The old Marine Richard “Lefty” Leflar died two weeks ago at his home in West Conshohocken, just outside Philadelphia, mean as ever, at the end of an afternoon of watching football, smoking cigarettes, and eating waffles with ice cream; his body riddled with half-century-old shrapnel, his back killing him, his heart wittering; yelling into the phone at his son, Brian, who lived a few doors away, to “run down the fucking street and carry me up the fucking steps!”

Brian came running.

“The only guy I’ve ever been scared of my entire life,” Brian told me, lovingly.

I met Lefty about 10 years ago, while working on my book Hue 1968, about the biggest, bloodiest battle fought by American troops in Vietnam. Gruff, muscular, weather-beaten, tattooed, chain-smoking, drinking beer, gnawing on homemade venison jerky, he spoke with me only after extracting a promise not to sugarcoat his words. Then he had a momentary misgiving.

“I don’t want to make the Marine Corps look bad, you know what I mean?” he said.

He was just 17 when he was hauled before a local magistrate— “I was a bit of a hoodlum” he told me. The magistrate, who held court in his barbershop, told him: “You have got two choices, my man. They really want to put you in juvie—you know we have to put you somewhere. Or join the Marines.”

“Okay,” Lefty said, “I will join the Marines.” A boy who had been arrested with him made the same decision.

Leflar in a formal Marines portrait (left) and his Platoon 2036 in Parris Island, South Carolina, in 1967 (Brian Leflar)

[Jeffrey Goldberg: Trump: ‘I need the kind of generals that Hitler had’]

Lefty was 18 by the time he was airlifted into the middle of the Battle of Hue (pronounced Hway), so fresh from training that he lacked combat gear and was still wearing his stateside greens, starched and pressed, complete with the stiff regulation cap with the Marine Corps emblem. Hours later he found himself weaponless, huddled in a crater filled with decaying bodies, his clothes blown off, a big gash on his head, cuts all over, bombs and shells exploding all around, too repulsed and horrified to remain in the hole but too terrified to climb out.

The dead “stunk like hell, and you could see, like, a fucking eyeball popping, and they are all fucking purple and what the fuck,” he told me. Then, in his chair, he drew up his legs and wrapped his arms around them and wailed. He said, “Just like that, a little baby, cried like a little girl.”

Lefty’s story was just one of thousands from that battle, but it has always stayed with me as an illustration of what countless young Americans endured in Vietnam. They were ready to fight for their country, trusted in the powers that deployed them, but, as Lefty put it, were largely ignorant of why. “Marine privates are not told too much,” he said, “and are the first to die.” His story contrasts vividly with that of Che Thi Mung, also 18 at the time, from a village just outside Hue, who was caught up and wounded in the same battle, fighting for the other side.

Che Thi Mung (via Mark Bowden)

Che was passionate. When I met her in Hue, the same year I met Lefty, she explained that she had been fighting for independence, a struggle that had engaged her family for generations, first against the French and then the Americans. Her father had been arrested and imprisoned. Her older sister had been killed. She herself had been arrested by South Vietnamese troops and waterboarded. Hue was her home. She was fiercely devoted to her cause and was willing to die for it.

As for Lefty: “I knew about Vietnam from boot camp. I didn’t know on the map where it was. As far as Hue, I couldn’t even say the name correctly; I pronounced it Hyoo. I didn’t have a clue as to where I was. I was shell-shocked as soon as I got there. I couldn’t hear, and I walked around in a daze half the time.”

Strip away the Cold War pieties that drew us into that war, and you are left with two teenagers on opposite sides in a sprawling fight to the death: a Vietnamese girl who knew exactly what she was doing and a tough boy from Philly without a clue. More than half a century later, we know that the fears that drove America to war were illusory: that Vietnam would become a satellite of Red China, that the fall of Vietnam would condemn the rest of Southeast Asia to the same fate. Such ideas are as faded as the snapshots that soldiers like Lefty sent home. They ought to make us forever skeptical of all such rationales, and remind us that the casualties of war number far more than the tallies of killed, wounded, and missing, and of those who later take their own life. Today, as the U.S. enjoys friendly relations with a unified Vietnam, it’s hard to even imagine a good answer to the question Why?

