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--- ---
title: "Dispatch #15 (May 2024)" title: "Dispatch #15 (May 2024)"
date: 2024-04-17T16:38:58-04:00 date: 2024-05-06T21:05:37-04:00
draft: false draft: false
tags: tags:
- dispatch - dispatch
@@ -25,28 +25,35 @@ references:
url: https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/ url: https://www.citationneeded.news/ai-isnt-useless/
date: 2024-04-18T16:30:46Z date: 2024-04-18T16:30:46Z
file: www-citationneeded-news-loassa.txt file: www-citationneeded-news-loassa.txt
- title: "The Judgment Of Magneto | Defector"
url: https://defector.com/the-judgment-of-magneto
date: 2024-05-07T01:04:07Z
file: defector-com-cfiovt.txt
--- ---
Some thoughts here... * Lisbon
* E-bikes
* Benfica
* Playlist[^1]
* Pointless Week
* https://stackstash.site/
* Laravel
* https://www.viget.com/articles/stackstash-taking-bookish-musings-to-the-next-level/
* Death Cab / Postal Service
* The Simple Secret Formula
* https://blog.landr.com/lofi-chord-progressions/
* iPad music
* https://www.reddit.com/r/synthesizers/comments/1ci0jcr/comment/l26rjp1/
<!--more--> <!--more-->
1. P64 By My Side - John Carroll Kirby {{<dither IMG_0733.jpeg "782x782" />}}
2. Need Your Body - Stimulator Jones {{<dither IMG_0725.jpeg "782x782" />}}
3. Temptations - Jitwam
4. Sunny - Bobby Hebb {{<dither IMG_5805.jpeg "782x782" />}}
5. Mais Que Nada - Paulo Sergio {{<dither IMG_5797.jpeg "782x782" />}}
6. Feet Keep Moving - Natural Self
7. Make My Day - Waldeck <audio controls src="/journal/dispatch-15-may-2024/The Simple Secret Formula.mp3"></audio>
8. Te Faço um Cafuné - Mariana Aydar
9. Primavera - Ocote Soul Sounds
10. When You're Gone - Jon and Roy
11. I Will Survive (lalala) - Hermes House Band
12. Off to the Side - L'Impératrice
13. I Believe in You - more*
14. Love Story (Retromigration Remix) - Malik Hendricks
15. Tout va bien - Voyou
16. Aquela Bossa Axé - Affonsinho
This month: This month:
@@ -68,6 +75,30 @@ Links:
* [Title][4] * [Title][4]
* [Title][5] * [Title][5]
* [The Judgement of Magneto][6]
> A fault-line yawned open within the global Jewish community, exposing the divide between those who had understood “Never Again” to be a humanistic warning, and those who saw it as permission in advance for whatever they deemed necessary to ensure it.
[3]: https://example.com/ [3]: https://example.com/
[4]: https://example.com/ [4]: https://example.com/
[5]: https://example.com/ [5]: https://example.com/
[6]: https://defector.com/the-judgment-of-magneto
[^1]: Here's my Lisbon playlist:
1. P64 By My Side - John Carroll Kirby
2. Need Your Body - Stimulator Jones
3. Temptations - Jitwam
4. Sunny - Bobby Hebb
5. Mais Que Nada - Paulo Sergio
6. Feet Keep Moving - Natural Self
7. Make My Day - Waldeck
8. Te Faço um Cafuné - Mariana Aydar
9. Primavera - Ocote Soul Sounds
10. When You're Gone - Jon and Roy
11. I Will Survive (lalala) - Hermes House Band
12. Off to the Side - L'Impératrice
13. I Believe in You - more*
14. Love Story (Retromigration Remix) - Malik Hendricks
15. Tout va bien - Voyou
16. Aquela Bossa Axé - Affonsinho

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[36]History
The Judgment Of Magneto
[37][ima]
By [38]Asher Elbein
2:13 PM EDT on April 24, 2024
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An illustration of Magneto placing a yarmulke atop his head.Illustration by
Mattie Lubchansky
[44]
245Comments
Somewhere beyond death, in a realm of judgment and pain, a concrete labyrinth
filled by countless names, a man walks. He is Jewish, and has been made hard
and cruel by his experiences in the Nazi death camps. He's also a mutant,
gifted with the power to manipulate metal and the electromagnetic spectrum.
