I was
heading to Palo Alto for a presentation at Stanford on political satire,
diaspora pride, and the urgency of Jewish memory and conscience in the face of
burgeoning fascism in America, but it was hard to pack amid panicked texts from
my mom. The subject of her frenzied concern: metal detectors, security
perimeters, and how to deal with “crazies” (her word) inspired by a New York
Times opinion editor’s signal boost of an article stating that I posed an
imminent threat to the safety of Jewish students on campus.
It all
started, arguably, with the erasure of Jews in a comic. I’d been invited by the
Stanford chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for
Peace to present my work during Palestine Awareness Week. Prior to the event,
the groups distributed flyers featuring comics I’d drawn that mocked two
Benjamins—Netanyahu and Shapiro—for their contempt for the progressive values
shared by the majority of American Jews. In response, Stanford College
Republicans plastered undergraduate dormitories with flyers setting a panel
from one of my comics alongside images from Der Stürmer, a Nazi propaganda
tabloid, all under the headline “Spot the Difference.”
The Der
Stürmer image featured a Jewish man as a worm and was originally captioned “The
Jew’s symbol is a worm, not without reason. He seeks to creep up on what he
wants.” The selection from my art was a panel from a decade-old comic,
“Metamorphosis,” which satirized the Jewish communal world’s millennial
outreach efforts via a depiction of 19th-century Jewish intellectuals chatting
not about socialism, communism, and Zionism, but about their cheeseball Jewish
young adult engagement initiatives. You couldn’t get more Jewish in-jokey than
that! Hence its publication in the Forward; hence its reproduction on tote bags
for the 2012 National Jewish Student Journalism Conference. According to the
campus Trump supporters, this portrait of Jews talking about Judaism was
tantamount to Nazism.
Following
the College Republicans’ lead, the Hillel-affiliated Israel on Campus
Coalition—which had been in the news for working with Israel’s Ministry of
Strategic Affairs to harass and spy on progressive Jewish undergrads—jumped on
the bandwagon, adding that I was “appropriating Passover” by drawing a seder.
Three
days later, a Stanford Law student published an op-ed in The Stanford Daily
situating my art within a history of “anti-Semitism and cartoons,” and calling
it “morally repugnant,” “ethically disgusting,” “feral and despicable,” and
“indefensible.” At a loss for additional synonyms, he went on to compare me to
Nazis, synagogue shooters, and “Palestinian terrorists,” and insisted I be
barred from speaking at the university lest Jewish students be traumatized. The
following day, New York Times opinion editor and columnist Bari Weiss shared
the screed on Twitter, adding a personal note of gratitude to the author.
Within
hours, I was facing six minyans of hatred. Top Jewish Trump surrogate Jeff
Ballabon insisted I was worse than a kapo, and then upped the ante to
“malshin”—a traitor to Jews who has historically merited the death penalty. The
Stanford Review (founded by Trump-supporting oligarch Peter Thiel) published a
diatribe comparing my art to blackface and insisting it was “so charged with
anti-Semitism that no political pretense could justify a public display.” In a
Jewish News Syndicate column, Jonathan Tobin—who had insisted in a National
Review piece two years earlier that “the case for Trump or even senior aide
Steve Bannon . . . being an anti-Semite doesn’t stand up to scrutiny”—called my
work “repugnant anti-Semitic trash.” Even the associate dean at the Simon
Wiesenthal Center joined in, comparing my art to “Nazi Germany’s anti-Semitic
genocidal propaganda from the 1930s and ’40s.” Granted, his boss had actually
blessed Trump at the presidential inauguration. But still, for a Holocaust
remembrance organization to make that comparison was startling. By the time I
arrived at Stanford, a pro-Trump group had published images of me superimposed
on comics I’d drawn condemning Trump’s racism, with the message, “Tell this
loser cartoonist who hates Jews and America that his racism isn’t welcome on
our college campuses.”
All of
this shouldn’t have bothered me. Hyperbolic art provokes hyperbolic reaction;
that’s par for the course in the genre of grotesquerie. And this campaign was
neither new nor unique: Weiss had spent years trying to get writers and
academics fired from their jobs for advocating for Palestinian suffrage. But
use of the term “Nazi”—and not just as a flippant epithet hurled by apartheid
advocates from the fever swamps of comment threads—gnawed at me. I felt
unmoored by the onslaught of hate.
As I
filed through JFK Airport, half-expecting the drug-sniffing dogs to bark “He’s
Waffen-SS!” before I could make it to the gate, I was struck by the irony:
“You’ve been drawing Trump having intercourse with dead pigs against a backdrop
of Klansmen and kids in cages, and now suddenly you’re sensitive?”
When
Trump’s election pulled back the curtain on the rise of the far right in
America, I’d naively assumed the Jewish left would be vindicated. As the
president solidified his stature as the hero of American Nazism, enacting
policies of white supremacist violence on the border and lending credence to
conspiracy theories about George Soros bringing in brown people to replace the
white race—an idea that helped incite two antisemitic massacres in the span of
six months, including the worst pogrom in American Jewish history—it seemed
clear: the only course of action was to oppose these escalating horrors by
every available means. And for Jews, this meant bringing our historical trauma
to bear on the unfolding American catastrophe.
I knew
there were those in the Jewish community—especially among the organizational
leadership, as well as within the vocal minority that supported Trump—who
insisted Holocaust analogies were verboten. But to me, they were mandatory, a
means of alarm and mobilization. Three weeks after the election, as an
admonition to Democrats not to compromise with an administration that promised
mass roundups and deportations of those deemed “illegal,” I drew an image based
on the iconic photograph of a boy raising his arms in the Warsaw Ghetto. In my
work, I tried to suss out why our collective memory was presumed too loaded to
apply to the current crisis. Two months after Trump’s inauguration, I drew ICE
agents dragging a mother from her screaming daughter as she cautions her child,
“Hush, sweetheart, and be careful with your analogies, lest you cheapen the
sanctity of the Shoah!” Art became a form of prayer and a form of witness. Even
as my subjects broadened beyond particularist Jewish topics, the art was
haunted by Jewish memory. It felt like the most Jewish art I’d ever made.
That’s
why Stanford floored me. This wasn’t just a spillover from Israel polemics.
