What Zoya Sees

Long a fearless critic of Israeli society, since October 7 Zoya Cherkassky-Nnadi has made wrenching portraits of her nation's sufferingand become a target of protest.

- Judith Shulevitz

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 I of the Soviet Union-and she has spent her life in a kind of internal exile.