Photograph © Loubna Mrie Eli Valley is the author of the critically-acclaimed Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel. His work has appeared in Jewish Currents, The New Republic, The Baffler, Gawker, and The Chapo Guide to Revolution (Atria, 2018).

The portraits in this book are Jewish art buoyed by memory in a sea of amnesia. As the United States retreads its well-worn tracks of bloodthirsty demagoguery, massacres of minorities, cult-baked conspiracies, family separation, and race war in pursuit of a fabled utopian past—tracks laid down from the earliest moments of European conquest, and reminiscent of the most brutal trails of Jewish history—these drawings are meant to bludgeon. This is Jewish comic grotesque, a form of prayer and a form of witness, every line haunted by past horror. Memory becomes a mirror—a reflection of the abyss ethnonationalism has always opened. It’s not a vanity mirror.

Few have thought we are on the verge of a Holocaust or that Jews sit anywhere near the top of an imminent target list. But progressive American Jews saw what has been happening, we felt it in our bones, and we knew that if our historical experience is used only as blinders when similar horrors start befalling other communities, then our history is worthless. For me, that has meant drawing deeper from the wells not only of Jewish history but of Jewish trauma. For generations, Holocaust memory and its associated imagery were sacrosanct: walled off from contemporary experience lest the memory be exploited and defiled. But those standards shattered once the ruling political party in the United States began guzzling white-supremacist ethnic-cleansing ideology, seeding conspiracies, summoning militias, and spitballing with Nazis to craft national policy. Memory has come alive, history is both metaphor and alarm, and past trauma has the power to illuminate and help mobilize against our current catastrophe.

Photograph © Loubna Mrie Eli Valley is the author of the critically-acclaimed Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel. His work has appeared in Jewish Currents, The New Republic, The Baffler, Gawker, and The Chapo Guide to Revolution (Atria, 2018).

The portraits in this book are Jewish art buoyed by memory in a sea of amnesia. As the United States retreads its well-worn tracks of bloodthirsty demagoguery, massacres of minorities, cult-baked conspiracies, family separation, and race war in pursuit of a fabled utopian past—tracks laid down from the earliest moments of European conquest, and reminiscent of the most brutal trails of Jewish history—these drawings are meant to bludgeon. This is Jewish comic grotesque, a form of prayer and a form of witness, every line haunted by past horror. Memory becomes a mirror—a reflection of the abyss ethnonationalism has always opened. It’s not a vanity mirror.

Few have thought we are on the verge of a Holocaust or that Jews sit anywhere near the top of an imminent target list. But progressive American Jews saw what has been happening, we felt it in our bones, and we knew that if our historical experience is used only as blinders when similar horrors start befalling other communities, then our history is worthless. For me, that has meant drawing deeper from the wells not only of Jewish history but of Jewish trauma. For generations, Holocaust memory and its associated imagery were sacrosanct: walled off from contemporary experience lest the memory be exploited and defiled. But those standards shattered once the ruling political party in the United States began guzzling white-supremacist ethnic-cleansing ideology, seeding conspiracies, summoning militias, and spitballing with Nazis to craft national policy. Memory has come alive, history is both metaphor and alarm, and past trauma has the power to illuminate and help mobilize against our current catastrophe.