Since his first appearance in the inaugural X-Men comic, he spent six decades
of Marvel publication history oscillating between supervillainous heel,
messianic terrorist, swaggering nationalist, and increasingly heroic
anti-fascist. He stood trial for crimes against humanity and tried his hand at
state building; he’s variously fought against, allied with, and led the X-Men.
He’s taken and abandoned many names: Max, Erik, Magnus. Only one ever stuck:
Magneto. 
This is the setup for Resurrection of Magneto, an ongoing miniseries by Al
Ewing and Luciano Vecchio. In it, Marvel’s master of magnetism, who is also the
company’s most famous Jewish character, counts his many sins, tortured by the
fear that he’s wasted his life on a poisoned dream. The comic arrives at a
fraught time. When it debuted earlier this year, Israeli bombs had been falling
on Gaza for three months; [45]25,000 people were dead. That number [46]has now
topped 34,000, and the bombs are still falling. 
It is a low and shameful moment. It is also one that suits Magneto entirely too
well—a distillation of all the ambiguities and anxieties of American Judaism as
it reckons with the sacrifices made to the promise of “never again,” and the
increasingly fraught question of what that actually means. 
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Magneto debuted in 1963, as the lead villain of the first issue of Uncanny
X-Men #1. The comic was a late, weak product of the long-running partnership
between artist Jack Kirby (who did most of the work) and Stan Lee (who claimed
most of the credit). The narrative engine was simple: A team of teenage mutant
superheroes, led by kindly mentor Charles Xavier, seek to protect a suspicious
populace from the depredations of evil mutants. “The human race no longer
deserves dominion over planet Earth!” Magneto snarls as he slinks through
Kirby’s rushed layouts, swearing to “make homo sapiens bow to homo superior!” 
Kirby (née Kurtzberg) and Lee (née Lieber) were both American Jews, and the
product of one of the great Jewish cities: New York. Their relationships with
that community varied; [47]Kirby maintained a muscular ethnic and cultural
pride in his Judaism, while Lee tended to avoid [48]associating with it. The
X-Men’s original creators wrote about people who, though sometimes able to pass
as WASPs, were inescapably and essentially different, and the subject of both
elaborate conspiracy and unthinking prejudice. They were human and not; eternal
Others hiding in the upstate suburbs, longing for acceptance from a world that
hated and feared them. That otherness would be interpreted in many ways over
the coming decades, [49]as imperfect stand-ins for various identities and
populations. But the American Jewish anxieties of the midcentury were there
first, and undergirded much of what came after. 
If the X-Men can be read as crypto-Jews, what was Magneto? Kirby had fought in
World War II, and Magneto fit alongside his other supervillains—if not explicit
Nazis, then fascists and bullyboys and tinpot dictators. Magneto himself is a
supremacist lunatic, barely cloaking his conquering urges in
self-justification. “They would kill us all if they could!” he says in an early
issue, fleeing a nuke that he’s primed to destroy a small country he’s just
tried to conquer. “We fight only in self defense!”
It’s a revealing line, but only in retrospect. The original incarnation of
X-Men, canceled due to low sales in 1970, was essentially a rough draft; so was
its lead villain. In 1975, Chris Claremont, a young Anglo-American Jewish
writer, inherited a freshly reinvented X-Men comic and set about turning the
book into a much more explicit metaphor about persecution. 
Magneto, he realized, needed an overhaul. Trying to work out where the
character’s ranting antipathy toward humanity might have come from, Claremont—
[50]who’d kicked around on a socialist kibbutz in Israel among Holocaust
survivors four years before he got the job—made a change that utterly redefined
the character: He tied Magneto’s origins and explosive rage to the German death
camps. “I remember my own childhood—the gas chambers at Auschwitz, the guards
joking as they herded my family to their death,” the villain recalls during his
big return in 1981’s X-Men #150. “As our lives were nothing to them, so human
lives became nothing to me.” 
While [51]initially playing coy about whether Magneto was explicitly Jewish,
Claremont wasn’t quite able to stop himself [52]from implying it, either. From
the beginning, Israel and Israeli politics are woven through Claremont’s
conception of the character. Menachem Begin, founder of Israel’s right-wing
Likud party and a former terrorist who masterminded the lethal 1946 bombing of
the King David Hotel in Jerusalem, was an explicit inspiration. In a later
issue, Claremont establishes that Magneto and Professor X are old friends who
had first met in Haifa after World War II. There, as Jewish militants were
waging open war against both the British Mandate and their Palestinian
neighbors, the two sparred genially over whether oppressed mutants should
pursue Xavier’s liberal integrationism or something more violent. “Mutants will
not go meekly into the gas chambers,” Magneto tells Xavier. “We will fight, and
we will win.”
The narrative substitution here is deft but familiar—tie the cartoonish
supremacist to monumental tragedy, and render him more human. But there were
other undercurrents here. Throughout the midcentury, the Holocaust went largely
unspoken of [53]in America and [54]Europe, and was a source of [55]pity and
embarrassment in Israel. Even as Claremont took over X-Men, however, a new
Holocaust memory culture took shape at home and abroad, fueled by a powerful
surge of expansionist Israeli nationalism. The spectacle of [56]Israel’s
rendition and [57]trial of (arguable) Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann in
1961 resurfaced the issue. Wars in 1967 and 1973 against coalitions of Arab
nations led by Egypt, which [58]effectively destroyed the Labor party’s long
dominance in Israeli politics, left the state awash both in the heady rush of
military conquest and a siege mentality. In America, Jewish
organizations—rattled by the Arab wars and perhaps not immune to the “[59]white
ethnic revival” that emerged in reaction to the civil rights movement—began
tying themselves ever more closely to political Zionism. 
In this context, the slogan “Never Again,” [60]popularized in English by the
American-born Jewish supremacist and terrorist Meir Kahane in 1971, became a
common rallying cry among American Jews and Israelis alike. Many understood it
to have a specific meaning: Never again for Jews. Such circumstances favored
the rise of men like Begin, who took over as Israeli Prime Minister in 1977 and
invaded Lebanon to attack the PLO in 1982; the war left Beirut a smoking ruin
and tens of thousands of Palestinians and Lebanese dead. Begin was among the
first Israeli leaders to seek justification in the Holocaust, both for the
invasion of Lebanon—“Believe me, the alternative to this is Treblinka, and we
have decided that there will not be another Treblinka,” [61]he said before the
war—and his vision of [62]Israel’s identity. To him, Palestinians and other
Arabs were the new Nazis, Palestinian political leader [63]Yasser Arafat the
new Hitler, and the next genocide forestalled only by Israeli walls and guns. 
Yet Begin appealed to Claremont as a model not simply for his terrorist past,
but also for his participation in the 1978 Camp David Accords that brought
peace with Egypt, which won him a statesman’s reputation. Over the course of
the writer’s run, the regretful Magneto increasingly sought to distance himself
from his 1960s behavior, first—in Uncanny X-Men #200—by agreeing to stand trial
for his crimes, and then by taking over Xavier’s school in the professor's
absence, teaching his students, and furthering his integrationist goals.
Whatever his reservations, the old supremacist terrorist would try to pursue
liberalism and coexistence.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Unfortunately, Begin proved a more apt model than Claremont had intended. By
the end of the 1980s, Marvel editorial mandated that Magneto turn heel again, a
decision that [64]played a large part in driving Claremont off the book. In the
absence of the writer that redefined him, Magneto became an increasingly
unstable antagonist, spending a good chunk of ‘90s X-Men comics manipulated,
insane, or in a coma—but always at war against the non-mutant world. In one
1999-2000 arc, the supervillain bullied the UN into granting him a mutant
nation on the fictional island of Genosha, the refugee population of which he
soon sought to turn into a conquering army. If the root of Claremont’s
reinvention could not be wholly ignored, it bubbled out in Magneto’s bristling
paranoia and monomaniacal focus on mutant power and safety, with ugly hints of
eliminationism underneath. Here was “Never Again” framed as the blind pursuit
of power and the false safety of the preemptive strike. 