Much of the art cited as proof of my “Nazism” was recent work—condemnations of
people abetting white supremacy in America. It felt different from earlier
denunciations, and not just in magnitude. These critics were furious at my
claim on Jewish memory and motifs, and insistent that I had no right to draw
from our history.
On the
Stanford campus, before the presentation began, I headed out a back door of the
lecture hall for a quick bathroom break in a nearby building. A single security
officer lingered outside. The time and place of the presentation had been
moved, and non-students were prohibited from attending, partly in response to
the uproar. Wandering between buildings, I was struck by the emptiness of the
grounds. The lead-up had been cacophonous, both off-campus and on. But now that
I was here, the sudden silence was unnerving. I felt like a phantom—like I’d
been erased.
It had been a springtime of erasure. Two months earlier, after Meghan
McCain wept on The View and
cited her friendship with Joe and Hadassah Lieberman while demonizing Ilhan
Omar, I drew a comic satirizing her appropriation of Jewish identity and
trauma. In response, McCain insisted on Twitter that I was an antisemite. Instead of
rallying around the absurdity of a Christian woman calling a Jewish artist an
antisemite for satirizing her weaponization of Jewish memory, the Jewish right
leapt, aghast, to her defense. The same polemicists who had spent decades
insisting non-Zionist Jews were crippled by a desire to ingratiate themselves
with gentiles now rushed to invite McCain to their Shabbat dinners. It wasn’t
even implied, it was emphatic: McCain was a Jew, I was a Jew-hater.
The phenomenon of Jews erasing Jews is not new, and it wasn’t new when
Zionism came on the scene over a century ago and bifurcated Jewish self-image
into the proud nationalist and the self-loathing assimilationist. In the
presentation I’d give at Stanford, I planned to discuss Max Nordau, an early
Zionist pioneer and proponent of “Muscular Judaism,” whose vituperative bile
against diaspora Jews became an integral component of the Zionist cause. At the
first Zionist Congress in 1897, he described the diaspora Jew he hoped to
erase: “He has become a cripple within, and a counterfeit person without, so
that like everything unreal, he is ridiculous and hateful to all men of high
standards.”
But the trend of erasure has seen a resurgence in recent years as a
newly emboldened Jewish left has set Zionist ideologues and American Jewish
leaders on edge. Two months prior to L’Affaire McCain, The Times of Israel
published a hair-raising op-ed by a white writer dissecting and dismissing the
Jewish identities of several Jewish women writers of color who had been
exploring racism in the Jewish community, and who hold left-wing views on
Israel/Palestine. The writer coined the odious term “Jewface,” proclaiming the
young women imposters. As I write this, the Forward has printed an op-ed by the
head of young leadership at the American Jewish Committee insisting that
American Jews who oppose Israeli settlements are mere “tokens” exploited by a
gentile left. “tokens” exploited by a
gentile left.
And
there’s a new twist to erasure: many of those doing the erasing are actively or
tacitly aiding in the rise of movements seeking the extermination of Jews. We
saw this most starkly after the Tree of Life massacre, when Trump flew to
Pittsburgh to meet not with local leaders, but with Ron Dermer, Israel’s
ambassador to the United States. Two days earlier, Dermer had gone on MSNBC to
exalt Trump, pivoting from the white supremacist massacre by invoking Jeremy
Corbyn, the “radical left,” and 1990s Black nationalist icon Louis Farrakhan as
he insisted, “I see a lot of bad people on both sides.” Israel’s Minister for
Diaspora Affairs Naftali Bennett flew to Pittsburgh and New York on an erasure
tour in which he insisted that the ADL’s statistics on growing antisemitism in
America were fictions. “I’m not sure at all there is a surge in antisemitism in
America,” he said. “I’m not sure those are the facts.” Vice President Pence,
for his part, appeared onstage with a pet “rabbi” from Jews for Jesus—a
movement that in its very name stands for the erasure of Jews—to feign
solidarity with the Jewish community. After Charlottesville, and then Pittsburgh,
and then Poway, the Jewish right can no longer conceal its bargain with the
forces of eliminationist antisemitism. But still they plod on, possibly in
denial themselves about where this is heading—that the erasure of Jewish voices
is a step toward the erasure of Jewish bodies.
For me,
the McCain imbroglio brought this into stark relief. You can’t truly get the
feel for Jewish erasure until your own lived Jewishness is called into
question. In retrospect, it was the perfect prelude to Stanford. After all, a
world where Jewish art turns Meghan McCain into a victim of antisemitism can
easily become a world where Jewish art against Nazism is damned as Nazi art
against Jews.
Lost in
the frenzy of right-wing Zionists and Trump hagiographers posing as Weimar Republic
cultural critics in the lead-up to the Stanford presentation was the question
of my actual sources of inspiration. I’m usually quick to bring up 1950s MAD
comics—their Yiddish-infused, riotous dreamscapes skewering postwar American
consumerism and conformity—as my formative bedrock. No disrespect to my
furshlugginer idols, but my roots also go back further, to the ferocious
anti-Nazi artists of the Weimar and early Nazi periods. Haunted by the
devastations of the First World War and horrified by the growing Nazi threat,
these artists produced searing portraits of a society barreling from one
catastrophe to the next. Grotesqueries abound, as in Otto Dix’s 1924 War
portfolio, 50 eviscerating etchings of maimed and mutilated soldiers. These
corpses in trenches, bullet-punctured faces, and grinning skulls teeming with
worms reveal the harrowing substratum of a Germany teetering on the brink of
fascism, populated in Dix’s other portraits by the discolored, plasticine
figures of the country’s elite and not-so-elite. Or in the works of George
Grosz, which ferociously skewer the self-satisfied greed and brutality of
military officers, bureaucrats, and industrialists while highlighting Berlin’s
self-destructive interwar spiral. In “The Voice of the People Is the Voice of
God,” from 1920, Grosz venomously sends up right-wing pundits as horses,
monkeys, and other unidentifiable beasts—including one with an early swastika
on its forehead—in a scene that could easily pass for a satire of the parade of
sycophants at Mar-a-Lago.
