The following contains spoilers for last week’s Marauders #11
For a woman who can walk on air, Kate Pryde has always had to carry a heavy weight. Since her introduction in 1980, Kate has been, in addition to her day job as a member of one x-team or another, an authorial stand-in for creators from Chris Claremont to Marc Guggenheim, a point-of-view character and an object of youthful crushes from at least one generation of fans, and the lead character of at least one failed animated TV pilot. And for one particular category of readers, she is something else, too: the first and most prominent Jewish hero in superhero fiction.
There was nothing particularly remarkable about Kate’s first appearance in Uncanny X-Men #129. An average, upper-middle-class suburban Chicago girl, “13 years old, going on 14,” Kate looks like any of the fresh-faced, Caucasian mutants who had been a part of the X-Men since the team’s first issue a decade and a half earlier. But look a little closer, and you’ll find some key visual cues: see the Magen David, the Star of David pendant, ornamenting Kate’s necklace, pay attention to her curly hair and recognizably Ashkenazic features, and you’ll find something that, in a quiet way, was groundbreaking – Kate was the first openly-acknowledged Jewish protagonist in a mainstream superhero comic.
At first, at least, it was a small gesture, really no different from any of the other broadly-sketched quirks signifying the multicultural background of the X-Men’s international cast: Banshee’s cartoon brogue, or Colossus shouting “Lenin’s ghost!” But under the pen of Chris Claremont, especially in the years after Kate’s primary co-creator John Byrne left the book, it gradually came to represent something deeper and more important to the character herself. This being a discussion of X-Men comics, it should come as no surprise when I say that the first indication of this comes during wrestling match with Dracula. Uncanny X-Men #159 by Chris Claremont and Bill Sienkiewicz finds the team under attack from the lord of vampires when Kate, attempting to drive him away, thrusts a cross at the villain – vainly, as it turns out, since, “The cross has no power over one such as I if the wielder does not believe in it! You are no Christian but a Hebrew!” And thus, ironically, it is Kate’s Star of David, not the weaponized cross, which drives the vampire away. Here, memorably and bizarrely, is our first indication that Kate’s Jewishness is more than simply ethnic window dressing: her belief in Jewish religion is a fundamental part of her self-definition, in a way that turns out to be quite literally key to her survival.
This, it turned out, was a thread that Claremont would continue to tug on during the remainder of Kate’s tenure with the team. In Uncanny X-Men #199, Kate accompanies Magneto to a reception at the National Holocaust Memorial, where she delivers a heartfelt monologue describing the loss her family suffered during the Holocaust in Poland: “I’m here for my grandfather, Samuel Prydeman. He wanted to be here more than anything…but he died, last year. He had a sister, my great-aunt Chava. She lived in Warsaw before the war. We tried to find her, but there was no record anywhere. It was like she’d been…erased – as if she’d never been.” By then, Kate’s Jewishness was enough a core part of her character that writers after Claremont felt periodically obliged to bring it to the fore: in Excalibur #90, she trash-talks a race of extraterrestrial protest atheists by proudly proclaiming that, “I belong to a religion named Judaism. So?” In X-Men Unlimited #38, Greg Rucka has her observing a yahrzeit, the Jewish remembrance for the dead, on the one-year anniversary of Colossus’s passing. In all cases, Kate’s Jewishness remains a largely low-key but ever-present part of her depiction, remarkable precisely because it is treated as unremarkable. She is an X-Men, and she is a Jew, and this fact is rarely if ever a matter of dispute or discussion. Which is another way of saying an important point: that Kate’s Jewishness is never portrayed as something that is, or should be, at odds with her mutant identity.
