I don’t think Nick Spencer’s Captain America story is anti-semitic

cap-america-kill-self

So far, Nick Spencer’s Captain American run is not my favorite work of his – I don’t think it’s nearly as interesting as Superior Foes of Spider-Man. But I don’t see it as antisemitic.

(A quick recap for those of you who don’t follow comics controversies: Nick Spencer is the current writer of the Captain America comic book. He’s writing a story in which Captain America has had his memories altered by villain The Red Skull so that Cap now believes that he’s a loyal sleeper agent of a terrorist organization called Hydra. Hydra is not technically the same as the Nazis, but it’s often been associated with or allied with Nazis in the comics. Since Captain America was created by two Jewish cartoonists, Jack Kirby and Joe Simon, who showed Captain America punching out Hitler months before the US joined WW2, many readers have argued that to have Captain America become a Nazi is disrespectful to the creators, and some have argued that the plotline is anti-semitic. Longer summary here.)

To me, the first issue of Spencer’s CA is about how many heroic qualities – like making sacrifices for the greater good, making the tough calls, being steadfast, and idealism – can also be a part of evil. Given a different set of memories, the same qualities that make Steve Rogers so heroic can also make him a convincing villain.

The first issue’s compassionate depiction of the suicide bomber’s backstory also fits with this theme. (Nick Spencer certainly isn’t the first person to explore this theme, but that’s okay.)

I know other Jewish readers have found the story hurtful and even antisemitic. Speaking for myself, I didn’t have that reaction.

Pop culture has always explored fascism and evil. I can understand why this can be seen as trivializing historic monsters like the Nazis. But I see it as one of the major ways our culture talks to itself about the problem of evil. Spencer’s CA is part of that dialog. (At least, so far it is. It remains to be seen where the story is going).

Because Cap is the most idealistic major character in the Marvel universe, it makes sense to use him as a vehicle to explore issues of idealism and evil.

I do have criticisms of the story – perhaps not deliberately, it comes off as saying poverty causes terrorism. But it’s my understanding that research has shown that poverty and becoming a terrorist aren’t nearly as connected as many liberals believe.

I also have concerns about where the story is going – will the murder Cap committed at the end of issue one just be brushed off?

(And I know that many people have criticisms, not so much of the story itself, as of how the editors and writer have talked about the story, and reactions to the story, in public. It’s legitimate to criticize that, of course, but my interest is in the comic itself, which at least for me is separable from how Spencer and others have talked about it.)

Returning to Jewish fans who are offended by the story, if they say they’re offended, then they are offended. But I have concerns.

I’m not comfortable with the argument that this Cap plot is “spitting in the face” of Cap’s Jewish creators. Kirby himself did a story in which Cap was hypnotized and saluted Hitler (in the end, of course, Cap recovered). Kirby was a lifelong fan of melodrama and stories that painted with big strokes; saying that Kirby would have found this plot repugnant seems to be to be projection.

More importantly, I don’t accept Captain America as an emblem or representation of Judaism in comics. Because Cap is not Jewish. And Cap couldn’t have been Jewish, because antisemitism in publishing at the time Cap was created never would have permitted that. And if a Jewish Captain America had somehow been published, the public wouldn’t have embraced the character.

To me, that Captain America is a creation of an antisemitic system – one that never would have let Simon and Kirby create a Jewish hero – seriously undercuts his value as a symbol of anti-antisemitism.

I’m not saying only Jewish characters can be anti-antisemitic. I am saying that the fact that no major superheroes of Cap’s era were Jewish isn’t a strange coincidence. It’s a result of an anti-Semitic culture in which mainstream comics publishers didn’t publish Jewish heroes. (The Spirit was Jewish, but – like Dumbledore being gay – we only know that because Eisner mentioned it years later.)

Exploring the nature of evil – including of Nazism, or of pop culture stand-ins for Nazism – is a legitimate thing for popular art to do. That’s what this story (so far) is doing. It’s completely fair to criticize the story if you don’t like how it came out. But I think that some of the criticisms, in this case, have been over-the-top – i.e., suggesting that Nick Spencer is himself an antisemite, or telling people that no one should buy any Spencer comic, or even telling Spencer to kill himself. In some cases, a line has been crossed between criticizing the story, and trying to punish Nick Spencer.

Again, everyone’s got a right to their own interpretation. For me, I don’t see the story as an insult to Jewish readers or creators.

This entry posted in Anti-Semitism, Comics other than Hereville!. Bookmark the permalink. 

12 Responses to I don’t think Nick Spencer’s Captain America story is anti-semitic

  1. 1
    Mandolin says:

    1) I haven’t read it, so maybe I’d disagree if I did.

    2) I’m finding a worrying strain right now in some discourse about art that seems to suggest depiction of a bad thing is itself bad. The request for more lighthearted narratives I understand; the concept that it’s not okay to write in detail about X, y, z… no. Consciousness raising is a thing, and so is talking about experiences that are part of humanity. Including evil.

  2. 2
    pillsy says:

    Alongside this, I’m also finding it annoying that so much debate over various media–especially debate about whether the work in question “problematic”–immediately polarizes between, “Totally fine!” and, “Unforgivably regressive!”

    I have dark suspicions that it’s those two positions that are best able to draw clicks, fuel outrage, and spread via the now-classic viral mechanism of, “Hey, friend, someone wrote an awful thing on the Internet and now you just have to read it!”

  3. 3
    KellyK says:

    He’s writing a story in which Captain America has had his memories altered by villain The Red Skull so that Cap now believes that he’s a loyal sleeper agent of a terrorist organization called Hydra.

    In fairness to the folks who view it as anti-Semitic, that’s not how it was originally presented by the writer.

    Spencer, who wrote the comic, told Entertainment Weekly that there isn’t any trickery at play. That the Steve Rogers who utters “Hail Hydra” is the real Steve Rogers, not a clone or an otherwise “affected” version of the character. He said:

    Issue 2 will lay a lot of our cards on the table in terms of what the new status quo is, but the one thing we can say unequivocally is: This is not a clone, not an imposter, not mind control, not someone else acting through Steve. This really is Steve Rogers, Captain America himself.

    Or in the Time interview with a Marvel editor.

    What does this mean for the Marvel Universe?

    It means on the most fundamental level that the most trusted hero in the Marvel universe is now secretly a deep-cover Hydra operative, a fact that’s really only known to the readers and to him. That makes every interaction he has with anyone take on a second layer, a second meaning.

    The implanted memories put a whole different spin on it. I guess Spencer could argue that implanted memories aren’t mind *control* so much as *manipulation* but it’s a pretty flimsy distinction.

    I think having Captain America *actually have been a Hydra plant all along* would be disrespectful to the creators of the character, and that seems to be what a lot of people initially reacted to.

  4. 4
    Michael says:

    @KellyK- I think Spencer’s argument is that the Cube is actually changing reality retroactively, which is different from brainwashing.

  5. 5
    Jeremy Redlien says:

    Mandolin,

    I agree on the whole “Depicting bad thing, is itself bad.” There’s also the trend of “character says X, therefore the writer(s) must uncritically believe x” assumption people weirdly make. I’ve even come across examples of people applying the above to characters who are clearly villains, which is particularly… odd.

    Amp,
    Anyways, when it comes to Captain America, the above plot makes me think of Operation Paperclip, especially your analysis of how certain characteristics of Captain America could lead to fascism. I wonder if the writers were deliberately playing off of that history or not? (I haven’t read the comic so I can’t say) and the parallels are pretty broad, so it could just be coincidence.
    -Jeremy

  6. 6
    desipis says:

    Mandolin:

    I’m finding a worrying strain right now in some discourse about art that seems to suggest depiction of a bad thing is itself bad.

    It’s the natural conclusion of the simplistic, monkey-see-monkey-do style theories that are popular in pop-culture criticism these days. The theory is that people do bad things because they see doing bad things as the “norm”; people see it as the “norm” because they are repeatedly exposed, through popular media, to seeing people doing bad things. This makes media where people do bad things as “problematic” regardless of context or merits; any campaign to reduce the amount of bad things in society must push back against all examples of bad things in popular culture.

    Jeremy Redlien:

    There’s also the trend of “character says X, therefore the writer(s) must uncritically believe x” assumption people weirdly make.

    The above theory can be extended by the assertion that it ought to be obvious that depicting bad things in media, causes more bad things in society. Therefore anyone who depicts bad things in their stories must naturally support bad things in reality.

    pillsy:

    Alongside this, I’m also finding it annoying that so much debate over various media–especially debate about whether the work in question “problematic”–immediately polarizes between, “Totally fine!” and, “Unforgivably regressive!”

    This is what happens when people take terms that no-one wants to be associated with (such as “racist” or “sexist”) and construct extremely broad and flexibly definitions with which to justify applying them. It sets up a polarising tension between those who want their writing to have maximum effect, justifying their language as technically correct, and those who don’t want to be labelled in a way that implies gross moral turpitude, instead wanting language that reflects the complexity and nuance of the circumstances.

