In the summer of 1896, writing from a prison cell one year into his sentence for gross indecency, Oscar Wilde pleaded with the British Home Secretary for a commutation. His “sexual madness,” Wilde wrote, pertained to “diseases to be cured by a physician, rather than crimes to be punished by a judge.” Noting “the intimate connection between madness and the literary and artistic temperament,” Wilde cited a cultural critic whose opus appeared in English on the eve of Wilde’s trial and ignited a firestorm in the media and chat­tering classes over its diagnosis of Wilde as one who “admires immorality, sin and crime.” The critic was Max Nordau, and his opus was Degeneration.

It’s hard to overestimate the impact of Nordau’s Degeneration when it burst into the fin de siecle, first in German in two volumes published in 1892 and 1893, and then in English three years later. A massive international best­seller that raged against the cultural avant-garde through the lens of science and rational progress, Degeneration mourned a society in its final throes: enervated by urbanism and pro­ducing art at once amoral, deviant, even criminally insane. Nordau lovingly dedicated his tome to Italian physician Cesare Lombroso, the founder of criminal anthropology who engaged in routine turn-of-the-century science: measuring felons’ skulls and prostitutes’ feet to determine the atavistic “stigmata of degeneration” common to the “criminal type.” Like in a Universal horror picture, Lombroso even preserved his own head in a jar in Turin among 400 skulls of the crim­inally insane he’d studied. Gothic horror is not incidental. Such was their fame and notoriety that Bram Stoker name­dropped both figures in Dracula, published on the heels of Degeneration: “The Count is a criminal and of criminal type. Nordau and Lombroso would so classify him, and qua crimi­nal he is of imperfectly formed mind.”

A physician as well as a critic, Nordau advanced Lombroso’s designation of “born criminals” to what Nordau termed “originators of the new aesthetic tendencies.” Like Lombroso, Nordau couldn’t help but noting, for example, the ear of degenerates, “which is conspicuous for its enormous size, or protrudes from the head, like a handle.” But Nordau gave the phrenology berth to evolve: “Degenerates are not always criminals, prostitutes, anarchists, and pronounced lu­natics,” he offered. “They are often authors and artists.” Parts of his diatribe resonate today, as when he identified technol­ogy, pollution, and information overload— “the vertigo and whirl of our frenzied life”—that lead to “mental weakness and despondency” and “a disinclination to action of any kind.” But instead of marveling at the fertile creative soil out of which modernism would bloom, Nordau condemned modern cul­ture as a sickness that must be quarantined lest it poison a credulous generation. In feverish detail, he picked apart what he considered the empty nervous performance of degenerate artists, for whom, he insisted, “There exists no law, no de­cency, no modesty,” just “moral insanity and emotionalism.”

It was Wilde’s luck to be tried in this climate, with the press fluttering about Nordau as the era’s celebrity cultural critic. Two days after Wilde’s conviction in 1895, London’s influential Westminster Gazette applauded the trial’s result: “In view of recent events, Nordau’s summing-up of his case against Oscar Wilde as the typical English ‘decadent’ comes with all the force of a fulfilled prophecy: ‘The degenerate who, in consequence of their organic aberrations, make the repul­sive and ugly, vice and crime, the subject matter of plastic and literary works of art, naturally have recourse to the theory that art has nothing in common with morality, truth, and beauty . . . ’”

Nordau’s cultural criticism was riddled with pseudo­science and quackery—he argued, for instance, that “bread made with bad corn” would cause, over generations, degen­eration and eventually “dwarfishness”—but it made such an international splash that Emile Zola scheduled medical checkups to disprove his own diagnosis. In addition to Wilde and Zola, Nordau’s who’s-who of the censured included Ibsen, Tolstoy, Verlaine (“a repulsive degenerate subject with asymmetric skull and Mongolian face”), Whitman, Wagner, Nietzsche, and practically all non-representative visual art­ists, including Impressionists, who he claimed had trembling eyeballs and deformed retinas.

And then Nordau co-founded Zionism.