Lefty finished his tour and came home angry. He’d seen a great deal of suffering and lost some good friends. He’d witnessed things that broke his heart. He had shrapnel embedded in his head and various other parts of his body, including his back, which would cause many years of suffering. The boy who’d enlisted with him was shot in the head two weeks in, and spent the rest of his life severely brain damaged.

[Beverly Cage: America is suffering an identity crisis]

“I was fucked up,” Lefty told me. “I been nuts since the war. I was nuts before I went in. I couldn’t handle my first marriage. It was absolute war—that poor girl had to put up with my shit. And all I did was fight; I would fight anybody. I would walk into a fucking bar and say, Let’s go. You three, outside. I did not care if I got beat up or not. I was nuts.”

After the war, Che was celebrated as a hero. Stories were written about her and the other “Hmong River Girls” who fought in Hue and other places. A statue honoring them was erected near the place where Che was wounded during the battle. It’s now a busy intersection outside a stadium. The shoulder where she got hit still troubles her. She went on to become a doctor. When I met her in 2016, she was retired. She cried as she remembered the terror, the pain, and the friends she had lost.

Lefty stayed angry, mostly at those whose ideas and orders put him and his buddies through hell. He distrusted anyone in authority. When the internet made it possible for him to reconnect with old war buddies, together they built a context for their war experiences, one based on fellowship and love. He was proud of his service, despite everything; proud enough to want me to include his story in the book. He was particularly proud of being a Marine. But he never sugarcoated his experience, and he never saw himself as a hero.

His wife, Donna, told me: “He would say, the only heroes are the ones who are dead.”

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.”

The Oakland Coliseum, where the Athletics played baseball for 57 years until last Thursday, is beautiful to me, in the subjective way that anything you have loved for a long time is beautiful. But the stadium is not, factually speaking, nice to look at. It is mostly concrete, with exposed rebar tracing the ceilings and water stains mottling the floor, and so dark in places that I’ve had to use a flashlight to see the ground in front of me. Because it was dug out from nearly 30 feet beneath the surrounding dirt, much of it sits damply below sea level, and because it was built to be shared with a football team, the Raiders, its field is rounder and has more foul territory than any other stadium in Major League Baseball.

The Coliseum’s best feature—a wide, almost decadent view of the golden Oakland hills—was intentionally blocked in the 1990s after the Raiders’ owner, Al Davis, demanded that the city build more seats in exchange for the team’s moving back from Los Angeles. (The government did, for half a billion dollars. In 2020, the Raiders moved to Las Vegas, shortly after the Golden State Warriors basketball team’s move from Oakland to San Francisco. Mount Davis—the monstrous slab of seats named, unofficially, after Al—remains.) The Coliseum regularly lands at the bottom of ballpark rankings and is often compared to a toilet bowl, even by people who like it. I have been watching the A’s play there my whole life, and it is one of my favorite places on Earth.

Being an A’s fan has always been painful in the ordinary way that being a baseball fan is painful. But in 2005, it started to become agonizing. John Fisher, a Giants fan whose parents founded the Gap, bought the team with Lewis Wolff as minority partner, and they quickly began trying to get out of the Coliseum. Like many MLB owners, they wanted the public to help pay for a change, via a new taxpayer-funded ballpark in a new location. But the city of Oakland, in a prolonged budget crisis partly stemming from the Mount Davis project, could not give Fisher (who is worth $3 billion) and Wolff everything they wanted.

