The unknown waltz was discovered in the vault of the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.

People often have mixed feelings about their birthdays, especially as they age. Countries can experience that too. For better or worse, America is due for a big birthday party: July 4, 2026, will mark the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence—our national semiquincentennial, in the awkward Latinate construction, or “semiquin” for short. In an ideal world, it would be a moment of commemoration and celebration as well as a chance to reflect on national history. But so far, the semiquin is shaping up as an embarrassingly accurate reflection of America’s identity crisis.

Until recently, America250, the federal commission charged with planning for 2026, was mired in organizational infighting and countless disputes, including over funding shortages and the distribution of patronage. Authorized while Barack Obama was president, the commission started work under Donald Trump, changed course under Joe Biden, and will spend most of 2025 answering to who knows which chief executive. But the challenges of 2026 extend well beyond logistics, appropriations, and leadership. How do you throw a grand national party when the country seems unable to agree on first principles or basic facts? Should 2026 be a rah-rah festival or a sober history lesson? What should the non-MAGA component of the American populace—that is, at least half of it— bring to such a patriotic occasion? Should it bring anything at all?

[Tom Nichols: Reclaiming real American patriotism]

Former U.S. Treasurer Rosie Rios, now the head of America250, still believes that the country can pull off something meaningful. The child of a Mexican-born single mother, she recalls the 1976 bicentennial as a moment when she began to feel “pride in what it means to be American.” She wants 2026 to offer the same sort of experience, tailored to a new generation.

And perhaps it will. As Rios pointed out when we spoke, 1976 was itself hardly a moment of political harmony; the Vietnam War and Watergate had just crashed to a close, right on the heels of the turbulent 1960s. Nor, for that matter, was American society especially peaceable at the time of the sesquicentennial, in 1926, when the Ku Klux Klan was regularly parading through Washington, D.C.; or at the time of the centennial, in 1876, when the country was fighting over the future of Reconstruction; or at the time of the semicentennial, in 1826, when a controversial populist leader, Andrew Jackson, had just lost a close election and vowed to return for a second go-round.

What seems different about the present moment is that the very idea of trying to tell some sort of national story—much less one with patriotic overtones—has itself been called into question. That’s especially true among the people who purport to care most deeply about an honest reckoning with the American past. For generations, liberals leaned into a story of gradual, if uneven, progress toward unfulfilled ideals. But even they no longer believe that the narrative of progress holds the power it once did.

There is, of course, no national narrative that will magically unite America; true national consensus has never existed and won’t suddenly materialize now. But during past celebrations—50, 100, 150 years ago—the people excluded from America’s mythic narrative managed to leverage the nation’s symbols and rhetoric and put alternative stories before the public. They believed that the Declaration of Independence and the flag could be useful and inspirational.

At stake in 2026 is whether a divided country can find common symbols worth embracing. But also at stake is whether those who take a critical view of America’s past will step up proudly and say not only what they stand against, but what they stand for in the American story.

There was once a standard template for how to celebrate a centennial: Declare greatness and throw a big party, preferably in Philadelphia. Over the past two centuries, this model has yielded its fair share of jingoism, along with fireworks and flags and cannon blasts. But it has also provided an opportunity for reexamining American history and for raising questions about the country’s future.

The first attempt at a national party in Philadelphia, during the “jubilee” year of 1826, did not quite come off. As one local newspaper noted, “The apathy of the citizens” seemed to be the defining feature of that particular July 4. The anniversary nonetheless occasioned at least a bit of national self-reflection. In early 1824, anticipating the semicentennial, President James Monroe invited the Marquis de Lafayette, the teenage French hero of the American Revolution, to return to the U.S. and take a look at what he had wrought. With much hoopla, Lafayette visited every state as well as the nation’s capital. But he also expressed horror at certain aspects of American life, especially the South’s ongoing embrace of slavery. During a visit to the Virginia plantation of former President James Madison, Lafayette pointedly reminded him of “the right that all men, without exception, have to liberty.”

