I wrote this poem after hearing of the Polish government’s legislation limiting discussion of the Shoah. Most, if not all, societies try to suppress the disturbing events of their past. It is the role of historians, artists, and activists to remind them of their buried misdeeds.

They are committed

to erasing their memory

they have placed themselves

upon the table

soon the lobotomy

then the plastic surgeon

to take away

their scars

They will rise en masse

one smiling

nation

happy to have forgotten

Jedwabne and

Kielce

happy to have stopped searching

through the mountains

of ash

Image via Pixabay

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In a survey published this month, the Claims Conference estimated that 66 percent of American millennials do not know what Auschwitz was. The news comes as alarming, as we live in an age in which access to resources and information on the history of World War II and the Holocaust is virtually immediate.

Just a few decades ago, the Shoah was hardly part of the public discourse in the States, and was rarely included in school curricula. Many American young people, in the ’60s through the ’80s, learned for the first time about the topic where they learned a lot about good and evil: comic books.

A new book entitled We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust, written and curated by comic book legend Neal Adams, historian Rafael Medoff, and cartoonist Craig Yoe, delves on the history of Nazi-related comic book stories, publishing a selection of those strips with rich background and commentary. Nazis, reads the book, “have been among the most ubiquitous of comic book evildoers.”

Adams and Medoff joined forces in 2008 to create a comic shedding light on the fight of Jewish artist and Holocaust survivor Dina Babbitt to reclaim the artwork she had been forced to create as a prisoner in Auschwitz from the Auschwitz Museum in Poland.

While working on the Babbitt case, the two decided to collect those older strips and compile them in a book.

“These are stories that people don’t know about,” Adams said in an interview. The stories, featuring superheroes like Batman, Superman, and Captain America, come from some of the best publishers, including the “Big Two”: DC Comics and Marvel.

Adams was ten years old when his family moved from the United States to West Germany; his father was serving in the US Army’s occupying forces. While there, Adams was shown three hours of raw footage taken during the liberation of the Nazi concentration camps.

“I couldn’t speak to my mother for a week,” he recalled. “Watching that footage took the life out of me . . . It was horrible.” His long-standing commitment to raise awareness of the Holocaust comes from that traumatic experience.

“People think of comic books as entertainment,” said Rafael Medoff. “They don’t realize that, in addition, over the years they have tackled very serious issues. When I was growing up in the 1970s, I encountered topics like racism, drug abuse, the environment.” Some of those stories were illustrated by Neal Adams himself.

In regards to the Holocaust, American comic books “shared a very important lesson from history that was not being taught in schools,” continued Medoff. “Most Holocaust survivors were still not talking about their experiences, and you didn’t have movies like Schindler’s List.”

The first Nazi-related strips, published in the 1950s, did not always refer to the Jews as the victims of the Holocaust. One story, for instance, called them “prisoners of war,” though Adams claimed that this grave omission was not the norm. At the end of the day, comics were a very “Jewish” medium, he explained, many of their creators being Jewish.

These strips taught their readers about Auschwitz, Kristallnacht, the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, and many more chapters from the history of the Shoah.

One of these stories, “From The Ashes,” was featured in a 1979 issue of Captain America. In an interview published in the book, Don Perlin, one of the artists, said that he had questioned the idea of depicting the Holocaust in comic books: “The Holocaust was real, people were tortured and murdered—was it appropriate to have Captain America come in and beat up all the Nazis and save everyone?” But he ultimately answered his own question: “If even one person started to think about the Holocaust because of a comic strip that I worked on, it was worthwhile.”

While the authors completed the book, the fight to get Dina Babbitt’s portraits back from Poland is still on. International lawyers and a coalition of artists have been committed in pressuring the museum to return them to Babbitt’s family, but the museum has been inflexible.

Josef Mengele forced Babbitt to paint those portraits—which ended up saving the artist’s and her mother’s lives. It’s startling that the museum won’t return them. But the comic creators and historians of We Spoke Out understand the significance of art and human dignity.

“In the world, you’re not just fighting evil,” Adams said. “You’re fighting stupidity and ignorance, too.”

