My grandparents left their home country as children when they heard the whispering of antisemitism starting in their home town. They got out and fled to America so I and future generations could be safe from persecution and mass murder. Only 2 generations ago.
And now America is becoming that country that they probably would have fled.
If you are not resisting, you are part of the problem.
And yes, I want non-Jews to reblog
Except I’m sorry but it’s not is it? A couple thousand white dudes babbling about jew conspiracies is not equal to Hitler and the holocaust no matter what. A couple thousand vs a few million? Your country isn’t fucking dumb. They FOUGHT to SAVE your kind and lost tens of thousands of men in the process. How about, fucking stop making it sound like the majority is Nazi and actually do some research. Jesus fucking christ.
Funny, since the Russians freed more prison camps than the US, including Auschwitz. The US didn’t care about the camps, they cared about fighting the ally of their declared enemy, Japan. And the US almost sided with the Nazis and had a large Nazi party in our boarders all the way up until (and even a little after) we entered the war.
Also do you know how large the Nazi party was at it’s peak? Just 7% of the German population. Smaller numbers don’t mean shit when they have people that aid and abet them by saying shit like “oh don’t worry they are too few to do harm.”
“My kind” have centuries of actual oppression running through our history, we can sense when something has changed and when it’s coming (back, again), it’s in our blood. Our grandparents and great-grandparents always told us to always have a bag packed, because they were afraid this would happen. “My kind” always know they will come for us again.
In this video from the Washington Post on the horrific situation in Charlottesville, white nationalist Sean Patrick Nielsen said that in addition to “standing up for local white identity” and “the free market,” his top value as a Republican was killing Jews:
This is how accepted anti-Semitism is. These monsters are so comfortable in support for their Judenhasse that they are literally unafraid to give their names to a major news outlet or to show their faces to an international audience and declare that they want to murder Jewish people. And I worry one day the rest of the world will let them—again.
Listen, I help run a blog about antisemitism and Jewishness. It’s mildly popular; 3,500+ followers, but not up to the tens of thousands of followers other blogs this subject area get. The reblogs we’ve gotten concerning Steve Rogers being Hydra outrank posts about actual living Jews being attacked, spit at, and harassed. They outrank posts about the Holocaust, survivors, historical antisemitism, stories about Jewish people’s preserved bodies being discovered in a Nazi scientist’s lab. The only conclusion I keep coming to is that people care more about two dead Jewish men and the character they created than they care about Jewish people in general.
When someone tells me it’s because antisemitism doesn’t exist in the US, that you can care about both, that they just don’t see posts about antisemitism on their dash, when I see news articles where people on the right are ~so surprised~ that there’s antisemitism in their ranks because it’s a leftist problem, that conservatives can’t be antisemitic because they support Israel (not true), when I see news articles where people on the left are surprised that there’s antisemitism in their ranks because it’s a right problem, that antisemitism isn’t a problem anymore because Israel exists (not true), claim that all Jews are white so they can’t be oppressed or victimized (not true), or claim that all Jews received reparations for the Holocaust (incredibly not true), both the beginning and the end of antisemitism? It makes me want to scream.
Antisemitism exists. We post about. People report about. I can only continue to believe the “we just didn’t know” excuse for so long. We are ignored, we are mocked, we are used as rhetorical devices for other oppressed people.
[SPOILERS FOR CAPTAIN AMERICA: STEVE ROGERS #1 BELOW]
Yesterday, Marvel released the first issue of Captain America: Steve Rogers by Nick Spencer, Jesus Saiz, and Joe Caramagna. It’s a pretty boilerplate (albeit beautifully depicted) story of a rejuvenated Steve Rogers back in the field…right up until he tosses an ally to his death and declares “Hail Hydra” in a final page splash. The whole thing is intercut with flashbacks to his childhood of a neighbor inviting Steve’s mother to a Hydra meeting, thus implying that Steve was indoctrinated as a child and has been a sleeper agent of Hydra all along.
This is comics, right? Unleash a shocking twist to get readers to pick up the next issue! Make everything All-New All-Different for a few months until things settle back into the status quo! Have a character behave so incongruously that fans just have to know why!
Except.
Except this is different than having Superman be a jackass to Lois and Jimmy on the cover of some Silver Age issue of Action. This is different than a kiss or a death or a resurrection. This is even different than the usual “wildly out of character” stunts that would normally have readers up in arms, like Batman using a gun.
