all this wisdom. We can do lots of things, and we’re not about to get dismissed.’” 

Eventually, Broitman decided to turn that concept into a comic book, creating her own superhero with a new set of adventures — or misadventures — as a menopausal woman. Part of why she wrote the book was to bring recognition to a set of issues that many women who are going through the same thing are loath to discuss publicly. 

“I think a lot of women feel that they’re going to be set aside if they start to raise these things,” said Broitman. “I don’t think it’s gained the kind of cultural acceptance or recognition that gives it an easy voice.”

The book employs classic comic-book tropes: good versus evil, with a protagonist helping rescue innocent victims from the bad guys. (“Guys,” in this case, being literal, because the villains in Holy Menopause are all men.) Mina is a curvy woman with thick red hair, with streaks of gray coming in. 

Then there are the side characters: the adult son who still lives with her and can hardly fend for himself; the male colleague who undermines her in a meeting; the Eastern European manicurist who helps Mina discover her powers. 

“What’s really, really important to me is that it is not a ‘woe is me’ story,” said Broitman.

Broitman’s medium was chosen for subversive purposes, and not just for storytelling.

“Comics are something you think about with young people, certainly very male-dominated. And I thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be funny and kind of subversive to take that art form and turn it into a conversation about what it means to age?’” Broitman asked. “And an older woman as a superhero on a platform.” 

It’s Broitman’s first book, and she doesn’t intend for it to be her last one. It is not the end of Mina’s middle-aged exploits. 

“What a better way to impact culture,” said Broitman, “than to create a superhero whose very powers are from the things that maybe undermine them in people’s eyes.”