Despised
by right-wing critics, Grosz was fined for defaming the German army and hauled
into court for drawing Jesus in a gas mask. Berlin police seized all copies of
his limited-edition Ecce Homo collection, ordering the original prints and plates
destroyed on the grounds that they were “indecent representations which offend
the sense of modesty and morality of a person of normal feeling.” They didn’t
define “normal feeling,” or how exactly it was possible for a person to have
normal feelings as society was collapsing all around them.
The
Nazis finished what the Weimar censors started. In 1933, Otto Dix was fired
from his position at the Dresden Academy and barred from its grounds. After
appealing his dismissal he was told certain works “most seriously injure the
moral feeling of the German people, and others could dampen the German people’s
will to defend themselves.” Nazis confiscated 260 pieces of Dix’s art. Grosz
fled to America 18 days before Hitler took power, escaping arrest and possible
murder. Nazis confiscated 285 of his works. Years later, a classified SS
document called him “one of the most evil representatives of degenerate art.”
Degenerate
art : A term codified by the Nazis to describe art they deemed a blight on the
German spirit. Like its war on the Jewish people, the Nazis’ war on art was
designed to eliminate what it insisted was a warped and pathological deviation
from artistic greatness—a deviation represented by Jewish, Bolshevik,
cosmopolitan, mentally ill, and other racially impure aesthetics. As many as
22,000 works of modern art were confiscated from museums; roughly a quarter of
these were destroyed.
Not
content to ban both the art and the artists, the Nazis decided to hold a
“Degenerate Art Exhibition” in July 1937 to coincide with the opening of the
“Great German Art Exhibition” the day before. Paintings and sculptures were
crowded together and accompanied by inflationary price tags—an indictment of
the “Jewish” art trade. The exhibition’s walls were adorned with slogans like
“Revelation of the Jewish racial soul,” “An insult to German womanhood,” and
“Nature as seen by sick minds.” The exhibition catalogue—more of a hate guide
to the exhibits, which included works by Dix, Grosz, and 110 other
artists—quoted from Hitler’s address at the opening of the Great German Art
Exhibition: “But what do you manufacture? Deformed cripples and cretins, women
who inspire only disgust, men who are more like wild beasts, children who, if
they were alive, would be regarded as God’s curse! And this is what these cruel
incompetents dare to present to us today as the art of our time.” Although most
of the artists featured in the Degenerate Art Exhibition were non-Jews, the
Nazis’ obsessive determination to erase non-glorifying art from civilization
mirrored its drive to remove unfit people from humanity.
“Degenerate
Art” has become synonymous with the Nazi war on free thought and expression.
Less known, but even more shocking, is that the term had been popularized by
none other than Zionist pioneer Max Nordau during his career as a cultural
critic, five years prior to his denunciation of diaspora Jews at the First
Zionist Congress. Obsessed with the notion of modern art as a signifier of
mental and physical deformity, Nordau condemned it in terms astonishingly
similar to his condemnation of diaspora Jews. “Degenerates, hysterics, and
neurasthenics are not capable of adaptation,” Nordau wrote of modern artists.
“Therefore they are fated to disappear.” Although their targets did not
entirely overlap, Hitler directly drew from portions of Nordau’s work in Mein
Kampf, while eliding the source.
There is
much to ponder in the way an early Zionist’s denigration of modern art and
diaspora Jewry mirrors the ideological monstrosities that would soon envelop
Europe. As my talk at Stanford neared, the polemicists and opinion writers—many
of them Nordau’s philosophical descendants—who insisted my art was “Nazi-like”
because of its grotesqueries, because of its hyperbole, and because it skewers
petty fascists, were not just exposing themselves as ignorant of a century of
exhilarating art that raged against the most despicable forces in history. They
were also operating within that history, treading the path of the very movement
they insist they despise. In their insistence on removing a supposedly profane
element from both the Jewish community and the artistic landscape, they were
direct heirs to the most abominable, antisemitic movement in Jewish history.
That they claimed to be doing so out of dire concern for Jewish welfare is
obscene.
We thought we were safe here. We knew it.
“Land of the free”—it resonated . . . Ethnic intolerance, racial prejudice,
nationalist hysteria . . . We’d faced it all wherever we lived. But not here.
Not anymore. It couldn’t happen here.
But just when we’d gotten comfortable,
we learned of an ugliness heading our way. The government opening its doors to
the very incitement we’d thought was a thing of the past. We had thought we
were safe—free from xenophobia, free from demagoguery. But we’d taken it all
for granted. On that day we knew: No matter how safe we think we are, we might
never really be free.
In the
final panel, a family is stunned and horrified to find Netanyahu speaking on
TV. The comic was a reflection on the moral abyss between American Jews and the
authoritarians helming Israel’s government. More than that, it raised an alarm
about the dangers Israel now posed to American Jewish lives in its embrace of
movements that have historically sought the elimination of Jews. But substitute
Netanyahu with Trump, and it’s no longer satire. It’s literal. Reading the
comic, reciting the litany of horrors that have become reality in America, my
voice started breaking. The last thing I wanted was a tearful spectacle—or
worse, performative pathos to drive the presentation home. I heard my voice
drop to a near-whisper.
I’d
presented the comic several times since the Trump nightmare began, and this had
never happened before. In part, it may have been the pressure releasing after a
full week of vilification. But that doesn’t fully capture it. I think, in the
end, “It couldn’t happen here” broke my heart. The cautionary tale of European
Jews deluded about their safety at the dawn of the 20th century has by now
become cliché. But it is happening here—not systemically to Jews, not
immediately, but it’s already begun against other communities, and it’s getting
worse.
By the
time I got home, I was starting to see myself through the eyes of the
demonizers. Yes, with less of the bigotry, the mendacity, the demagoguery, the
cruelty, the disdain for centuries of Jewish civilization, and the contempt for
even the barest notion of Palestinian humanity, but still—part of me was afraid
to go back to drawing lest everything look like, or be interpreted as, a
Goebbels concoction. Self-doubt is essential to making art, but it can also be
paralyzing.
I know
this is the goal of gaslighting: insist on an alternate reality and eventually
the target will start to question their own reality. It worked. After the
concerted campaign of erasure, I started to erase myself. I was exhausted; I
didn’t want to draw.
