Eli Valley Quotes (1970-)

“It’s actively seeking to sacrifice the left in the service of clicks. To me, The Forward was once the pinnacle of the politically active Jewish left in America. It was an American institution; it no longer has that institutional or cultural imprimatur.”

“you have to remember that Trump has no shame. There’s nothing that we can say to him, or nothing that he can say, that will make him blush. However, he’s only in power because of all these seemingly normal people supporting him. If we can make all of them radioactive, beyond radioactive, then we can take some steps towards hopefully neutralizing this larger threat.”

“I call Trump Netanyahu with smaller hands in the introduction. Netanyahu shares a lot in common with Trump. Including demagoguery, bigotry, attacks on the press, attacks on institutions of democracy, attacks on human rights organizations. I don’t know if Trump has gone that far yet, but he will. It’s a similar method of autocrats. It was inconceivable to me for the past ten years that anyone in a Jewish communal organization or institution would allow Netanyahu into its doors, because he’s the kind of thing that we have feared. And yet, he’s the head of the Jewish state.”

“He’s an Orthodox Jew who pretends to embody authenticity while engaging in some of the most despicable behavior, all while using his familial history to deflect charges of collusion with Nazis.”

“it’s horrifying that people who helped pave the way toward where we are are still in leadership positions. So the reckoning I see is this fissure. I think of Gershom Scholem’s On Jews and Judaism in Crisis. The subtitle of my book — Comics on Crisis in America and Israel — is a nod to his reference to crisis.”

“If you just look at the majority of American Jews, they are more like Bernie Sanders than Joe Lieberman, in terms of secular versus Orthodox, or non-nationalistic versus nationalistic, or moral versus corrupt. There are all these articles that keep coming, saying that Bernie Sanders isn’t talking about his Judaism enough, or contrasting him with Joe Lieberman as the American Jewish icon, because — because why? Because Lieberman wears a yarmulke? Because he lends his name to extremist movements, like Christians United for Israel? To me that’s not Judaism, and for the press and even the Jewish community to implicitly assume that these extremes are our norms — that is what is self-loathing, that is when we become self-hating.”

“If you just look at the majority of American Jews, they are more like Bernie Sanders than Joe Lieberman, in terms of secular versus Orthodox, or non-nationalistic versus nationalistic, or moral versus corrupt. There are all these articles that keep coming, saying that Bernie Sanders isn’t talking about his Judaism enough, or contrasting him with Joe Lieberman as the American Jewish icon, because — because why? Because Lieberman wears a yarmulke? Because he lends his name to extremist movements, like Christians United for Israel? To me that’s not Judaism, and for the press and even the Jewish community to implicitly assume that these extremes are our norms — that is what is self-loathing, that is when we become self-hating.”

“Kafka is enormously important. Years ago I wrote a Jewish travel guide to Prague and other cities in the region. At the time, I was really into Kafka. It comes out a little in my work now, probably more subconsciously than it did then. Then I was reading all of his Letters to Felice, I was nuts, literally, when I was living in Prague. It’s a cliché, I know. But to this day, everything we say about Kafka’s a cliché, since his writings are seen, with 20/20 hindsight, as a horrifying prediction of what was to come, both with the Holocaust and Soviet tyranny, living in a police state. But in terms of influence, there’s the horror and the grotesquery, the allegory and hyperbole, the elevation of pulpy narrative, the Jewish obsessions, the generational tensions, but also the humor. I mean, Kafka’s stories were also meant to be funny, which is something that is not often appreciated today. Philip Roth called him a “sit-down comic”...Culturally, working in this period of enormous transformation for Jews and in Europe more broadly, I found Kafka a sort of guide to turning history and memory into a narrative, into art that becomes even more compelling than the tradition it replaces. And there are specific things, like authenticity. Kafka was obsessed with Galician Jewish refugees in Prague at the beginning of World War I. He considered them to be the embodiment of authenticity. And in his diaries, he writes about them. He talks about how if he could be anybody in the world, he’d just want to be this little Jewish boy he remembered seeing, seemingly free of worry. He idealized them as true Jews, essentially. And that definitely stuck with me, because I’ve done similar things. I’m not proud of that, but we’re always trying to deprogram ourselves from what we have learned as authenticity when we were young.”

“Eli Valley’s cartoons are outrageous and absurd. That’s because we’re living at an outrageous and absurd moment in American Jewish life.”