I recall it bothering me slightly at the time because I was only aware of comics Magneto as Roma (didn’t really follow him closely, so apparently missed the retcon) and I thought the movie had made him Jewish out of laziness, as in everyone knows the Jews were victims, no one remembers the Roma, so let’s just change Magneto.
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Magneto never said, “As you know, Charles, I am a Jewish person,” but there was a scene where they were having a conversation in their street clothes and he was wearing an outfit typical of Orthodox Jews in New York
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Except 1. Killmonger was never remotely the sole Marvel representative of someone traumatized by anti-Black racist oppression. 2. Magneto was not someone fighting back against Nazi oppression. He was someone who already had backstory of threatening to nuke the world (in his first outing), subjecting people to experimentation (the Savage Land mutates), etc., and just generally being a complete, unapologetic mutant supremacist up until Claremont’s re-aging of him in the late 1970s.
Google the Rivka Jacobs 1998 “Magneto is Jewish” FAQ pointing out many, many indications by then in the writing that Magneto was Jewish.
That some schools may have such works in their curricula does not mean that all do, nor that all kids pay much attention to it. A family member of mine, after switching from teaching elementary school to (public) high school about ten years ago, was immediately horrified by the level of ignorance in the high school students (even upper grades) she dealt with regarding the Holocaust (aside from something to make jokes about).
And I have frequently encountered adults who know almost nothing about the Holocaust beyond the barest outline, and quite a few times I have found myself arguing with people over their denialism of even the basic facts.
Google “Survey finds ‘shocking’ lack of Holocaust knowledge among millennials and Gen Z” (NBC News Sept. 16, 2020, 3:28 AM EDT). “Sixty-three percent of those surveyed did not know that 6 million Jews were murdered in the Holocaust, and over half of those thought the death toll was fewer than 2 million.” Do you have a glib Thor meme for that, too?
By the way, since you mention it, “Boy in the Striped Pajamas” has serious flaws, as noted by a number of Holocaust historians. E.g. kids arriving in Auschwitz not old enough to be used for labor were generally among those sent straight to the gas chambers (some were instead sent to Mengele for experimentation). It also credits the pretense that German public had little idea what was going on, a comforting polite fiction of the post-War years. (See “The Boy in the Striped Pajamas : A Failed Holocaust Fable” By Richard Schickel, TIME, Friday, Nov. 07, 2008; and “The Problem with ‘The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas’”, Hannah May Randall, The Holocaust Exhibition & Learning Centre.)
Editing to add on, since I’m limited as a new user from replying individually to further posts:
As for “And yes, Primo Levi is ALWAYS relevant when discussing Holocaust education and understanding.” Sure, if you’re actually going to use it for understanding. You instead cited him in the post to which I replied merely to point out kapos existed, something I’m already well aware of.
As for Claremont being Jewish, I already addressed that in my initial post when I mentioned his background. I don’t think it was badly intentioned, but something that isn’t badly intentioned can still be a bad idea, and can be subject to criticism, even if it was creatively inspired by their own background.
Also, I’m not claiming you as my anything, I’m just asking you not to put down the feelings of others (e.g., in my case, the grandson of two survivors who had much of their immediate families wiped out) regarding their own historical trauma as “disingenuous pearl clutching BS” just as you wouldn’t want your own (valid) feelings about your own historical trauma dismissed as “disingenuous pearl clutching BS”.
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We have glib memes for almost everything.
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So why are you dismissing Claremont’s? Seems to me, you think that some people’s traumas are more valid than others.
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Characters are retconned and rewritten to give them more complex and nuanced backstories all the time.
One of the reasons Chris Claremont was so successful at revitalizing the X-Men franchise was because he approached the job as a method actor, developing the characters by examining their motivations. Two-dimensional villains who are evil for the sake of being evil are freaking boring.
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I’m not saying anyone’s traumas are “more valid than others”. I have a right to think another Jewish person’s creative decision was an unwise one. (I can think of worse invocations of the Holocaust by fellow Jews that I suspect you’d even agree with me on.) I didn’t even initially see this it this way myself, when I started on X-Men in the early '90s, but another Jewish person bitterly complained about this to me, and the more I thought about (I had previously just blindly accepted everything X-Men as awesome, aside from starting to feel around the time of Onslaught that certain story ideas felt particularly unconvincing) the more it bothered me as well.
Yes, and the comics generally benefited from his approach. There are multiple ways to do that for a character, and there are perils in precisely how you use history to flesh them out. Sometimes it’s clumsy, and that can matter.
And people have the right to push back against that…
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I’ll bet that Dr Doofenshmirtz takes the cake for the most complex set of backstories of any villain to explain his motivations.
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What if I’ve already peaked?
It’s all downhill from here…
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What’s the practical difference between a racist who’s merely an ass, and a racist who thinks he can defend his racism by quoting Cicero?
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Everyone is limited to a maximum of two consecutive posts in a topic
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I do my commuting/shopping etc. by bike.
This always sounds like good news to me “and the wind, it’s going to be at my back right”. Or as they used to say, may the road rise up to meet you.
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