Image courtesy of IDW Publishing/Yoe Books. Art by Joe Kubert. All DC comic artwork, its characters and related elements are trademarks of and copyright DC Comics or their respective owners

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I wrote this poem when we started reading the book of Shemot this year, but its core feelings have been with me since my non-Jewish childhood in Germany: grief, and the longing to find and get to know what was lost. I do think there is shared trauma among the post-war generations— at the same time, it is often also a dividing line between those whose relatives survived the Holocaust, and those who live with a feeling of secondhand communal guilt.

I began to explore Judaism and made my first Jewish friends when I lived in Buenos Aires. My life is quite Jewish now, and I sometimes forget that I converted, but there are a few dates on the calendar that remind me: November 9^th, for example, and January 27^th, or 27 of Nisan, Yom HaShoah.

The Jews are gone.

What is left in Germany are Germans

with names that in New York are Jewish,

the Hoffmanns, Kaufmanns, Bachmanns,

the Breuers, Seidels, Kleins,

the Meyers, Gerbers, Arndts, and Schwartzes.

At times I see them disappear, the names,

from class rosters, record albums, signatures,

bylines, store fronts, wedding announcements,

one by one,

like the people around me

in the synagogue, in my office, at my table,

one by one

the Goldbergs, Weinstocks, Lewisohns,

the Kirschenbaums, the Halperins, the Katzes.

I stared for hours at the photo of Anne Frank,

wanting to talk with her.

I was younger than she was when she went into hiding.

I am three times older now than she was when she died.

The questions are still valid:

How can you say you didn’t know?

So visible a silence, so tangible an absence.

How can you say enough time has passed?

The Jews are gone.

What is left in Germany are names that haunt

the Germans from generation to generation.

Photo from the interior of the Pinkasova Synagogue, where names of Holocaust victims or missing persons from the Jewish community during WWII are painted on the wall. Via Flickr.

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Destination Unknown, which opens in New York tomorrow, is a collection of testimonies from Holocaust survivors culled over a thirteen-year period. Jewcy had the chance to speak with director Claire Ferguson, producer Llion Roberts, and 92-year-old survivor Ed Mosberg about how this film came together and why it’s vitally important to keep talking about the Holocaust.

Jewcy: How did you begin working on this film?

Roberts: In 2001, I went with my brother on a trip to Auschwitz like millions of other people have done. When I got there, I came across a picture of a 13-year-old girl named Christina. She had been in Auschwitz from December 1943 to May 1944; she only survived six months. She was the spitting image of my own daughter, who was also thirteen at the time. That struck me, so when I went home, I immediately started researching.

Eighteen months later, I made a call to a company in Ronkonkoma, New York, that was the only place that had some equipment I needed, and eventually I got through and they explained to me that they were closed for Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot. The conversation quickly turned to the Holocaust, and soon I was on conference call with one survivor, and then another. Ed Mosberg was the third, and this continued for the next fourteen years. In 2013, a sampler of the survivors’ interviews was put on Blu-ray. We met with Claire in December, and all 400 hours was put into her Avid.

Ferguson: I looked through all this extraordinary material, and it was then a question of how to piece together the jigsaw puzzle. What film do we make from this? It’s not possible to make a history of the Holocaust. It’s a well-trodden subject: the more you learn about it, the more it becomes unfathomable. How could you have a life with so much pain and then live with this? Focusing on the trauma of survivors and the lives they made afterwards seemed like the most powerful direction.

It was a huge challenge. Llion filmed thirty survivors, and in the film we only used twelve. Trying to tell a story with a narrative arc that would link these twelve survivors and still hold on to their individual stories was a delicate balance. The detail is what makes this film special. We even have love stories of people who survived and were reunited. There are important, moving details among horrible traumatic memories.

Jewcy: Ed, the sight of you wearing your uniform from the concentration camp and a tallit in the film is extremely powerful. Can you talk about what motivated you to do this?

