The CW is up to four shows that simultaneously take place in the DC comic book universe— that’s The Flash, Supergirl, Arrow, and Legends of Tomorrow. Tonight will begin their annual crossover, “Crisis on Earth X” as all four shows briefly share the same plot-line, full of wedding veils, one-liners, cheap leather and… alternate universe supervillain Nazis?

To no one’s surprise, the idea of our beloved heroes masquerading under swastika hoods has raised pulses online, although, naturally, one can predict that our beloved heroes will no doubt triumph in the end, pausing along the way to throw a few right crosses into a few Nazi faces. There are several reasons for the skepticism: some are simply tired of Nazis as plot devices; others find it disrespectful to portray Jewish-created icons as their fascist nemeses. Really, it boils down to an ongoing question over how to represent the Holocaust in fiction: is it sacred or is it profane?

This has been an artistic debate since the limping aftermath of World War II, when Crossfire, a deep-in-the-shadows film noir, and Gentlemen’s Agreement, a Very Important Picture, both tackling the specter of anti-Semitism, battled for top prize at the 1947 Academy Awards. (Spoiler: Gentleman’s Agreement won out.) If you ask the Academy voters, year after year, it seems the only way to score points is with Oscar bait—Schindler’s List, Life is Beautiful, The Pianist, The Reader, etc., etc. It would be cruel to lump them all in the same boat (I will, after all, never doubt the sincerity of Spielberg), but, after a while, you begin to grow cold in the sight of new and shamelessly manipulative emotional Holocaust porn. The same images, gray, ground-up, replayed until rote. The same heartstrings plucked like an out-of-tune fiddle. The same. The same. “Good” German as hero, Jew as object, maybe pummeled, maybe tortured, but always saved, and if not, well, haven’t we learned a lesson about humanity? The same.

But there has always been an alternative—alternate histories. Time and time again, artists have cracked at the skeleton of history to see if they could reset it on a different path. Jews are an introspective lot, so it follows they’ve tried their hands at similar diagnoses: what if Charles Lindbergh and his America Firsters had defeated FDR (Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America)? What if a Khazar army had existed in the corner of Hitler’s Europe (Emily Barton’s The Book of Esther)? What if Kafka had been saved by a golem hiding in Prague’s Old-New Synagogue (Curt Leviant’s Kafka’s Son)?

Some of these questions have happy answers, as in Quentin Tarantino’s revenge thriller-cum-spaghetti western Inglourious Basterds, which features (spoilers for many of these) Hitler and his cronies gun-blasted in the head. But Jews are a pessimistic lot, too, so often we’re left more uncertain than before (as when the Frozen Chosen of Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union find themselves once more homeless and booted from their Alaskan refuge). This may be because these grimmer alternate histories are not really asking what if the Nazis won or lost—that’s a decided point. Instead, the familiarity with the subject allows them a canvas on which to explore wider thoughts.

The Plot Against America, for instance, has renewed life in a world that may not have remembered America First is a tried and true (and failed) phrase. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Simone Zelitch’s more recent Judenstaat both grapple with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by transplanting it to different places and times—the first to an Alaskan territory full of black hatters and the second to a Cold War-inflected Germany, awarded to the survivors after the end of the war.

Both of these novels follow in Crossfire’s tonal footsteps of sculpting their alternative histories in a hardboiled Chandleresque mold (to suggest, perhaps, that you can create as many worlds as you want, but corruption is universal). This structure allows information to be doled out piecemeal and the façade of improvement exposed as just that—a façade. Perhaps the prime example of this sub-genre is Lavie Tidhar’s A Man Lies Dreaming, which takes both the World War II alternate history and crime fiction ideas to their electric conclusion by making his protagonist a London-based private eye named Wolf hired by a Jewish femme fatale to find her sister, only to reveal that Wolf is in fact Adolf Hitler in hiding, the German communists having won the election in this version of history. The premise seems preposterous and almost offensive, until Tidhar throws another wrench in the gears and introduces a second perspective—that of a former Yiddish pulp writer, Shomer, who is imprisoned in Auschwitz and dreaming of this whole other reality as an escape. Indeed, in the end, it seems what Tidhar is really exploring is not what ifs, but hows: how do we talk about the Holocaust?

Director Laszlo Nemes, discussing why he felt compelled to shoot Son of Saul in such an immediate style, said, “the Holocaust is becoming a sort of myth… some kind of fantasy world.” Son of Saul of course takes place in our world, but wholly and unabashedly rejects the period piece ghettoization of Holocaust films and turns it into a thriller. A way, Nemes feels, to keep the memory alive. The same could be said of these excursions to actual fantasy worlds.