Fifty years later, on the other side of the devastating Civil War, Philadelphia tried again. This time, it succeeded. With an eye to the world’s fairs then popular in Europe, the city was determined to put on “the greatest international exposition that the world had ever witnessed,” as the historian Thomas H. Keels writes—albeit an exposition with a distinctly American stamp. The nation was engaged in a fierce debate over race, political partisanship, women’s rights, and the growing concentration of capital. All the more reason, organizers thought, to try to get everyone together to celebrate what there was to like about America.

They started planning a festival for 1876 that was ultimately attended by some 20 percent of the American population. Upon arriving in Philadelphia, those millions of visitors found an entire mini-city constructed to house and display the marvels of the modern world. At the Main Building, ticket-holders encountered their first telephone, courtesy of the rising young inventor Alexander Graham Bell. Thomas Edison sent his latest inventions too. France contributed the upraised right arm and torch of a proposed Statue of Liberty; visitors could ascend stairs to the top for just a dime. The sheer number of gigantic expo buildings—249 in all—testified to the organizers’ outsize ambitions.

This frenzy of activity and investment sent an unmistakable message: Despite the Civil War, America was full of energy and on the rise. But the scale of the spectacle masked important absences. Although 26 states built their own pavilions, most southern states opted out. Black citizens were banned from the expo altogether. When Frederick Douglass, an invited guest, tried to take his seat on the dais at the opening ceremony, guards blocked him until a U.S. senator intervened. The grim politics of 1876 would soon result in a violent and contested presidential election, and with it the end of Reconstruction in the South.

If the expo did little to renew American commitments to equality, it did provide an occasion for certain excluded groups to restate their claims to full American citizenship, using the Declaration as inspiration. On July 4, Susan B. Anthony showed up uninvited at the Independence Hall ceremonies, flanked by fellow suffragists, to read the Declaration of the Rights of Women. In Washington, a group of Black men produced their own Negro Declaration of Independence.

By 1926, the political terrain looked different. White women could finally vote; most Black men and women in the South could not. The U.S. had been through another war, this time in Europe, and had come out of it disillusioned. At home, during the war, the country had jailed thousands of dissenters. The Ku Klux Klan had built a powerful constituency, especially within the Democratic Party. And the country had slammed its doors shut to most immigrants.

The organizers of the sesquicentennial celebration nonetheless doubled down on the model of a big party in Philadelphia. An estimated 6 million people showed up—not as many as the organizers had hoped for, but still a substantial number. The marvels on display were thoroughly of their moment: on the lowbrow end, Jell-O and Maxwell House coffee; on the high, Kandinsky and Matisse.

The exposition was billed as a “Festival of Peace and Progress,” but like its predecessors, it could not help but reflect the political tensions of its time. When the KKK put in a bid for a special Klan day at the fair, the mayor of Philadelphia said yes before saying no. The fair itself was largely segregated, though Philadelphia’s Black community mobilized to ensure at least modest access and participation. Under pressure, the festival added the future civil-rights icon A. Philip Randolph as a last-minute speaker to represent the Black community and share the platform with government officials at the opening ceremony. Randolph delivered a searing account of how the nation had betrayed its promise of equality for Black citizens.

Philadelphia tried to give it one more go 50 years later—for the bicentennial, in 1976. As the big birthday approached, though, many observers started to question whether the standard model really made sense anymore. “Is a World’s Fair-type Bicentennial festival appropriate for a country wracked with social, racial, and environmental agonies?” the writer Ada Louise Huxtable asked in The New York Times. By 1976, President Richard Nixon’s resignation and the mounting traumas of the 1970s had helped to yield a scaled-back, privatized, and decentralized celebration. There were some old-fashioned touches, such as the American Freedom Train, which conveyed the nation’s founding documents and historical treasures from city to city, and the cheery tall ships that sailed between ports. But corporate promotion rather than civic purpose carried the day. Branded products included a 1776-themed tampon disposal bag marketed with the slogan “200 Years of Freedom.”

Critics pushed back against what they described as the “Buycentennial.” Some of the most theatrical resistance came from an ad hoc group called the People’s Bicentennial Commission, organized by the New Left activist (and future social theorist) Jeremy Rifkin. The group held rallies at sites such as Lexington and Concord, all the while claiming to be acting in the true spirit of ’76. Rifkin thought it crucial that the American left engage with rather than reject the narratives and symbols of the nation’s founding. Other groups, including the Afro-American Bicentennial Corporation, sought to ensure that at least some programming would reflect the Black experience. They advocated for a more diverse and inclusive account of the nation’s history—not one American story, but many.

At least some of that vision began to be realized in the years during and after the bicentennial. What 1976 may have lacked in spectacle, it ultimately made up for with quiet investment in the infrastructure of public history, much of it attuned to bringing overdue attention to marginalized groups. According to a study by the American Association of State and Local History, some 40 percent of all historical institutions in existence by 1984—museums, living-history sites, local preservation societies, and the like—were created during the bicentennial era.

In the summer of 2016, while most of the country was transfixed by the presidential race pitting Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump, Congress established the United States Semiquincentennial Commission, made up of private citizens, members of Congress, and federal officials. The commission was given the job of overseeing a national 2026 initiative.

Its leaders took their time getting started, and Trump’s White House offered little guidance beyond the implicit admonishment to make American history great again. In Philadelphia, a group of local boosters took matters into their own hands. They called themselves USA250, a name barely distinguishable from that of the federal commission, and set out to make the case for a “blockbuster festival.”

USA250 had no shortage of ambitious, expensive ideas. Beginning in 2025, according to one scheme, roving caravans would crisscross the country, showcasing the best of American history, art, food, and music. In 2026, the caravans would converge on Philadelphia. The budget that the organizers imagined was a symbolic $20.26 billion. However, there were no longer many takers for this kind of effort, even in Philadelphia. The arrival of COVID in early 2020—and the fear of super-spreader events it engendered—dealt another blow to the prospect of a big in-person bash.

As for the federal commission, it swiftly descended into a morass of charges and countercharges over process, favoritism, hiring, gender discrimination, and budget decisions. In June 2022, Meta pulled out of a $10 million sponsorship deal, reportedly owing to the commission’s “leadership dysfunction.” Around the same time, several female executives quit the commission and filed suit. They described a Gilded Age level of “cronyism, self-dealing, mismanagement of funds, potentially unlawful contracting practices and wasteful spending”—not to mention sex discrimination and a toxic work environment. In the midst of the meltdown, the Biden White House stepped in to appoint Rosie Rios as the new commission chair. By then, the clock was down to less than four years.

One of the federal commission’s signature initiatives, America’s Stories, is radically decentralized—less a top-down master plan than a national Instagram feed. Its website encourages Americans to send in personal reflections about the country’s past, present, and future in the form of songs, poems, personal essays, photographs, audio recordings, and videos. The stated goal is to create “the most inclusive commemoration in our history,” one in which “no story is too small” to matter. Rios views the emphasis on social media, as well as on diversity of experience, as a way to attract constituencies that might otherwise look elsewhere—notably young people, who often seem to think that the past has little to offer.

R. Scott Stephenson, the CEO of Philadelphia’s Museum of the American Revolution, describes the federal strategy as a “StoryCorps model” of historic commemoration. He worries that such a decentralized approach won’t rise to the moment. “If it’s just about everybody telling their story,” he asks, what’s to bring everybody together? His concerns are echoed by many in the public-history sphere. At the moment, though, almost nobody sees any prospect for a single big in-person celebration reminiscent of the extravaganzas of the past.

Nobody, that is, except for Donald Trump. Alone among major political figures, Trump has seized the early momentum to offer a grand, centralized semiquincentennial vision. In May 2023, he released a campaign video introducing the idea of a Salute to America 250, the “most spectacular birthday party” the country has ever known. Though billed as a serious celebration of the world’s oldest democracy, the plan contains no shortage of reality-TV touches. One proposal is a Patriot Games, in which high-school athletes would be pitted against one another in interstate Olympics-style competition. Another is the National Garden of American Heroes, a long-standing pet project in which Trump hopes to select “the greatest Americans of all time” to be honored in a Washington statuary park. The centerpiece of the celebration would be the Great American State Fair, an 1876 expo-style gathering to be held in Iowa. “It’ll be something!” he promised.

The video’s release produced plenty of critical commentary from MAGA skeptics. But, to paraphrase Trump, the Great American State Fair would at least be something: a focused, national, in-person commemoration with a clear message about where the country has been and where it is going. Whatever its other virtues may be, the individualized, localized, “invitation” approach evades any such nation-defining mission.

