Cartoonists From The United States

"When is it correct to use the F-word? Not the four-letter one that has become so common it barely raises an eyebrow, the seven-letter political word: fascist. The term arose with the early 20th century European political movement that gave us Hitler and Mussolini, so it weighs heavy with the horrors of World War II and the Holocaust. But, arguably, there are 21st century fascist regimes, even if they do not brand themselves with the term. Hungary’s leader, Viktor Orban, probably qualifies as a fascist. Russian President Vladimir Putin certainly does. Even the supposedly communist regime in China is more fascist than Marxist. Broadly defined, what is a fascist? Here are some key characteristics: A fascist supports a charismatic nationalist leader who seeks total or near total power. A fascist is a member of a party or a movement that supports that leader without question. Fascists believe political opposition is illegitimate and subversive and that perceived enemies of the state -- whether in the media, in popular culture, in academia or in competing political parties -- must be suppressed or, if it is the leader’s wish, prosecuted and tossed into prison. A fascist believes private industry, the courts and elected officials should all be in thrall to the leader. And a fascist has no objection to the leader’s quasi-military secret police committing acts of political violence and rounding up alien groups perceived to be a detriment to the homeland."

"The big, macho men from ICE who are storming around American cities like Visigoths are a bunch of cowards. They arm themselves as if they are battling ISIS terrorists in Iraq while the only threat they face is common American citizens with whistles and protest signs. They break into private homes without warrants, they gas school kids, they tackle women on the street, they smash into the cars of American citizens. And one of them summarily executed a mother of three children because -- well, because he could. They think they are tough, but they are punks hiding behind masks. They are poorly-trained thugs dressed up like real soldiers who think they are living out a video game where they get points for assaulting anyone who gets in their way. They are the farthest thing from the real cops who police communities with restraint, discipline and a knowledge of the law."

"These mercenaries do not serve the country, they serve a regime that excuses their unjustified violence and lies about their lawless actions. President Donald Trump falsely alleges that Renee Good, the mother of three gunned down in Minneapolis by an ICE agent, was a “professional agitator” who showed “disrespect” for law enforcement. His toady press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, who will say any despicable thing to please her boss, accused Good of being “a lunatic.” The Homeland Security boss, Kristi Noem, branded Good a “domestic terrorist.” There is zero evidence of any of the Trump administration’s slander. Renee Good was, indeed, out on the street to monitor the actions of ICE, but, as anyone can see in the video taken seconds before she was murdered, she was smiling at the ICE agents and telling them she was not mad at them. Good was, in fact, doing what she had been ordered to do, moving her vehicle out of the way. Trump and his team are even bigger cowards than the cosplay cops they have sent to terrorize immigrants and punish Democratic cities. It takes leaders with maturity and guts to admit fault and accept accountability. The cruel clowns in the White House will never be brave enough to do that."

"This is what it has come to in America. An aspiring-authoritarian president has assembled his own poorly trained army of aggressive thugs who hide their identities, flout legal procedures and use excessive force on a daily basis. And even when the force they apply proves lethal, the president, the vice president, a cabinet secretary and the rest of Trump’s lackeys and henchmen, defend these marauding goons with brazen lies that challenge citizens to not believe their own eyes. Two-hundred-and-fifty years ago, Americans rebelled against a king who was sending troops into American cities. Those British troops acted with far more restraint than the thugs to whom the Trump administration has given free rein to assault and even murder both citizens and non-citizens. As in 1776, the depredations of a new would-be tyrant must be resisted by all who love liberty. If that strikes you as melodramatic, tell it to the children of Renee Good."

"Traditional conservatives are as anti-fascist as any liberal. Their political vision is derived by libertarian thinkers of past centuries, such as John Locke and Edmund Burke. Their modern philosophy was articulated by erudite commentators like William F. Buckley and George Will. Their political heroes are men like Ronald Reagan and John McCain. Today on the right, there are plenty of folks who call themselves conservatives -- they are all over social media, they fill every time slot of Fox News and they dominate the Republican Party. Yet, these claimants to a long tradition that favors limited government, the rule of law and the advancement of liberty are unquestioning supporters of a president whose actions are those of a lawless, aspiring dictator. These people who claim to be conservatives, yet enthusiastically cheer for a man who violates the core tenets of traditional conservatism every day, should stop pretending they are something they are not and simply accept the better description of what they have become. It is a word that starts with F."

