Among the pedestaled titans of Western music, George Frideric Handel was the first composer whose work not only quickly became celebrated in his own time but has been heralded ever since. Before Handel, no real “repertoire” of enduring music had existed. Composers were considered craftsmen in an evanescent art, their creations regularly superseded by fresher work. Most music that got performed was relatively new. Claudio Monteverdi, the preeminent European composer of the early 17th century, was largely forgotten within decades of his death, in 1643. Johann Sebastian Bach amounted to hardly more than a cult figure after he died, in 1750, his major works unplayed well into the next century.

When Handel died, at 74 in 1759, he was already well fortified for posterity. A celebrity since his 20s, he had been the subject of grand portraits and was depicted as Orpheus in a 1738 statue in London’s Vauxhall Gardens. Whereas Bach earned an unmarked grave in Leipzig and one obituary four years after he died, Handel was buried in Westminster Abbey.

Handel stands apart in another way from the musical giants who have since been rediscovered and enshrined: Each of them is renowned for an array of often-performed pieces. His stature is owed above all to a single work—the oratorio Messiah. Among the towering masterpieces of Western music, the Messiah occupies a distinctive place: It is familiar to more people than any other work of its kind. Bach’s B Minor Mass and St. Matthew Passion and Monteverdi’s Vespers are comparable among supreme choral pieces, but they aren’t performed at your church or the high school down the street. The Messiah often is, trotted out during the Christmas season by amateur and professional choruses around the globe. A fair percentage of the world probably knows the “Hallelujah” chorus well enough to sing along.

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This skewed acclaim is unfair to Handel, who was as brilliantly prolific as any composer who ever lived. But it is also a tribute to the overwhelming effect of the Messiah, which is a feat of sustained inspiration arguably unsurpassed in the canon of Western classical music. “Comfort ye, comfort ye my People,” the libretto opens, pulling us in at the beginning, its flow of compelling melody and stirring choruses enthralling us for the next two hours and leaving us singularly exalted.

Reasons for the Messiah’s enduring power are manifold, though certainly they begin with the music itself, which manages to join the lofty and the populist, as does all of Handel’s work. In Every Valley: The Desperate Lives and Troubled Times That Made Handel’s Messiah, Charles King takes his cue from the oratorio’s ability to convey, era after era, “a transporting sense that something cosmic and profound was at stake, even when the cares of this world happened to intrude.” King, who embarked on the book during the pandemic, found renewed comfort in the Messiah’s arc, especially its message of hope in difficult times, starting with those first words: “Comfort ye.” He also felt moved to recover “the Messiah’s sheer weirdness” by exploring its origins in the murkier currents of what is remembered as the age of reason.

King, a professor of international affairs and government at Georgetown University and a splendid writer, has made a specialty of popular cultural history. A meticulous researcher, he delivers surprises, and his prologue is one of them:

Some days he would wander the manor house in a blank stupor, barely able to lift a foot … He was so afraid of the cold that he lay under six blankets in winter and four in summer. He never married, fathered no children, and made distant enemies more readily than close friends.

These fine and vivid sentences are not, as the reader expects, about Handel. They are about his exquisitely odd and obsessive acolyte, Charles Jennens, the Messiah’s librettist, a figure few listeners are aware of.

King proceeds to relay more about Jennens’s inner life and creative struggles than about Handel’s, of which firsthand reports are skimpy. Jennens’s story is indeed fascinating. A rich squire and crabbily conservative political dissident, he was “emotionally tormented,” but still managed to be a significant art collector, Shakespeare scholar, and patron of music. King’s resurrection of Jennens’s crucial role, laboring in private over a libretto that he hoped would inspire “the Prodigious” (as he called Handel) to new musical heights, helps illuminate how unusual Handel’s oratorio was and remains.

Here is the “weirdness” that King emphasizes. An oratorio is essentially an unstaged opera, a story told in music. The Messiah is a collection of gnomic scriptural passages that are prophetic in import but offer no story at all. “It has nothing that could be called a plot,” King observes. “Its form is more like that of a found poem, built from Bible verses that have been rearranged and, here and there, edited” by a depressive man struggling to find his way toward hope and a return to a pre-Enlightenment vision of religion. Jennens, for whom faith and kingship were imbued with mystery, endorsed the legitimacy of the deposed Stuart monarchy and rejected the rational Deist perspective. For his part, Handel—a generally agreeable though fiercely proud man, witty and gluttonous and gouty, and given to polylingual swearing—was probably indifferent to such political and sectarian matters. But he knew a good librettist when he saw one.

The form of King’s book is like an intricate collage, gathering very different characters with the goal of concentrating on the surround, the context. Not all of the figures are directly connected to Handel, and at times King’s deep background verges on the tangential. But a similar storyline links his cast of characters: They are coping with dire predicaments (of widely varying sorts), in a time of political flux and fear, all of them managing to carry on—a spirit of perseverance that runs through the Messiah.

For example, King delves at length into the outlandish marital travails of the contralto Susannah Cibber, whom Handel turned to as he rounded up singers for the Messiah premiere, in 1742 in Dublin, a propitious convergence for both. We learn, as a scandalized public did, all about her husband’s outrageous abusiveness, her lover’s and family’s efforts to protect her, the two lawsuits her husband filed against the lover (a creditor whom he’d initially welcomed into a ménage à trois). Cibber’s well-known suffering lent her musical lamentations in the oratorio a raw power—“He was despised and rejected of Men,” she sang, “a Man of Sorrows, and acquainted with Grief”—for a stunned opening-night audience and in many of her performances after.

Other lives and issues are more peripherally entangled in King’s tale of the Messiah’s emergence. A distressing chapter on the British slave trade, to which Handel had a minor financial connection, features an African Muslim named Ayuba Diallo who ends up enslaved in Maryland. Against all odds, he ultimately succeeds in returning to Bundu, in West Africa. His episodic journey includes an interlude in London, where “it would not have been unusual to see Diallo walking past Jennens’s townhouse in Queen Square”—though who knows if the two ever met. Several times in his absorbing narratives, King reaches for these sorts of indirect associations.

And what about Handel’s evolution, personal and musical? After all, he is the composer who made the Messiah, even if he didn’t do it alone, or have the originating idea for it. Handel sometimes gets a bit lost along the way in Every Valley. After a well-stocked chapter about the oratorio and its premiere, King understandably—he isn’t a musician or musicologist—doesn’t devote much space to exploring the particulars of Handel’s style and reputation, or the special place of the Messiah in his work as a whole.

The compositions that Handel churned out at a remarkable rate were simultaneously demand-driven and distinctive, convention-bound and transcendent. Working within the musical language of his time, he could conjure any effect: dancingly energetic, profound, aristocratic, folksy, eerie, heart-filling, comic. He could do it all, and he had an uncanny sense of how to grab an audience. (His effervescent Water Music is a familiar example.) Few could work faster; that Handel wrote the Messiah in 24 days has long stirred talk of divine inspiration, though in fact he was known to turn out a three-hour opera in three weeks. Some have speculated that he was manic-depressive and wrote when he was manic. Indisputably, his speed was abetted by liberal borrowing from his own work and generous pilfering from other composers’ (not illegal in pre-copyright times, but still regarded as a bit tacky). Four Messiah choruses are lifted from his earlier pieces, none of them sacred. About his plagiarisms, Handel was unapologetic, saying more or less that those people didn’t know what to do with their stuff.

He wasn’t wrong: Handel the enthusiastic copier was also a pioneer in developing the English oratorio. Born in Halle, Germany, in 1685, he settled in England in 1712 and concentrated on the genre of Italian opera seria, a London craze whose popularity later faded. Facing bankruptcy by the 1730s, Handel revived his career by turning from seria—courtly entertainment stuffed with mannered drama—to the pared-down English oratorio. Making use of his operatic skills and dramatic instincts, he transfigured this new musical genre with results that most choral composers you could name—Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Brahms—are manifestly indebted to. By contrast, the artificiality of his operas, the major part of his output, has kept them from becoming repertoire staples.

[From the November 1946 issue: Handel]

In all of his work, Handel was among the greatest, most irresistible of tunesmiths. Like Bach, he believed in a union of word, meaning, and music. To that end, Bach often pursued esoteric symbolism and numerology, with vocal lines crossing in the music when Christ is mentioned, and the like. Handel wanted his illustration to be more on the sleeve. “Their land brought forth frogs,” the soprano sings in his oratorio Israel in Egypt, to an accompaniment that is hopping, hopping, hopping. When the chorus proclaims, “There came all manner of flies,” the strings break out in buzzing.

In those places, Handel plays the plagues of Egypt for laughs, but he does the same kind of thing in earnest in the Messiah. “Every Valley shall be exalted,” the tenor sings in a robustly rising line, which sinks for “and every Mountain and Hill made low.” Then “the Crooked” (jagged line), “straight” (held note), “and the rough Places” (jagged again), “plain” (long held note). Each word and image of the text is painted like this.

Meanwhile, you hear Handel lifting the music to mighty climaxes over and over, and it never gets old.

“For unto us a Child is born, unto us a Son is given,” the chorus sings, tossing that bit back and forth in dancing counterpoint. Momentum begins to gather, the notes climbing, the rhythm bouncing us joyously along: “And the Government shall be upon his Shoulder; and his Name shall be called.” Then we arrive at spine-tingling proclamations: “Wonderful, Counsellor, The Mighty God, The Everlasting Father, The Prince of Peace,” as strings race ecstatically above. What Beethoven, who considered Handel his only musical superior, particularly admired was his ability to get dazzling effects with simple means. As both composers knew, simple is hard.

Among the possibly apocryphal stories about Handel, one has him commenting to his servant, upon finishing the “Hallelujah” chorus, “I did think I did see all Heaven before me, and the great God Himself seated on His throne, with His company of Angels.” In fact, nothing indicates that he considered the Messiah his magnum opus at the time, or expected that this piece—with its grandeur, its gravitas, its power to be emotionally moving at nearly every moment—would be his ticket to immortality. Famous though he was, Handel was still a jobbing composer, and composers had never been endowed with an immortal aura.

[From the April 1885 issue: Handel 1685–1885]

Yet he was eager to share an awestruck response to the Dublin premiere. As King reports, Handel wrote a letter a few months after the event, enclosing an Irish bishop’s verdict: “The whole is beyond any thing I had a notion of till I Read and heard it,” the cleric reported. “It seems to be a Species of Musick different from any other.”

The letter was to Jennens, the Messiah’s librettist. Handel wanted him to know “how well Your Messiah was received in that Country.” One of the most inspired composers of all time might have been aware, in some sense, that he had transcended himself, but he could not claim to understand the alchemy that had worked this wonder. In the spirit of his oratorio, the goal of his letter to Jennens seems to have been not to blow his own horn but to give comfort to his companion in the endeavor.

*Lead image credit: Illustration by Paul Spella. Sources: Heritage Images / Getty; Photo12 / UIG / Getty; Geoffrey Clements / Corbis / VCG / Getty; Print Collector / Getty; Lebrecht Music & Arts / Alamy; CBW / Alamy; Album / Alamy.

This article appears in the December 2024 print edition with the headline “The Weirdest Hit in History.”

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Updated at 11:36 a.m. ET on October 6, 2024

You can’t walk far in Tel Aviv without encountering a raw expression of Israel’s national trauma on October 7. The streets are lined with posters of hostages, and giant signs and graffiti demanding BRING THEM HOME. Making my way through Florentin, a former slum that has become an artists’ neighborhood, to visit Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi, one of the most popular painters in Israel, I passed a mural of a child being taken hostage. A Hamas terrorist in a green headband and balaclava points a rifle at the child, who has his hands in the air. The boy is recognizable as a version of the child in the famous photograph from the Warsaw Ghetto uprising in 1943. The artist first painted the mural in Milan, but images of October 7 are not always well received outside Israel. In Milan, someone scrubbed the Jewish child out of the picture.

Zoya—first name only, at least in the art world—also made drawings about October 7 that met with an unexpectedly hostile response abroad. Until then, Zoya’s international reputation had been ascending. She was seen as a sharp critic and satirist of Israeli society—Israel’s Hogarth, as it were. Like him, she sketches people whom others overlook; like his, her portraits editorialize. Perhaps you assume that overlooked means “Palestinian.” Zoya has made paintings about the plight of Palestinians, but what really interests her are even less visible members of Israeli society, such as African immigrants, and the invisible and stigmatized, such as sex workers. Since her October 7 drawings were shown in New York, however, she has been accused of making propaganda for Israel. Similar charges have been leveled against other prominent Israeli artists since the start of the Gaza war, but the denunciation of Zoya was particularly public.

Zoya is an immigrant herself—born in Kyiv in 1976, when Ukraine was still part of the Soviet Union—and she has spent her life in a kind of internal exile. In Kyiv, she was a Jew. In Israel, she’s a goy (non-Jew), at least by rabbinic standards, because her mother isn’t Jewish, by the same standards. (Zoya’s father was Jewish, and so was her mother’s father.) She is married to an even more recent immigrant, Sunny Nnadi, who comes from Nigeria. She used to vote for the far-left, Arab-majority political party Hadash, but stopped when it, along with a coalition of similar parties, sided with Vladimir Putin in Russia’s war on Ukraine. She has the word ATTITUDE tattooed on her left forearm, in English. Her art tests the boundaries of the permissible. When Zoya had a major solo show in 2018 at the Israel Museum, one of the country’s preeminent institutions, the newspaper Haaretz noted the incongruity of the museum’s embrace of Israel’s “eternal dissident.”

That exhibition, which was called “Pravda,” depicted Soviet and post-Soviet immigrants struggling to acclimate to an unfriendly Israel. Two paintings, for example, lampoon the rabbinic authorities who enforce religious law. Many of the million or so new arrivals had never kept kosher or been circumcised, and roughly a quarter of those weren’t considered Jews by Israel’s rabbinic establishment, usually because their mothers, like Zoya’s, weren’t Jewish. A handful chose to undergo Orthodox conversions.

That’s the backdrop for The Rabbi’s Deliquium, which is set in the home of two young Russian converts to Orthodox Judaism. The scene is only half fantastical. The man wears a kippah and his wife’s hair is covered. Their baby’s head is also covered—by a giant kippah. (In real life, infants do not wear kippahs.) A rabbi is inspecting their kitchen to ascertain whether they are really keeping kosher; this kind of thing actually occurs. He lifts the lid of a pot and finds himself face-to-face with a huge pig snout. Deliquium means a sudden loss of consciousness. We know what is going to happen to the rabbi next.

The Rabbi’s Deliquium, 2016 (© Zoya Cherkassky. Courtesy of the artist and Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv.)

In the second painting, The Circumcision of Uncle Yasha, two ultra-Orthodox rabbis in blood-splattered scrubs perform the operation in a pool-blue operating room. One wields a pair of scissors while Uncle Yasha looks down at his penis in terror. The other rabbi covers his face with a book labeled TORAH, as religious Jews sometimes do with their prayer books, but in this case the gesture suggests a refusal to see. In the corner of the operating room lies a kidney dish filled with blood. The scene evokes the infamous anti-Semitic blood libel, in which Jews are said to drain the blood of a Christian child to use in their Passover matzah. The show’s curator, Amitai Mendelsohn, understates the allusion’s outrageousness when he calls it “slightly unsettling” in the catalog. The painting is so sacrilegious, it’s funny—admittedly, it’s also a Jewish in-joke that would probably work less well outside Israel, where a mordant reference to a slander that resulted in the deaths of countless Jews might well come across as simply distasteful.

Zoya’s October 7 drawings are not funny at all. Days after the invasion, having taken her terrified 8-year-old daughter to Berlin, Zoya began putting on paper the scenes of horror that wouldn’t stop tormenting her. She first posted her drawings on social media. Soon they were being projected onto the white facade of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art from “Hostages Square,” the plaza in front of that building, which has become a site for public art and protest about the kidnapped. The Jewish Museum brought the drawings to New York, where Zoya occasioned a story in The New York Times, among other outlets, not on account of her artwork, exactly, but because she was heckled and did something unusual in response.

The incident occurred in February, and some of it was recorded on phones. Zoya and the museum’s director, James Snyder, are about to have a conversation onstage when young activists in black surgical masks stand up and begin to shout. As they are hustled out, another group rises and yells from printed scripts: “As cultural workers, as anti-Zionist Jews of conscience, as New York City residents, we implore you to confront the reality of”—boos and cries of “Shut up” from the audience drown out their words. Clearly, the Jewish Museum crowd is not on the side of the protesters. Guards forcibly remove the second group of disrupters.

Suddenly, cheers erupt near the stage and Zoya comes into view, a large, long-haired, makeup-free woman in a stretchy gray dress and black boots, sitting calmly, apparently unfazed. You have to read the news accounts to learn what had just happened off-screen: Zoya had said, simply, “Fuck you.”

When more protesters had been escorted out and the drama had subsided, Zoya caustically observed, “I am very, very happy that there are privileged young people from privileged countries that can know how everybody in the world should act.”

The protesters had also given out flyers with an insulting caricature of “The Zionist Artist at Work,” showing an artist in combat gear painting a missile. According to an Instagram post by a group called Writers Against the War on Gaza, the activists accused the Jewish Museum of participating in “violent Palestinian erasure” because Zoya had failed to include the Palestinian victims of the Gaza war in the show. Zoya’s immediate response to that charge was that she may yet make art about the Palestinian victims. “Just because I have compassion for people in the kibbutz doesn’t mean I don’t have compassion for people in Gaza,” she told the Times.

Zoya has addressed Israeli cruelty toward Palestinians in the past. A 2016 painting called The History of Violence shows a uniformed Israeli soldier guarding two handcuffed men stripped down to their underwear, presumably Palestinians. After Pogrom (2023) portrays a couple and child in front of their burning home, an apparent reference to the 2023 settler rampage in the Palestinian village of Huwara, in the West Bank. It reworks a World War II–era painting by Chagall, The Ukrainian Family, about Jews in a similar situation, as if to say, Who’s committing the pogroms now?

After Pogrom, 2023 (© Zoya Cherkassky. Courtesy of the artist and Rosenfeld Gallery, Tel Aviv.)

Not everyone in the audience at the Jewish Museum opposed the protest. In an article largely sympathetic to the activists, the online art magazine Hyperallergic quoted an anonymous spectator saying that the audience’s hostile response to the protest was “chilling.” Two months after the incident, Zoya posted the following on Instagram: “The Central Committee of the CPSU”—the Communist Party of the Soviet Union—“allowed more freedom of artistic expression than [the] contemporary art world.”

In late May, I asked Zoya what she thought about the melee now, especially that “Fuck you.” Every aspect of her appearance says I don’t have time for this nonsense : her single-color stretch dresses (she was wearing black that day), her Velcroed sandals, her blunt bangs, her black rectangular glasses. We were at a printmaking studio in Jaffa that had invited her to learn how to make monotype prints. The process involves painting on a large piece of plastic, then taking an impression. She was turning a painting of hers into a black-and-white version of itself, using broad, confident strokes, and she didn’t stop as she answered my question. “I think this was exactly the level of discussion appropriate for this situation,” she said.

Zoya’s series 7 October 2023 deserves a place in the canon of art about war. Twelve small, meticulous drawings in pencil, marker, crayons, and watercolor form a mournful martyrology. The backgrounds are flat black and the colors are somber, except for violent reds and oranges that reappear in several works and sometimes burst into red-orange flames. Zoya uses an easy-to-parse visual language, part grim children’s-book illustration, part German Expressionism: You feel Max Beckmann, one of her favorite artists, in the slashing lines, darkened hues, and unflinching yet somehow religious representations of horror. “I’m quoting historical paintings that depict suffering,” she told me. She wanted their help channeling the pain “so I’m not alone in this series.”

Zoya portrayed victims only; perpetrators are nowhere to be seen. With one exception—a drawing of child hostages—she did not reproduce the faces of actual people. Her figures are all sharp angles and outsize oval eyes. In a drawing about the Nova music festival, where hundreds of Israeli concertgoers were killed, the sticklike upper arms of the young people running from their murderers stretch out while their forearms slant up toward heaven and their calves kick out behind them. The staccato repetition of limbs and hands and toes turns the scene into a dance of death. Two drawings do disturbing things with heads. In Massacre of the Innocents, based on the Giotto fresco of the same name, murdered children lie heaped on the ground, and you can count more heads than bodies (some bodies may be blocking our view of others, but the effect is still eerie). In Zoya’s rendering of a rape victim lying face down in blood, her head has turned too far to the side, like a broken doll’s, and her empty eye sockets stare at the viewer.

Israelis gave me strange looks when they learned that I’d come all the way from New York to write a profile of an artist. In the middle of a war? Maybe I was really writing about the cultural boycott? That too, I said. Many Israelis in the arts and academia dread the anti-Israel fury—or at least the fear of protest—that is making curators, gallerists, arts programmers, publishers, university department heads, and organizers of academic conferences loath to invite Israeli participants. Being shut out of international venues is a constant topic. For two decades, the Palestinian-founded Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) movement and the Palestinian Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel have pressured cultural organizations around the world to exclude Israelis, with mixed results.

But now the mission is succeeding. The Israeli visual artists I talked with feel that the world turned on them in a day—on October 19, to be precise, when Artforum published an open letter signed by 4,000 artists and intellectuals calling for a cease-fire, an end to violence against civilians, and humanitarian aid for Gaza. To the outrage of Israelis and many Jews elsewhere, the original version of the letter failed to mention that Hamas’s atrocities had started the war—or to mention Hamas at all.

A month before I arrived in late spring, Ruth Patir, the artist chosen to represent Israel in the Venice Biennale, announced that her show would remain closed until there was a cease-fire and the hostages were released. The message, relayed a day before the press preview of the Israeli pavilion, was idealistic but also strategic: It had become clear that protests would block Israel’s pavilion. I went to see Mira Lapidot, the chief curator of the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, who helped hang the show in Venice and participated in the decision to cancel it. She has deep reservations about the way the war is being conducted, but she was shocked that people in the arts, of all fields, would fail to recognize that “a person is not their government and not their state, that people are multifaceted, have different views, that there is a place for individuality. It is all completely just wiped out.”

The Terrorist Attack at Nova Music Festival, 2023 (© Zoya Cherkassky. Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort, New York.)

No less unnerving than the cancellations are the opportunities that dematerialize: the once-friendly museum director who no longer calls, the dance company that can’t seem to book its usual tours. When I asked Israeli artists whether they had any upcoming shows abroad, I found that if they said yes, very likely the show would be in one of three places: a Jewish-owned gallery, a Jewish museum, or Germany, where strict laws prohibit anti-Semitic activity. (In June, Germany’s federal intelligence agency classified BDS as a “suspected extremist organization.”) Artists from abroad are also staying away from Israel. Kobi Ben-Meir, the chief curator at the Haifa Museum, told me that he used to be able to talk reluctant artists into showing their work there; now, if they take his calls, they say Let’s talk in a year or so. “We are kind of like in a ghetto right now, here and also internationally,” Maya Frenkel Tene, a curator at the Rosenfeld Gallery, which represents Zoya in Israel, told me. “A Jewish ghetto.”

Zoya being Zoya, she waved off my questions about boycotts. Being boycotted is not like having your home bombed, she said—and that, in turn, is not as bad as being in Gaza, she added. Later, she told me that she wished boycotts were her problem. What is your problem, then? I asked. “What to do to avoid the Holocaust,” she said. Did she mean what would happen if Hamas or Hezbollah overran Israel? “It’s not only Hamas and Hezbollah. The scariest part is what is happening within Israel,” she said, “these crazy right-wing Israelis” who attack humanitarian aid convoys and terrorize Palestinians in the West Bank.

[Read: The new culture war in Israel]

Zoya deplores the coalition governing her country, but about Gaza, she said, “I’m jealous of people who know what is the right thing to do. I have no idea.” Like almost everyone I met in Israel, she wondered whether she and her family would have to leave; she and Sunny have thought about going to his village in Nigeria, but violence roils that country too.

Zoya’s dismissiveness notwithstanding, the boycotts are worrisome, and not just because they seek to censor the art of an entire nation. Zoya’s work in particular is a reminder of what would be lost. Her art offers the world a chance to learn about the richly complicated reality underneath the schematic picture of Israel as a society of oppressors and oppressed that is all too often disseminated by anti-Zionists. Zoya’s art should not be defined by the October 7 series alone. She is prolific and protean, and those drawings are not necessarily her best work. When she arrived on the Israeli art scene in her early 20s, she was precociously sophisticated. Over the course of nearly three decades, she has made unforgettable art about art and searing art about society, and mastered a remarkable array of genres: manga, digital art, Jewish liturgical texts, even Soviet Socialist Realism, whose greatest artists she is determined to rescue from the trash heap of Western art history. “She can do anything and everything in art,” Gideon Ofrat, a prominent historian of Israeli art, told me. “She does not repeat herself. She always develops a new style and a new language, and everything she touches is done expertly from a technical point of view.”

What unites Zoya’s eclectic body of work is her supremely jaded and very Soviet sarcasm—and an empathy for her subjects that has deepened over the years. “It’s easy to be ironic as an artist, but it is not easy to be funny,” Ben-Meir, the Haifa Museum curator, said of Zoya. Stupidity or hypocrisy or ideological rigidity activates her inner shock jock—in her art, and in person. These days she gets a lot of her comic material from postcolonialist lingo. Once, as we were leaving her studio, a shrieking sound came from somewhere in the building. What on earth is that? I asked. Wild parrots, Zoya answered. Parrots were brought to Israel as pets but escaped and reproduced; now they occupy all of Tel Aviv. “They are not indigenous to this land,” she observed. “Genocidal settler parrots!”

When the 14-year-old Zoya learned in 1991 that her family had finally received permission to move to Israel—as it happens, they left two weeks before the fall of the Soviet Union—she was excited: She would finally have access to all the Western culture forbidden to her, like music and art. Yet she had already been studying for four years in one of the best art schools in the Soviet Union, a nation that offered more rigorous training in the techniques of academic realism than any other country, and when her teacher told her that art students in Israel didn’t master the same skills, she cried. “I thought, I will never learn how to draw,” she told me. She got into one of the top Israeli high schools specializing in art and found that the students’ draftsmanship indeed lagged behind hers. She had her friends back home send her their homework assignments and did them on her own.

Zoya belongs to a cohort of young émigrés from the former Soviet Union known as the “1.5 generation,” the first set of child immigrants in Israel who didn’t assimilate the way children usually do. The muscular sabra ideal never appealed to them; when they grew up, they held on to their hybrid identity, Liza Rozovsky, a reporter at Haaretz originally from Moscow, told me. The “Russians”—“in Israel they did become ‘Russian’ all of a sudden, even though most of them did not even come from Russia,” she noted—had their own schools, their own theater and music-enrichment classes. Missing their biscuits, cakes, and very nonkosher sausages, they opened grocery stores that stocked Russian brands. The children were miserable at first: They dressed wrong, ate funny-smelling sandwiches in school, and were bullied. Pride came later, Rozovsky said. The teenage Zoya did fine. “I was in the art bubble,” she explained. But she registered the unhappiness around her.

The Russians didn’t fit into the Western racial categories often used to classify Israelis—white Ashkenazi overclass on the top; dark Mizrahi, or Middle Eastern, underclass on the bottom—because they were white and Ashkenazi, yet rungs below better-integrated Israelis socially; no one knew what to make of them. Whatever advanced degrees and white-collar jobs they may have had in the Soviet Union, now they worked as cleaning ladies and night guards. The run-down neighborhoods they moved into had previously been the domain of the Mizrahi Jews, and the two low-status groups engaged in a war of mutual condescension. The Mizrahim thought that Russian men were pale and unmanly and that Russian women were all prostitutes. Zoya remembers Israeli boys taunting Russian girls by calling out “Five shekels!,” meaning five shekels for sex. For their part, the Russians considered the Mizrahim—indeed, most Israelis—loud, uncultured boors.

Russians didn’t fit into the Israeli art world, either. In 1990s Israel, realism was reactionary, passé. “It was embarrassing to know how to paint, but even more embarrassing to know how to paint like a Russian,” Zoya said in a gallery talk in 2017. Good artists—serious artists—made abstract, conceptual, intellectual pieces. Cultural gatekeepers were Ashkenazi. There were almost no Russian gallery owners or curators. Zoya studied at the HaMidrasha School of Art at Beit Berl College, known as a home for avant-garde, nonrepresentational artists. The poststructuralist curriculum annoyed her. She couldn’t make sense of subversive French thinkers such as Georges Bataille and Jacques Lacan, because she wasn’t familiar with the discourses they were subverting; that made her feel ashamed. To the great chagrin of her mother, she never graduated. “I’m not a philosopher, and I didn’t go study art because I want philosophy,” she told me. “I like painting.”

Zoya didn’t become a painter right away. She made conceptual works whose point seemed to be that they were amusing to make. An early collaboration with a classmate involved flying to Scotland with a lightweight, human-size sculpture of a friend in what looked like a body bag—U.K. customs officers were flummoxed—and then taking the “friend” into the forest, where they posed him in various positions and photographed him. Don’t ask what the point was: They were 19. “At this age, you can’t really explain what the hell it means,” Zoya said.

Her breakthrough came in 2002 with a solo show called “Collectio Judaica.” It was the product of a great deal more thought and care. Like “Pravda” 15 years later, it would probably not do well outside Israel; its attitude toward Jewishness is even more open to misinterpretation.

The show mostly consisted of Jewish objects, all perfectly designed and executed by Zoya. But it was not a simple celebration of Jewish material culture. Some of the items were traditional: a Passover Haggadah, two porcelain seder-plate sets, and four mizrach gouache paintings (a mizrach hangs on the eastern wall of an observant Jewish home in order to orient prayer). But other fabrications were, well, sui generis. In the gallery window lay three brooches, all 18-karat-gold replicas of the yellow cloth Star of David that the Nazis made Jews wear, complete with the word Jude in the middle. A Tel Aviv council member in the pro-settler National Religious Party heard about the show and demanded that the mayor and Israel’s attorney general close it. Her effort failed. The show was a hit.

Why would anyone turn one of the most despised symbols of anti-Semitism into jewelry and display it as if it were a Jewish treasure? The seemingly bizarre undertaking encapsulated the fundamental gesture of the show. “I think this is the most important work Zoya did ever,” Zaki Rosenfeld, her gallerist in Israel, told me. (Since 2019, Zoya has also been represented by the Fort Gansevoort gallery, in New York.) Zoya was erasing the line between the sacred and the vile, the Jewish artifact and the anti-Semitic image, then polishing the resulting monstrosities to a very high shine.

The inspiration for “Collectio Judaica” came from a mug in the shape of a hooked-nosed Jew, which Zoya found in an antiques store in Tel Aviv. “I asked the seller, ‘How much is the anti-Semitic cup?’ ” she told me. “And he said, ‘Why do you think it’s anti-Semitic?’ For me it was obvious it’s anti-Semitic. And I said, ‘Maybe this is how he sees himself.’ ” “Collectio Judaica” was in essence an homage to distorted Jewish self-perceptions, an aestheticizing of their masochistic attractions. As Zoya later put it, she wanted to show “how Jews see themselves through the anti-Semitic gaze.”

The objects are mesmerizing. Take the Passover Haggadah. Zoya, who knew virtually nothing about Jewish liturgy, wrote it herself, by hand, in a Hebrew font she invented that looks remarkably authentic. She then illuminated it in a style that combines medieval art and Russian Constructivism, tossing in a few references to Tetris, a computer game invented in the Soviet Union. Many of the illustrations portrayed rabbis with the bodies of birds. This was an allusion to a famous 14th-century Haggadah, the Birds’ Head Haggadah, which sidestepped the medieval Jewish aversion to representing the human face by replacing Jews’ heads with those of birds. But Zoya reversed the order and attached birds’ bodies to Jewish faces, thereby invoking an old anti-Semitic trope in which Jews were portrayed as ravens.

Animal faces in the mizrach gouache paintings were based on a late-19th-century anti-Semitic German postcard depicting Jews as animals, according to the scholar Liliya Dashevski. The panels of another exquisite object, an East Asian–style folding screen, featured paintings of Orthodox Jewish men whose coattails flip outward like birds’ tails. Dashevski speculated that Zoya was playing on a secular-Israeli slur for Hasidic Jews, “penguins.” And then there were the seder plates. In their center, Zoya drew Gorey-esque little boys, one trussed in rope, the other naked and chubby like a Renaissance putto. Around them she delicately splattered red paint, like drops of blood. Did the bound children merely refer to the killing of the firstborn, part of the story of Passover, and did the drops of blood allude to the red wine dribbled by seder participants onto the plate to indicate their sorrow at Egyptian suffering? Or was she invoking the blood libel? Yes and yes. The objects held layers of meaning.

Gideon Ofrat, the art historian, was enchanted by “Collectio Judaica.” “This surprising, shocking, satirical anti-Semitism. It was breathtaking. It was very daring,” he told me. He bought a pillow—“perfectly done”—embroidered with the portrait of a big-nosed old man with a sack over his shoulder, a depiction of the Wandering Jew, another anti-Semitic trope. The Jewish Museum in New York now owns the Haggadah and a seder-plate set.

Zoya’s career as a high-concept prankster thrived, but toward the end of the aughts, she decided to do something really radical: learn to paint life again. The push came from a mentor she acquired during a stint in Berlin, Avdey Ter-Oganyan, a charismatic and transgressive Russian “action,” or performance, artist with a fiery disdain for art-world norms. He encouraged Zoya to shed her intellectualism and recommit herself to seeing.

First Money, 2021 (© Zoya Cherkassky. Courtesy of the artist and Fort Gansevoort, New York.)

But that would take practice. So Zoya went back to Israel and identified four female artists from the former Soviet Union who were eager to get out of the studio. The five of them went to the rougher neighborhoods of Tel Aviv, such as Neve Sha’anan, where many foreign workers and refugees live, and set up their easels. People stopped to chat or comment on their paintings; some posed for portraits. After a while, the women decided to call themselves the New Barbizon, a tribute to the 19th-century French painters who rebelled against the claustrophobic conventions of the French Academy and painted landscapes en plein air. Zoya got her husband, Sunny, who is a truck driver, to drive a “Barbizon mobile” so they could transport big canvases all over Israel. Eventually they traveled as far as Leipzig, Moscow, Paris, and London.

The New Barbizon painters were serious about painting, but their adventures had a certain performativity about them. As Zoya put it, they were trolling. Their target was the art establishment, which still turned up its nose at their old-school realism. At a big art fair in Tel Aviv called Fresh Paint, in 2011, they sat right outside the fair on portable chairs. They put up signs—one of them read ARTIST WITH DIPLOMA—and drew the people waiting in line for 50 shekels a pop.

Within a few years, New Barbizon had become a phenomenon. (People in the art world “love being trolled,” Zoya said.) Collectors began buying the women’s work. The New Barbizon artists had many shows, as a group and individually; they still do.

With Zoya’s 2018 solo show at the Israel Museum, she came full circle. “Pravda” was one of the first major cultural events to reflect the Russian Israeli experience. The labels were in Russian as well as in Hebrew and English, which was unheard‑of. As usual, Zoya trafficked in stereotype, counting on style—exaggerated cartoonishness, a hint of the grotesque—to communicate a spirit of satire. After all, stereotypes are a key part of the immigrant experience, the lens through which newcomers see and are seen. Hence the obtuse rabbis, the cowering Uncle Yasha, and, in Aliyah of the 1990s, the naked Russian woman, presumably a prostitute, presenting herself doggy-style. In Itzik, a swarthy Mizrahi falafel-store owner grabs a blond Russian waitress and tries to kiss her. Unsurprisingly, some Mizrahi Jews accused Zoya of racism. Zoya rejects the charge. It’s a “commentary on racism,” she said, not what she thinks of Mizrahim. “Some people get it; some people don’t get it. What can I do?”

“We rushed to the show,” Rozovsky of Haaretz told me. She recognized every scene in every painting: Zoya had painted her life. Rozovsky and a friend took a selfie in front of The Circumcision of Uncle Yasha, planting themselves on either side of his penis. “It was us! We were here! Not in some small Russian cultural center but in a museum.”

One afternoon during my visit, I got to see Zoya’s goofy side, because Natalia Zourabova dropped by. In addition to being a New Barbizon painter, she is Zoya’s best friend, and together they’re like “two snakes in conversation,” Zoya said. “If someone ever publishes our WhatsApp, we’re dead.” The two of them (Zoya doing most of the talking) told me about performance pieces they’d dreamed up—just for fun, not to actually stage. One would parody this year’s Met Gala, which hundreds of protesters tried to overrun; the police stopped them a few blocks away. The women would play celebrities, dressing up in outfits made of shiny thermal blankets, and be carried dramatically up a staircase—it would invoke the entrance to the Met—on the shoulders of some strong men. Then they’d dash back down the stairs and play pro-Palestinian activists, protesting themselves in their role as celebrities indifferent to genocide. Maybe they’d ask Sunny and his mover friends to do the carrying, Zoya added, because, being African, they would insulate the women’s celebrity characters from criticism: “They are Indigenous to a far place.”

Indigenous is a word always lurking in Zoya’s mind, waiting to be worked into a dark joke. It means “inhabiting a land before colonizers came,” and is precisely what Jewish Israelis are accused of not being—they’re allegedly the colonizers. (Those who dispute this claim counter that Jews have lived continuously on the land that is Israel and Palestine for thousands of years.) Hence, many Israelis hear Indigenous as the prelude to a demand: “Go back to where you came from.” But where is that? Zoya, whose paternal great-grandparents were shot during the two-day slaughter of 33,771 Jews at Babi Yar, outside Kyiv, has an answer. It takes the form of a brazenly tasteless sketch of her and Sunny. He’s decked out like a Tintin caricature of a cannibal, in bones and a grass skirt. Zoya wears the striped pajamas of a concentration-camp inmate. You have to read these portraits as hieroglyphics: Sunny = “Indigenous,” Zoya = “Auschwitz,” and together they’re “the Indigenous of Auschwitz.” Think of it as another “Fuck you.”

Brash as she was, I was talking with a more subdued Zoya, she told me. The past four years have been hard. The loneliness of COVID brought a new tenderness to her work. During the pandemic, she did two online exhibitions for her New York gallery. “Lost Time” (2020) sketched historical scenes of Jewish life during periods of plague in a sweetly schmaltzy idiom that reminds me of the kitsch my parents used to hang on their walls. “Women Who Work” (2021) rendered the lives of sex workers, naked and numb and subject to violence, in a tone that is sorrowful but allows them their dignity and fleeting moments of intimacy. After the pandemic, she mounted “The Arrival of Foreign Professionals” (2023), oil paintings that tell tales from the African diaspora in Israel and Europe. Another show included fond portraits of her husband’s family and others from his hometown in Nigeria, Ngwo, where Sunny and Zoya now have a house.

The war in Ukraine put Zoya at a new remove from her past and her family, many of whom still live in the country. Recent paintings of her old Kyiv neighborhood show Russian tanks rolling through the streets. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s formation of a far-right government in 2022 made left-leaning artists like Zoya feel even more cut off from mainstream Israeli society. Since then, they’ve come to feel that they’ve been cast out of the community of nations.

[From the January/February 2024 issue: Zombie history stalks Ukraine]

Zoya shares the national anguish about the hostages, grieving for them as if they were relatives. One day, she told me, she went to a park with friends, and they saw a typical Israeli family—“you know, the grandpa that is telling jokes,” and his three children and their children. It was, she said, “a very nice family that reminds you of the kibbutznik type of family.” (The majority of the October 7 attacks were on kibbutzim in the south of Israel.) Zoya and her friends had looked at the family and said to one another, “This could be the family of the kidnapped. We look at them, and we’re like—” She broke off her sentence and, putting her head in her hands, started to cry.

It dumbfounded me, the crumbling of the invincible Zoya. But I was finding the same despair everywhere I went. “You are not even allowed to talk about it,” she continued, weeping, because each time the response would be the same: “‘Look what you are doing in Gaza. You cannot cry for what happened to you.’ ” I felt I could almost hear hecklers, transmogrified into spectral figures in Zoya’s head, snarling at Israel’s pain.

And then Zoya, who had so laboriously retrained herself to look, implied that the act of seeing itself had become unbearable—not always, but sometimes. Seeing pictures of beautiful young people on Facebook, she said, she couldn’t stand their beauty, because the images were likely to have been posted to commemorate those who had been killed at the Nova festival. Even seeing “your children”—her child—was distressing, “because you imagine things.”

Zoya was still painting, of course, but her subject at the moment was, mostly, life in Germany, past and present, based on wry sketches she had made over the course of many visits. (Occasionally, the news was so terrible that she had to react, as when Hamas murdered six hostages at the end of August and she made a sketch of one of them, Hersh Goldberg-Polin, and posted it on Instagram.) She told me she had chosen Germany because she had a show coming up in Leipzig, but I thought that maybe she also had to avert her eyes from her immediate surroundings. If so, Zoya can’t be the only artist in that situation. All over the region, the present is hard to look at, and the future is ever harder to imagine.

This article previously misstated where in Nigeria Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi and her husband, Sunny, have a home.This article appears in the November 2024 print edition with the headline “What Zoya Sees.”