[Read: Taxpayers are about to subsidize a lot more sports stadiums]

Over the next several years, especially after Fisher became sole owner of the team in 2016, the product he was offering began to deteriorate. Oakland had never been a big-money team, but its management started spending even less on players and player development. Ticket prices rose precipitously. The Coliseum fell further into disrepair. A’s leadership announced that the team would explore other markets. It seemed obvious what was happening, and not just because it was basically the plot of the movie Major League: Fisher was cynically and systematically working to make Oakland baseball harder to love and then blaming the fans for not loving it enough. He miscalculated: We loved Oakland baseball anyway—unconditionally. We just didn’t like him. Last year, the A’s had the lowest payroll in baseball. They also had a possum living in a broadcast booth and the lowest attendance of any team in the league. But on nights when the fans arranged it, the park was packed in reverse boycott, 27,000 people and hardly any official A’s gear in sight, just an ocean of kelly-green shirts with a message for Fisher: SELL.

Like all activism, this was love. Like all activism, this was wild optimism—a belief that enough people, working together, could make things different. “All baseball fans believe in miracles,” John Updike once wrote. “The question is, how many do you believe in?” Last spring, Fisher abruptly walked away from negotiations to keep the team in Oakland. (The mayor called it “a blindside” and accused Fisher of using the city as “leverage.”) No miracle had come. The A’s were leaving. They will now spend the next three years in Sacramento, sharing a stadium with the Giants’ Triple-A affiliate, before, in theory, moving into a $1.5 billion ballpark on the Las Vegas Strip that will be financed in large part by taxpayers and seems oriented toward casual, visiting fans who are looking for a vacation activity and don’t mind paying high ticket prices. (Ground has not been broken, but according to renderings, the park will be very shiny and have a view of the simulacral Statue of Liberty that fronts the New York–New York casino across the street.) Every MLB owner approved the move. It is the first time in two decades that one of their teams has relocated, and the first time in history that one has done so after such a fight with fans.

Those fans are mostly done with Major League Baseball. They’re airlifting their devotion to the local Pioneer League baseball team or to the independent soccer team that will play at the Coliseum next year. Oakland, a great sports city with a population roughly the size of Miami’s, has no more major professional sports.

Fisher almost never speaks to the press, but last week, he emailed a letter to fans attempting to explain himself. He wrote that he had always wanted “to win world championships and build a new ballpark in Oakland,” and that he and his colleagues “did our very best to make that happen.” I received this message while I was on the phone with Steven Leighton, a fan who had dedicated the past few years to persuading Fisher to sell, perhaps to one of the many people who had reportedly come out of the woodwork to express interest in buying the team and keeping it in Oakland. (Leighton was telling me about the time his dad took him out of school to watch the final game of the 2012 season, as a surprise.) That night, Larry Beil, a local news anchor, called the letter a “great work of fiction” and ripped it up on the air.

A stadium is a funny thing for anyone to own. It’s real estate, sure. But I can’t think of any other building that holds so many memories. The Oakland Coliseum hosted 4,493 regular-season games, 61 playoff games, and one All-Star Game. It is where a batboy got the nickname MC Hammer, where a platinum-blond cheerleader called Krazy George invented the Wave, and where Rickey Henderson set a league record for stolen bases that still stands. It is where, on Mother’s Day 2010, Dallas Braden pitched the 19th perfect game in baseball history, in front of 12,000 people, every last one of them holding their breath; afterward, he scooped his grandmother, who had raised him after his mom died, into a weepy bear hug on national TV. (I was watching, away at college, holding my breath too.)

Some memories are collective; others are personal. The Coliseum is where Esperanza Uruena went into labor and begged her husband not to make her leave, even as her insides twisted and cramped—Dave Stewart was pitching. It’s where my friend Rachael once threw out the first pitch with her daughter, Ynez, strapped to her chest; this past week, Ynez, suddenly 5, was in the parking lot wearing a traffic pylon like a witch’s hat and waving a SELL flag. When I was a kid, my family and I would lay pilled blankets on the field after games and watch fireworks explode above us. I wrote in my diary after one of these nights that it was the happiest I had ever been. In our 20s, friends and I would sit 10 or 15 wide at weekend day games, cheap beers in our hands and feet up on the bleachers.