Theodor Herzl, Nordau’s fellow Pest-born Jew, took center stage in the Zionist movement, drafting dreamlands and soliciting sultans. But toward the end of 1895, Herzl visited Nordau for psychiatric treatment, after friends con­cluded he’d gone mad. Instead of a cure, the infection spread; after huddling for three days over a draft of Herzl’s The Jewish State, Nordau exclaimed, “If you are insane, we are insane together. Count on me!” Nordau’s official biography, written by his wife and daughter, captures the moment: “Thus the Jewish State was born. The great message concerning the resurrection of the people was ready to go forth to all Israel.” “Resurrection” is hyperbole; “regeneration” is not. Nordau’s lasting contribution to the Zionist movement was in concocting “Muscle Judaism” as the antidote to supposed diaspora degeneration. Channeling both the internalized antisemitism endemic to Zionism and the calisthenics craze captivating early 20th-century European nationalists, Nordau imagined a revivified Maccabean Jew in a reclaimed homeland, head upright, biceps flexed and abdomen taut, to supplant what he saw as the diseased garbage soul of the diaspora. This vision, suffused in visceral contempt for the diaspora Jewish mind, soul, and even physicality, continues to inform Zionist thought and expression.

By Nordau’s death in 1923, his obituary in The New York Times all but ignored Degeneration, giving it mere passing mention in a list of “notable works” before delving at length into Nordau’s Zionism. But aside from this altered legacy, it was remarkable how seamlessly Nordau transitioned from one project to the next. The same ferocity he once flung at degenerate art was funneled into fulminations against the diaspora. Even the cadences of his philippics would overlap. In 1897, at the First Zionist Congress, Nordau railed against the diaspora Jew he sought to replace: “The emancipated Jew is insecure in his relations with his fellow man, timid with strangers, and suspicious even of the secret feelings of his friends . . . He becomes a cripple within, and a counter­feit person externally, so that like everything unreal, he is ridiculous and hateful to all men of higher standards.” The tirade was eerily similar to passages just half a decade earlier in Degeneration: “The degenerate ego-maniac is too feeble of will to control his impulsions, and cannot determine his actions and thoughts by a regard to the welfare of society, be­cause society is not at all represented in his consciousness. He is a solitary, and is insensible to the moral law framed for life in society . . . [He is] a weak creature, powerless to govern himself.” Although Nordau distinguished Jews from degen­erates in the ability of the former to adapt, he ended his 1897 address with a clear merger of the two schools of condescen­sion: “It is a great sin to let a race to whom even their worst enemies do not deny ability, degenerate in intellectual and physical distress.” With neither a state of their own nor full emancipation in the countries they resided in, Nordau con­tinued, Jews would degenerate into parasites and pests, lik­ening them to “disease-causing pathogens.”

Degeneration was forgotten; modern art conquered the world. But the ideas lingered. The year of Nordau’s death, a failed painter, in prison for a putsch, plucked the concept from obscurity. Condemning Cubism and Dadaism as “morbid excesses produced by lunatics or degenerates,” Adolf Hitler raged in Mein Kampf against art as a sign of the unfit, warn­ing that if society were to normalize such art, “one of the most severe changes of mankind would have begun, the regression of the human brain.” True to the tenets of Degeneration, Hitler connected artistic obscenity to mental degeneration, laying down laws modeled on aesthetics and eugenics that would become inseparable from the National Socialist vision. Five years later, German architect Paul Schultze-Naumburg published the highly influential Art and Race, which explic­itly linked degenerate art to a supposedly mentally ill ob­session with disfigurement by juxtaposing modern art with photographs of diseased and deformed bodies. By 1933, Nazis would put Hitler’s art critique into action when they confiscated or destroyed thousands of works by 1,400 artists deemed degenerate, putting the artists out of work, locking them in prison, forcing them into exile, or driving them to suicide. In addition to Expressionists, Surrealists, Dadaists, and Cubists, those targeted for censure included artists cre­ating explicitly political grotesqueries grappling with the continental crisis. These included masters like George Grosz, described in an SS document as “one of the most evil rep­resentatives of degenerate art,” whose drawings ferociously skewered the self-satisfied greed and brutality of military officers, bureaucrats, and industrialists while highlighting Berlin’s self-destructive interwar spiral. Or Otto Dix, whose World War I-haunted etchings of bullet-punctured faces and grinning skulls teeming with worms revealed the harrowing substratum of a Germany teetering on the brink of fascism, populated in Dix’s other portraits by the discolored, plasti­cine figures of the country’s elite and not-so-elite.