Before World War II, Jewish comics creators were the first line of defense against American complacency. Supermen in spangled tights ‘kapowed’ and ‘bammed’ their way through failed diplomacy. The sacred meeting the profane. Now, again, when this generation is cottoning on to the underbelly of neo-Nazi movements in this country and elsewhere, it seems these icons are leading the fight. After all, how could Supergirl and the Flash ignore a world succumbed to evil, even if they were ignorant until now, even if it is not their own?

You can’t let the Holocaust grow stale. You can’t let it become period piece and period piece alone. The past has to stay present or else we’ve already damned the future. It won’t rest easy on some stomachs, but when is genocide supposed to?

Photo: Melissa Benoist as Overgirl. By Jack Rowand/The CW

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It’s a rare thing when a work of art makes me sit back and say, “Wow,” rarer still when it’s something Holocaust-related. The sheer volume of art that has been produced around the catastrophic events of WWII is overwhelming; but more than that, artists have a tendency to allow their emotions to rule unchecked, sure that the audience will forgive their indulgence; after all, it’s the Holocaust.

All this is to say that when Alexis Fishman’s Der Gelbe Stern (“The Yellow Star”) knocked me over sideways on Thursday afternoon at the New York Musical Theater Festival, I was as excited to be excited as I was charmed, thrilled, moved, and amused by her miraculous turn as Erika Stern, a fictional Weimar cabaret star performing for the last time in 1933 before a jealous, Nazi ex-lover shuts down her show. A mixture of original songs, stand-up comedy, and monologue, the show sparkles every bit as much as Fraulein Stern’s earrings under the spotlight.

For starters, Ms. Fishman, an Australian by birth, manages to convey the deep charisma crucial to pulling off her role as Berlin’s biggest cabaret star. She is laugh-out-loud funny with her Marlene Dietrich accent and her songs about the perfect boyfriend, Attila the Hun. She’s incredibly raunchy, too, in a way that conveys her delight with sex, rather than a two-dimensional performance of sexiness designed to appeal to the audience’s gaze. It’s a post-modern delight rather than a modernist one, but hey, I was into it! I only wished she had done something sexy with the Nazi flag; the forbiddenness of the swastika has, inadvertently, lent it an erotic quality that Fishman seems to know but not actualize. She is the person to do it.

There is real chemistry between Erika and her gay, closeted pianist, Otto, which makes for great fun. I was also reminded of the true pleasure one gets from watching a performer in a show they have themselves written; one feels the intelligence behind the work as a genuine part of the performance, rather than a performance of genuineness.

But the real brilliance of Der Gelbe Stern lies in Fishman’s masterful balancing of sentiment and irony. Just when you’re ready to relax into giggles, she elicits tears, and just when you’re ready to indulge those tears, she cracks the whip of her wit, as if to say, “Snap out of it!” It’s a truly masterful performance. Catch one of her two final shows on Monday, July 21. (Tickets here.)

Image credit: Hunter Canning

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Last month, Bob Dylan was in the news for a new interactive music video for “Like a Rolling Stone” (brought to you by Israeli director Vania Heymann). This month, he’s in the news for alleged racism. The Council of Croats in France has sued Dylan over a comment he made analogizing Croats to Nazis in a 2012 Rolling Stone interview with Mikal Gilmore.

“This country is just too fucked up about color. It’s a distraction. People at each other’s throats just because they are of a different color. It’s the height of insanity, and it will hold any nation back – or any neighborhood back. Or any anything back. Blacks know that some whites didn’t want to give up slavery – that if they had their way, they would still be under the yoke, and they can’t pretend they don’t know that. If you got a slave master or Klan in your blood, blacks can sense that. That stuff lingers to this day. Just like Jews can sense Nazi blood and the Serbs can sense Croatian blood.”

The Guardian reports that after the comments were made, many Croatian radio stations decided to stop playing Dylan’s songs.

According to CRICCF secretary general Vlatko Maric, Parisian courts have accepted to hear their case and asked Dylan to appear as part of the hearing. “[Dylan’s comments were] an incitement to hatred,” Marić said in a statement. Although France has strict hate speech laws, CRICCF stated that all they are seeking is an apology.

And, just a few weeks ago, Dylan was awarded France’s Legion of Honour. We’ll see what happens next.

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Cats are definitely the animal kingdom’s most photogenic species. There is something about kitties on film that melts our cold cynical hearts into pools of warm milk. Which is why I was surprised to find them frolicking with Nazis in this positively adorable war-time photo series. This Tumblr may just be the internet’s starkest juxtaposition of cute and sinister ever.