Ten years ago, the A’s played the Royals in a single-elimination wild-card game. It was in Kansas City, but I watched in Oakland, in a dive bar so crowded, I could barely move my arms, with a friend I’d been to a couple of games with. It was our first date. The A’s lost 9–8 in 12 innings. The next season, that man and I bought quarter-season tickets, and the season after that, and the season after that, touching knees in the right-field bleachers, April to October. The bleacher-dwellers have their rituals, and we were happy to submit: We clapped along with the drums and the cowbells, headbanged for Sean Doolittle, believed in Stephen Vogt. We watched as our favorite players left, traded away or given up to free agency. In 2015, the team entered a painful, protracted slide, and then—still among the worst-paid teams in baseball—they rallied to reach the playoffs for three seasons straight.

[Read: What Moneyball-for-everything has done to American culture]

During the last of those seasons, one shortened by plague and played in empty stadiums, we moved across the country. When baseball came back, we were somewhere else: We watched different teams, in different ballparks. We read the bad news coming out of Oakland. We had a baby, Bobby, in the middle of the postseason, and I listened to the World Series on the radio while I nursed in the dark. We loved our son without condition or limit, and then, just when we thought it was the happiest we’d ever been, we got even luckier: He became a baseball fan, running coffee-table bases on fat, unsteady toddler legs and begging to watch the highlights over breakfast. (He’s a New Yorker, so he roots for the Mets.)

This summer, we took Bobby to the Coliseum. We wanted him to see the place where his parents fell in love, and we wanted to chant “Let’s go, Oak-land!” one last time together. We sat in our usual spot: Section 149, among the drummers and the diehards, the people who reverse-boycotted and fought and still scream “Fuck you, Fisher” when their team scores a run. Since the deal had become final, their ranks had thinned considerably. “I had to be here as much as I could, but everyone grieves in different ways,” Esperanza Uruena told me that afternoon. But we got to see some old friends, and our son got a certificate that said MY FIRST A’S GAME, which we joked we should take a Sharpie to—add and last. Bobby, one and a half, did not understand the significance of anything, but he had a great time watching the game. His dad and I both cried.

In the face of the ineffable, A’s fans have been grasping for metaphor. Thursday was a funeral; no, a funeral for someone whose death was preventable; no, a funeral for someone who’d been murdered, and the killer was charging admission at the door. The Coliseum, meanwhile, is Baseball’s Last Dive Bar. It’s home. It’s a concrete cathedral—which is maybe a little grandiose for a place with so many sewage problems and such stubborn possums, but I like it. Mircea Eliade, the great religious scholar and historian, spent years trying to understand precisely what makes something holy, why people chose to pour their faith into certain containers and not others. His conclusion, ultimately, was that sacredness is defined subjectively and circularly: The sacred is that which is not profane, and the profane is that which is not sacred. The believer gets to decide, in other words, where and when and how she finds what Eliade called hierophany: the manifestation of the divine, the moment when an ordinary object ceases to be ordinary.

I had learned about Eliade and hierophany from the book Baseball as a Road to God, co-authored by the former New York University president John Sexton. Last week, I spoke with Sexton by phone. He is incredibly smart and kind, even though he’s a Yankees fan, and he could probably tell that I was a wreck. He told me a story about a trip he’d taken some years ago, to Australia. With a guide, he and his family went to Uluru, the giant sandstone monolith that rises out of the flatness of the outback like a breaching whale and is a religious site for the Aboriginal Pitjantjatjara people. “To our native Australian guide,” he told me, the rock “was the most sacred place in the world.” To Sexton and his family, “it was a beautiful, overwhelming natural wonder, but it wasn’t ‘sacred.’” These places are not intrinsically sacred—they’re sacred if, and only as long as, living people see them as such, find miracles in their presence. I think Sexton had intended to make me feel better, to help me understand that the Coliseum could be divine as long as I wanted it to be. Instead, I thought about Bobby, who will never remember the mighty Oakland A’s, oblivious and happy as his parents wept at the ballpark, and about all the people who had consecrated the Coliseum, only to see it abandoned and emptied out.

