He found the phrase “goyim gonna goy” and uses it like five times per day. He’s also a very firm believer in “if you can’t say anything nice, say it in Yiddish.”
Since I mentioned this the other day, I thought I’d dig into it.
* Bucky is in every way – appearance, acts, name, neighborhood – coded as Irish Catholic. I don’t feel like I’m indistinguishable from an Irish Catholic. I mean, I know, these days we’re all “white” but … no.
* Most Jewish!Bucky fics involve, like, a degree of Jewish religious practice that seems totally at odds with the “completely and utterly passing” thing. Passing isn’t effortless. It takes work. A lot of work. And a lot of that work is about ignoring your religious practices. So I don’t believe that Bucky would be going to synagogue or keeping kosher or any of that.
* For that matter, his name is James Buchanan Barnes. That is emphatically not a Jewish name, and I don’t believe a mother names her kid that unless she is intending to pass and pass hard. As in “literally never tell him about her ethnic or religious background” sort of pass hard.
* If Bucky does have any sort of Jewish consciousness, which Jewish!Bucky posits, I don’t believe for a second that he would never mention that in the context of the Nazis. That’s just… bizarre. Jewish American soldiers in WWII knew exactly what they were fighting for and what the stakes of their engagement were.
* The Soviets? Not fond of Jews. Bucky already has a silly character arc that confuses Communism and Fascism, but man. There is _no way in hell_ that the Soviets would use a Jew as their super-power experiment.
* I want to briefly go back to personal appearance. Yes, Jews come in all shapes and sizes but there is a very distinct way that Jewish men look and, to my eternal regret, it is not “ethereally haunted straight-haired pretty boy.” This bugs the hell out of me, not the least of which because common Jewish features are considered unattractive.
* Ultimately, it feels “tacked on.” If Bucky were a Jewish character, he’d have a different story arc, a different life experience, different personality, different appearance, different behavior, and be treated differently by his peers. Trying to shoehorn it in ex-post-facto just feels awkward and unnecessary.
Obligatory notes: I’m Jewish, but I’m descended from Holocaust refugees, so to a degree the “living in the US pre-war” story is not my family story. I certainly know about it, but from cultural context rather than personal family. Obviously, I don’t speak for all jews, or really any jews but me. Tons of Jewish fans love Jewish!Bucky and more power to them. I don’t mind if this is something you want to do, or if it feels right to you, totally fine. You don’t have to tag anything. I just wanted to air my grievances.
P.S. If I had to pick characters for “probably crypto-Jew” in Captain America it’d be Peggy Carter and the Starks.
Replying to this requires me to sort of gesture at something I’ve been meaning to write for a long time about canonicity more generally and the differences between “yeah, this is almost certainly not going to turn out to be canon” and “this is explicitly uncanonical,” but this is not that post.
I’m a Jew. I write middle-class Jewish Bucky. I’m almost certain that if Bucky’s ethno-religious background and social class are mentioned in Cap 3, he’ll be either poor Irish Catholic or less poor Anglo-Scottish WASP (ninnieamee writes him this way), and I don’t care. Because the thing is – we really see very, very little of Bucky in the movies. There’s lots and lots room to make stuff up as long as it’s not directly contradicted by canon.
Honestly, Steve being Catholic isn’t canon either. bomberqueen17 has done some really neat stuff with Irish Protestant Steve! (It’s a really long series, but totally worth it; possibly my fave Natasha in fic.)
But I don’t think Bucky is necessarily passing. In re: names, I have an ancestor named George Washington Guilford (or possibly Gilford? I can’t remember how it was spelled), which sounds really damn WASPy but…nope, Jew. (I’ve talked about this before.) Now, obviously somebody who Anglicizes Goldfarb into G(u)ilford and gives their kids the names of presidents is trying to emphasize American-ness and not be so clearly marked as a Jew to the non-Jewish world, but that doesn’t mean passing entirely, it just means that “coming out” is a choice rather than a default the moment someone sees your name.
I model Bucky’s degree of assimilation after my grandfather, who is about ten years younger but grew up in Jersey and Queens, and who was Bar Mitzvah’d and still doesn’t eat pork but who never spoke Yiddish after his grandmother died.