Mosberg: Before the war, I had my whole family, and then everybody was murdered. This is what motivated me to do everything. My wife can’t talk about the war and what she lost because she was ashamed that she survived. Many tried to cover or eliminate the numbers on their arms. I was never ashamed. It is my duty to tell the world and show them what happened. I was wearing that tallit in Birkenau when I donated a Torah to the Israeli army. This was the end of the line of the railroad tracks: whoever came in there didn’t leave. Soldiers were saluting my wife at that time, and it was very powerful.

Jewcy: Ed, I read that you donated a Torah to Steven Spielberg’s synagogue. Can you tell me about some of the philanthropic work that you can do?

Mosberg: I’ve rescued about twenty Torahs from the Holocaust. I make them kosher, and then donate them. My mother was a religious woman – I think she would be very proud of it. I donate to Yad Vashem, to the Shoah Foundation, to rabbinical schools. Anyone who needs, I give to them, especially places where the Holocaust is involved. It’s very important that they teach people what can happen. When the camps were liberated in May 1945, Americans didn’t let them out from the camps because they were afraid that they would kill the Germans. When Patton was in charge of the camps, he said, “I cannot give to the Jews better food than other prisoners they will say I am discriminating. They want to go to Palestine, and English don’t want to let them in.”

If you were not there, you don’t know what it was. This was a terrible life. In October 1943, a group of rabbis came to talk to President Roosevelt to get him to bomb railroad tracks leading to the camps but he wouldn’t meet with them. If he had, maybe my family would be alive today.

Jewcy: What stands out to you most from your experiences?

Mosberg: When they liquidated the ghetto, I was there. I saw a baby taken from his mother and shot. Parents put a child in a knapsack and then the Germans shot into the knapsack. They made sick people run across to the other side or be shot. It was like a game for the Germans. Mauthausen was the worst concentration camp. There were 186 steps we had to walk on from morning to night, and whoever fell behind or couldn’t do it was punished horribly. They were burning and shooting those people. The smell never left me. I always smelled this. I can never forget this.

Jewcy: What lessons do you think today’s generation can learn from the Holocaust?

Mosberg: We should not forget and not forgive. We have no right to forgive! Only the dead can forgive. As long as I love this is my duty and obligation to go and talk and talk until the last day of my life. Whenever I talk, they should listen and hear it. There are plenty of deniers. If you didn’t live through this, you can’t understand.

Destination Unknown opens in New York and Los Angeles on November 10, and November 15 in Bangor.

Image: Ed Mosberg in Destination Unknown.

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Presented at Lincoln Center each year, the New York Film Festival, now in its 55th year, is always Jewish experience. For example, last year, the festival presented documentary The Settlers, an incisive look into one of Israel’s most contentious issues.

This year’s most Jewish content comes in the Special Events section of the festival. This weekend is the screening of  Claude Lanzmann’s Four Sisters. Lanzmann, now 91, is a French filmmaker most well-known for his epic and important documentary Shoah, which was released on PBS in 1987 and runs over nine hours. Rather than recreate history with a fictional narrative or attempt to recreate the lives of the survivors he interviews, Lanzmann’s style has always been to let them speak for themselves. Their stories are immensely powerful (understandably), and now Lanzmann returns with the presentation of four new interviews completed decades earlier— complementary pieces to Shoah.

The notion that there can never be too many Holocaust stories has never felt truer than in Four Sisters: The Hippocratic Oath, the only one of the four films screened for press ahead of the public showing of the series. Viewers who expect anything other than a straightforward question-and-answer session will be disappointed: this is simply a filmed interview between Lanzmann and survivor Ruth Elias. Yet, it’s much, much more than that. Ruth, who was born in Czechoslovakia in 1922, lived with her family for several years at the start of the Holocaust before being sent to Theresienstadt, and later Auschwitz.

What distinguishes Ruth’s story – though each person’s experience during the Holocaust was horrifying and needs not be qualified by a standout event – is that she interacted closely with Josef Mengele, who conducted experiments on her after she gave birth to a baby. It is not easy to hear Ruth tell this tale. Ruth projects a quiet confidence, speaking in English throughout the interview and eloquently recalling the horrors she suffered during that time. She also shares positive memories of her childhood and, most stirringly, of the friendship she has made with the woman she now considers her mother, a doctor in the camp whose courageous act gives the film its title.

