jerusalemsunrise: gpack3: jerusalemsunrise: ...

25 May 2015
92

gpack3:
jerusalemsunrise:
brevoortformspring:
HOLY CRIMINY! I’ve messaged you about this before but these people just won’t stop.
WANDA AND PIETRO WERE NEVER JEWISH!
They have had no Jewish identity. They have never participated in anything culturally Jewish. And Jewish law very specifically requires that your mother be Jewish. Even with Magneto as their father if they wanted to be recognized as Jewish they would’ve been required to convert.
I am a Jewish reader who thinks Jews are massively underrepresented in comics. Especially Marvel comics. Marvel books take place (primarily) in New York. In NYC you can’t go into a Starbucks without randomly bumping into 3 Jews. and then before the day is done you’ll bump into 3 more. Yet in all of Marvel Comics we’ve got, what, Magento, Thing and Kitty Pryde?
I have never identified with Wanda and Pietro being on that list. People need to stop trying to claim changing their parentage is a slight against the Jewish people. I also assume the majority of these people aren’t even Jewish and are just people who like to complain on the internet. I can’t imagine an actual Jew looking at Wanda and Pietro and thinking “Oh yeah. This totally represents me and my people.”
There’s plenty of reasons to dislike this change in the twins’ history. Screwing with Jews is not one of them.
Your understanding of post-Holocaust Jewish identity is bad and you should feel bad.
Most Conservative, Reform, and Reconstructionist Jewish communities recognize patrilineal Jews as Jews BECAUSE of the Holocaust. First of all, the whole notion of Judaism being a matrilineal religion arose from how commonly Jewish women were raped by foreign adversaries. That was the only way of telling if a child was Jewish by blood or not. After the Holocaust, when our numbers were so heavily decimated, this ceased to be an important distinction. So, to modern Jewish people, the Maximoffs are Jewish, without question, because their father, Erik, is explicitly Jewish.
Comic books and super heroes literally would not exist without the Jewish people and Jewish ethics. Pretty much every single major comic book artist and writer of the 20th century was Jewish. And in the 20th century that fucking MATTERED. America was deeply anti Semitic and the largely JEWISH writers of these comics could not explicitly make their characters Jewish because of those strong anti Semitic/Nazi sympathies within America at the time. Other people have unpacked the ways in which characters like Captain American and Superman are HEAVILY Jewish coded. But the Maximoffs are not Jewish coded. They are explicitly Jewish and you, as a non-Jew trying to dictate their identity is pretty ridiculous. Especially considering they were created by a Jewish writer.
Culture, religion, and ethnicity are not built into people’s genetic codes. They’re a product of upbringing. If their only connection to the Jewish faith or culture is the biological father they only met well into adulthood, and learning of their heritage did not inspire them to pursue it or embrace it, then they aren’t Jewish.
Culture and religion aren’t defined by genetics, but ethnicity most certainly is. When you send away for a DNA test about your ancestry, it’s always broken down into a person’s ethnicity. And Judaism, unlike pretty much any other faith, is an ethno-religion. If you’re born to at least one ethnically Jewish parent, it’s not something you can deny whether or not you choose to embrace it.
And if you’re not Jewish or Rroma, you don’t really have any business dictating how those people make sense of their heritage.

Adding to the Romani part of their identity, Magda was a Roma, AND the people who adopted Wanda and Pietro were also Roma. So they were ethnically and culturally Romani as well as ethnically Jewish, and neither parts of their heritage/ethnicity made it to the movies.