I mean, yeah, I agree, if Bucky were intended to be a canonically Jewish character they probably wouldn’t have cast Sebastian Stan, there would probably be lines about it in the films, etc. But there’s nothing in canon that actively contradicts that characterization, either. I certainly don’t think anyone is wrong for not writing Jewish Bucky, and writing Jewish Bucky requires, as you say, thinking about what that means for characterization and behavior and his feelings about the war and so on. But if you want to do that – if the pre-war Jewish urban experience, where people are assimilating asymmetrically and it’s very class-linked and there’s enough of a Jewish population that nice Irish boy James Cagney grew up speaking fluent Yiddish, if that interests you – Bucky makes a perfectly delightful vehicle to do it.
None of which is to say, of course, that you have to like it, or that people who don’t write Jewish Bucky are wrong (I’ve seen people claim that and wow, no). But that’s why I do.
Not to mention – there could be a lot more at play here if Bucky were only half-Jewish, or wasn’t raised with strong religious practices at home. It’s perfectly possible to have written him as ethnically Jewish and not religiously Jewish.
For my part, the Jewish side of my family came to the US pre-WWII, and oh man, did they assimilate and assimilate hard. They took names that wouldn’t mark them as Jews and Anglicized pretty much everything. They also did not raise their children as explicitly Jewish and more than a few of them converted to Catholicism (this is how we ended up with me, the Irish Jew).
I don’t write my Bucky as explicitly religious anything, but I do like reading Jewish!Bucky fics. It honestly doesn’t bother me that he’s not canonically Jewish. He’s not canonically queer, either, so, I’m willing to suspend my disbelief for both.
A lot of fics with Jewish!Bucky show him as being reasonably religious, but I would like to briefly present a reading of Jewish!Bucky that is NOT religious: born to immigrant parents, probably Russian or Polish, coming from an atheist socialist background that was incredibly common amongst Eastern European Jews of the time. Add Steve Rogers into the mix, and you cannot tell me that they are not the most rabble-rousing, argumentative, sharp-tongued socialists on any side of Brooklyn.
He would keep some of his cultural roots, but he’s not kosher, he didn’t have a bar mitzvah, he hardly steps foot inside a synagogue, his parents scoff at the idea of keeping sabbath. The labor party is their religion. As for joining up, he’s heard the horror stories of what’s happening in Europe, and keeps his religion off his dog tags.
^^^^ that was a large swath of my family, too. The ones who didn’t convert to Catholicism. 😉
Okay so recently I had to do some research for my essay (@alleeclarke will remember this for sure) and while I was researching propaganda in US in the years leading up to the WW2 I couldn’t help but think about… well, Stucky, of course.
Now, in the years leading up to the outbreak of the war in Europe, US was pretty much neutral when it came to ‘’choosing sides’’ – there were both pro-nazi and anti-nazi groups forming inside the US itself, but before the attack on Pearl Harbor people were generally not very concerned about the whole deal.
This lead up to the pro-nazi groups being particularly vocal about their affiliations, and I’m here to talk about one in particular – German American Bund’s rally at Madison Square Garden in New York City on February 20, 1939.
Supposedly, 22 000 Nazi supporters attended the rally under police guard, calling Roosevelt’s New Deal the “Jew Deal” (you will also notice that they put up Washington in the middle of it all) while demonstrators protested outside.
I understand that it’s a very popular opinion in this fandom that Bucky did not volunteer but was, in fact, drafted (there is an excellent meta about his number and what it might say about his involvement in the war). But Sebastian does not agree, and Sebastian is always right (don’t try to deny it).
I can see Bucky protesting outside this event while the police guard and Bund’s troops try to hold them at bay. I can see Bucky being so angry at America and angry at the world and war and just waiting for the opportunity to join the army and kick some nazi ass. I can see Steve setting his jaw the way he does and promising to himself and to Bucky that all these people who hurt Bucky for being so vocal about his religion will get what they deserve.
I can see Bucky going to Synagogue after rally, even after Steve tells him it’s not a good idea, and Steve going with him because he is so determined to protect Bucky even though he is 90 pounds soaking wet. I can see Bucky putting up his mezuzah in front of his apartment and pretending not to notice the kids he’s seen at rally looking at it with hatred in their eyes.