In 2001’s New X-Men, Scottish writer Grant Morrison mined that queasy space for
maximum discomfort. That run, a barn-burning 2001 attempt to reinvigorate the
series in the wake of the blockbuster 2000 X-Men film, begins by re-staging the
Holocaust in grand sci-fi scale, with mutant-killing robots wiping out the 16
million mutants of the mutant nation of Genosha, Magneto seemingly among them.
The terrorist became a martyr, and the island’s ruins a monument to his memory.
Disaffected students at Xavier’s school don Che-like T-shirts emblazoned with
his face and the slogan “Magneto Was Right.” 
And then, in “Planet X,” the penultimate arc of the comic, Magneto returns and
wrecks it all. Having infiltrated the Xavier school under a false identity, he
subverts students into terrorists, badly thrashes many of the X-Men, and turns
Manhattan into a death camp for humans before the team finally kills him.
“What people often forget, of course, is that Magneto, unlike the lovely Sir
Ian McKellen [who played him in the blockbuster], is a mad old terrorist twat,”
[65]Morrison once said. “No matter how he justifies his stupid, brutal
behavior, or how anyone else tries to justify it, in the end he's just an old
bastard.” It’s as thorough a rejection of the Claremont model as could be
imagined. Morrison’s Magneto is a frightening but strangely feeble presence.
His own propaganda of power and grievance—it’s literalized as a sentient
power-boosting drug because, hey, it’s comics—leaves him utterly unconnected
from reality. He’s reduced to ranting on a rooftop to a crowd that can’t hear
him, while marching the humans of New York into abattoirs. “This all started as
politics and freedom,” one of his students says in dawning horror. “When did we
all turn into such total Nazis?”
When indeed? Magneto’s broader heel turn coincided with a shift among some
Jews, who [66]began to regard the trajectory of the Jewish state—by then
expansionist, swaggering, increasingly adept at leveraging the sympathies and
shames of Europe and America—with a troubled eye. Survivors of Auschwitz with
deep emotional ties to Israel, like Jean Améry and Primo Levi, nonetheless
condemned the torture of Arabs in Israeli prisons and the Jewish supremacism
behind Begin’s rise. In a clear-eyed 1980 column, the Israeli writer Boaz Evron
[67]dissected the ways that Israeli politicians increasingly bent the Holocaust
to their own purposes, as a means of policing diaspora politics and excusing
their own nationalist policies. That management created in the Israeli
consciousness “a peculiar moral blindness,” Evron observed: an ideological
framework that set Jews as a whole (embodied, in their view, by Israel) outside
of humanity—eternally hated, eternally feared, permitted everything and
forbidden nothing. Orthodox polymath and theologian Yeshayahu Leibowitz was
more strident still, warning throughout the 1990s that adherence to Israeli
nationalism was corrupting global Judaism as a whole, a position that led him
to [68]eventually decry the “Nazification of Israeli society.”
Claremont had drawn a similar connection back in 1981, in his big reinvention
of Magneto in Uncanny X-Men #150. After almost killing X-Men team member Kitty
Pryde, a 13-year-old Jewish girl, the shocked supervillain collapses to his
knees. “I believed so much in my destiny, in my personal vision, that I was
prepared to pay any price, make any sacrifice to achieve it,” he wails in a
moment of operatic clarity. “Can you not appreciate the irony? In my zeal to
remake the world, I have become much like those I have always hated and
despised.” Claremont, [69]reflecting on the issue years later, went right at
it: “His shattering realization is: 'What kind of monster have I become? Has
what the Nazis did to me in the Shoah made me a Nazi?'”
This kind of comparison quite understandably tends to get people screamed at.
Equating a Jewish government to the Nazi regime has long been a red line in the
discourse, cast as an inherent and particularly vicious antisemitism. Yet the
unspeakability of the comparison marks a vulnerable spot. Under Morrison,
Magneto’s ugliness feels deliberate and pointed, a finger pressing against a
bruise. Too hard for Marvel, as it turned out: In an impressive feat of
backpedaling, the company hastily overturned the entire storyline after
Morrison left, revealing that the maddened genocidaire had actually been an
imposter. The real Magneto, revealed by a returning Claremont to be secretly
alive on Genosha, would never do such a thing. The villainous path was closed;
he could get his face-turn after all. 
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
It’s ironic, considering Morrison’s critique of Magneto, that the lasting
influence of their time writing the character was something they’d intended as
satire—the slogan “Magneto Was Right.” It was a fair conclusion for characters
and fans alike to draw. After a 2005 editorial edict depowered the vast
majority of characters in the X-line (though, notably, not the marketable ones)
a succession of writers spent 15 years piling on stories of hate crimes. The
battered X-Men and redeemed Magneto thus drifted increasingly into each other’s
ideological orbits.
And why not? Read enough X-Men comics, and you’ll notice that the fundamental
feature of the franchise—the idea of mutants as eternal stand-ins for Jews, or
black people, or queer people—is its essential pessimism. In X-Men, minority
life is wholly defined by oppression. No improvement can last; progress is
always an illusion; as figures in an ongoing, eternal piece of intellectual
property, mutants must always be hated and feared. This enforced, recursive
Marvel-Time unwittingly echoes what we might call Jewish-Time: the idea that
Jewish people were, are, and always will be [70]oppressed by antisemitism, cast
as [71]the same villain in different costumes. Persia is Rome, Russia is
Germany. Rather than discrete historical occurrences—contingent, contested,
complex—they are foreordained, essential, and inescapable. There is only the
pogrom, forever. 
Actual Jewish history isn’t so clear-cut. Most of our communities have
lived—indeed, still live—under the rule of multiethnic nations, and those
experiences have profoundly shaped our culture and religion. In Babylon and
Persia, Imperial Rome and Charlemagne’s France, in Al Andalus and the vast
lands of the Ottomans and as far as western China, Jewish communities spread
and prospered under the disinterested gaze of non-Jewish governments. Such
minority communities—and in this, Jews are in no way unique—sometimes endured
spasms of brutal violence. We remember the victims of those horrors, and are
right to do so. But that is not the only story of Jewish life; it seems
profoundly disrespectful to our history to forget the rest, or to subordinate
it so profoundly to Jewish suffering. 
This [72]Judeopessimism, which centers Jewish identity around past and
potential future trauma, grants a strange kind of privilege even as it elevates
danger into the ubiquitous and decisive aspect of Jewish life. That danger can
be real—antisemitism is real—but centering it like this also extends the
entitlement of myth, of living in the four-color world of propaganda, of being
at once eternally strong and desperately weak. Conceptualize history in this
atavistic way, as many diaspora and Israeli Jews do, and you might see
nationalistic power as a necessity. If Professor Xavier’s integration can never
come, then the hour of Magneto must always be around the corner. 
It’s notable that in 2008, amidst this slow transition, Magneto finally became
canonically Jewish, officially and incontestably, in the pages of Greg Pak and
Carmine Di Giandomenico’s Magneto: Testament. The book, an extensively
researched and often brutal retelling of his origin amid the Holocaust death
camps, reveals his original name of Max Eisenhardt and follows him from the
passage of anti-Jewish laws to his time as an Auschwitz [73]Sonderkommando,
disposing of the camp dead. By stripping away the heightened sci-fi logic of
other X-Men comics, Testament forces readers to consider Max not as a
metaphorical mutant minority, but a recognizably human one. 
Mostly, though, this dark past serves as textual justification for an era in
which Magneto is rendered, in effect, as power fantasy. In his 1980 essay,
Evron dryly observed that American and Israeli Jews both clung tightly to “a
double, contradictory image—the virile [Israeli] superman, and the potential
Holocaust victim.” The former construction, he argued, offered American Jews a
chance to indulge their fantasies of toughness and manliness. By 2014, for
example, a 21-issue series written by Cullen Bunn had positioned Magneto as a
modern Nazi-hunting vigilante, operating out of hotel rooms and killing
anti-mutant bigots. The series mined a pulp thrill from Magneto’s moral
ambiguities, but ultimately justified them. “People say he’s some sort of
monster,” a young mutant says. “But I’m just glad that mutants have someone
like him. Someone who can be angry, who can do the bad things, so that we might
survive.”
