Letters / On “Kamala’s Convention”

It seems that you published Eli Valley’s disgusting attack on Kamala Harris because the magazine disagrees with her policy position on Israel and the Gaza Strip. This kind of absolutism in politics never wins elections. Jewish Currents should take a lesson from Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is mature enough to understand the need for flexibility in order to serve greater objectives. Or does the magazine believe that things have to be made worse before they can get better and therefore wouldn’t mind a Trump victory?

I’m disgusted by Eli Valley’s cartoon of Kamala Harris. I understand that his style is meant to mimic the antisemitic illustrations published in places like Der Stürmer in the the 1930s, but the effect when applied to a Black woman is undeniably racist. In the future, Valley should keep these drawings in his mental basement.

Kamala Harris serves in a presidency currently breaking US and international law to commit crimes against humanity. My art appeared the day after Harris’s speech at the Democratic National Convention, in which she fervently vowed to continue supplying Israel with the arms it uses to target and massacre civilians. During the convention, despite the pleas of prominent Israeli hostage family members, the Harris team refused to allow an elected Democratic official who was Palestinian to take the stage to endorse the Vice President. In her speech and in her actions, Harris has made clear where she stands on the question of Palestinian humanity.

Every few hours, the revelry at the convention was punctuated online by horrific images of children in Gaza whose heads had been blown off by US weapons fast-tracked to Benjamin Netanyahu by the Biden/Harris administration. We’ve seen such images day after day, month after month—of children slaughtered and mutilated by weapons the administration has supplied to Israel in obscene violation of the Leahy Law, which prohibits providing weapons to countries engaged in human rights abuses. For eleven months, the Biden/Harris administration could have abided by this law to stop weapons shipments, thereby forcing Israel’s far-right, authoritarian government to accept a ceasefire deal for the return of hostages. Instead, the administration has chosen to collaborate with Netanyahu in abandoning the hostages and exploiting their agony for the purpose of state-sponsored terrorism. No words about how Trump would be worse absolves this administration of its complicity with Israel’s “war cabinet” in the premeditated murder of tens of thousands of civilians. If anything, the specter of Trump should rally the Harris team to stop alienating core constituencies, who are appalled at the Biden/Harris/Netanyahu obliteration of Gaza. Either way, to tell us to shut up about it is to demand that we abet genocide.

Like all my work, my drawing of Kamala Harris is fiercely Jewish art in the tradition of Yiddish artists like Leon Israel and Saul Raskin, and MAD artists like Will Elder and Bernie Krigstein. To compare a Jewish satire of a person committing genocide to Nazi vilification of Jews is despicable. The most charitable reading is that this is yet another indictment of American Jewish literacy, or at the very least an attempt to evade our collective complicity in the atrocities. Less charitably: Equating Jewish anti-fascism with Nazi antisemitism is far more grotesque than anything conceivably depicted in art.