In 1937, Max Nordau’s legacy was sealed in the most pop­ular presentation of modern art in history. The Exhibition of Degenerate Art, opened in Munich, showcased the pas­sionate and kinetic art of the early 20th century, slapped together to frame masterpieces of Modernism as stigmata of sickness. “All around us you see the monstrous offspring of in­sanity, impudence, ineptitude, and sheer degeneracy!” Alfred Ziegler, President of the Reich Chamber of Fine Arts, railed at the launch, timed as a foil to the opening, the previous day, of the nearby Great German Art Exhibition—kitschy odes to masculinity and motherly milk as cringe-inducing as their social media heirs touting Roman statues today. Amid the Degenerate Exhibition’s paintings and sculptures, crowded chaotically in nine narrow, dimly lit rooms, the walls were covered with lengthy harangues, absurdly decontextualized statements by artists and critics, and slogans like “Madness Becomes Method,” “Nature As Seen By Sick Minds,” and “The Jewish longing for the wilderness reveals itself—in Germany the Negro becomes the racial ideal of degenerate art.” Here the boundaries of Nordau’s degeneration were expanded to include denigration of Germany’s military, political, and re­ligious elite. Inflationary price tags were included to indict the “Jewish” art trade; drawings from insane asylums were thrown in to expose the artists’ alleged lunacy. The exhibi­tion catalogue—more of a hate guide to the exhibits, which included around 650 works by Dix, Grosz, Max Beckmann, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, and 107 other artists—quoted from Hitler’s address at the opening of the Great German Art Exhibition: “But what do you manufacture? Deformed crip­ples and cretins, women who inspire only disgust, men who are more like wild beasts, children who, if they were alive, would be regarded as God’s curse!” In Munich alone, the exhibition drew over two million visitors, encompassing five times as many visitors than attended the Great German Art exhibition. After traveling to 13 German and Austrian cities, the most valuable works were sold abroad (or, in the case of choice masterpieces, pulled out to decorate Hermann Göring’s residence). Thousands of other confiscated works deemed “the dregs of degenerate art” were burned in 1939 in the courtyard of the central Berlin fire department.

Although most of the artists were not Jewish, the exhi­bition was framed as a conspiracy of Bolsheviks and Jews to contaminate the German people’s aesthetic and moral fit­ness. In Hitler’s speech at the Great German Art Exhibition, quoted at length in the catalogue, he mirrored Nordau’s retinal conjecture, arguing that if congenital defects caused degenerates’ twisted vision, the state should “consider pre­ventive measures that would spare later generations from inheriting such dreadful visual defects.” This was the first announcement in a cultural context of what would become the Nazi programs of sterilization and euthanasia.

In fairness, Nordau’s Degeneration was not quite as ra­cially obsessed as Hitler’s version, their targets of ar­tistic reprobation did not fully overlap, and Nordau did not single out Jews for censure—in fact, he cited antisemitism as a symptom of degeneration. Still, Nordau established a pseudoscience focused on criminally deviant, medically unfit artists who were parasites on society that must be ostracized, their works banned, and if necessary, in a harrowing pas­sage toward the end of Degeneration, eliminated. “Whoever looks upon civilization as a good . . . must mercilessly crush under his thumb the anti-social vermin,” he wrote, using the German term for vermin that Franz Kafka would later use in the first line of Metamorphosis. “There is no place among us for the lusting beast of prey,” Nordau continued, “and if you dare return to us, we will pitilessly beat you to death with clubs.” In the Exhibition of Degenerate Art, the walls referenced another passage from Hitler’s speech at the Great German Art Exhibition: “We will be leading a relentless war of cleansing . . . a relentless war of destruction against the last elements of our cultural decomposition!”

