Eli Valley’s ‘Tough Stuff’

A new collection presents the anti-Zionist cartoonist’s provocative depictions of the politically corrupt and morally bankrupt.

by

Museum of Degenerates: Portraits of the American Grotesque

By Eli Valley

OR Books, 272 pages, 10" x 12"

Publication date: February 11, 2025

Many years ago, during the George W. Bush Administration, I brought several of my university students to visit the renowned editorial cartoonist Paul Conrad at his dealer’s gallery in Santa Monica. By then in his seventies, Conrad—a fiery truth-teller who took aim at Richard Nixon, the Vietnam War, and racist backlash against the civil rights movement—used a great deal of colorful language as he spoke of his abrasive cartoons’ many targets, and joked that he would never run out of material.  

Conrad, who died in 2010, belonged to a history of political cartooning that has for centuries depicted untold misery and hardship inflicted on the masses by monarchs, dictators, and other authoritarians. From nineteenth century satirists such as Honoré Daumier in France and Thomas Nast in the United States to iconic early twentieth century illustrators such as Herblock, Bill Maudlin, and Ted Geisel (better known as Dr. Seuss), these creative and often acerbic artists have managed to lampoon the likes of Jefferson Davis, Adolf Hitler, and Joseph McCarthy. 

But as fascism looms in the United States, it has grown more difficult to satirize those responsible for its development, be it the Trump Administration, proponents of Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, or other enablers of each state’s inhuman and murderous political project. Though cartoonists have received somewhat lesser recognition since the early twentieth century, contemporary leftwing cartoonists such as Jen Sorensen, Allan Schmertzler, and Dwayne Booth (also known as Mr. Fish) have continued the tradition on the web and in smaller publications, highlighting injustice, corruption, and the often repulsive nature of the people who run the machinery of government and the economy. At the top of this distinguished list is Eli Valley, a Jewish American cartoonist known for his provocative and often grotesquely exaggerated depictions of wealthy and powerful figures. 

Until recently, Valley’s work had primarily appeared in publications such Jewish Currents and The Forward—the latter of which eventually fired him over his critical depictions of Zionist figures—as well as his 2017 collection, Diaspora Boy: Comics on Crisis in America and Israel. But now, the independent progressive publisher OR Books has issued Museum of Degenerates: Portraits of the American Grotesque—a fascinating compendium of Valley’s incendiary efforts to portray the repulsive underside of U.S. politics. With his intense and unrelenting satirical vision, Valley seeks to condemn contemporary fascism, Zionism, and corruption wherever he finds it—and he finds it often. His wide range of targets includes Republicans, their high-ranking enablers in the Democratic Party, Christian Zionist fundamentalists, genocide purveyors such as the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), and a cast of assorted creeps such as Roy Moore, Stephen Miller, and David Duke. 

Across his body of work, Valley uses vulgar language and imagery to great effect. His aesthetic is strikingly reminiscent of the early twentieth century political artists George Grosz and Otto Dix, whose harsh geometric styles rendered their subjects viscerally unpleasant to look at. This approach can often alienate audiences: I’ve seen such reactions when I teach Grosz and Dix to my students at the University of California, Los Angeles, and I expect to see similar reactions when I add Valley to the syllabus in the near future. Viewers need a strong stomach to get through Museum of Degenerates, but it’s worth the discomfort: The truths he depicts are every bit as necessary and compelling as they are tough to take.  

In one comic titled “Israel at 70,” Valley skewers the bizarre relationships between Israel’s far-right Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Hungary’s authoritarian, antisemitic Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, depicting Netanyahu gifting Orbán several boxes of yellow Star of David badges. “Who could have dreamt,”  Netanyahu says to his fellow greedy autocrat, “that in just seventy years. . . . we’d be manufacturing these ourselves for export?” Through Valley’s lens, Netanyahu is a snivelling coward, holding in his palm the eternal Jewish symbol as he besmirches the very Jewish tradition he cynically claims to protect. 

In a similar vein, his 2019 parody of an AIPAC promotional poster pictures Yigal Amir, the right-wing extremist who assassinated then-Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in 1995, as the organization’s featured speaker. “From AIPAC to Netanyahu to Christchurch,” Rabin is depicted saying, “we are keeping the dream alive.” Valley’s point is bluntly made: The actual featured speaker at AIPAC’s 2019 Policy Conference was Netanyahu. 

Mainstream Democrats rarely evade Valley’s satirical pen, either. One of his easiest targets is former disgraced New York governor and current New York mayoral zombie-candidate Andrew Cuomo. At the center of one cartoon is Cuomo’s twisted face atop a pyramid of cash, surrounded by references to the corruption and sexual harassment scandals that have plagued his political career. A quote from the self-serving apology he offered before his 2021 resignation from office—“I never knew at the time this was making anyone feel uncomfortable”—sits above the sexual comments Cuomo allegedly made to his female aides, including “Have you ever been with an older man?”  

And like cartoonists of generations past, Valley finds contemporary oligarchs irresistible as targets of his ire. In a cartoon for Jewish Currents titled “Bezos in Bessemer,” Amazon owner Jeff Bezos—who was personally involved in hardball tactics to intimidate union organizers at an Amazon warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, in 2021—looms huge and menacing above a sea of helpless workers and conveyor belts, moving his human pawns around to maximize profits. 

The cartoon is inspired directly after Leon Israel’s work in the Yiddish satirical weekly Der Grosser Kundes on April 7, 1911—two weeks after the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire, which killed 146 Italian and Jewish workers. Valley’s cartoon replicates Leon Israel’s, but with a contemporary twist: instead of fading into smoke, the screaming women in Valley’s version are depicted holding Amazon packages. Bezos is eminently deserving of condemnation through this particular medium—in January 2025, longtime Washington Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned from the paper, which Bezos has owned for more than a decade, after she submitted a draft of a cartoon depicting him as subservient to Trump. 

All of this is tough stuff. The genocide in Gaza, the continued massacres by settlers in the occupied territories, and the duplicity of AIPAC combine throughout Valley’s work in ways that validate his dark and haunting vision. Perhaps unsurprisingly, his work has been subject to vicious attacks by right-wing Jewish supporters of Israel, who have labeled him a “kapo” and a “self-hating Jew,” among other slurs. For these critics, Valley writes in the book’s commentary, “the sole barometer of Jewishness and of attitudes toward Jews is Israel.” 

Paul Conrad’s claim that he and cartoonists like him would never run out of material was undeniably prescient. The jackals in power today are even worse than those of Conrad’s era. Two hundred years after Daumier and others helped to pioneer the genre, the political cartoon remains an artistic weapon of attack, capable of holding truth to power. Valley wields his editorial pen effectively and devastatingly. We need brilliant, perceptive artists like him—and others—if we are to see these jackals for who they truly are.