Tag: steve rogers

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Why Jewish!Bucky makes me uncomfortable

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.

ETA: I got a copy of Jews of Brooklyn when hansbekhart mentioned it and I highly recommend it. 

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. 😉