With many new films using cutting-edge styles and clever techniques to share their truths, it proves surprisingly rewarding to see this very matter-of-fact, simple film, which also appears grainy (this interview was conducted in the 1970s) and is not always easy to understand. Sitting near her, Lanzmann appears occasionally as he asks a question or follows up on something she has said, listening attentively just like the audience. At no point does he interject or try to prompt her to dig deeper on a given subject; this is her story and all he desires to do is get her to share it. He even sits by as she plays her piano accordion with an impressive passion, recalling songs in Czech and Hebrew from her childhood.

Ruth’s resilience shows in her survival of the Holocaust and her building of a new life in Israel. The other three films in this series, which showcase women from four different areas of Eastern Europe, are sure to be just as powerful. This is documentary filmmaking at its barest and purest, and this feels even more relevant now as survivors are getting older and Holocaust stories are becoming part of the past.

Find out more about Claude Lanzmann’s Four Sisters, which screen from Saturday to Tuesday, October 7 to 10, on the New York Film Festival website.

Photo from Four Sisters: The Hippocratic Oath.

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In fact, you could spend your whole life on Holocaust music; there are ongoing projects to collect and preserve music written during the War, as well as by those who perished in it. And not all of it is so obscure; there’s famous works of art produced in camps and amongst resistance groups. Today, we’re just curating a short list of five Jewish men who contributed to music culture before the War:

Miklós Vig was a Hungarian singer, actor, and comedian, best known as a cabaret performer. You can hear him sing on this track:

Leon Jessel was a German operetta composer who enjoyed great success in his lifetime, and at least one piece of his is still often heard today. Jessel was a convert to Christianity, but he still remains on the long list of Jews who’ve created Christmas music— if his “Parade of the Tin Soldiers” is familiar, it may be because the Rockettes use it in their Christmas Spectacular:

Szymon Kataszek was a popular Polish musician best known for the club and jazz scene, but he also wrote for film, including this waltz:

Józef Koffler was a Polish composer and music academic who was prolific in his lifetime and has an enduring legacy. This piece is one of his earliest works we still have:

Jakub Kagan was, like others on this list, a Polish-Jewish musician known for his work with jazz bands. This tango (often performed with rather risqué lyrics), was arguably his biggest hit:

Image of “Złota Pantera” (“The Golden Panther”) via YouTube. 

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Serena Dykman is a granddaughter of survivors. She has directed, and appears in, Nana: A Transgenerational Documentary on Tolerance. This groundbreaking film tells the story of her grandmother, Auschwitz survivor Maryla Michalowski-Dyamant, and the journey of her mother, Alice, and herself to come to terms with their past. If you believe that you have seen every statement of resilience and every vision of horror eloquently related, you will find a renewed and different connection to the legacy of the Shoah after you see this film.

Jewcy: How did you conceive of this project, of presenting the experience of your grandmother, who had died when you were eleven years old, to a new generation?

Dykman:  It happened quickly.  I always knew that my grandmother was a survivor. I was completely aware, but I did not understand what that meant.  I am from Paris and Brussels.  I went to Brussels the day of the attack at the Jewish Museum; the next time I traveled to Europe was after the attacks on Charlie Hébdo and the kosher supermarket.  I had been traveling with the memoir my grandmother had written, but I had not opened the book.  When I came back to New York, I realized what she had stood for.  Saddened that she was not here to tell her story, I realized that her message of tolerance and hope needed to be heard by a new generation.

In my last semester at NYU I took a documentary film class.  Three weeks after the course I was filming on location at Auschwitz.  If I had thought carefully, I would not have had the courage to go through with it. I retraced my grandmother’s memories, reading aloud while physically retracing her steps.  Back in NY, many people who had heard about the project sent me archival footage, over 100 hours, including interviews with my grandmother. Then the film started taking a different shape.  I discovered my grandmother more in the editing room than I had in her memoir.