After
several weeks of self-doubt, a national debate brought some clarity. In
mid-June, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recorded an Instagram video in which she
condemned the concentration camps on our border and called for action to stop
the atrocities. Within hours, the country was up in arms over the term
“concentration camps,” with some of the same individuals and institutions that
had condemned me as a Nazi insisting that Ocasio-Cortez was not only
misinformed, but antisemitic. The rabbi at the Simon Wiesenthal Center who had
denounced me insisted that her use of the term “concentration camp” was an
“insult to victims of the Shoah.”
Thankfully,
in an open letter published in The New York Review of Books, over 400 scholars
interceded to say: these are concentration camps. Jews throughout the country
came to Ocasio-Cortez’s defense, insisting that Jewish memory is nothing if not
an injunction to stop the horrors from repeating. Soon the grassroots
initiative Never Again Action was formed to confront the machinery of ICE
concentration camps directly.
I
started drawing again—tracing the horrors in black and white, holding the
grotesqueries up like a mirror—because I remembered: we are fighting for our
memory and we are fighting for our lives. As far as creative motivation goes,
nothing quite compares to witnessing the methodical erasure of our collective
history and conscience. I am going to keep drawing.
A
Springtime of Erasure. By Eli Valley. Jewish Currents, November 25, 2019.
In a
discussion on The View, Meghan McCain was reduced to tears over Ilhan Omar’s
recent comments on the American pro-Israel lobby. “Just because I don’t
technically have Jewish family that are blood-related to me doesn’t mean that I
don’t take this seriously,” she said.
In
response, cartoonist and writer Eli Valley drew a now-infamous comic that
depicted her performing her new role as spokeswoman for American Jews. McCain
called it “one of the most anti-semitic things I have ever seen.”
It’s not
the first time such things have been said about Eli Valley and his work, much
of which is collected in the anthology Diaspora Boy. But McCain seemed unaware
of the controversy that has long followed Valley’s satirical commentary on
American and Israeli culture and politics, adding, “this reveals so much more
about you than it does me…”
What
does it reveal about Eli Valley? I gave him a call to find out.
SH : First
of all, I had no idea that Meghan McCain is Jewish. What’s the story behind
that?
EV : It’s
been fascinating just from the point of view of how satire becomes reality. It’s
an old story, reality eclipsing satire.
SH : There’s
that Tom Lehrer line, that satire died when Henry Kissinger won the Nobel Peace
Prize.
EV : You
can add Bret Stephens getting a Pulitzer for writing. Anyway, reality has been
eclipsing satire throughout the Trump administration, but this is such a
perfect example of it. She claimed it was her friendship with Joe and Hadassah
Lieberman that made her personally traumatized by what Ilhan Omar said. So I
just took it to the absurdist step of her claiming to be Jewish herself. And
then her reaction was that I am antisemitic towards her, which makes the
hyperbole reality.
SH : Okay,
so let’s get this established for readers who may not be familiar with your
work. We’ve already established that Meghan McCain is Jewish. Are you Jewish?
EV : By
her standard, no. But I consider myself Jewish.
SH : What’s
your own relationship to Jewishness?
EV : My
father was a rabbi. My mother is a secular Jew. By the way, I don’t say my
father’s a rabbi for street cred or any kind of clout.
SH : Meghan
McCain’s dad, if I’m not mistaken, I don’t think was a rabbi.
EV : I
once published a Jewish travel guide to Central and Eastern Europe, and at the
time I actually did think it would help the book, noting that my father was a
rabbi. But right now, saying my dad’s a rabbi, I’m not saying it to establish
any kind of street cred, it’s just the facts.
I grew
up observant until my parents got divorced. Then I was observant when I was
visiting my dad, and at my mom’s I was secular. So it created a sort of multiple
affiliation background.
SH : So
there’s a kind of—as a non-Jew myself you can correct me here—but there’s one
sense of being Jewish as being a member of the religion, and then there’s
what’s colloquially called something like the “lox-and-bagel” type of being
Jewish, where it’s an American cultural/ethnic group. Sounds like your parents
represented both of those.
EV : Yeah,
I think the lox-and-bagel description, certainly for secular Jews, is slightly
a caricature, and I think it’s used often by Orthodox or Zionist Jews to erase
the validity of the majority of American Jews. It’s one of the tools at their
disposal, basically. You know, saying we’re just Seinfeld Jews, we’re just
lox-and-bagel Jews.
When I
say secular I don’t just mean purely Yentl or Fiddler on the Roof. It’s
definitely informed by Jewish values, but not in a religiously observant sense.
SH : What
about now, do you see yourself as belonging to one or the other?
EV : I’m
not religiously observant at all. But it’s not only cultural either! Judaism is
such a multi-faceted identity, and expression of one’s essence, that it
encompasses both culture and values.
SH : That’s
something that comes up in regards to your work, the latest being this
depiction of Meghan McCain. You have an eye for the grotesque. I look at the
comic and I recognize that it’s Meghan McCain, but I also wouldn’t have seen
her that way unless you showed her to me that way. I’m thinking in terms of
this idea, and it might be a diasporic idea, of “Jewish humor.” Usually when
people say that they’re talking about Henny Youngman or Woody Allen, but for
you, it’s embodied more by Mad Magazine.
EV : Yeah.
I mean, I do think there’s an overlap!
SH : Do
you see yourself as having a specifically “Jewish” aesthetic? I’m thinking in
terms of your satirical approach.
EV : Yes,
for sure. I draw from what I call my own “ethnic pride” over the creators of
Mad—Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, and the rest of the crew of Jewish children of
immigrants living in New York City, with an office in what is now condos and a
Duane Reade. That’s where they were revolutionizing American comedy in the
1950s.
SH : Do
you see that as bearing on your visual aesthetic as well? Do you see monsters
in the right-wingers you draw, just when you look at them, or does it emerge as
you draw them?
EV : You’re
asking if I see them in—what’s that film noir word?
SH : Chiaroscuro?
EV : Yeah,
thank you, no, I’m not quite a dog who sees things in, such, whatever. But I do
see them as monstrous personalities, and ethically beyond the pale of what
we’re supposed to be when we’re acting with empathy towards other humans, and I
try to convey that in my art.