In the war on the arts, the echoes of Nordau in Nazism are startling. But the full arc of the man immortalized on countless streets and stamps in Israel, whose body lay in state for thousands of visitors when it was brought to Tel Aviv, has been obscured. Understanding Nordau’s vision of aberrant art, his views of human atavism, and his attitudes toward diaspora Jews—and understanding the fascist cam­paign against art, Jews, and all deemed impure—can help shed light on our ongoing crisis as we follow in the footsteps of past ethnonationalist horrors. It can also help crystallize the inspiration behind much of the art in this book. The cur­rent global war against supposed degeneracy inspired—or, to be clear, incited—many of the portraits that follow. This art, in turn, has been attacked in language that overlaps with that used by the progenitors of “degeneration,” whether con­cerning morality, mental illness, or non-cherubic depictions of society’s elite and the atrocities they inflict. Today’s polem­icists decrying vulgarity operate in the same universe as their forebears, and it’s worth exploring why.

But it would be simplistic to frame my art entirely as a reaction to the mind-body horror of a 19th-century phrenologist as he migrated from pseudoscience into Zionism. It would also be misleading to pretend my inspi­ration comes solely from Weimar-era grotesqueries, the culture from which they emerged, and the antagonisms they engendered. My drawings also have roots in, and operate in dialogue with, early 20th-century Yiddish cartoons as well as the American comic books condemned in 1955 by the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency for offering “short courses in murder, mayhem, robbery, rape, cannibal­ism, carnage, necrophilia, sex, sadism, masochism, and vir­tually every other form of crime, degeneracy, bestiality, and horror.”

The portraits in this book are Jewish art buoyed by memory in a sea of amnesia. As the United States retreads its well-worn tracks of bloodthirsty demagoguery, massacres of minorities, cult-baked conspiracies, family separation, and race war in pursuit of a fabled utopian past—tracks laid down from the earliest moments of European conquest, and reminiscent of the most brutal trails of Jewish history—these drawings are meant to bludgeon. This is Jewish comic grotesque, a form of prayer and a form of witness, every line haunted by past horror. Memory becomes a mirror—a reflection of the abyss ethnonationalism has always opened. It’s not a vanity mirror. Few have thought we are on the verge of a Holocaust or that Jews sit anywhere near the top of an imminent target list. But progressive American Jews saw what has been happen­ing, we felt it in our bones, and we knew that if our histori­cal experience is used only as blinders when similar horrors start befalling other communities, then our history is worth­less. For me, that has meant drawing deeper from the wells not only of Jewish history but of Jewish trauma. For gener­ations, Holocaust memory and its associated imagery were sacrosanct: walled off from contemporary experience lest the memory be exploited and defiled. But those standards shattered once the ruling political party in the United States began guzzling white-supremacist ethnic-cleansing ideology, seeding conspiracies, summoning militias, and spitballing with Nazis to craft national policy. Memory has come alive, history is both metaphor and alarm, and past trauma has the power to illuminate and help mobilize against our current catastrophe.

But of all my drawings, it was those that drew upon Jewish memory that riled my right-wing Zionist haters more than any other. Ever since my first satire of Zionist mythology, I’d been called a Nazi by Zionists who had never encountered a single Yiddish cartoon, who were willfully ignorant of decades of Jewish American lampoonery in the pages of MAD, and whose entire frame of reference for black-and-white linework was curiously confined to the pages of Der Sturmer. Now I was called a Nazi for condemning Nazism. The Jewish right was furious at my claim on Jewish memory and motifs, and insistent that I had no right to draw from our history. Even more, they found it outrageous that a Jew out­side the circles upheld for generations as the sole bastions of Jewish authenticity—Orthodox and Zionist—would criticize those same circles for their sickeningly disproportionate sup­port of antisemitic tyranny in America. It’s become a paradox that sectors of the right have come to use “Nazi” in place of “de­generate” as a reflexive epithet against the left. And in a grue­some historical irony, the ideological heirs of Max Nordau who praise authoritarians while condemning my drawings for their grotesquerie, vulgarity, and Jewish leftism—the very qualities pilloried in Munich’s Exhibition of Degenerate Art—are following the footsteps of the most abominably an­tisemitic movement in history. That they profess to do so out of dire concern for Jewish welfare is obscene.