The problem is, many Americans don’t know what they’d be celebrating. On the left, rejecting traditional patriotism has become de rigueur: by kneeling for the national anthem, dismissing the Founders as enslavers, and expressing unease at the prospect of flying an American flag. Seeing left or liberal activists deploying the images and ideas of the revolution for their own purposes is far less common than it used to be. One consequence may be that many people who care about a critical, nuanced view of the American past will simply opt out of 2026. If that happens, who will be left in charge of defining what founding-era ideals such as “independence,” “revolution,” “We the People,” and “the general Welfare” are supposed to mean in the 21st century?

The task of identifying a usable past is of course much easier for Trump and his MAGA coalition than for those who seek a true reckoning with the country’s history of injustice. Trump has a clear view and a simple message: that only certain people count, that the past was better than the present, and that U.S. history was a tale of triumph until roughly the 1960s.

Trump’s views are embodied in the work of a group called the 1776 Commission, appointed near the end of his presidency. Its creation (and name) was partly a reaction to The New York Times Magazine’s 1619 Project, with its emphasis on slavery and the Black experience. It was also a bid to put the Trump stamp on the founding legacy. “As we approach the 250th anniversary of our independence, we must resolve to teach future generations of Americans an accurate history of our country so that we all learn and cherish our founding principles once again,” the commission’s report stated—at the same time promoting its own exclusionary and distorted vision of the past, one in which the Founders would obviously have opposed progressive social policy, affirmative action, and all forms of identity politics.

Professional historians have scorned The 1776 Report as right-wing propaganda rather than anything resembling actual history. But scholars have often hesitated to offer an alternative national narrative in its place. By and large, they do not view themselves as being in the business of nationalism or patriotism; their mission is mostly to tell the truth as they see it. Within academia, the nation-state is itself often seen as a suspect form of social organization and power with a dubious track record.

But in this moment of democratic crisis—and democratic possibility—there is something dissatisfying about sidestepping the challenge of 2026, with its implicit call to create a usable but thoughtful national narrative. During Trump’s term in office, the historian Jill Lepore chastised fellow academics for abandoning the project of a national story just when it was needed most. “Writing national history creates plenty of problems,” she argued. “But not writing national history creates more problems, and those problems are worse.”

Coming up with an honest but coherent vision for 2026 is a genuine challenge. For the past 60 years, much of American historical scholarship has been about exposing a darker story behind self-congratulatory myths. As a believer in that effort, I have long shared the left’s ambivalence about patriotic symbols: the flag, the Founders, the national anthem, the Fourth of July. Today, though, I feel an urgency to reclaim and redefine all these things, lest they be ceded to those darker forces historians like to write about.  

[David Waldstreicher: The Fourth of July has always been political]

The fact is, Americans have a pretty good origin story, as such things go: centrally, a revolution on behalf of human equality, despite all of its flaws and blind spots and limits. “On the subject of equality,” the political theorist Danielle Allen has argued, “no more important sentence has ever been written” than Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal.” For its moment—and even for ours—it was a bold and revolutionary statement.

Movements for equality, racial justice, and human rights have long taken advantage of that legacy. The abolitionists of the 1830s invented the Liberty Bell as a symbol of human freedom, seeing in its inscription to “proclaim liberty throughout all the land” a useful link to both the past and the future. The labor radicals of the late 19th century claimed Jefferson and Thomas Paine along with Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Finding a stake in the American story has always been more difficult for those deliberately excluded from the Declaration’s vision: women and sexual minorities, Black communities, Indigenous nations. In 1852, Frederick Douglass delivered his famous address asking “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?” His answer was that it marked a day of mourning, not celebration. Still, Douglass seized the moment to pressure white citizens to live up to their “saving principles,” noting that the Founding Fathers understood that “there is always a remedy for oppression,” even if they did not follow that insight to its logical conclusion.

What we are witnessing now, with respect to America’s 250th, is thus a strange turn of events. To varying degrees, abolitionists, suffragists, labor leaders, and civil-rights activists were willing and able to harness America’s mythic rhetoric and stated principles to advance their causes. They embraced and invented cherished national symbols. And yet today, many who profess to believe in human equality and social justice seem to have little use for the American origin story and its most venerable words and figures.

