How Jewish comic books broke post-war silence over the Holocaust

Published: 27 September 2018

Last updated: 5 March 2024

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.

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.

FULL STORY How Jewish comic book artists led the fight to break the silence on the Holocaust (Haaretz)

Photo: Cover of a 1979 edition of Captain America featuring a storyline in a concentration camp. (Marvel Comics / Image from the book "We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust")