Superman is Jewish? The intersection of history, religion, and popular culture in comics

I have blogged previously about Art Spiegelman’s Maus.  The books were an eye opener for me, seeing the powerful emotions, a storyline that personalizes history while not minimizing it, and a format that invites in reluctant readers.  Graphic novels (books in comic book format, with illustrations, and often dealing with topics that align more with adult themes) are a great entry point for both strong readers and reluctant readers.  The art form of comics allows two media to be conjoined and to deepen the experience of the audience.  Comic books have traditionally been in the realm of pre-teen and teenage boys.  The simplicity of the illustration can fool many in to believing that there is little worth between the covers.  Surprisingly - thankfully - there is so much more going on inside of these books.  Seemingly because of their innocuous nature, they are able to convey adult themes, open doors to history, and deal with current events in a way that can be both profound and easily overlooked at the same time.

 

In 1941, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon created the character Captain America.  On the cover, Cap has infiltrated a Nazi bunker, and is punching Adolf Hitler.  A great image from today’s standard, and nothing less than we would expect from the stories we are taught in our textbooks.  But, the comic came out in March 1941, before the US was committed to the war.  The war was "over there," and Americans wanted nothing to do with it.  Kirby and Simon were young Jewish artists and decided to turn current events into their story.  Their work did not start the war, or increase patriotism.  It took current events and pushed them to the forefront.  It demanded attention and erased ignorance.  It piqued interest and awoke a younger generation.  (Very much in the same vein as Comedy Central’s Daily Show and Colbert Report, today.)

The Holocaust would come up again in popular culture in the 1950s.  Several different stories would deal with the history in different ways.  Stories would continue, ideas would be shared.  And in the 1960s, Stan Lee would create the story of the X-Men, a group of humans that are different, and therefore feared.  I began reading the series in the 1980s, and was immediately drawn to the storyline of exclusion.  While not overtly mentioning antisemitism, it would be hard to deny, even as a boy, the historical basis.  Seeing America’s transformations throughout the 90s - the cultural acceptance of interracial dating, homosexuality, and other minority communities - the X-Men storylines reflected society, and built empathy. 

At some point, I stumbled upon the graphic novel, X-Men:  God Loves, Man Kills.  My eyes were opened.  A part of the story deals with violence aimed at those considered different, and therefore, considered unworthy of life by some (an arching theme in the X-Men universe).  Two young children are hung from a swing set.  They are found by the arch-enemy Magneto (created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, both Jews).  This sets up the backstory.  Magneto will become a complex character that several writers will work to flush out.  Ultimately, in Magneto: Testament, published in 2008, we discover that Magneto is raised Jewish in a German home. His family flees the Nazis and are caught in Poland.  Long story short, his past helps shape his views, and quite possibly reflects the nature of the creators. Magneto’s complexity will be reflected in the movie series, but will not be as effective at generating the empathy and complexity of the character.  The films, though, do provide a decent entry in to the comic world. 

Most recently, Disney has paired up with several creators to develop a film and online graphic novel set entitled, “They Spoke Up:  American Voices Against the Holocaust."  This is an interesting series, and I am just breaking in to it as I write this, but looks to be a promising resource.   I will blog about that in the coming weeks.  There are other great works available out there including a great story entitled 2nd Generation: Things I Never Told My Father, in graphic novel form, dealing with the complexity of the Holocaust that allows entry and absorption at multiple levels.  They just aren’t available in the United States. 

As I was researching for this post, I came across a recently published book (2012) entitled Superman is Jewish? that relates similarities in Jewish culture with the comic book storylines.  The author makes a wonderful comparison of the alien that would become Clark Kent being rocketed to safety by his parents before their destruction:  An interstellar “Kindertransport.”  Comic books are much more complex than we can even imagine. 

Sadly, there has been little new in the way of Holocaust graphic literature.  The stories of the 1950s provided shock and awe at a time when it was still fairly new in the cultural psyche.  The Holocaust is rarely invoked as a teaching tool in modern mainstream culture.  It has been moved to the shelf of distant history.  We must be careful to not lose the lessons learned in such a hard fashion.  We must follow the lead of Jack Kirby and Stan Lee, use the media of comics and graphic novels to shape the future generations in a less blunt fashion.  Truly, it is often those that need the lesson the most that will be most likely to pick up this form of literature.  Rather than just re-illustrating Anne Frank, let us seek to build on the exploration of humanity by find new avenues and new stories to tell in different formats. 

Making connections in an Olympic year

With the school year quickly approaching, I’m, as always, brainstorming how I will grab these history students’ attention at the beginning of the year.  Using the Olympics as a “hook” might be the perfect connection between past as present.  We can spend some time on the ancient games and culture as well as a few games as case studies.  With my high school students, the 1936 Nazi Olympics would be a great example of how politics drive the actions of a nation and effects the international community- something we will continually come back to over the course of the year.

If making this connection is something you’re interested in, there are some fabulous resources out there.  Most notably, there is an excellent exhibition on the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s website, titled “The Nazi Olympics: Berlin1936”.  This is something that is easily navigated by students. It is supported by a teacher’s guide, which holds valuable, well-written activities and discussion questions. (There is also this set of lesson plans developed by the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education to accompany the exhibition.)

Students might also be intrigued by the Jewish VirtualLibrary’s article “The Nazi Olympics”.  It lists out non-“Aryan” medalists in the games.  Students always are amused when they see examples of Hitler’s ideas on Aryan supremacy being nullified.

Every four years, we have the opportunity to watch the world unite for friendly competition.  I believe it is always great to remind our students what we learned from the past and have a frank discussion about what we can improve on today.

Have a great beginning to your school year!

Bystanders, Collaborators and Perpetrators

Recently at MCHE we went through some “refresher” training in a curriculum series titled Echoes and Reflections.  This is a really great resource for teachers, especially if you had a class or an entire unit designated to Holocaust studies.  But, I am not one of those lucky teachers.  In fact I teach US History, so I always have to find creative ways to work in Holocaust education into my classroom during our unit on WWII.  I’ve blogged aboutways to do this in earlier posts such as comparing and contrasting Jim Crow andNuremberg Laws.  I’ve used readings from the book Race and Membership inAmerican History:  The Eugenics Movement, which was created by Facing History and Ourselves to examine eugenics programs and racial misconceptions in both the US and Germany.     

The newest lesson I introduced this year was dealing with the terms:  bystanders, collaborators, and perpetrators.  I used a lesson from the Echoes and Reflections curriculum that has students define the terms and then apply them to a document.  The document is an official report discussing one particular Jewish transport.  In this lesson, I had students first define the terms bystander, collaborator, and perpetrator.  We discussed the definitions and came to a consensus on each definition.  Then they read the report and made a list of all people who were involved or aware of the transport.  We discussed that list as a class and then I asked students to label who was a bystander, collaborator, and perpetrator based on the definitions.  

We then went over the labels and it was really very interesting to see how the students came up with different labels for most of the people.  We then had a group discussion about these three terms and how you determine who should be held accountable and how. For example, we asked if the US was a bystander and if so what was our responsibility?   My students really wrestled with these questions and I think it helped, once again, to establish the complexity of the Holocaust in dealing with the subject of responsibility and accountability. 

Training on this curriculum is available through the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education in July - and all registered participants receive a free copy of the curriculum valued at $100. If you are not able to attend a training, you can still check a copy of the curriculum out of the MCHE Resource Center. 

Countries that Own Glass Houses Shouldn’t Throw Rocks

Having just finished the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and Dr.Will Meinecke’s book Nazi Ideology and the Holocaust (available for free download by clicking here), I was disturbed, but not surprised, by the Nazi’s plan for euthanasia and sterilization of the "undesirable" European population.

“From 1939 to 1945, an estimated 200,000 Germans deemed ‘unworthy of life’ were killed in the various ‘euthanasia’ programs.” These programs included Operation T-4 and Operation 14 f13. Specific groups were also targeted by the Nazis for sterilization, including the “Rhineland Bastards” or children of African soldiers and German women. The Gestapo actually set up Special Commission #3 and between 1935 to 1937, they found, identified, and sterilized (in secret) some 385 children of these mixed raced couples. In July of 1933, a law was passed by the Nazis called the “Law for the Prevention of Genetically Diseased Offspring."

If you were born with certain disorders that German scientists believed were inherited you were to be sterilized. These disorders included mental illness, feeblemindedness, serious physical abnormalities, seizures, blindness and deafness, alcoholism, and Huntington’s Chorea. The law was very specific about the possibility of passing on a congenital disease to an offspring. If there was a chance of this happening the state would have you sterilized. Period. After 1934, the Nazis sterilized between 300,000 to 400,000 disabled people and through this law they were also able to sterilize Roma or gypsies. Mind boggling numbers – yes? However, the Nazis were not the only society culpable of this practice. It was going on in America as well.

In the early 20^th century, some 15,000 people were sterilized in over three dozen states on the grounds of eugenics. In 1927, even the Supreme Court upheld the practice in the case of criminal punishment. But Americans were also sterilized for being poor, a prisoner, or feebleminded. Sound familiar? During the Depression over 30,000 were sterilized and most were in mental asylums or state institutions. The justification for this practice was the cost to taxpayers for institutional care. Remember the infamous propaganda poster? “This genetically ill person will cost our people's community 60,000 marks over his lifetime. Citizens, that is your money.” You probably noticed the word “marks” and figured this was German. But it could just have easily been posted on a street corner in Kansas or Missouri. That’s how widespread the practice of sterilization was in our country.

Sterilization ended in Germany when the Nazis were defeated in 1945 and throughout most of the world it began to disappear. So imagine my surprise and dismay when I woke up last week to my NPR news report at 6:00am and heard that North Carolina’s legislature had decided to compensate eugenics victims from their state. Unbelievably North Carolina continued sterilization until the mid-1970s. Some 7,600 men, women and children were seen by the state’s eugenics board and deemed unable to “improve the caliber of the population” or were seen as a welfare burden on the state. Sound familiar? One girl was sterilized at 14 after the birth of her only son. The board decided she was unfit for parenthood, because she was poor and smelled bad. Many of the North Carolinian victims had the procedure unknowingly and weren’t aware until they tried to have a child later in life. If you ever get a chance to see USHMM’s “Deadly Medicine” the end is very telling. Video clips show victims of Nazi sterilization who were having fertility tests for years before they told their doctors what camps they had been in and who had taken care of them. Only to find they were no longer able to have a child.

As a library media specialist in a middle school, I teach propaganda lessons with my 8^th grade students in the context of the Nazis and World War II. I added American propaganda this year as well to remind students of our county’s use of fear and euphemisms in persuading our citizens. However, next year when I teach the persuasive technique of “citing statistics” I will show the above information side by side so students can see the alarming parallels. Only in America, sterilization went on for another 30 years and paying the live victims $50,000 now as an apology won’t erase the crime committed on them.

Resources:

• Teaching Resources for eugenics and Deadly Medicine
• Jewish Virtual Library Resources on Euthanasia
  
• “Panel Recommends Paying Eugenics Victims $50,000,” Julie Rose, 10 Jan 2012.
• Excerpt from a 1942 biology text book in Germany discussing racial policy
• USHMM Other Victims booklet - The Handicapped
• Propaganda images promoting racial policy and euthanasia
• Race and Membership in American History: The Eugenics Movement