Jewcy:  Some explorations of the lives of survivors, their children, and grandchildren, report the continuation of unspoken trauma, even dysfunction, in these families.  Your film is centered in the strong bond between mother and daughter.  How did your relationship with your mother inform your vision in this film?

Dykman: I have always been close to my mother.  It all came together; I began to realize, to learn, “this is why she reacts this way.”   I finally understood how heavy the weight of the heritage has been for her entire life.  My grandmother was outspoken. As a child, when my mother asked her mother, “where are your parents?” the response she received was that they had been gassed by the Nazis.  The second generation had to suffer for what their parents suffered. They had the responsibility to pass on their parents’ survival story.  It was hard because they were so close. As a member of the third generation, I was close, but not so close that the process would kill me.

Jewcy: Your grandmother’s personality is strong, ironic, proud.  In footage of her interviews by those learning about the Shoah, she seems at times surprised by their naivité. In response to the question, “Why did Hitler choose to persecute the Jews?” she answers “I don’t know. Hitler didn’t confide in me.”

Dykman:  My grandmother was changed by the war, but not completely.  She had an incredible sense of humor. People who see this ask if she was like that before the war.  Her memoir reveals this characteristic in her childhood and teenage years.  After the war she met and married my grandfather, a non-Jewish Pole. She was not, she believed a “regular person.” She educated herself after the war. She studied the Bible and wanted to understand society and human intolerance.   She had been raised in a liberal setting and was not religious.  Speaking for myself, my Jewish identity is more cultural than religious.  People would sometimes ask my grandmother if she believed in God.  She would answer, “After what I just told you, do you think I believe in God?  

Jewcy: Your grandmother relates several instances of the Nazis’ sadistic use of language and of the attempt of your grandmother to subvert this torture.  In one anecdote, she describes hauling rocks as part of her slave labor in the camp.  A Nazi guard repeatedly asks her what she is carrying; every time she answers, “a rock” he threatens her, finally telling her it is not a rock, but a stone. How does your film try to recover language from this lethal assault?

Dykman:  Reading aloud is what started the whole film.  My grandmother had a distinct way of phrasing things. French was not her first language; her syntax was unusual.  Her style was to never complain.  Rather, she would act out what she was saying, but not in a theatrical way.  She speaks as if the story takes place in the present and acts out dialogue.  People who refer to the Holocaust as something that happened seventy years ago hear her speak and learn of its relevance today.

Jewcy: How did recent terrorist attacks in Europe become a framework for your film?

Dykman:  My perspective changed while making the film.  I made the film after witnessing the attacks in Paris and Brussels.  The first screening was after the subsequent airport attacks in Brussels.  What had happened to the Jewish people was also happening to others, and my grandmother’s call for tolerance needed to be timeless. Rather than add references to more specific acts of terror, I wanted to film to be timeless, and to exclude no one. I worked with an amazing editor who understood the framework of the film.

Jewcy:  As your mother states with conviction in one of your conversations about her struggle as a child of survivors, “Long live life. Long live Nana.”

Nana: A Transgenerational Documentary on Tolerance premieres on November 6 (Maryla’s Birthday), at the St. Louis International Film Festival.

Image from Nana.

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The People vs. Fritz Bauer (awkwardly similar in title to The People V. O.J. Simpson, but commonalities end there), is a bit of a misnomer since Fritz Bauer is not the one on trial. The famed German attorney general later went on to orchestrate the Auschwitz trials in the 1960s, but this story takes place in 1957 when he receives word that Adolf Eichmann is hiding out in Argentina. His enthusiasm to catch Eichmann and put him in trial in Germany is not matched by those around him, particularly a number of high-ranking officials who have a vested stake in ensuring that the war criminal does not name names.

It seems that films about the way that non-Jewish Europeans acted during and after the Holocaust are almost as prominent as those set during the Holocaust. Sure, Schindler’s List and The Pianist are the ones that went on to win Oscars, but there’s something to be said for reflection and for showcasing the way that the mindset of the times is hard to overcome. The Polish film Aftermath, released in the United States in November 2013, told one such story, of two brothers targeted for dredging up their hometown’s vicious role in the murder of its Jewish population. The French film The Round-Up, starring Jewish actress Mélanie Laurent, spotlighted the eagerness with which the French authorities rid themselves of their unwanted Jews, with little prompting necessary from the conquering Nazi forces.