But I’ll
be honest with you, it’s my personal aesthetic, I like drawing this way, even
when I’m drawing friends. I find the art to be aesthetically appealing, but others
might find it offensive.
SH : I
don’t think you make everyone look like a monster. But when you do, it’s
uncanny to me how much I can recognize them in the grotesque image you present.
EV : Do
you think Meghan McCain looked like a monster?
SH : Yeah.
But it also looked like her.
EV : Good,
good. It’s difficult when drawing women in particular, because the grotesquerie
is more easily matched with male-presenting figures.
SH : And
you’ve certainly done that.
EV : Well
it just happens that people in power happen to be more men than women. I’ve
gotten a couple responses concerning fat-shaming, and I am sensitive to that.
It’s sort of an impasse when it comes to this, because all of my art involves
like, folds of flesh. Whether the person is a certain weight or not.
SH : Flesh
is central to your aesthetic.
EV : It
can be interpreted as being fat-shaming, but that’s not the goal. And I do
apologize if it increases societal judgment of people of different weights.
That’s not it. I find it, aesthetically, visually enticing—bodies and flesh—when
working on the art.
SH : Let’s
put this in context. I’ll start with what happened afterward and then we’ll go
to what happened beforehand. McCain said, this cartoon is “one of the most
anti-semitic things I’ve ever seen.”
EV : I’m
assuming she was in a coma during Charlottesville and Pittsburgh.
SH : Right.
I mean, a drawing of someone who is not Jewish, by the son of a rabbi, she
called the most antisemitic thing she’d ever seen. How does that work?
EV : I
think she identified so much as a victimized Jewish person under the onslaught
of the supposed terrorist Ilhan Omar that any criticism of her is a criticism
of the Jewish people. So when you’re in such a warped mindset, it’s natural
you’re going to call a piece of Jewish art antisemitic.
SH : What
did you think of Ilhan Omar’s statements themselves?
EV : Honestly,
I think there is room for nuance here in the discussion. Let’s establish this
first: she didn’t make antisemitic remarks, she criticized monolithic support
for Israel. In America, that’s led by mostly rapture-thirsty Evangelical
Zionist antisemites, and to equate Israel with Jews is itself antisemitic—à la
Trump’s insistence that Israel is “our” country, and American Jews aren’t
exactly American. Having said that, and knowing the discourse will be tainted
from the start by bad-faith assholes, it’s worth the trouble to be sensitive
about the language. Don’t give them an open! Some people, especially among
older generations, will be triggered by certain phrases even if you’re not talking
about Jews.
So with
that in mind, ideally she could have phrased things to avoid any unintentional
or momentary overlap with the historic vernacular of antisemitism. But what she
said doesn’t make her an antisemite. People are making it a big deal because
they’re pretending Israel equals Jews, and antisemitism is now defined as
criticism of AIPAC and Likud. When talking about fealty to Israel, by, let’s be
honest, mostly fucking Evangelicals, okay, the language can unfortunately
overlap, or be confused with, this mythology. And if we were operating in good
faith—and I’m thinking especially of Democrats here—we could have her back and
help her understand these nuances instead of appeasing right-wing creeps with
show trials.
This is
how you correct it. You say to them, listen, certain people are sensitive about
this, particularly people who have experienced the horrors that this mythology
has led to. So keep the criticism, just don’t make it about puppetmasters and
shit.
The
reason I’m saying that is partly because my mom, who is very progressive, she
initially said to me, “Oh, dual loyalty, that’s really antisemitic.” And then I
explained to her the context, and the fact that she wasn’t singling out Jews in
particular, and my mom said, Oh my god, yes. And she saw that. So it’s sort of
a tonal thing, sensitivity to that.
But
that’s the problem: It could have been addressed easily, and move on. Maybe
three to five seconds out of the 24-hour news cycle. Then let’s move on to the
actual national crisis at hand. And the way we know that we’re dealing with bad
faith, that it was actually about her stance on Israel, is that people who have
been criticizing her, and pretending she’s some kind of antisemitic terrorist,
have turned this from seconds into multiple 24-hour days. We entered
all-hands-on-deck catastrophe mode, while we have the hero of American Nazism
sitting in the Oval Office.
When
you’re talking about “both sides,” it’s true, your whole argument shouldn’t be
“Oh, the other side is so much worse.” But here’s the thing—aside from the fact
that Republican members of Congress say much worse things than what Ilhan Omar
said, and on an hourly basis. We are dealing with a crisis unlike anything
we’ve seen in decades in this country. We’re in a national crisis. And we’ve
been in a national crisis since November 2016.
Some of
Omar’s biggest antagonists have devoted more time to maybe three words that she
said than to the man who has galvanized ethnic cleansing and white supremacy in
the United States. And that is reprehensible. It’s morally outlandish, and we
should not stand for this shit.
SH : Name
some names.
EV : Oh,
Seth Mandel, Bethany Mandel, who rejoiced at the White House six weeks after
Trump inspired the biggest mass murder of Jews in American history.
John
Podhoretz, who claims to be a “never-Trumper,” but when push comes to shove,
they all line up.
Bret
Stephens, Bari Weiss. Just run down the list of people who pretend to be
concerned about antisemitism but it turns out that they’re only concerned with
criticism of Israel, and to hell with American Jews.
SH : If
we go back to Omar’s original statement, an editor at the Forward asked her who
she “thinks is paying American politicians to be pro-Israel.” And she said,
“AIPAC,” which is literally a group that exists for that exact purpose. Somehow
that was antisemitic?
EV : You
know what’s funny is, just as the reaction to the comic proves the premise of
the comic, so the reaction to the claim that AIPAC wields excessive power
proves that they wield that power.
SH : One
of the worst antisemitic stereotypes is that “Jews run the media,” but Jewish
media is fairly limited. You used to work for the Forward, and you and I have
both contributed to Jewish Currents, which takes a different political stance.
Do these publications serve the same cultural purpose?
EV : Tablet
is right-wing. Forward was center-left, now it’s just hot takes, plus Josh
Nathan-Kazis’s reporting. But the hot takes: two headlines that they did about
Ilhan Omar said she was separating the Jews from the left, which I thought was
such a false dichotomy.