  7. 7
    Mandolin says:

    It’s the natural conclusion of the simplistic, monkey-see-monkey-do style theories that are popular in pop-culture criticism these days. The theory is that people do bad things because they see doing bad things as the “norm”; people see it as the “norm” because they are repeatedly exposed, through popular media, to seeing people doing bad things. This makes media where people do bad things as “problematic” regardless of context or merits; any campaign to reduce the amount of bad things in society must push back against all examples of bad things in popular culture.

    This strain of criticism has been popular since I was born. I just used to see it associated more with critiques from the right (video games will cause everyone to kill everyone else) than from the left. That’s just historical coincidence though–historically, both the right and left have been guilty of it.

    So I suppose if I frame it in *that* historical context, then the shift isn’t worrying. If I frame it in the context of how this particular facet of the argument (about fictional depictions) has evolved over the last 15 years, then, well, I thought this was an argument leftists hashed out in the 70s. But pendulums, and all that.

    I’m a big fan of “do your work, do it well, and don’t be an ignorant asshole when doing it.”

    I hate to say it, but I actually about 20% blame twitter. I think people say things that make sense if you have the full context, but shifting context makes a 144-character tweet very hard to endow with specificity and nuance. So, those get dumped, and over time, with repetition, “intent isn’t magic” or “believe women” become seen as goods in themselves, rather than a way to express part of an argument. (“Believe women” should mean “believe women in social contexts at the same rate you believe men,” not “women never lie.”) It’s not Twitter’s fault per se, or a flaw in the thinking of young people; it’s just a novel interaction which is good to track and maybe mitigate.

    I’ve been calling it political first approximation. I have Many Rants which Barry and Grace get to hear over IM. ;)

  8. 8
    Mandolin says:

    (FWIW, I’m counting the porn wars, which were of course a leftist strain of ‘don’t depict this,’ as prior to ‘my time.’ I think it overlapped me slightly as a toddler.)

  9. 9
    Copyleft says:

    I thought Ben Grimm (aka The Thing) was the earliest major Jewish superhero. (Not counting The Spirit, where it was never mentioned in the stories.)

  10. 10
    desipis says:

    This strain of criticism has been popular since I was born. I just used to see it associated more with critiques from the right (video games will cause everyone to kill everyone else) than from the left.

    That’s certainly true. I pretty sure the moral panics I remember about thinks like rock music, d&d or computer games in the 90’s all seemed to come from the right.

    I’m a big fan of “do your work, do it well, and don’t be an ignorant asshole when doing it.”

    This feeds into the two values I see as underlying the trend on the left. (I don’t think the blame can be laid on twitter, although it certainly doesn’t help).

    First there’s the idea in progressive circles that understanding isn’t needed for people to take action. It’s somewhat congruous with the ‘participation trophy’ culture, in that its considered important for people to participate in the social change, but not so important that people be able to discuss and develop their own understanding of social issues. What matters is that people feel like they’re doing something; whether there actually are positive outcomes isn’t seen as important.

    Second, there’s the idea that things are so bad, so intolerable, that something absolutely must be done, and done right now. The state of society is compared against an idealistic utopia, and found extremely lacking. The focus on the short comings is so intense that all the progress made through the ages is seen as worthless; it’s seen as better to throw the dice and live with the consequences than attempt to build on what has already been achieved.

    Adopt these ideas as core values (as the modern left seems to have) and you get a lot of people doing a lot of silly things all in the name of a good cause.

  11. 11
    pillsy says:

    This is what happens when people take terms that no-one wants to be associated with (such as “racist” or “sexist”) and construct extremely broad and flexibly definitions with which to justify applying them.

    Yes, desepis, it’s all the fault of people in your outgroup! Never let anybody forget that!

  12. 12
    David Schraub says:

    I’m unfamiliar with this comics (or comics in general, for that matter), but this strikes me as cogent, nuanced, and sensitive analysis. One thing I liked in particular is that it does not make the jump from “I don’t think this comic is anti-Semitic” to “anti-Semitism, as a concept, has no valid bearing on our appraisal of this comic.” Frequently, the simple question “is such-and-such anti-Semitic” is taken to exhaust the field of anti-Semitism discourse — a serious mistake that badly impoverishes how we analyze that concept as a entrenched and structural phenomenon. This post is a great model of how not to do that.

    Very well done — thank you.