That’s the fantasy. Here is a man against whom every bigot, every neo-Nazi,
every gay-basher will find that they have bitten off far more than they can
chew. Isn’t this the way it should have happened? No weapon formed against him
can prosper: The mechanical, mechanized means of death that killed so many of
our ancestors can be set back on their perpetrators with a contemptuous flick
of the hand. And despite his demonstrated ability to level a city, Magneto will
always hit the correct targets, the ones that have it coming. He will be a
superhero, and always Right. He will not have to reckon with himself. He will
not have to change. 
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
And yet, miraculously, Magneto has. In 2019, after years of languishing in a
narrative holding pattern, the X-Men franchise relaunched with a wildly
ambitious five-year story, spearheaded by a group of writers initially led by
Jonathan Hickman. Formed from multiple interweaving series, it is rooted in a
simple premise: Mutants have again established their own sovereign nation on
the living island of Krakoa. This time, however, Xavier and Magneto are working
together as leading partners, and mutants have worked out how to use their
powers to resurrect the dead. The world may hate and fear them, but it can no
longer kill them. 
For most of its existence, the Krakoa era has been an impressively
precision-engineered setup, something that can be plausibly read in multiple
ways. You can, if you like, interpret it as a metaphor for the promises and
failures of Zionism, or ethnonationalism more generally. Here is a state formed
out of, and justified by, the memory of atrocity. It is built on a dream of
establishing a [74]new cultural identity (complete with [75]a new language) and
[76]a quasi-socialist yet techno-capitalist setup. 
And yet its government never quite gets around [77]to creating a real
constitution; its spy agency is too busy pursuing foreign policy debacles and
internal power politics [78]to catch the threats rising around them. As time
goes on, the beautiful Krakoan dream is brutally undercut by the agendas of the
monsters they allow in—people who see the nation as an avenue to their own
power and want to twist it into something horrific, and who nearly get their
wish. You can also read Krakoa just as easily as an invocation of the original
Zionist nightmare: a small nation surrounded on all sides by enemies bent on
its elimination, who poison its reputation and are ultimately successful in
destroying it via brutal sneak attack. (The status quo, recall, can never be
transcended for long; Marvel-time is mythic Jewish-time; the next pogrom for
the X-Men is always coming.)  
Over the course of the narrative, Magneto—subjected to a remarkably sustained
bit of authorial examination—finally begins to evolve. Under Hickman’s pen, he
opens the series in fine old form, as a swaggering nationalist atop the Krakoan
embassy in Jerusalem, browbeating deceitful ambassadors, playing power politics
at Davos, indulging in feats of incredible strength. Yet as the story winds on,
Magneto finds that mutant nationalism, with all its attendant compromises and
failures, is not actually the balm he sought. In his growing disillusionment,
he abandons the project. “I tried to build something,” he muses in the pages of
2022’s X-Men: Red #1, written by British writer Al Ewing. “But when I tried to
wrestle my dream into the world—to make it real—it broke apart. Shattered to
pieces. And they cut me to the heart.” 
That disillusionment, too, might sound familiar. By the 2000s, an increasingly
right-wing Jewish nationalism had both the American and Israeli mainstream in a
chokehold. The dream of peace had been replaced by a fantasy of a perpetual
managed apartheid. Powerful and increasingly reactionary lobbies like AIPAC
came down harshly on insufficiently deferential politicians; institutional
programs like Birthright worked to funnel diaspora Jews through hasbarist
fantasies. Over time, as previous Holocaust survivors and Israeli writers had
predicted, the gravitational pull of the state increasingly [79]twisted the
more[80] liberal elements of diaspora Judaism out of true. Transferred
nationalism, as George Orwell [81]caustically observed in 1945, proved “a way
of attaining salvation without altering one’s conduct.” Move over, Hashem; we
have new gods now. 
