Eli Valley, Museum of Degenerates: Portraits of the American Grotesque

New York: OR Press, 2025. 252pp. $45.00

Sometimes, unpredictably, a radical artist gets a real break. A recent New York Times Book Review “Newly Published/Graphic Books” section admiringly described Eli Valley’s new and startling book of drawings and side-texts as exploring “antisemitism and authoritarianism through woodcut-style texts.” Indeed, like the recent Guardian original featuring Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman in dialogue over the Israeli pogrom in Gaza, this brave cartoonist is a public hero.

Not to everyone, of course. Eli Valley was a dangerous artist long before Donald Trump’s Christian nationalists took power, openly aspiring to a near-future apocalypse in Israel—or rather, post-Israel, minus Jews who decline to convert. In the introduction to this newest work, Valley says of his already famously (or notoriously) satirical work that his critics hate him most for calling upon memory. Memory that “has come alive, history is both metaphor and alarm, and past trauma [that] has the power to illuminate and help mobilize against our current catastrophe” (p. xi).

That is: collective memories that have been twisted into justification for things otherwise beyond any moral defense. Or, put another way, memory in light of the seemingly exterminative Israeli assault upon the men, women, and—above all—the children not only of Gaza but increasingly the West Bank, and perhaps even Lebanon and Syria in the period ahead.

Valley has long been hated for his attacks on the rising U.S. Right, but never so much as now. Assaulted as a Nazi by “Zionists who had never encountered a Yiddish cartoon” of the kind that ridiculed the Jewish rich and foolish, and described by Steven Miller as “everyone’s favorite Nazi cartoonist,” Valley yielded not one inch of ground. He gleefully quotes a Newsweek journalist calling him “one of the world’s leading self-hating Jewish cartoonists and promoters of Third Reich-style Judeophobic propaganda” (p. xii). There is absolutely no truth in this charge leveled at Valley from the Newsweek journalist.

What follows the newsweek quote, is about 250 oversized pages of outrageous art and commentary, mainly exposing how the Jewish establishment has embraced the historic (and mostly unashamed) bloc of antisemitic Christian conservatives. There is no one quite so savage as Valley when he gets riled up—no one, at least, in the history of visual satire. Valley puts himself in front of an ideological firing squad, chest bare, daring them to shoot. Or rather, to keep shooting—because he also speaks for the non-Zionist, anti-Zionist Jewish community, a group more hated, by far, than actual, verifiable antisemites. He snatches a post-massacre headline from the Jewish Forward (Buhle and Valley are both past contributors to its pages): “After Pittsburgh, Jewish Groups’ First Fight is Against BDS—Not White Nationalism.” A phrase that says it all.

The very title Museum of Degenerates is clipped from a real-life Nazi anti-art venture that displayed paintings and novels in a German museum in the mid-1930s. For Valley, being assaulted in the pages of mainline Jewish publications places him alongside the younger generation of Jewish campus protesters—what Natan Sharansky once called “un-Jews” and what the Simon Wiesenthal Center in Los Angeles denounced as “despicable” when his drawing of Ariel Sharon as Pharaoh was made into a poster on the UCLA campus. The long history of Jewish prophets denouncing the worst tendencies among Jewish power-holders had, evidently, come to be associated only with antisemites.

But there is more to say about Valley and the soul of his work, which he sometimes describes as a kind of Jewish prayer. The wonderfully humorous character of his drawings—perhaps unmatched in satirizing the rich since the German artists of the Weimar years—frequently offers more pain than laughter. Valley suggests that he draws upon Psalm 130:1, “From out of the depths, I call to you,” referencing the cantor or yorid, who literally descends a few inches to a lower point on the pulpit, so that he may lift up the spirit from the depths (pp. xvi–xvii). The depths are not pretty. Valley explains that he is going to maintain his commentary with each cartoon, recalling what he did and why. He is descending, in prose as well as pictures, in order to lift up.

Sometimes, he is ruminative, wondering whether a different set of visual choices might have been better. Sometimes—actually, very often—he is really, really funny. More often, he is not only bitter at what official Judaism has become in the U.S. but at what its loudest voices have made it seem to have become.

Thus, Trump himself is seen as an obese, decaying Nazi. But Morton Klein, president of the Zionist Organization of America, also looks pretty decayed, as he denounces the African American leader of the Minnesota Democratic Party, Keith Ellison, for being too “Islamic”—that is, too close to the Left—to be made head of the Democratic National Committee in 2016. The Democrats have been doing splendidly since then, of course.

The visual text and the prose asides are unremitting and deathless in their expression. And sometimes, they are personal. In 2019, neoconservative New York Times columnist Bari Weiss went public with a campaign against an upcoming presentation by Valley at Stanford University. Students there had taken note of a drawing Valley had made for the Jewish Forward a decade earlier, about Jewish leaders in old Prague—a drawing actually adopted for tote bags at a National Jewish Student Journalism conclave. Stanford student Republicans reprinted the image, without permission, alongside an avowedly antisemitic image from Der Stürmer, the Nazi paper, as Israeli nationalists on campus demanded Valley be banned from campus for potentially “traumatizing” students. That Valley had actually been invited by Jewish student peace groups made no difference (pp. 96–97).

It goes on. That is to say, the campaign against Valley goes on. But perhaps it has carried his work further into the public sphere, especially among the peacenik Jewish public on campus and beyond. We can hope so!

Eli Valley has been torturing tribalist, occupied-territory-seeking Jewish neoconservative and neoliberal hawks for about a decade now. His art style is utterly unique, a combination of cartoon and comic art all mooshed together, with odd items galore. If many readers miss a detail or two (or three) in this delightfully oversized volume, it is likely due to the dense content and storylines, ruthlessly moral in an immoral world.

Peter Beinart, a Jewish commentator who moved leftward after becoming famous, says in the preface that if the cartoons in this book are “outrageous and absurd,” it is because we are living in an “outrageous and absurd moment in American Jewish life.” That is, the language of American Jewry remains overwhelmingly liberal, but the silence over the cruel reality of the occupation of the West Bank is deafening.

Beinart calls Valley’s work a “searing indictment of the moral corruption of organized American Jewish life in our age”—on the face of it, a pretty shocking observation. With a kicker: the book is also the Eli Valley story. As you might have guessed, reader, Valley is the son of a rabbi, raised with the imagery of the Jewish diaspora—imagery full of righteous suffering and apparent triumph, ever-insecure triumph.

Actually, the story is more complicated and even more interesting. His parents’ marriage broke up, the kids moved out with their mother, and there is even a photo of her somewhere in the 1970s, looking like Joan Baez, guitar and all. One fine, progressive secular Jewish parent is more than many Jewish Americans are lucky enough to have.

Valley’s Diaspora Boy is a bigger, tougher version of Mad Magazine, closer to the intensity of Mad Comics than its later incarnation. It is also an unrelenting critique of Jewish nationalism, the occupation, and the power structures that sustain them. Reader, look for this volume and dig in.

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