I can see Bucky surviving Hydra’s torture and joining Howling Commandos with even more anger in his soul. I can see Bucky feeling so much shame and anger at the fact that an organization that has nazi roots used him for over 60 years. I can see Bucky in 2016 being accused of secretly still working for Hydra and unleasing all hell on everyone who dared to even think of it.
Bucky’s apparently late deployment 1943 but enlistment could be explained by dependants in the household. MCU materials describe him as the oldest of four and the absence of a brother around Steve suggests if there was one, he was too young to socialize or later serve. In the interim between Sarah Rogers’ death and Steve’s enlistment, one or both of Bucky’s parents could have died or become ill, too, leaving him to help raise his siblings. When the next oldest could help, Bucky was free to upgrade his eligibility status. It would also explain why Bucky and Steve were not spending the last night at Bucky’s parents’ home.
Being together on the schoolyard doesn’t mean that Bucky had to be Catholic like Steve (pay no attention to the inconsistent prop canon on Steve’s dogtag marking him as Protestant despite 616 canon.). A relative who attended parochial grade school in Brooklyn during World War II confirmed that several of her classmates were Jewish and observant. The rationale she recalls hearing is that the quality of the school was perceived as better than public schools and the school ties would help with future employers.
Give me Wanda Maximoff going to a synagogue, slipping into the back row, so she can have a minyan when she says kaddish for Pietro.
Give me Wanda Maximoff saying kaddish alone in her room, even though it’s not supposed to count without a minyan, because she’s too anxious and overwhelmed to go outside.
Give me Wanda Maximoff returning to Sokovia to erect a memorial for Pietro, something Jews don’t do until at least a year has passed.
Give me Wanda Maximoff leaving stones on the top of his grave.
Give me Wanda Maximoff mourning the only way she knows how, even though she hasn’t thought of herself as religious in years.
Give me a Jewish Wanda Maximoff who isn’t over her brother’s death.
ok look i know its not comic canon but ever since i found out pietro and wanda were jewish (back when all i knew was x-men evolution) i’ve wanted them to be buds with kitty pryde
we are several years a couple of movies and so many comics past that point but, i still want it
the maximoffs are jewish mutants and need to have jewish mutant seders with kitty that is all bYe
Headcanon that Magneto “kidnaps” all Jewish mutants – and probably several Jewish non-mutant heroes for a Seder every year, because he knows it’s the only way they’ll be able to make the time for it, since there’s villains attacking every two seconds.
The Avengers and X-men track down their missing teammates roughly around the time of “Chad Gadya”.
I would read this comic
R-who-is-not-on-Tumblr and I have QUESTIONS
Does using a mutant power count as work? Is it enough to not actively use your power, or would really Orthodox mutants look for a temporary suppressant?
Who would be the Shabbos non-Jew for Magneto? I mean, Charles, obviously, back in the day, but now? Pyro, maybe? 99.9% sure Nightcrawler would be there for Kitty.
Would creating this as a LARP be as amazing as I think?
Don’t forget Ben Grimm in your Jewish Marvel Characters group.
When did this blow up
anyway Kurt is def the Shabbos goy for Kitty bc Kitty is the guardian of whatever he gives up for Lent
Magneto probably got Toad to do that during the brotherhood days but who knows
Ben Grimm is the uncle who hides the afikoman in the same place every year
anyway if someone does the art I’ll write this marvel hire me
Steve Rogers and Bucky Barnes talking post-mission stuff when suddenly, Bucky’s metal arm points upwards and he winds up being carried away. The last thing he hears Bucky yell before he disappears into the sky behind Magneto is “I RSVP’d this year, Magnus! This really isn’t – “
“It’s tradition that I kidnap you, Barnes. And after all, tonight is all about tradition!”
i have just been informed moon knightis also jewish so i will be reading all his comics immediately
anyway imagine patrilineal bobby drake mind his own business doing x-men business like teaching kids how to kill things with their powers when suddenly
nYOOOOOOM
and he’s gone
on the ground there’s a note like
“you’re invited to the maximoff family seder 5776, please RSVP and indicate preferred method of kidnapping”
and there are little boxes next to options like “reality portal” “speedster pickup” “metal”
did someone say they need a rromani jewish artist? SUP GUYS
you me wombatking lets make this happen
Dr. Walter Langkowski drops by from Canada. No one bats an eyelash when the 8-foot-tall Sasquatch walks in. It’s not even in the top ten bizarre things that happen when Magneto hosts his annual seder.