Why not reclaim them? The American revolution was, after all, a revolution—not in every respect the one you or I might have wanted, but an enormous stride toward equality. And revolution itself is an inherently malleable concept, made to be renewed and redefined with each generation. One need not wear a tricorne hat or fly the stars and stripes in order to celebrate the unlikely moment when a group of private citizens organized, dreamed big, and defeated the world’s most powerful empire.

Though, now that I think of it, why not wear the hat and fly the flag? Despite today’s political optics, neither one actually belongs to the devotees of MAGA rallies. Perhaps those on the left can at least seize the moment to open up the conversation over what, if anything, really makes America great—and to teach some actual history. If they don’t, the meaning of 2026—and of American patriotism—will be decided for them.

The little clump of cells looked almost like a human embryo. Created from stem cells, without eggs, sperm, or a womb, the embryo model had a yolk sac and a proto-placenta, resembling a state that real human embryos reach after approximately 14 days of development. It even secreted hormones that turned a drugstore pregnancy test positive.

To Jacob Hanna’s expert eye, the model wasn’t perfect—more like a rough sketch. It had no chance of developing into an actual baby. But in 2022, when two students burst into his office and dragged him to a microscope to show him the cluster of cells, he knew his team had unlocked a door to understanding a crucial stage of human development. Hanna, a professor at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, also knew that the model would raise some profound ethical questions.

You might recall images of embryonic development from your high-school biology textbook: In a predictable progression, a fertilized egg morphs into a ball of cells, then a bean-shaped blob, and then, ultimately, something that looks like a baby. The truth is, though, that the earliest stages of human development are still very much a mystery. Early-stage embryos are simply too small to observe with ultrasound; at 14 days, they are just barely perceptible to the naked eye. Keeping them alive outside the body for that long is difficult. Whether anyone should is another matter—for decades, scientific policy and regulation has held 14 days as the limit for how long embryos can be cultured in a lab.  

Embryo models—that is, embryos created using stem cells—could provide a real alternative for studying some of the hardest problems in human development, unlocking crucial details about, say, what causes miscarriages and developmental disorders. In recent years, Hanna and other scientists have made remarkable progress in cultivating pluripotent stem cells to mimic the structure and function of a real, growing embryo. But as researchers solve technical problems, they are still left with moral ones. When is a copy so good that it’s equivalent to the real thing? And more to the point, when should the lab experiment be treated—legally and ethically—as human?  

Around the 14th day of embryonic development, a key stage in human growth called gastrulation kicks off. Cells begin to organize into layers that form the early buds of organs. The primitive streak—a developmental precursor of the spine—shows up. It is also at that point that an embryo can no longer become a twin. “You become an individual,” Jeremy Sugarman, a professor of bioethics and medicine at the Johns Hopkins Berman Institute of Bioethics, told me.

[Read: A woman gave birth from an embryo frozen for 24 years]

The primitive streak is the main rationale behind what is often referred to as the “14-day rule.” Many countries limit the amount of time that a human embryo can be kept alive in a petri dish to 14 days. When a U.K. committee recommended the 14-day limit in the 1980s, IVF, which requires keeping embryos alive until they are either transferred or frozen around day five or six, was still brand-new. The committee reasoned that 14 days was the last point at which an embryo could definitively be considered no more than a collection of cells, without potential individual identity or individual rights; because the central nervous system is formed after the 14-day milestone, they reasoned, there was no chance it could feel pain.

But the recent rise of advanced embryo models has led some groups to start questioning the sanctity of the two-week mark. In 2021, the International Society for Stem Cell Research relaxed its 14-day guideline, saying that research could continue past 14 days depending on ethical review and national regulations. (The organization declined to set a new limit.) In July, U.K. researchers put out a similar set of guidelines specifically for models. Australia’s Embryo Research Licensing Committee, however, recently decided to treat more realistic models like the real deal, prohibiting them from developing past 14 days. In the United States, federal funding of human-embryo research has been prohibited since 1996, but no federal laws govern experiments with either real or model embryos. “The preliminary question is, are they embryos at all?” Hank Greely, a law professor and the director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University, told me. Allow one to develop further, and “maybe it grows a second head. We don’t know.” (Having a second head is not necessarily a reason to disqualify someone from being human.) In the absence of an ethical consensus, Hanna is at work trying to cultivate his models to the equivalent of day 21, roughly the end of gastrulation. So far, he said, he’s managed to grow them to about day 18.

Researchers generally agree that today’s models show little risk of one day becoming walking, talking human beings. Combining sperm and eggs the old-fashioned way is already no guarantee of creating new life; even women in their 20s have only about a 25 percent chance of getting pregnant each month. Making embryos in a lab, sans the usual source material, is considerably harder. Right now, only about 1 percent of embryo models actually become anything that resembles an embryo, according to Hanna. And because scientists don’t have a great idea of what a nine-day-old embryo looks like inside the body, Greely said, they don’t actually know for certain whether the models are developing similarly.

[Read: The most mysterious cells in our bodies don’t belong to us]

And yet, in the past few years, scientists have already accomplished what seemed impossible not so long ago. Both Hanna and Magdalena Żernicka-Goetz, a developmental and stem-cell biologist at the California Institute for Technology and the University of Cambridge, have created models for mice with brains and beating hearts. Scientists and ethicists would be wise to consider what qualifies as human before human embryo models have beating hearts, too. The most important question, some ethicists argue, is not whether researchers can achieve a heartbeat in a petri dish, but whether they can achieve one with a model embryo implanted in a human womb. “It's no longer so much about how embryos are made or where they come from, but more what they can possibly do,” Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist and the director of life sciences at Boston’s Museum of Science told me. In an experiment published last year, seven-day-old model monkey embryos were successfully implanted in the uterus of three female monkeys. Signs of pregnancy disappeared about a week afterward, but the paper still raised the specter—or perhaps the promise—of a human version of the experiment.

Building more realistic embryo models could have enormous benefits—starting with basic understanding of how embryos grow. A century ago, scientists collected thousands of embryo samples, which were then organized into 23 phases covering the first eight weeks of development. Those snapshots of development, known as the Carnegie stages, still form much of the basis for how early life is described in scientific texts. The problem is, “we don’t know what happens in between,” Hanna said. “To study development, you need the living material. You have to watch it grow.” Until recently, scientists had rarely sustained embryos in the lab past day seven or so, leaving manifold questions about development beyond the first week. Most developmental defects happen in the first trimester of pregnancy; for example, cleft palate, a potentially debilitating birth defect, occurs sometime before week nine for reasons that scientists don’t yet understand. It’s a mystery that more developmental research performed on embryo models could solve, Greely said.

Better understanding the earliest stages of life could yield insights far beyond developmental disorders. It could help reveal why some women frequently miscarry, or have trouble getting pregnant at all. Żernicka-Goetz has grown models to study the amniotic cavity—when it forms improperly, she suspects, pregnancies may fail. Embryo models could also help explain how and why prenatal development is affected by viruses and alcohol—and, crucially, medications. Pregnant people are generally excluded from drug trials because of potential risks to the fetus, which leaves them without access to treatments for new and chronic health conditions. Hanna has started a company that aims, among other things, to test drug safety on embryo models. Hanna told me he also envisions an even more sci-fi future: treating infertility by growing embryo models to day 60, harvesting their ovaries, and then using the eggs for IVF. Because stem cells can be grown from skin cells, such a system could solve the problem of infertility caused by older eggs without the more invasive aspects of IVF, which requires revving the ovaries up with hormones and surgery to retrieve the resulting eggs.

[Read: Christian parents have a blueprint for IVF]

Answering at least some of these questions may not require hyperrealistic models of an embryo. Aryeh Warmflash, a biosciences professor at Rice University, is studying gastrulation, but the cells that form the placenta aren’t relevant to his research questions, so his models leave them out, he told me. “In some sense, the better your model goes, the more you have to worry,” he said. Hyun told me he cautions scientists against making extremely complex models in order to avoid triggering debate, especially in a country already divided by ideas about when life begins. But given all the medical advances that could be achieved by studying realistic models—all the unknowns that are beginning to seem knowable—it’s hard to imagine that everyone will follow his advice.

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.”