The anti-Semitism of The People vs. Fritz Bauer is not nearly as overt. Bauer, who was born in Germany and returned from Sweden after the Holocaust, was Jewish, and he is notably the only Jew in such a position of civil service when the film begins. He is adored by many and has friends, but he also knows that there are those within the government and judicial system with Nazi leanings who will stop at nothing to make sure that their complicity and guilt is not brought to light. Bauer enlists Karl Angermann (an idealistic young prosecutor, a fictional composite of those dedicated to Bauer’s cause,) as his ally, fully aware that he can trust no one else.

History knows that Eichmann was ultimately put on trial in Israel and hanged for his crimes. This film doesn’t offer too much suspense in its insular universe in terms of how events will play out, but it does paint a harrowing picture of the struggle for change in postwar Germany. Bauer knows that contacting Mossad for help in tracking down Eichmann may be considered treason, but worse still, Mossad is uninterested at first, telling him that they need more solid proof to go after this lead. Bauer wants Eichmann brought to justice, but in doing so he also wants to put Germany as a whole on trial, a goal that seems unachievable given the many obstacles in his way.

This portrait of the 1950s bears some resemblance to a recent Oscar-winning film, The Imitation Game. Though the plot primarily involves Europe and the Nazis, the true villain is the backwards nature of laws and society at the time. A conniving enemy of Bauer’s mentions early on that they have a dossier on the Jewish civil servant which includes multiple arrests for male prostitution. As if being Jewish wasn’t enough of a crime, charges of homosexuality could really destroy a man. The hope for contemporary audiences would be that widely-supported homophobia and anti-Semitism are both things of the past, though recent world events have shown that it’s hardly the case.

The People vs. Fritz Bauer won big at the German Film Awards, scoring trophies for Outstanding Feature Film as well as for director Lars Kraume, supporting actor Ronald Zehrfeld, who plays Angermann, and its screenplay. Don’t expect this film to take home any Oscars – it’s a decent drama but not in the same category as recent German Oscar nominees like The Lives of Others or The White Ribbon, both of which also addressed lingering suppression after World War II in Germany. This is an important story but doesn’t even feel like the most interesting part of its protagonist’s life, in which, at the Frankfurt Auschwitz trials, he later finally had the chance to put the nation of Germany of trial.

The People vs. Fritz Bauer opens in American theaters on August 19.

Image: Still from The People vs. Fritz Bauer

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‘What is this that God hath done unto us?’—Genesis 42:28

It is well known within the Marvel comics universe that Magneto is Jewish. While hinted at vaguely since his inception, Magneto “came out” of the shul in the 80’s, and his Jewry has been, if not forefront and center, then at least a constant undertone to his character ever since. Indeed, much of Magneto’s hatred and mistrust of humanity could—and has been—traced to the loss of his family as a child at the hands of the Third Reich. Numerous references in the comics—including a self-titled standalone run focused on Magneto’s bildungsroman in Hitler’s Germany—make sure that readers don’t forget this central aspect of the sometimes villain/sometimes anti-hero’s backstory.

Even the movie trilogies (both original and new) make a point of mentioning Magneto’s heritage (though not nearly well enough), perhaps due in part to the Jewishness of Bryan Singer, who has been involved in all six films, directing four of them. What seemingly appears as a victory of ethno-religious diversity, upon further examination, begs the question: how does Marvel, and pop culture at large, view the Jew?