Almost in unison, most American Jewish organizations have reacted to the country’s accelerating plunge with either tacit acquiescence, equivocation, or enthusiastic participation. Weeks after the most horrific mass murder of Jews in American history, directly incited by mainstream Republican “Great Replacement” demagoguery, a clue to the betrayal arrived in a Forward headline: “After Pittsburgh, Jewish Groups’ First Fight Is Against BDS—Not White Nationalism.” Jewish organizations would exploit the imminent threat of GOP-instigated massacres in order to criminalize criticism of Israel. This abandonment of American Jewry was flagrant, astonishing and, in retrospect, inevitable to anybody who had observed communal priorities as Israel lurched further toward tyranny. It had its own internal logic, however brutal: American Jewish leaders had built an entire communal culture around Max Nordau’s Zionism, so in their minds our very existence outside Israel, the only conceivable future for the Jewish people, is disposable. And so a nightmare has become real: Organizations built to support American Jews were so accustomed to equating antisemitism with criticism of lsrael that they couldn’t, or wouldn’t, identify the real deal when it swept into the American government. And they’d spent so many years fueling the most dangerous flames of fascism in Israel—and ostracizing members of their own community who tried to douse those flames—that they were paralyzed when the inferno threatened to consume their own homes. But even this characterization gives too much credit to organizations that made the ultimate bargain of sacrificing the security of their constituents in order to shore up apartheid.

It would be difficult to capture the volumes of armchair anal­ysis directed at anti-fascist Jews, a phenomenon paralleled by unhinged efforts to portray the liberal Holocaust survivor George Soros as a criminal collaborator in the Nazi genocide. Much like in Degeneration, criminality is often the focus. After he co-founded Zionism, at the Fifth Zionist Congress of 1901, Max Nordau called for “a careful statistical inves­tigation of the Jewish people” in order to better agitate for statehood. In his litany of qualities to investigate, Nordau proclaimed, “How many criminals, mentally ill, deaf-mutes, cripples, blind, and epileptics do the Jewish people have? Do they have a particular criminality, and what sort is it?” By now, that “particular criminality” has been diagnosed as “anti-­Zionism.” In 2022, the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) codi­fied the notion when it publicly denounced anti-Zionist Jews as antisemites who pose a threat equivalent to Nazi terrorists. One year earlier, former Soviet refusenik Natan Sharansky coined the term “un-Jews” for Jews who oppose ethno­nationalism. Comparing anti-Zionist Jews with the most consequential villains in Jewish history, he helpfully traced their lineage to antiquity, citing Tiberius Julius Alexander as the ur-un-Jew for “his greatest crime against his people” in facilitating the Roman destruction of Jerusalem.

This is consistent with the new degeneracy: Zionist an­tisemites are virtuous, anti-Zionist Jews are villains. In a 2022 survey, American Jews ranked Israel 14th down their list of priorities, far below climate change, voting rights, jobs, the economy, and healthcare. Instead of taking the opportunity for introspection, Zionists have cited the poll as further proof that American Jews hate themselves. Jewish values are degraded and dismissed; in their place, the sole barometer of Jewishness and of attitudes toward Jews is Israel.

Meanwhile, the Jewish right—a mi­nority of Jews that has claimed the exclusive mantle of Jewish authenticity for generations—joyously celebrates Christian nationalists. Netanyahu’s long-serving ambassador to the United States, Miami-born Ron Dermer, gave away the game in his first public remarks after leaving the post in 2021: “The back­bone of lsrael’s support in the United States is the evangelical Christians,” he argued. Dermer, who sprinted to Pittsburgh to run cover for a movement of Nazi terrorism after the worst massacre of Jews in American history, ob­served that evangelicals far outnumber Jews and are much more likely to be “passionate and unequivocal” supporters of Israel. “So if you look just at numbers,” the emissary of the Jewish state posited, “you should be spending a lot more time doing outreach to evangelical Christians than you would do to Jews.” It’s a fine deal for Christian nationalists, for whom there are two types of Jews: Those who view Israel as the sole place they should exist, and degenerates.