SH : Right,
historically, the American left has always been highly populated by Jewish
immigrants.
EV : Not
just historically, but today! We are the left.
SH : For
me, as a person of an ethnically Muslim background, looking at the politics of
the Middle East, I was for a long time scared to speak out about it, or even
hold my own opinions about it, until I realized that there is a robust and
conscientious group of Jewish people in America and Israel who see the plight
of the Palestinians as a human rights issue and are dedicated to addressing it.
Personally it’s been empowering to me to see people like you, and the staff at
Jewish Currents, just not compromising.
EV : I
appreciate that. I remember once this woman I knew, she didn’t really know the
Jewish institutional world, so when I mentioned the right-wing bent she was
just like, absolutely in awe, because she said, every Jew I know is on the
left!
SH : Did
you have a moment when you changed your perspective? Were you raised with an
equation between Jewish identity and Zionism? Was there a moment of a break
from that?
EV : Well
my parents couldn’t afford to send me to Israel as much as the other kids in my
day school, but I was able to finally go when I was in college, and one of the
things was that I was staying in a youth hostel in Safed, and it was run by
Jewish outreach types—”Kiruv” is the Orthodox term for it. Trying to bring in
like, less than observant Jews into the fold. They were saying atrocious things
about Palestinians. It was an extremist place. In Jerusalem going to Shabbat
dinner via another one of these Kiruv places, and this patriarch, this elderly
man, starts singing “Ha’aravim klavim”—”the Arabs are dogs.”
SH : So
that shook you?
EV : Yeah,
in terms of the fact that the religion could be used for racial and ethnic
hatred. But it wasn’t until I became more active in the American Jewish
community that I saw it wasn’t just among religiously observant people that
this attitude permeated. I’m not going to say American Jewish leaders are
saying “Arabs are dogs,” but there is this rightward bent that foundationally
has the premise that Palestinians are less-than. And you see it filtered
through the statements of Bret Stephens about the “disease of the Arab mind,”
or Marty Peretz saying “Muslim life is cheap,” and all that.
SH : That
is a central aspect to your work, the tension between “Diaspora Boy” and
“Israel Man.”
EV : That’s
a satire of Zionist attitudes towards world Jewry, since the inception of
Zionism. I initially came up with that ten years ago but it’s becoming so
accelerated now that Trump is in the White House and Netanyahu is helming
Israel.
Netanyahu
is choosing alliances with neo-Nazi nationalist white supremacists over the
welfare and safety of the world’s Jews. You can’t get more clear-cut than that.
It’s not even a punchline. It’s absurd, but it’s true. Satire is eclipsed by
reality.
SH : Meghan
McCain isn’t the only one who’s called your work antisemitic. People like Abe
Foxman, former Director of the Anti-Defamation League, have denounced you. Some
detractors call you a “self-hating Jew.” But if your subject is antisemitism,
and you’re using the mode of satire, your work has to include representations
of antisemitism. How do you navigate that line?
EV : Well
with the comic what I was doing was mocking exploitation of Jewish kitsch. I’m
mocking her for taking on our history and also our trauma. In one incarnation I
actually considered putting her in the actual garb of a prison camp, or
Auschwitz. But then I decided no, I’m going to go more towards the kitsch
aspect, but I’m going to keep the Star of David in German, Jude. That was
necessary, a sign of the trauma too.
SH : There’s
a bit of the lox-and-bagel aspect too.
EV : Just
a little bit, with the matzo ball soup, that she’s pouring without any liquid
into the bowl. That was the centerpiece for me. I considered putting pickles,
but I actually wanted to stay away from what we were talking about
earlier—that’s a stereotype of secular Jews by Orthodox Jews and by Zionists
who say that Jewish life will wither outside of Israel. And I didn’t want to do
that. What I wanted to do is try and imagine what a person who fetishizes Jews
imagines Jews are like. And that’s why, boom, Yentl. I was thinking of Seinfeld
too actually, but it’s kind of a cliché. Fiddler on the Roof was possible as
well.
SH : Yentl
was the right one.
EV : I
thought so. And a little dreidel. Matisyahu was the deep cut for Jews of a
certain age who remember there being that like Jewish intra-communal kitsch of
10 years ago. And just the idea that she would do it now in 2019 made it
absurd. Josh Nathan-Kazis of the Forward said his favorite thing about it was
that tons of gentiles were totally confused. Flabbergasted. “What is
Matisyahu?” So that was good. That was actually one of the signs that this was
a piece of Jewish art. That’s why it’s even more absurd that she’s calling it
antisemitic. It’s absurd that all these right-wing Jews who hate the majority
of American Jews are calling it antisemitic.
The
reason they call me a self-hater is because they define Jewish authenticity as
Zionist. And the punchline to that is, the people who were the proponents of
what they consider to be authentic Judaism and self-love, have now, in the
aggregate, allied with forces seeking to destroy the Jewish people.
Eli
Valley is Not Sorry. By Shuja Haider. Popula , March 11, 2019.
It was
the first week of January and, as usual, the world was slipping ever more
precipitously toward complete insanity. Newly installed Michigan congresswoman
Rashida Tlaib had just made headlines for telling a crowd, in reference to
President Trump, “We’re going to impeach the motherfucker.” Soon afterward,
Trump — he of “shithole countries,” “Get that son of a bitch off the field,”
and, “You’re not gonna raise that fuckin’ price” — responded by telling
reporters, “I think she dishonored herself and her family.” Political
cartoonists across the country traipsed to their drawing boards and
contemplated how they could address the president’s hypocrisy while elevating
themselves above the fray and maintaining good taste. But one of their number
wasn’t interested in grace or editorial standards.
“I mean,
if nobody else is gonna draw Trump shouting ‘My opponent’s language is a
disgrace!!’ while fucking a pig carcass surrounded by Klansmen and kids in
cages I guess I have my weekend cut out for me,” Eli Valley tweeted. One could
be forgiven for thinking this was mere bluster, one of those anti-Trump tweets
that serves as a vulgar venting mechanism and dissipates into the ether. But
three days later, Valley tweeted out the fruit of his fury. Sure enough, it was
everything the initial tweet had promised and more: a widescreen image of a
gelatinous flesh-blob resembling the president of the United States copulating
with a dead boar while nearby children suffer behind bars and KKK men gaze on
from behind impassive hoods. It was rendered in Valley’s distinctively filthy
chiaroscuro, all sweeping lines and gruesome textures, and the tweet’s text
simply read, “Good morning.”