If this actually becomes a comic I will buy 20. I know a lot of people I need to gift it to.
it’s almost passover, i’m bringing this shiz back
ok but I want to know more about how Magneto leads the Seder
is his style “mumblerush through all the liturgical text as fast as possible and skip bits if everyone is bored” or “every single word gets read aloud and translated since most of us don’t know a lot of Hebrew” or “find a new variant text every year to keep things interesting” or what
does he pick individuals at the table to take turns reading aloud (and assign the bit about the Wicked Son to whoever he’s most annoyed with at the moment)
is there singing
Um. This is fairly obvious, I think. There’s a tradition of leftist seders, of feminist seders, of stonewall seders. A family we regularly did a seder with at least two years out of three had half the wobblie songbook at the back of their hagadah.
Magneto would run a MUTANT SEDER. It would have a lot of the liturgy, but not all and not strictly (no one is going to argue Magnus is particularly observant) but it would also have a lot of sidenotes about the oppression and coming liberation of the Mutants. A reading about Genosha-as-Mitzrayim. A genetic sample on the seder plate. A reading about inviting all mutants in to come eat and how Eliyahu is probably masquerading as a Morlock with teleportation powers. Very pointed shade thrown at En Sabah Nur. “If he had destroyed Master Mold and not returned the Phoenix Force Dayyenu If he had returned the Phoenix Force and not restarted mutant births Dayyenu.”
Moon Knight is, of course, always embarrassed during the seder. He’s Jewish, but he’s also the champion of an Egyptian god, so he’s very conflicted about the liturgy, especially the plague of darkness, which seems to offend the patron of travelers-by-night.
Billy brings Teddy, and they’re both happy to be there, but they don’t sit near Wanda – he just can’t deal sometimes and neither can she.
This – not Christmas, not any other day of the year – is the one day nobody starts shit. After all. We have literally seen God in the Marvel Context and He’s LITERALLY JEWISH.
(full disclosure: I may have been hoping someone would go there)
Attempts to retell the Pesach story descending into actual physical brawls over whether Moses was a mutant, tho.
This is Elijah’s favorite seder. He actually drinks his entire cup of wine.
(Someone tell me the invisible dude who travels around the world to every fucking Pesach dinner party isn’t a mutant. I will fight you.)
This being the first night of Chanukah, I figured it was a good time to post our header image.
This comes from the Marvel Holiday Special from 2011. The story, entitled “Chinese Food For Christmas” was scripted by Jamie S. Rich, penciled and inked by Paco Diaz, colored by Jean-Francois Beaulieu, lettered by Jeff Eckleberry.
It features Marvel’s stable of Jewish Super Heroes including: (top row, left to right) Moon Knight/Mark Specter, Songbird/Melissa Joan Gold, Kitty Pryde, The Thing/Ben Grimm, (bottom row) Sasquatch/ Walter Langkowski and Wiccan/Billy Kaplan.
I love the fact that Abraham and Howard were the ones who built Captain America. He is quite literally the Golem built by these two modern-day Jewish wizards to go where these men could not, and defend their people from the men who would kill them.
And Abraham put the words in Steve’s head: not a perfect soldier, but a good man. That’s Steve’s shem.
I love the fact that Abraham and Howard were the ones who built Captain America. He is quite literally the Golem built by these two modern-day Jewish wizards to go where these men could not, and defend their people from the men who would kill them.
And Abraham put the words in Steve’s head: not a perfect soldier, but a good man. That’s Steve’s shem.
I love the fact that Abraham and Howard were the ones who built Captain America. He is quite literally the Golem built by these two modern-day Jewish wizards to go where these men could not, and defend their people from the men who would kill them.
And Abraham put the words in Steve’s head: not a perfect soldier, but a good man. That’s Steve’s shem.
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