These individuals and organizations are not just afraid of dissent, they’re afraid of losing their exclusive claim on Jewish narrative and the authority to classify opposition to despotism itself as degenerate. It’s boundlessly cynical, but one could argue that American Jewish leadership calculated what the future holds for the ideology dominating Jewish institutional life, and which alliances and strategies will best ensure its de­sired outcome. One path leads to full suffrage and equality in Israel/Palestine, the other to permanent apartheid and even genocide. Right-wing Jewish communal leadership made its choice, and it has spent years building alliances and strate­gies, even with the most loathsome movements in the coun­try and abroad, to help bring it to fruition. Everything that stands in the way of its preferred outcome—Palestinians first but also Jews with unacceptable views and values—must be eliminated.

Any pretense that American Jews were perceived as any­thing other than surrogates for an ethnonationalist client state vanished on October 7th, 2023. After Hamas brutally attacked Israel, inflicting unprecedented civilian casualties and abducting more than 240 hostages, and Israel retaliated by commencing months of indiscriminate bombing, revenge killings of civilians, and the engineering of famine in Gaza, political and communal leaders codified the parameters of American Jewish existence. Jews who opposed Israel’s daily crimes against humanity, judged by the International Court of Justice as a plausible case of genocide, were ex­cised from communal life. Weeks after October 7th, when the North America President of the Jewish Agency for Israel demanded the excommunication of Jews who opposed the war, not a single leader of a major American Jewish organi­zation objected. Meanwhile, US elites coalesced around the notion of American Jews as Israelis on temporary visas. Led by a Christian nationalist speaker of the House, Congress passed a resolution that claimed to “support the Jewish com­munity” by stipulating that anti-Zionism was antisemitism. This linked all Jews to a state committing war crimes, codi­fied ethnonationalism as the single acceptable expression of Judaism, and opened the door to classifying non-nationalist Jewish identification as terrorism. President Joe Biden, who won his office as the antidote to MAGA authoritarianism, rushed to embrace Benjamin Netanyahu—a staunch MAGA­-allied authoritarian who had spent years working to under­mine Biden. Biden justified Israel’s genocidal onslaught by repeatedly declaring that the safety of American Jews was conditional: “Were there no Israel, there’s not a Jew in the world who will be safe.” The media leapt to consolidate this narrative. In April 2024, after Israel had killed tens of thou­sands of civilians in Gaza, The Atlantic updated its frightful cover story from nine years earlier (“Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe?”) by ominously predicting, “The Golden Age of American Jews Is Ending.”

Soon the forced conscription of American Jews into in­struments for genocide in the Middle East and state sup­pression at home entered the realm of hallucination. Amid a tsunami of McCarthyite firings in industries ranging from entertainment and media to tech and health care, mem­bers of Congress introduced bills that would, among other measures, revoke tax-exempt status from philanthropies supporting Palestine; install pro-Israel monitors at colleges that receive federal funding; defund colleges where stu­dents or faculty criticize Israel; criminalize the teaching of non-Zionist Jewish history; suppress social media that hosts opinions critical of Israel; and dramatically increase the carceral penalties for peaceful protest. This was a taste of the tyranny we’d been warned was looming in a second Trump term, now served up on a bipartisan platter. Meanwhile, Christian Zionist, insurrectionist, and “Great Replacement” theory-spewing members of Congress subjected university presidents to show trials over alleged antisemitism on col­lege campuses. These public interrogations were designed to reinforce the fantasy, propelled by right-wing donors and an obedient press, that Jewish students were cowering in fear of pro-Palestinian activism and curricula acknowledging the 1948 Palestinian expulsion known as the Nakba. In one exchange, a theocratic Christian congressman misquoted Genesis to grill the president of Columbia University as to whether she wished her institution to be “cursed by God” for not “blessing” Israel. (“Definitely not,” the president whimpered.)

Centuries ago, in an architectural flourish found in many Ashkenazi synagogues, the amud, where the cantor stands, was recessed a couple of inches beneath the floor. It was meant as a physical manifestation of Psalm 130:1, “From out of the depths I call to you.” The cantor, known as a “yored” for “one who descends,” stepped down to lift the spirit, in a ges­ture of humility and also of anguish in the pursuit of prayer. Without being too dramatic, the metaphor has stuck with me as an apt description of the comics-making process in the midst of calamity. The works in this book were drawn from the depths at a time of growing horror.