[Read: Baseball is broken]

A regular football season is 17 games. Regular basketball and hockey seasons are each 82 games. A regular professional baseball season is 162 games, 81 of which are played at home. Esperanza Uruena missed only nine this season. Baseball—like falling in love, or raising a child—is mostly about the choice to keep showing up. It makes the mundane holy, through repetition and commitment, attention that becomes devotion, one day at a time, just like Mary Oliver said. It is ritualized submission to forces beyond your control, and as such, it is about the most radical, sacred, bighearted thing a person can do: Loving a team, like loving anything unconditionally, is the decision to make your world larger, even though it will hurt. Streaks end. Leads are blown while you get up for a beer. Your favorite guy gets traded, or injured, or sent down. A thing you organized your life around for years is taken away. The Oakland A’s were so much to so many of us, for so long, and now they are nothing at all.

But on Thursday, we were at the Coliseum, 46,899 of us—there to show that the A’s meant something to us, even if we didn’t mean anything to the A’s. Krazy George was there, signing autographs and banging a drum. So were Rickey Henderson and Dave Stewart, throwing out the first pitch, and Dallas Braden, now a color commentator, choking up in the booth. Rachael and her husband, Matt, were up in the 300s with their kids, and Esperanza was down near me in the bleachers, her fingernails painted green and gold. Women carried sleeping, floppy-limbed newborns—so their babies could see the place, just once, even with their eyes closed—and ushers carried bouquets of red roses given to them by fans. We chanted “Let’s go, Oak-land!” and “Sell! The! Team!,” our voices made louder bouncing off all that concrete. At some point, a beach ball appeared, and at some point afterward, once it had traveled hundreds of feet and fallen onto the field twice, it was euthanized with a pocketknife.

Oakland took the lead in the third and widened it in the fifth. By then, it was mayhem: Security guards had abandoned their posts to watch the game, and the aisles were clogged with bodies leaking sweat and tears. Smoke bombs, toilet paper, and two people escaped the stands and made their way onto the field. Someone in the bleachers unfurled a white banner so wide that five people had to hold it; in spiky, handwritten capital letters, it said UNFORGIVABLE. During the eighth inning, Kara Tsuboi—who has been an in-game announcer since 2009 and will not be going to Sacramento—thanked fans and staff. “This place is special,” she said. We got on our feet and didn’t sit back down.

Then, the ninth. The Rangers had scored, so we were ahead, but barely. Mason Miller struck out two back-to-back, then Travis Jankowski grounded to Max Schuemann at third base for an easy out. It was over, two hours and 29 minutes and 57 years after it had started. As the crowd cheered and the players shook hands, I ducked into a corridor to call Bobby. I told him I missed him, which was technically, though inadequately, true. He was in his hometown, playing with magnets, and I was in mine, pondering devotion, and I wanted so badly to be closer to him, I thought I might swallow my iPhone right there.

When I returned to the bleachers, almost everyone remained, chatting and hugging and taking selfies and looking out at the Coliseum, still the same and so, so beautiful. People pitched their torsos over the fence to pass the groundskeepers souvenir cups, empty water bottles, and Ziploc baggies to fill with dirt from the field. For anyone who wanted a different memento, a wide-necked guy in a Henderson jersey was demonstrating how to yank a cupholder off the seat. A final “Let’s go, Oak-land!” rose and fell: There weren’t enough people there anymore to make it last. A drummer in a bucket hat passed tissues to a crying security guard. At some point, the stadium music died. And then, about an hour after the game had ended, we had to go. We filed out of our seats and into those dark tunnels, holding our cups of dirt, the concrete under our feet scattered with toilet paper and rose petals.

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