Amidst a perpetual occupation whose brutality was, in all senses, unspeakable,
the Holocaust memory culture that sustained the state took on an increasingly
acid and farcical edge. Germans [82]scolded refugees for daring to identify
with persecuted Jews; the increasingly white-nationalist Elon Musk [83]
performed the stations of the cross at Auschwitz alongside Ben Shapiro, to show
how much of an antisemite he wasn’t. Even before the October 7 massacre, the
Likud and its partners even further to the right in Israeli politics had grown
fat on entitlement, unaware or disdainful of the fact that they were badly
overspending their credit. A fault-line yawned open within the global Jewish
community, exposing the divide between those who had understood “Never Again”
to be a humanistic warning, and those who saw it as permission in advance for
whatever they deemed necessary to ensure it. As a villain and antihero, Magneto
easily stood in for the latter camp; those decades of endless, intermittently
coherent historical rage, and the way in which it made every response allowable
and indulged. 
And yet if superhero comics can be a site of bubbling anxiety and creaky
metaphor, they can also offer flashes of genuine grace. Let us return, then, to
where we began: the realm of judgment. In 2022, amid the excellent “Judgement
Day” crossover, Magneto died, falling in combat against a physical embodiment
of genocide, in order to save the world. Ewing writes him a deathbed epiphany:
“We must fight together—all of society's so-called undesirables,” he whispers.
“Or our enemies will destroy us simply for daring to exist.”
It wasn’t going to last. Death in superhero comics is an illusion; the only
question was what shape that return might take. In Ewing’s Resurrection Of
Magneto, it’s a tour-de-force examination of the character, one that sifts and
dissects and synthesizes his entire creative history, from Kirby/Lee to
Claremont and Morrison, as the man himself wanders past walls of monumental
concrete and fire. There are names, too: the names of all who died by his hand
or through his inaction, for the sake of his dream, and the too few that he has
saved. 
In death, of course, he’s still Magneto. He’s still swift to anger and quick to
lash out and prone to expediency; his suffering has not necessarily ennobled
him. He is as he’s been written. But, Ewing gently suggests, he might also be
something else as well. Magneto can not just evolve, but repent. In the Jewish
tradition, repentance is a long and difficult road, and one that offers no
guarantees—not of comfort, and not of a return to a pleasant status quo with
one’s sins absolved. It asks us instead to give up our illusions, our
resentments, our stiff-necked devotion to our own self-determination. It asks
us to accept both the reality of our sins and our capacity for good. It demands
that we abandon our belief in easy miracles. There is only the walk; there is
only the work. 
“Throughout my life, I have repressed the rage in me until it exploded, or I
have given it free reign over all decision,” Magneto says, confronting his old
Kirby/Lee self on the road back to life. “But I cannot return to the world and
return to the same path. I must change... So I acknowledge all that I have
done. I admit all that I am. I own the shadow that is in me. And if this is the
engine that drives me—let it drive me to a better world. A world for all who
are hated and feared.” 
For all who are hated and feared. “The true guarantee against
ideologically-based extermination is not military power and sovereignty,” Evron
wrote in 1980. That is, not in the building of more and higher walls, but in
the “eradication of ideologies which remove any human group from the family of
humanity.” Such a pursuit offers fewer opportunities to swagger and punish, and
tickles no atavistic fancies. Yet it is, in its way, a far more grand and
radical desire. 
Change in corporate superhero comics is as much of an illusion as death, of
course, and about as permanent. Any character development is subject to
reversion, and rare indeed is the development that doesn’t get walked back
somewhere down the line. But at this moment, this is what a reborn Magneto has
come to stand for—not the wary and vengeful paranoia of “Never Again,” but the
greater aspiration of “Never Again” for anyone. 
If to be a Jew of the diaspora is to be, in the Kirby/Lee/Claremont
formulation, a mutant, then this is what we must remember. We are not immune to
hatred and fear, and we are not the only ones subject to it. And we cannot be
safe until we create that better world for everyone, together. It’s a hard road
to such a world, and haunted. It might, perhaps, be an impossible one. The
judgment of Magneto is that all of us have to walk it anyway.
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[90]Asher Elbein
Asher Elbein is [91]a journalist and fiction writer based in Austin, Texas.
Among other places, his work has appeared in The New York Times, Scientific
American, Undark Magazine, Audubon, and Texas Monthly.
Read More:
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