See for yourself:

Nazis With Cats [Tumblr]

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Banksy unveiled his latest today: a Nazi injected into an otherwise bucolic landscape painting, comprised of leaves, snowcapped mountains, and a shimmering lake.

Aptly titled, “The banality of the banality of evil,” Banksy explains on his site that he vandalized and then re-donated the painting to the Housing Works thrift store in Gramercy, with one not-so-subtle addition.

Banksy has been really pushing New York City’s envelope lately. Earlier this week, he posted a rejected op-ed that he had submitted to the New York Times, calling the new World Trade Center building an eyesore and a defeat to the terrorists of September 11:

It would be easy to view One World Trade Centre as a betrayal to everyone who lost their lives on September 11th, because it so clearly proclaims the terrorists won. Those 10 men have condemned us to live in a world more mediocre than the one they attacked, rather than be the catalyst for a dazzling new one.

When Hannah Arendt coined the term “the banality of evil” to describe the Eichmann trial for the New Yorker in 1963, it created quite the uproar. What do you think of Banksy’s appropriation of Arendt’s famous line? Has Banksy’s edgy, interactive street art gone too far by making light of genocide?

Here’s the trailer for Margarethe von Trotta’s “Hannah Arendt” in case you have no idea what the eff me and Banksy are talking about:

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Award ceremony acceptance speeches tend to be long and sanctimonious. But at the 2013 GQ Men of the Year Awards, comedian Russell Brand used his time to tell the audience about Hugo Boss’ shameful history selling uniforms to the Nazis. It wasn’t long before Brand was kicked out of the after party where he allegedly exchanged harsh words with GQ’s UK editor, the Daily Mail UK reports.

Shortly afterwards, Brand was kicked out by the magazine’s editor, Dylan Jones. According to the comedian’s Twitter feed, the two men exchanged angry words, with Jones saying, ‘What you did was very offensive to Hugo Boss.’ Brand replied, ‘What Hugo Boss did was very offensive to the Jews.’

Hugo Boss has faced muddled accusations of clothing the Nazis for a long time, but perhaps Brand’s entertaining allegations onstage at the high-profile award ceremony were deemed too much by the event’s coordinators. For the rest of the world, thank you, Brand, for making an otherwise dull event entertaining and informative for all.

(Photo by David M. Benett/Getty)

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• The Harvard basketball coach behind Linsanity? A Jewish kid from Scarsdale. [Tablet]

• H. Jon Benjamin returns as Archer tonight, proving yet again that neurosis and alcoholism are funniest when left in the hands of a Jew. [Slate]

• Jesus was Jewish??? [Huffington Post]

• Nazis still trying to steal Jewish artwork from beyond the grave. [Times of Israel]

• In other news, political women still subjected to games of hot-or-not. You stay classy, Germany. [Haaretz]

• Jon Stewart uses comedy against the NRA because logic and reason can’t seem to make a dent. [The Daily Show]

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• Jewish Deadheads: because of course. [JTA]

• Bob Dylan’s perplexing artwork. [NY Observer]

• David Mamet’s new play, The Anarchist, is closing after 17 performances. [Arts Beat]

• Sheldon Adelson says he doesn’t cry when he loses. [Daily Intel]

• Maccabi Tel Aviv captain Guy Pnini was suspended after calling a teammate a Nazi. [Reuters]

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• OMG. Bette Midler might appear on Glee—as Rachel Berry’s grandmother.

• Paul Shaffer says he might not always be the band leader on the Late Show with David Letterman.

• That famous Edvard Munch painting, ‘The Scream,’ about to be displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, has a Nazi-era history that’s not being disclosed by the museum, say descendents of the painting’s Jewish former owners.

• Someone bought the Tribeca townhouse Dominique Struss-Kahn was renting while on house arrest in New York. Hope there aren’t any ghosts of libertines past.

• Urban Outfitters is coming out with a Lisa Frank line. Suburban girls everywhere completely freak out.

• Mindy Meyer brought an elephant to her Long Island fundraiser—that 15 people attended.

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• True story: Visa applications to Kazakhstan have increased since Sacha Baron Cohen’s 2006 Borat film.

• Sarah Silverman talks about prepping for her nude scene with Michelle Williams in their new film Take This Waltz.

• Jewish food festivals in the South are growing in popularity, and drawing a lot of visitors after church.

• Watch the Mile End team eat (and drink) their way through Russ & Daughters and Sammy’s Roumanian—though we could have done without the music.

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