One of the thorny aspects of the mutant metaphor, as essayists like Charles Pulliam-Moore have discussed at length, has long been the risk that in seeking to represent all marginalized readers through a single, fictional identification, it risks actually marginalizing real-life groups who are or should be depicted overtly in the comics. But Kate has always served as an example of how that dilemma can be effectively navigated, by allowing a character to assert both their fictional and real-world marginalized identities without allowing one to detract from the other. An early, if subtle, example comes from the landmark graphic novel God Loves, Man Kills, when Kate fights off a group of bigoted, anti-mutant toughs while coming home from her dance class. Here, in Brent Anderson’s art, the visual of Kate’s prominent Star of David is paired with dialogue asserting mutant rights: a metaphor in action, but one which doesn’t exclude real oppression in favor of an imagined one. But perhaps the most memorably full-throated defense of Kate’s multifaceted identity comes courtesy of Brian Michael Bendis in All-New X-Men #13. The context here is the fairly notorious “m-word” speech delivered by Kate’s erstwhile teammate Havok in Uncanny Avengers, in which he bullishly protested against the use of the term mutant to define him. Bendis gives Kate a lengthy response to Havok – and, perhaps, to the speech’s real-life author Rick Remender – in words that deserve to be quoted at length:
This is a remarkable speech on a number of levels. First, because it manages to foreground a recognizably real-world scenario in a response to a fictional character’s speech about an imaginary minority group. And second, because it explicitly affirms what the sociologist Kimberle William Crenshaw termed intersectionality: the way that multiple identities and sociopolitical categories interact simultaneously to define a person’s self-perception and place in society. Intersectionality tends most often to be discussed in the context of discrimination (as, indeed, Kate does here), but it can just as easily be a source of positive identification as well. Kate is both Jewish and a mutant, as well as White, American, and sometimes Utopian or Krakoan. She is also, for those following the subtext of the character throughout the decades, strongly indicated to be gay or bisexual. And at no time, to Kate or to those around her, are any of these things regarded as being to the detriment of any other. She is a person in the whole.
This, as it happens, presents an interesting contrast with the other prominent and highly visible Jew in X-Men lore, Magneto. Indeed, from the very beginning of Magneto’s canonical Jewishness, the character has often been written as a foil to Kate. In the issue that first strongly hints at Magneto’s Jewish origin, Uncanny X-Men #150, his moment of self-revelation (and turning-point epiphany) comes when he nearly kills Kate in a fit of anger. As he says then, “She – she is a child! I remember my own childhood – the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the guards joking as they herded my family to their death. As our lives were nothing to them, so human lives became nothing to me. As a boy, I turned my back on God forever…”
My colleagues Stephanie Burt and Ian Gregory have brilliantly dissected Magneto’s Jewish background elsewhere on this site (and their analysis is absolute required reading for those who haven’t yet checked it out), and I won’t repeat their full discussion here. But I think this monologue helps to flesh out Magneto’s philosophy in important and significant ways. Note not only his reference to having abandoned religious faith after Auschwitz, but also the fact that it is Kate’s youth and vulnerability, not her Jewishness, that triggers his remorse. Elsewhere in the same speech, he makes his position even more clear: “I swore then that I would not rest ‘til I had created a world where my kind – mutants – could live free and safe and unafraid.” Unlike Kate, he is not a Jewish mutant any more than he is a German mutant any longer. He is a mutant, simply and without qualification.
In other words, Magneto’s identity is not intersectional but monolithic. His mutant identity has come to supersede all others. That’s not to say the trauma and lessons of the Holocaust don’t guide his politics and ethos: as he makes clear in these scene and many later ones, it is very much at the root of them. But those experiences and lessons are ones that he has extrapolated to the mutant cause. His actions are not Jewish actions: they are mutant actions, informed by Jewish experience.
Forgive me if I pause here for a personal digression. I grew up an X-Men fan, and I grew up a Jew, and both of these facts left their mark on who I am. My grandmother, a first-generation American, used to tell me stories of her family in Poland: how her father tried to retrieve them to America before the War; how, out of fear and uncertainty they refused; how there was no more family to be found there or anywhere, because they died in the gas chambers at Treblinka, every one. So Kate’s Jewishness is familiar to me, but so, too, is the more universal sense of wrathful justice espoused by Magneto, seeking justice and vengeance on behalf of the oppressed beyond the limits of Jewishness. These aren’t abstract philosophies assigned to characters for me, or, indeed, for most of the Jewish comic readers I myself have known. They are oppositional portraits of the way we see ourselves in the world.