Due to their wild—if somewhat varied—success, the portrayal of Magneto by the movie franchise is the image most X-Men fans have of the “master of magnetism.” A sufferer of loss, Magneto is bent on assuring the safety and supremacy of mutantkind, led by his Brotherhood, no matter the cost, even at the expense of the lives of humans and mutants alike. His ethnocentric militarism, perhaps not dissimilar to the Israelites’ tribal conquest of the Promised Land, acts as a foil to his rival and (former) best friend Charles Xavier’s pacifism and Christ-like love and hope in humanity. This creates a dichotomous narrative wherein Christian coding exemplifies and equates compassion and pacifism with Christ, while Jews are maligned by (Christian) interpretations of God in the Old Testament as a vengeful, distant force. It excludes a whole realm of pathos from the Jewish psychology and enforces a negative, inherently anti-Semitic association between Jews and cruelty.

Evidence of this can be seen in Magneto’s storyline, across which a Moses metaphor, with a little stretching, can be neatly laid: a common man turned leader, promising to free mutants from the bondage and tyranny of humankind, who leads his followers through multiple bloody conflicts until they reach their Israel: the island sanctuary of Genosha. Though sometimes convinced to work alongside the X-Men for the greater good, Magneto remains—at least in the movies—opposed to and highly skeptical of Xavier’s philosophy, mainly due to his willingness to harm humans in his quest for liberation. This Jewish reading of Magneto, however, is a purely extrinsic viewpoint, which the movies do not at all portray or promote. Instead, Marvel movies see the Jew as one thing only: one who suffers.

The most striking reference to Magneto’s Jewishness, if due not to its gravitas then to its frequency, is the somewhat hackneyed “Holocaust Survivor” trope, which both movie trilogies embrace in nearly identical scenes. Magneto, a young boy, is torn from the arms of his mother at the gates of Auschwitz (beneath the rain, of course), and while screaming and reaching back for her, his burgeoning powers twist and warp the barbed-wire fence that now separates them. His survivorhood is referenced later, either through pointed language or shots of tattooed numbers on his forearm, to ensure the viewer does not forget that Magneto lived through the Holocaust.

Any reference to Magneto’s Jewishness or Judaism (save for a few brief frames of a Chanukah flashback) are nonexistent. Though more attention has been paid to Magneto’s heritage within the comics, this coverage has been inconsistent, with scattered examples spread across decades and multiple creative teams. The references are there, but only for those willing to search.

Now, this distortion for one of Magneto’s primary aspects could be forgiven, seeing as X-Men is not a self-designated Jewish comic (despite the Jewishness of its two creators), except for the fact that this excessive hearkening to Magneto’s survival of the Shoah reinforces this idea that a Jew can be reduced to an overplayed image of an emaciated victim in striped pajamas. What it does is create a narrative of victimhood, through which, and only through which, a character’s Jewish identity is given voice. This is not to suggest that audiences need a flashback of Magneto studying Torah (though what a delight that would be), but what is required is nuance when it comes to the portrayal of Jews as complex, individual characters and not simply emotional clichés used to prop up or promote some tired understanding of an entire people as victims.

What it ultimately boils down to is (mis)representation. Dissenters are wont to point out that little if any mention is ever made of the Christian-hood of any of the other X-Men, and while this is true, by dint of our existence in a Christian centric society (within which the X-Men also exist) it is assumed that unless explicitly stated otherwise, all characters are Christian (or straight, etc.). Pointing out Magneto’s heritage matters because his is a background that so often goes unnoticed and unrepresented in mainstream media, but what matters more is how it’s represented. In both of his movie iterations, Nightcrawler’s Catholicism is subtly stated by brief scenes showing him praying, clutching a rosary, or making the sign of the cross. When confronted with overwhelming odds, his religion acts as succor for his soul, a shelter and support, all without being heavy handed.

The sole instance of Magneto speaking to God comes as an anguished crying out as he clutches the dead bodies of his recently murdered wife and child. Though this remains within the vein of traditional Judaism, where questioning God is not only common but oftentimes encouraged, the intent of the scene is most likely not to portray Magneto as a man succumbing to the pressures of the world while wondering aloud why the Almighty would burden him with these hardships. Rather, it only adds flare to the anguish of an already tortured man. Magneto does not overcome, he suffers.