Quick comics history lesson: Captain America was created in 1941 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby as a superpowered, super-patriotic soldier fighting the Axis forces. He was famously depicted punching out Adolf Hitler on the cover of his first appearance, inCaptain America Comics #1—which hit stands in December 1940, a full year before Pearl Harbor and before the United States joined World War II, making that cover a bold political statement.
You probably already knew that, but I’d invite you to think about it for a minute. In early 1941, a significant percentage of the American population was still staunchly isolationist. Yet more Americans were pro-Axis. The Nazi Party was not the unquestionably evil cartoon villains we’re familiar with today; coming out in strong opposition to them was not a given. It was a risky choice.
And Simon and Kirby—born Hymie Simon and Jacob Kurtzberg—were not making it lightly. Like most of the biggest names in the Golden Age of comics, they were Jewish. They had family and friends back in Europe who were losing their homes, their freedom, and eventually their lives to the Holocaust. The creation of Captain America was deeply personal and deeply political.
Ever since, Steve Rogers has stood in opposition to tyranny, prejudice, and genocide. While other characters have their backstories rolled up behind them as the decades march on to keep them young and relevant, Cap is never removed from his original context. He can’t be. To do so would empty the character of all meaning.
But yesterday, that’s what Marvel did.
Look, this isn’t my first rodeo. I know how comics work. He’s a Skrull, or a triple agent, or these are implanted memories, or it’s a time travel switcheroo, or, or, or. There’s a thousand ways Marvel can undo this reveal—and they will, of course, because they’re not about to just throw away a multi-billion dollar piece of IP. Steve Rogers is not going to stay Hydra any more than Superman stayed dead.
But Nazis (yes, yes, I know 616 Hydra doesn’t have the same 1:1 relationship with Nazism that MCU Hydra does) are not a wacky pretend bad guy, something I think geek media and pop culture too often forgets. They were a very real threat that existed in living memory. They are the reason I can’t go back to the villages my great-grandparents are from, because those communities were murdered. They are the reason I find my family name on Holocaust memorials. They are the perpetrators of unspeakable, uncountable, very real atrocities.
But writer Nick Spencer and editor Tom Brevoort are more concerned with making this “something new and unexpected”; with having “fun” and getting readers “invested in Hydra characters.” Because what’s more fun than downplaying genocide?
I’m not going to pretend to be cool here. I’m emotional. This is emotional. Captain America isn’t even my usual guy to get incandescently angry over the erasure of his coded Jewish history— that’s Kal-El, the Moses of Krypton—but reading this comic made me feel sick to my stomach. Reading the flippant responses of many non-Jewish readers—including friends—has brought me to tears. Somehow a community that gets up in arms about whether or not Batman has a yellow circle behind his logo seems to think that being angry about this is stupid, or indicative of a lack of experience with comics.
So let me be very clear: I don’t care if this gets undone next year, next month, next week. I know it’s clickbait disguised as storytelling. I am not angry because omg how dare you ruin Steve Rogers forever.
I am angry because how dare you use eleven million deaths as clickbait.
I am angry because Steve Rogers’s Jewish creators literally fought in a war against the organization Marvel has made him a part of to grab headlines.
I am angry because the very real pain of the Jewish community has been dismissed since this news leaked on Tuesday night as “Twitter outrage.”
If this story doesn’t hurt you? Good. I’m genuinely glad. I don’t want anyone else to have the gorge rise in their throat when they read the entertainment news. I love comics. I don’t want them to make people feel angry and betrayed. But understand that not feeling that way comes from a place of privilege, and don’t dismiss the concerns of those of us who are upset just because you have the luxury not to be.
I’ve been trying to think of how to finish this post, but I don’t think I can say it better than my friend and fellow Panelteer Sigrid Ellis did here:
And knowing that this wound is temporary, that it’s for the sake of sales and money and a story beat, that just makes it hurt more, not less. How little we must matter, the people who needed Steve to be the defender of the underdog and the weak, how little we must matter if betraying us for a story beat is so easy.
How little must we matter. The people who created Captain America, and Superman, and countless other heroes like them. The people who need him. The people whose history and suffering and hope, as we stood on the brink of annihilation, gave you your weekly entertainment and your fun thought experiment, 75 years later.
I'd Much Rather Have a Dragon 