(no subject)
I recently got hold of a comic from my adolescence, Captain America 275, which dates from late 1982 - I guess I or my brothers bought it some time during our long trip back to Australia from the US. I was 14, and after a couple of years in Virginia I vaguely knew there was such a thing as Judaism, but the comic was the first time I encountered anti-Semitism.
Steve Rogers (aka Captain America) is out shopping with his girlfriend Bernie Rosenthal and his landlord Anna Kappelbaum when they're shocked to discover vandalism at a local synagogue, where the caretaker has been assaulted and the Torah scroll stolen. "A Nazi swastika!" exclaims Steve. "Who in heaven could have done such a thing?" He dismisses the vandalism as "a random incident". Steve's naivety is surprising, given that (for complex reasons) he actually fought against the Nazis in World War II. The story is partly about his learning that anti-Semitism is alive and well in the modern day.
Some neo-Nazi guys are planning a rally; we briefly see one of their meetings. This was the first time I encountered Holocaust denial, too. A counter-rally has been organised by Bernie's ex-husband Sammy Bernstein. As often happens in this sort of story *sigh* Sammy is taking things too far, planning a violent confrontation. (Cf the Quantum Leap episode Liberation, etc etc.)
Even as a kid, it was hard to entirely agree with Cap when he condemned the men as "two of a kind"; Sammy isn't terrorising a community with violence and vandalism, nor calling for the deportation of American citizens on the basis of their race, as the neo-Nazi group are. (OTOH, he is a possible romantic rival!)
That said, the comic showed me what one does when one is confronted by racism:
(It wasn't until I reread the comic this year that I got the joke in that last panel - Steve Rogers couldn't look more like the Aryan ideal if he tried. :-)