"As I pondered a pronoun change, I began to think of gender less as a scale and more as a landscape. Some people are born in the mountains, while others are born by the sea. Some people are happy to live in the place they were born, while others must make a journey to reach the climate in which they can flourish and grow. Between the ocean and the mountains is a wild forest. That is where I want to make my home."

"I am trying, as [Jimmie] Robinson advised, to take all of this as, if not a compliment, at least a kind of testament to the strength of my work. Being the author of a heavily challenged book is stressful, and it wastes a lot of my time – but it puts me in very good company. I never expected my book to sit on lists beside Beloved, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Hate U Give, Speak, and Of Mice and Men. It still feels vaguely surreal, and I'm sure I haven't processed the ripple effects I will feel for the entire rest of my career. For now, I am strengthening my commitment to continue writing stories centering trans, queer, and nonbinary characters. Certain parts of the country may be fixated on censoring me, but I will not be censoring myself."

"I remember when I first realized I never had to have children. It was like walking out of a narrow alley into a wide open field. I never have to get married. I never have to date anyone. I don’t even have to care about sex. These realizations were like gifts that I gave myself."

"(On whether the level of ire directed at the book was anticipated) I braced myself for a little bit of that. But when the book came out, what it was met with initially was just this absolute wave of love and support. And the pushback didn't come until late 2021. And at that point, I think what mostly surprised me was the timing of it — and then also the level of it, and then following that, the longevity of it."

"I drew as much as I felt like I needed to tell the story that I was trying to tell and get the points across that I was trying to make. And I honestly think the book is a lot less explicit than it could be or would have been if written by a different author. The topic of gender touches on identity and touches on sexuality, and it touches on all of these things. And it's hard to fully explain, I think, how a gender identity can impact every facet of life as an adult without touching at least a little bit on sexuality. And so I wanted to not shy away from that."

"And we start with a major development in the Israel-Hamas war. Israel's Defense Forces putting it plainly, quote, eliminated Yahya Sinwar... Sinwar best known for inflicting though horrors of October 7, 2023, when he orchestrated Hamas's brutal mass murder of roughly 1,200 people in Israel, including 46 Americans, the deadliest day for Jews since the Holocaust. Around 100 of 250 hostages taken by Hamas are still believed to be in Gaza, including seven Americans, four of whom are believed to be alive. Sinwar hid from public view for the last year after the attack. U.S. officials believe he hid in tunnels..."

"As the Israeli government warns of a new phase in its fight against Hamas, brand-new polling just into CNN shows how Americans are feeling about this war. The U.S. public broadly feels Israel's military response to the Hamas terrorist attack is fully justified. But the difference by age is quite stark; 81 percent of Americans over the age of 65 feel the response by the Israeli government is fully justified. But just 27 percent of Americans 18 to 34 years old feel that way. The humanitarian crisis is also top of mind for many Americans; 71 percent of Americans feel a lot of sympathy for the people of Israel; 41 percent feel a lot of sympathy for the Palestinian people."

"I’m sure that you think that a policy debate would be better than a personality debate, but if President Biden had gone onstage and spoke about the size of a pro golfer’s penis, I think you would be on this show right now saying you were shocked and appalled, and you would suggest it was evidence of his cognitive decline"

"I'm Jake Tapper in Washington, where the state of our union is rather terrified that this brutal war between Israel and Hamas is about to get much bigger and much worse, more desperation in the Middle East this morning."

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

"thirty years ago, alt-weeklies were the lifebloods of communities. Now, you can count them on one hand."

"even if the comics are hyperbolic and insane, I have very serious intentions with them, and I do aspire to the trajectory of Jewish literary and intellectual culture. And I know it’s a glib answer, but when people ask me who my readership is, the obvious answer is me and my friends, but the longer answer is ghosts from the past and ghosts from the future. As far as the past, I’m mesmerized by the kinds of writings and cultural output that was being created in Central Europe in the early 20th century, and I like to think that my comics are a reflection of and a debate with that."

"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."

"Basically I love over the top. I love insanity. I think that the political debates I’m satirizing are insane, so I tweak them a little bit to make it a distorted mirror of reality. The specific antecedents are the Mad Magazine comics of the 1950’s which lampooned a lot of the sacred institutions of Americana in a period of mass commercialization and consumption — things like Mickey Mouse, which they made into Mickey Rodent, or Archie, they went after all these popular cultural bulwarks, and they just eviscerated them. While they were making fun of both the comics or television shows or movies themselves, they were also using them as a way to satirize elements of a capitalist society at the time including McCarthy. So the early Mad comics were an intense inspiration from that perspective, but also the perspective of the actual method of the two stalwarts that were Harvey Kurtzman and Will Elder. With Will Elder, in particular, it was the way he drew, it was so beautiful and intricate but also so wild and out of this world in terms of the way he would pack every panel with so many different details and asides and illusions."