Valley’s
been having a series of good mornings, by which I mean terrible mornings. His
career’s going great, but that’s partly because everything else is going to
hell in a handbasket. As the weight of humanity’s chaos has become more and more
unbearable, Valley’s lewdly honest cartooning, fueled by his personal rage at a
world gone wrong, has become a staple in the angrier corners of the American
left, especially among its Jewish partisans. For well over a decade, Valley has
unsparingly attacked political and communal leaders in the United States and
Israel for their venality and sadism. Now, with two books on the stands and a
devoted online following showering him with likes and retweets, Valley is
demonstrating that he’s one of the only political cartoonists willing to enter
into a staring contest with the abyss.
There
was a time, not so long ago, when Valley was an unknown and profoundly
uncontroversial figure who barely engaged in the debates that he so
energetically dives into today. Sitting in his cramped, comic-book-brimmed
studio apartment in downtown Manhattan, I ask him about a curious professional
irony that demonstrates just how much his life has changed in recent years. In
1999, Valley was living in Prague, giving tours of Jewish historical sites in
Eastern Europe, and he published his first book: a hefty prose tome entitled
The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe: A Travel Guide and Resource
Book to Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, and Budapest. It proudly wore a blurb from none
other than Nobel–winning writer, Holocaust survivor, and Israel advocate Elie
Wiesel: “This beautiful and melancholy book is more than a guide to great
Jewish cities: it is a book of tales.”
But
flash forward to August 2014 and you’ll find Valley publishing a comic called
“Wiesel, Weaponized” in +972 Magazine, a left-leaning outlet that covers the
Israeli–Palestinian conflict. At the time, Wiesel was emphatically advocating
for the Israeli side in that summer’s war in the Palestinian territory known as
the Gaza Strip. In the comic, sinister Israeli scientists affix Wiesel’s head
and brain to the front of a bomb-dropping drone vehicle and use it to
annihilate Arabs in Gaza while spouting platitudes like, “This is a battle
between those who celebrate life and those who champion death!” At the end, the
Wiesel drone flies off into the sunset, muttering fragments of pro-Israeli
talking points: “Conscience of humanity … Civilization versus barbarism … Arabs
… Death cult … Fires of Moloch … Israel chooses life …”
Valley
says he was benighted when he wrote his first book, the one blurbed by Wiesel.
As he puts it, “I was not educated at the time about Wiesel’s support for Elad”
— an organization that represents Jewish settlers in the Israeli–occupied
Palestinian West Bank. “So I was happy to have that blurb.” In the past, Valley
had been inclined to sympathize with Zionism, the hard-to-define ideology that
advocates for Jewish self-determination and has come to be synonymous with
supporting the State of Israel. Now, he’s probably the leading critic of
Zionism in American editorial cartooning. Two things led to the change. First,
after learning more about Zionism’s past and present and seeing Israel take an
increasingly rightward tilt, he became what he now calls a non-Zionist — i.e.,
someone who doesn’t define himself by the aim of destroying Zionism, but still
questions it at a fundamental level. Second, he joined a fateful cartooning
contest.
Valley
had a prehistory of artistry. Growing up in New Jersey and upstate New York as
the son of a largely secular woman and a conservative rabbi, he had loved
comics and doodled his own. During his undergraduate career at Cornell, he’d
drawn political cartoons for the school paper (he shows some of them to me and
is profoundly embarrassed by his then-topical takedowns of things like the
German reunification and petty university politics). But after college, he had
no intentions of continuing down the visual artist’s path. That changed in
2006, when he entered a competition called the Israeli Anti-Semitic Cartoons
Contest, which aimed to celebrate Jewish free expression in the face of an
Iranian newspaper’s competition for cartoons about the Holocaust.* Inspired,
Valley picked up his pen once again and drew a horrific image of a Jewish man
with two phalluses sexually assaulting Muslim and Christian women. It didn’t
win, but Valley — who had been harboring dreams of being a fiction writer —
decided to try his hand at professional political cartooning.
Over the
course of the next decade, Valley saw his expressionist, woodcut-esque work
published in an array of venues — first in the alt-culture web magazine Jewcy,
then mostly in the venerable Jewish outlet the Forward, where he became an
artist-in-residence. In a noisy Manhattan coffee shop, Dan Friedman, the former
arts editor and executive editor of the Forward, described Valley to me as
“cutting-edge, doing stuff that no one else is doing, understanding it like no
one else is understanding it, and presenting in a way that’s totally unique.
Not only in the Jewish world, but actually, as far as I can tell, in the
cartooning world. Partly because he’s self-taught and partly because he’s a
unique guy.”
Valley
barred no holds when he submitted work to the Forward, and occasionally had to
be reeled back in. Even with editorial guidance, he regularly received
blistering criticism from the Jewish establishment. Take, for example, one of
his earliest Forward cartoons, November 2008’s “Evangelical Zionist Tours of
Israel.” In it, he lampoons the kind of Christian Evangelicals who root for
Israel out of a hatred for Arabs and a belief that Jews must retain sovereignty
in the region in order to bring about Biblical armageddon and the subsequent
victory of Jesus — as well as the Jews who accept their support. In one panel,
a Christian tourist asks the prime minister of Israel, “Would you be so kind as
to declare yourself king, then unmask yourself as the Antichrist?” To which the
prime minister responds, “That depends. How much money do you have on you?”
The
right-leaning, heavily Zionist magazine Commentary called that comic
“ferociously repugnant.” The International Fellowship of Christians and Jews
said it was “morally wrong, patently false, and an outrageous, mean-spirited
spin on reality — even for a caricature.” An editorial at the American Thinker
declared that the comic was “one of the most offensive cartoons I have even
seen.” And that was only the beginning of Valley’s magnetism for critique.