Reviewing these drawings chronologically, the earlier works tended toward arch, multipanel absurdity. Over time they condensed into single-panel scabs of rage: postcards from dystopia. The circus-clown buffoonery and self-parodic villainy of the Trump era lent itself to broad satire, but that was always a trap. The crux was, and continues to be, the abyss. The alarmists have been correct, the advocates of civil obeisance to norms have been murderously wrong. Many of these comics read like stenography today, as invented abom­inations became literal over time. The style of my art, the stretches and scratches, is meant to be painful, a sack of nee­dles hurled up from the pit out of rage at the subjects and as spur for the reader. The art was not born of bitterness, the enemy of satire, but rather naivete giving way to disillusion­ment: I genuinely believed that, if it came to such a farcically fundamental threat, complicity would not be the norm. Every drawing in this book is undergirded by the awareness that this is a crisis and by the astonishment that it is not being treated like one.

This is a Museum of Degenerates in multiple senses. It’s a visual tapestry that will hopefully give strength to those la­beled degenerate by the hatemongers and autocrats pictured in its pages. It’s also a compendium of art denounced as de­generate and often targeted for erasure by those same auto­cratic hucksters. But mainly it’s a series of portraits of petty authoritarians who constitute the genuine degeneracy of our time. The appropriation might seem puerile, a graphic ren­dition of “I’m rubber, you’re glue,” but there’s a place for the puerile when sifting through sewers. Back in 1937, Munich’s Exhibition of Degenerate Art raged against similar reversals. “The harlot is held up as an ideal,” the exhibition catalogue groused, “in contrast to women in bourgeois society, who in the view of the creators of this ‘art’ is morally far more de­praved than the prostitute.” Besides, as we’ve seen with star­tling consistency, every accusation is a confession. Crusaders against supposed moral squalor have so frequently been ex­posed as rapists, pedophiles, sex traffickers, groomers, stalk­ers, harassers, and torturers that they’d save us a lot of trouble by turning themselves in prior to the projection.

Most of these drawings were incubated on social media and self-published online, appearing in print here for the first time. In a larger sense, the art emerged from online com­munity and conversation at a time when print media and its digital counterparts were imploding and when online plat­forms were razing barriers and hierarchies maintained by our comically nepotistic gatekeepers of discourse. It’s notable that one of the earliest drawings in these pages, a caricature of Donald Trump, was published by Gawker; that website was subsequently shut down by Peter Thiel, a far-right oli­garch determined to suppress the free flow of information. One of the last drawings forms an appropriate bookend: a caricature of Elon Musk, another far-right oligarch deter­mined to suppress information, in his case by sabotaging the very platform that hosted so much of this art. The commu­nity Twitter fostered, and the ways it facilitated critical en­gagement with powerful figures, is fast becoming a relic. As I write this, news has emerged that Musk plans to erase social media accounts of the deceased, expanding his war on infor­mation to a war on memory itself. For this reason, too, this book is a museum.

With that in mind, and in recognition of the current ma­chinery of enforced amnesia, I’ve included detailed notes on the drawings. The whiplash of events in recent years has clouded the sources, policies, and statements that catalyzed much of this work. This process has been abetted by a mul­tibillion-dollar disinformation industry working relentlessly to rewrite both the specific incidents and the broad strokes of recent history. Finally, contextual notes are necessary in light of the barrage of lies in efforts to paint this anti-fascist art as art conceived and drawn by a Nazi.

I drew many of these pieces during the windows of clar­ity that followed the GOP’s ritualistic incitement of domestic terrorist attacks. In some of these works, I added the Hebrew word “zachor”—remember—by my signature. It’s in memory of the murdered but it’s also an exhortation to never forget the continuing catastrophe. This museum is also a memorial. The crisis will begin to end only after the memory of atrocities spurs action that brings appropriate fury to the injunction “Never Again.”

These comics are not hyperbole, they are an understatement.