"I think one of the things that infuriates my critics is that I refuse to let them define Judaism for me."

"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’re passionate about something, you’re able to combine a hobbyist interest with an actual rigorous exploration."

"Comics, excommunication, and antifa are the trinity of our tools."

"Government is a sterile body and an abstract thing; whereas Jewish issues and Jewish debate gets to the kishkes."

"we have to stop accepting this kind of elevation of Israel as the highest point."

"(Is Israel a particularly prescient example for the rise of right-wing politics across the world?) Yes, especially because of the ethno-nationalist aspect. It’s one of the reasons Israel has made these horrifying alliances with right-wing and sometimes even overtly anti-Semitic movements throughout the world. Including in America, but also in Europe. It was such a shanda when Netanyahu acquiesced to the Hungarian government’s extremist, right-wing, anti-Soros, anti-Semitic campaign — but really it just showed his true colors. Can we start calling Netanyahu an anti-Semite? Are we allowed to do that yet? Or is that going too far?... He certainly prefers Evangelicals to Jews."

"There aren’t a lot of types of views allowed in the Jewish community and there is a large group of Jewish youth who feel they don’t have a voice...It’s support Israel or else, but without open discourse the Jewish community loses. We need to be questioning the accepted truths of the Jewish world"

"They’ve been defining authenticity for so long, but they’re outside the sphere of mainstream political opinion. My fantasy is to flip the script. Why don’t we start admitting the obvious? That we are the authentic Jews. We embody the Jewish values of the past several hundred years of post-enlightenment Jewish history. These neo-cons are the aberration. They should stop speaking for us, but maybe it’s time to stop including them in the community. There’s so much focus in the Jewish world on Klal Yisrael, which basically means peoplehood. Under the guise of Klal Yisrael, we‘ve been conversing endlessly with each other in the spirit of inclusion, all while apartheid was being codified in the West Bank. Over how many years, decades, or centuries are we supposed to be in dialogue with people who not only refuse to acknowledge our authenticity but who are all-in in a project of ethnic-cleansing?"

"in general brainwashing begets brainwashing. In terms of liberal Jews who check their progressive values at the door when it comes to Israel, it’s fear and guilt: If we object to Israel’s policies, then we must hate ourselves, and we don’t want to be considered self-hating. For those with an emotional connection to Israel, they might do a cost-benefit analysis. They say, if it‘s my people or the Palestinian people, then someone’s gonna have to lose out, and it’s gonna be them. That’s even further then a lot of people ever get with this. For a lot of people it’s just an emotional level based on educational experiences they’ve had since they were children. When some people start admitting that this is not the ideal they’ve been taught, they rationalize it by saying, the Palestinians are to blame."

"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."

"Ben Shapiro at Seder is a reclamation of Jewish religion, culture, and narrative after years of Shapiro’s hateful invective directed towards American Jews. … My art exposed the absurdity of an Alt-Right figurehead such as Shapiro, who has built a career attacking the vulnerable, laying exclusive claim to Jewish tradition, values, and ethics. … It's time we started calling the contempt shown by the Jewish right towards the American Jewish majority, its tacit and active alliances with white supremacists, and its repeated calls for our very erasure as Jews, what it is: anti-Semitism. And we should not tolerate it."

"Satirizing the powerless is not good satire"

"(What would it mean to have a leftist Jewish community that doesn’t always have to be so reactive — one that’s not always on the defense against conservative Jewish gatekeepers?) It would be as diverse as the Jewish community is today, with all the different strands, fluid identities, and multicultural expressions. Some of it would be nostalgic, reinventing nostalgia, some would explore inter-generational tensions, some would be based on new Jewish experiences and encounters."

"What’s happening in Israel and what we’ve been ignoring and normalizing for the past ten years has now suddenly hit our own shores."

"It’s outrageous that they claim the mantle of Judaism, while in my view they trespass some of the most basic post-enlightenment Jewish values. I come at it from a fierce Jewish-pugilistic perspective."

