How Jewish Comic Book Artists Led the Fight to Break the Silence on the Holocaust
During World War II, American kids pored over comic books where superheroes like Captain America and Superman punched out Nazis. But one thing completely missing was any storyline about the Nazi’s victims, Jewish or otherwise.
In the following decades, though, a small number of bold artists – several of them Jewish – began to use comics to bring stories about the Holocaust to readers. These stories, involving superheroes like Batman, Captain America and the X-Men, managed to reach a generation that did not learn about the Nazi genocide in school. And more recently, there has been an unprecedented surge of Holocaust storylines entering the comic book universe.
An upcoming exhibition at Holon’s Israeli Cartoon Museum on how comics depicted children in the Holocaust and a recently published book, “We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust,” both focus on what might seem at first an unlikely pairing of medium and message.
“Most people correctly perceive comic books as entertainment,” says Rafael Medoff, co-author of “We Spoke Out” and director of the David S. Wyman Institute for Holocaust Studies. “But when I was growing up in the ’70s, my friends and I also saw how they addressed social issues,” including racism, poverty, drug abuse and environmentalism.
https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/.premium-how-jewish-comic-book-artists-led-the-fight-to-show-the-holocaust-1.6462797
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