Were this only an instance of poor or unimaginative character development, it would be bad enough, but the insidious truth of the matter is that Magneto is a snapshot of how pop media views the Jew. While there are certainly exceptions that prove the rule, for the most part, Jews are seen as two-dimensional caricatures, only interesting as victims to be saved or avenged. Think of the Jewish children in Au revoir, les enfants, whose impetus in the film is to be befriended by Catholics and yet still carted off to the concentration camps. Or the Bear Jew in Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds, who, by dint of his ability to actually fight back, must surely be a Golem, a construct of Jewish folklore. But Jews are more than victims and our stories more varied and complex than the narratives of suffering others wish to place upon us. Representation matters to be sure, but how we are represented matters just as much. A cast filled with stereotypes accomplishes little and harms more than it helps.

It’s time Marvel embraces the Jewish heritage of its characters and realizes that a Jew can do more than survive Auschwitz.

Alex Franco is a Georgia-born writer currently geeking out in Paris.

Read also: Hey, Marvel, Where Are Your Jews?

How Superman Stopped Being Jewish, And Why He’s Coming Back

Images: David Yardin and John Byrne for Marvel comics and via Wikimedia

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Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Memorial Day, is today, though it’s actually not the only one each year. January 27th is for all the victims of the War, including the Rroma, the disabled, and other victims of Nazi atrocities. The one we observe this month is an internal affair, Jews mourning our own dead.

And every single year, on all of these dates, I hear people scoffing at these days, calling the Holocaust a “genocide of white people.” They mean that with racially-motivated atrocities occurring in the world today, why pay attention to one that occurred against a group they think of as white? They see it as a zero-sum game: Commemorate the Shoah, bury the Rwandan genocide.

Fake progressives use days like Yom HaShoah as proof that if you want attention for your group’s tragedy, it sure helps to be white. Seeing Jews as white in America today gives them ammunition to minimize the Holocaust.

Even if the Holocaust were a genocide against “white people,” they’re making it sound like that makes the deliberate eradication of an entire group of people less heinous. If I had to hazard a guess, they probably think this is a clever thing to say due to their inaccurate and myopic view of race relations more than half a century and an entire ocean removed from the event in question.

The people saying this invariably tend to see themselves as leftist, activist, justice-oriented, and more than willing to challenge established norms. They see themselves as righting historical and current injustices, and challenging institutions and narratives that unfairly privilege some groups over others. They are, in short, the Good Guys.

Except, of course, they aren’t. Not that being leftist, activist, or challenging norms is a bad thing; I consider it a very good thing. But as Jews are all too aware, the Left and the Right meet at Jew-Hate Junction, and anti-Semitism as the socialism of fools is all too prevalent. Understanding that white people are not subject to any sort of institutionalized discrimination because of their whiteness is an important thing to remember and to challenge— that also goes for us Jews who are white or white-passing in varying degrees. However, that doesn’t somehow mean that it’s a privilege to have experienced a genocide.

The notion that the Holocaust and its memory should intentionally be diminished because “Jews are white now” is not just insulting, it’s downright dangerous. The notion that other genocides don’t get attention because “we only pay attention to the Holocaust because they’re Jews” is a notion that ties directly back to noxious libels about insidious Jewish strangleholds on the media and society.

The notion that this was a “white genocide” deliberately ignores how the Holocaust was entirely predicated on white supremacism — no Jew, no matter how pale, had any sort of white privilege at the time, and millions of us died for it. That some Jews (not all!) have some access to the benefits of whiteness in some parts of the world today (the USA is not the entire world!) doesn’t make all Jews of all colours retroactively privileged, much less during a genocide.

Ultimately, this type of narrative serves to not only blame Jews for being subject to one of the worst of all crimes, it also serves to label us privileged for it.

Make no mistake: this is anti-Semitism. And anyone who utters such a thing, who types it out and writes a screed defending it online, is a bigot who is all too happy to harness fancy sociology terms in order to justify the same impulses that ultimately led to the deaths of over a third of our entire global population.

B. Lana Guggenheim is a writer on politics, anti-Semitism, and the utter misery of living a late capitalist existence.

Image credit: A Nazi chart explaining racial policy, via Wikimedia

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