"(On the question of authenticity there is also a leftist Jewish trend to try and go back to a time before assimilation. For example learning Yiddish and reconnecting to a culture that existed before the holocaust. Is this trend trying to uphold a romantic idealized version of Judaism that cannot exist anymore?) I don’t think learning Yiddish and whatever else they’re doing is pre-assimilation. Jews were speaking Yiddish when they were assimilated. The problem today is that the main Yiddish speakers are Hasidic, but we forget that in New York and Warsaw before the war there were tons of Yiddish speakers who were assimilated. It was more the language of cultural autonomy. The larger debate is something I grapple with too, and it goes back to your question about living off the fumes of a dead culture. But for most cultures, in order to create something new you need to be well steeped in the roots and branches of what came before. So I don’t think it’s simply nostalgia. I think they‘re learning Yiddish as a galvanizing point in order to bound forward with something new, whatever that might be."

"I am proudly Jewish and it flies in the face of their whole theory of assimilation and that lefty Jews just don’t know what Judaism is."

"(Diaspora Boy reminded me of the perception that Israel is the culmination of Jewish history. Does this belief need to change?) This belief needs to change in every way. Physically, in terms of male toxicity, which is inherent in this shit. Emotionally and spiritually, maybe we should stop saying “aliyah,” which means “going up” and “ascending,” for moving to Israel. No, I don’t think so. Israel should be considered one of the Diaspora communities in the world. That’s what I consider Israel to be. We’re in a constant state of Diaspora. Israel did not end anything, and it is certainly not higher than any other Diaspora community."

"we must disabuse ourselves of the notion that an alliance with Israel absolves you of anti-Semitism."

"The term Kapo was used inaccurately for decades against liberal Jews. Now we have conservative Jews in bed with Nazis, so if we ever had a time where the term Kapo can be used legitimately, it is now. Maybe we need to use that term a bit more."

"I found MAD comics from the 1950s very informative and influential, and also obviously the independent comics from the ’60s and ’70s, which emerged partly because MAD comics had to be suppressed, as a result of Congressional hearings and the self-censorship of the comics code in 1954. That sort of led, indirectly, to the independent comics explosion in the ’60s, which were almost all influenced in some way by the MAD comics. But also, I see MAD comics as one of the pinnacles of diaspora Jewish culture — not just because they were throwing in Yiddish words everywhere, but because they were, in many ways, anti-establishment at a time when Jews had not yet been accepted by the mainstream in terms of culture and politics. So MAD is, a lot of the time, mocking consumerism and red-baiting and conformity in 1950s America, and it was largely the product of these outsider Jewish kids in New York, who were the children of immigrants."

"This whole “both sides” needs of journalists, it’s so outside the parameters, or even the metaphysics, of satire. I’m not here to present both sides. I’m here to make an argument. It also gets to the whole idea of punching the downtrodden, you know? It’s like, “Let’s try to understand why the person in power is supporting policies that are disenfranchising entire communities. Let’s try and see their point of view — for our satire.” No, actually, we don’t need to do that for our satire."

"It really is absurd. It’s just amazing to me that the vast majority of American Jews are progressively inclined, and our spokespeople and our arbiters of authenticity are on the right side of the spectrum. They’re not elected — they’re just self-proclaimed leaders. It’s like that quote from Abe Foxman in the comic “It Happened on Halloween,” saying, “I don’t represent. I lead.” That’s damn true, because none of these people represent us."

"the Gaza War in 2014...I know a lot of people became activists during that period. That’s actually when IfNotNow emerged."

"I am inspired by grotesque art. I like it."

"thinking that they’re the authentic ones, because implicit in that is that we are somehow deficient. And honestly, if there’s no other point to Diaspora Boy, it’s to say we are not deficient. We are authentic. Honestly, it’s crazy that that should be a radical thought. That should be self-evident. But it needs to be said."

"anxiety and depression can also change how you see what people are doing and what they’re saying and what [they’re] actually meaning."

"when someone’s like, “Design a black character,” well, what does that mean? That could mean literally anything."

"you don’t want your stories to all be people who just have their shit together all the time. They need to be flawed because humanity is flawed. Everyone’s got problems, y’know? And I’m just really happy that we’re able to get that across sensitively to people. ’Cause we also didn’t want it to go too far to the other end where it’s like, oh, ’cause she has a mental illness she’s crazy. That’s not what we wanted to do."

"I try to put as much of their personality into the kind of clothes that they wear and how they wear their hair or their make-up and so on and so forth"