By Evan R. Goldman in San Diego
While watching Peacemaker, season 2, I thought about how the portrayal of Nazis in popular media creates a dilemma for the Jewish people. The DC Comics television show was about an obscure anti-hero who found an alternate universe in which the Nazis won World War II and became the prevailing political party in America. The Nazis were the villains of the story. But no Jewish people were portrayed in the show.
The dilemma is that on the one hand, the vilification of Nazis in modern media can generally mean support for Jewish people. This is good. The Nazis are the bad guys; their views should be condemned and rejected. But on the other hand, popular media often separates the Jewish people from portrayals of the Nazis. As a result, the real suffering and story of the Jewish people – a major reason why the Nazis are villains – gets left out of the picture.
In addition, media creators are faced with a dilemma about how to portray Jews if they are in the business of portraying Nazis. It would be deeply offensive to show Jews at the mercy of Nazis in a television program, or it at least runs that risk. Basically, a reenactment of the Holocaust, even for fictional purposes, would be quite offensive and difficult to watch. Yet, if Jewish characters were shown in TV and movies with Nazi villains, it would risk stereotyping and profiling. This probably explains why popular media separates the Jewish people from the Nazis.
Peacemaker is not the only program to separate Jews and Nazis. Indiana Jones and Captain America vilified the Nazis but had very little, if anything, to say about Jews. Perhaps if popular media actually acknowledged the intentional Jew-hatred and genocide of Jews that makes the Nazis so evil, we wouldn’t have to worry about these dilemmas.
Jew-hatred and mass murder is what makes the Nazis evil. That is why they are the villains. This is so engrained in the Jewish mind that we may not realize how lost it is on others. Everyone should know why the Nazis are evil, particularly with respect to the suffering of the Jewish people.
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Evan Goldman is in private law practice in San Diego. He litigates all kinds of cases.