Both of these outlooks become especially relevant when applied to the current status quo of Krakoan nationhood in the X-Men books. In House of X #1, Magneto memorably asserts to a group of humans, “You have new gods now.” This is the literal apotheosis of his belief system, the moment at which mutant identity surpasses and replaces prior identities not just for himself, but for all mutantkind. Sociologists and historians would recognize this as a common form of ethnogenesis and national formation, and we can see it reflected elsewhere, most especially in comics penned by House of X’s writer and lead X-architect Jonathan Hickman. In House of X #5, Storm engages in a call-and-response ceremony following the resurrection of her teammates that strongly evokes the form and function of a religious liturgy. Likewise, the deeply memorable, affecting, and unsettling X-Men #7 depicts the ceremony of the crucible, the formal rite by which mutants undergo death in combat prior to being reborn whole. Watching the miracle of rebirth, as a comrade ascends in a halo of light, the strongly Catholic Nightcrawler declares, “I think I need to start a mutant religion.” If even Kurt Wagner, that most religious of X-Men, seems ready to embrace a new national faith, is not Magneto’s view of a sole identity triumphant at last?
Well, maybe. But elsewhere, and especially under Hickman’s fellow writers, the picture is more complex. In Tini Howard’s Excalibur, Betsy Braddock has wrestled with her dual national identities of Briton and Krakoan. Leah Williams’ X-Factor makes a point of highlighting the unapologetic gay and bisexual identities of its cast, among their other personal and defining characteristics. So the question remains unresolved, on and perhaps off the page as well: is Krakoa, as some critical readers have accused, an ethnostate, erasing individual identities in the service of a more homogenous mutant one? Or is it something more variegated – a patchwork quilt or a melting pot, wherein its citizens are allowed to embody any number of identities within the overarching framework of a shared culture? Do the two notions reinforce each other, or are they bound for collision?
With these questions in mind, I want to return to where we started, with the topic of Kate. Kate’s recent death and subsequent resurrection in the pages of Gerry Duggan’s Marauders have opened up a flurry of commentary specifically in regard to her Jewishness. The most controversial touchpoints have been her funeral by pyre– cremation being contrary to Jewish religious practice, as well as generally taboo due to its associations with Holocause crematoria – as well as her knuckle tattoos visible on the most recent solicited cover.
The first thing I would say, briefly, about these critiques is that after all this time, Kate’s level of religious observance is still unknown. We know from some of the scenes discussed earlier (that battle with Dracula, remember) that she practices some kind of active Jewish faith, but that she has never been known to wear head coverings or engage in other, stricter practices of traditional observance. So the best we can say is that Kate is something more than secular, and something less than Orthodox, as these things go. The second thing I would say is that, to my mind, parsing out Kate’s religion is considerably less important than gauging the thoughtfulness and intentionality of the people crafting these stories. And any notion that Duggan or others have been simply careless about Kate’s Jewishness, or even deliberately dismissive of it, is countered in Marauders #11 by the use of the Jewishly significant number 18 in reference to Kate’s resurrection, as well as Xavier’s exclamation of “to life!” (l’chaim, signifying the same word, chai, life, as the number 18). This is not to mention the comeback of Kate’s old, curly hair at the same time as those knuckle tattoos. Writing about a Jewish character in the absence of a Jewish team of creators or editors, as with the writing of any marginalized character, requires effort and consideration from those telling the story. It’s a complicated picture, and there are no easy answers.
But more significant to me is that image of Kate’s cremation, her body set to sea, engulfed in fire. Engulfed, yes, but destined to rise again. Kate will return to us in a way that her family, and my family, and six million others could not. She is the Jewish woman who will not perish in the flames, the bush that burns but is not consumed. She will not be obliterated from the history of her people. “Never say that there is only death for you,” begin the lyrics of the old Polish partisan song, sung by Jewish resistors in the darkest days of the war. On Krakoa, death is not the end. It cannot be. Kate, Jewish, mutant, will endure.
To life, indeed.
Zach Rabiroff edits articles at Comicsxf.com.
