Painted at the height of the Vietnam War, Nancy Spero’s work invokes the Holocaust to indict America’s brutal neocolonial militarism. Her Star of David has six screaming, spike-tongued death heads at its points, each bearing a yellow star—a reference to the badges Jews were forced to wear by the Nazis. Each is labeled with an early year of Hitler’s regime, when the first extermination camps were built. The heads can also be read as helicopters, one of Spero’s recurrent symbols of modern industrialized warfare. The helicopter is “a primeval (prime-evil) bird or bug wreaking destruction. I imagined that Vietnamese peasants saw it as a giant monster. I viewed the helicopter as the symbol of [the Vietnam] War.” At the center of the Star of David is a bent, howling human figure, an anguished expression of horror at the mechanized violence of contemporary war.