A 2010
comic about wide-eyed American Jews who buy into the ideology of the Israeli
ultra-Orthodox right wing prompted a prominent American ultra-Orthodox writer
to vaguely link the comic to the then-recent Haitian earthquake. When Valley
published a comic in which Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu sexually assaults
Barack Obama in +972 (even the Forward refused to run it), the right-wing group
NGO Monitor cited it in an attempt to strip the publication of its funding.
Commentary even went so far as to call a 2012 Forward comic by Valley “firmly
within the tradition of Nazi ideologue Julius Streicher’s anti-Semitic
illustrations.” Valley’s response when I ask him about that last critique is
appropriately harsh: “The ‘Nazi’ epithet reveals Commentary’s profound
ignorance of Jewish history, culture, and politics, and its grotesque eagerness
to trivialize the term ‘Nazi’ by equating criticism of Israel with Der Stürmer.
It’s a shanda” — a Yiddish word meaning “shame” — “but that’s the role
Commentary fills: shanda of the Jewish world.”
Matters
came to a breaking point in late 2013, when the Forward published a Valley
comic called “It Happened on Halloween,” which depicted the Jewish then-head of
the Anti-Defamation League, Abraham Foxman, railing against Jews for not being
sufficiently conservative. Foxman ultimately takes on the role of a raving
anti-Semite, attacking a Jew who advocates for an embargo on Israel and
screaming “perfidious Jew!” at him before being jailed. From his cell, Foxman
yells, “The Jews did this to me! It was the Jews!” The real-life Foxman was furious
and the Forward was barraged with calls and emails decrying the comic. Under
great pressure, the Forward opted to tell Valley they would no longer be
accepting pitches from him. He did a few scattered Forward cartoons over the
ensuing months for appearances’ sake, but it was the end of an era for him.
And yet,
Valley’s legend has only grown since then. He continued to be published in +972
and today has a home at comics site the Nib, the progressive magazine Jewish
Currents, on his own Twitter feed, and elsewhere. He’s also returned to the
print world for the first time since publishing his guidebook. In 2017, he
published an oversize collection of his comics, along with commentary on them,
called Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel, which sold out in
its initial print run and featured a foreword from influential Jewish
commentator Peter Beinart. (Beinart neatly summed up Valley’s appeal in the
piece: “Eli Valley’s cartoons are outrageous and absurd. That’s because we’re
living at an outrageous and absurd moment in American Jewish life.”) Last year,
he provided illustrations for The Chapo Guide to Revolution: A Manifesto
Against Logic, Facts, and Reason, a book published by the popular lefty
podcasters of Chapo Trap House. For years, he also maintained a day job as
editor of Contact, a Jewish-issues magazine published by the pro-Israel
Steinhardt Foundation — remarkably, they allowed him to publish his comics,
even one that attacked a program the foundation was involved in — but the magazine
folded a few months ago. All Valley has now is his comics and his fury.
He reels
at the alliance that the Israeli government and certain American Jewish
organizations have formed with the Trump administration and the GOP that backs
it. When Valley and I speak, it’s just a few weeks after the massacre of 11
Jews by an anti-Semite in Pittsburgh, and I ask him what he felt about the
incident. He pauses for a moment, then responds, “There’s just weariness and
outrage and fury and the sense that we could see this coming. We’d been
watching it happen. We’d been sounding the alarms for years now. And our
leadership in the Jewish community and what I call the GOP–Nazi Party now,
because of the normalizing of the latter into the former, have ignored us or
have responded to our sirens with, ‘Oh, but we love Israel’ and it’s like
satire is dead.”
Indeed,
Valley’s comics have been getting heavier and less conventionally satirical as
the Trump era grinds on. Prior to November 8, 2016, he was contemplating a move
into apolitical, surreal work. “But then this happened, Trump came into office,
and I really do feel that everything is collapsing and I don’t really feel like
I have an alternative,” he says. “The idea of drawing comics of that sort just
seemed like such a comfortable and out-of-touch reaction to what’s happening. I
would love to be able to get to them again but I just don’t know if this world
is ever going to be able to come together in that way again.” Trump’s rise has
also brought him to loathe certain Jewish institutions and individuals even
more than he did before. He has come to feel that it’s time to excommunicate
GOP-allied Jews from Jewry, altogether. As he put it in a speech at a recent
Jewish Currents release party, “Jews who ally with Nazis are not Jews, and must
be thrown out from the Jewish people before they destroy us all. For our own
safety.”
Valley’s
newer comics are so provocative and full of rage that they make the one that
got him booted from the Forward seem positively tame. Just before the midterm
elections, he tweeted out a drawing of Benjamin Netanyahu — who, like the
Pittsburgh shooter, has railed against liberal Jewish billionaire George Soros
— painting the words “KIKE SOROS” on a poster of the latter while he delivers a
sinister smile and muses, “To our brothers and sisters in America, the State of
Israel says: solidarity.” Just two days later, he tweeted out another
envelope-pusher: caricatures of various Republican Jews toasting the Jewish new
year — which, in the Hebrew calendar, is 5779 — and saying, “Our single wish
for 5779 … is to ‘Make America Judenrein!’” Judenrein, of course, was the term
the Nazis used to describe an area that had extinguished or expelled all of its
Jews. The next day saw yet another audacious tweet, with an image of Trump
wearing a swastika armband while Netanyahu embraces him, with the president
declaring, “See, what’d I tell ya: The Jews love me!”
In other
words, Valley is moving into darker and darker territory, which, if you share
his political viewpoint, is entirely fitting for the times in which we live.
His work is absolutely not for everyone, but the fact that he’s found a
following provides him with some solace — not because fame eases his political
pain, but because it means he’s not alone in his feeling that the time for
artistic moderation is over. “I’m excited that there are new generations that
are rejecting propaganda, so that gives me hope for the future, seriously,” he
tells me. “Just the fact that despite the crisis and the agony and the
apocalyptic tenor of our times, creating art that, to me, resists and also is
resilient and embodies consciousness — my consciousness and the consciousness
of hopefully some others — that is gratifying. That gives me, if not hope, then
definitely sustenance through these times.”
*A
previous version of this article misstated the impetus behind the Israeli
contest — it was not in response to outrage over cartoons of the Prophet
Muhammad.
Eli
Valley Is the Angriest Political Cartoonist in America. By Abraham Riesman.
Vulture , February 20, 2019.
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