Eli Valley Quotes

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

(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.

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.

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.

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