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An essay on the bond between animals and humans
Essays on anti-semitism
An essay on the bond between animals and humans
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Racism has occurred throughout the ages. Stereotypes based on social classes, body size, and physical treatment in general has occurred. Many have been enslaved, teased, and even killed! Antisemitism is one of many forms of racism occurring back in the 1940s and 1950s. Maus is the story of Vladek, a Jew who underwent the terrors of World War II. In Maus the Jews are depicted as mice, and the germans as cats. This goes to show how the artistic treatment of the cat’s and mice in Maus symbolizes the actions and treatment of different groups of people during this time. To begin, the Jews are treated like parasites. According to Art Spiegelman (the author), “Brr. The polish get heated cabins.Yes, and we’re just left to freeze in these tents.” This …show more content…
This is just like how cats kill mice by sinking their claws into the mice’s flesh. This bleeds the mice to death as the cats start to sink their claws in to kill them slowly and horribly. This proves that the Jews have a terrible death note from the Germans. Next, the Jews are being bled to death by the German torture. An image on page 157 shows a bleed in the comic that extends of page as Vladek is being shipped of to Auschwitz saying, “We knew the stories-that they will gas us and throw us in the Ovens. This was 1944… We knew everything. And here we were.” This quote proves that the Jews treatment of torture by the Germans is symbolic because the Jews are being miserably killed by being burnt to death, gassed, and put to terrible working conditions. The German cats are sinking their fangs into Vladek as he is pushed into a truck heading for Auschwitz, bleeding him of his life through the immense torture he will begin to face. Finally, the artistic treatment of animals is all just a masking effect. In an image on page 125, a dog says, “Can I help you Mr Spiegelman?” The face of a dog represents an
In school Eva encountered a hard time because she was Jewish and the other children knew they could get away with blaming things on her. An example of this is when a group of boys put bird eggs on the teachers chair so she would sit on them. This joke caused the teacher to become upset and ask who had put the eggs on the seat. The children replied that it was the dirty jews referring to Eva and Miriam. The teacher then punished them without investigating what had really happened. Also within the classroom there were examples like if you kill two jews out of five how many do you have left.These events in the school shows how antisemitism was present in young children and lessons. As talked about in class many schools had lessons that were directed to teaching children how awful the Jewish people were compared to
As Trollope mainly concerns himself with upper-class society, social movement is necessarily a major issue in his novels, and added to his predisposition to prejudicial class awareness, Trollope behaves very questionably with regard to his non-English characters, particularly his Jewish characters. European Jews have consistently been oppressed throughout their history on the continent. The most widespread slurs used against Jews, then and now, are founded in resentment of the fact that Jews, in Europe, have historically found employment in banking, pawnbroking, and usury.
In the poem “Woodchucks” by Maxine Kumin, the speaker is in her garden and is annoyed with some woodchucks that are eating and destroying the produce in the garden. The speaker in turn tries to remove the woodchucks by using humane gas to kill them and when that is unsuccessful, she resorts to more violent means. This poem uses the annoying woodchucks to signify the Jewish people during the Holocaust by the Nazi Party.
Firstly, Art Spiegelman made use of certain animals to stand for human characteristics is appropriate to the cultural context of the Holocaust. Adolf Hitler’s idea of Jews are not belong to human race but vermin began the Holocaust during the World War II. As he said: “The Jews are undoubtedly a race, but they are not human” (Andrew Loman). Under his domination, Er Sturmer, a Nazi newspaper publication, and some anti-Semitic publications think the image of mice is a suitable image to describe Jews because they believes Jews should be eliminated as vermin. At the time, mouse were cultural stereotype of Jews in the most of Nazi Germnay’s eyes. In Maus, Art Spiegelman used Nazi Germany’s idea of Jews are disease carrying vermin to depict Jews as the image of mice. Secondly, Animal imagery helped Art Spiegelman to reveal the social reality of the Holocaust in an entertaining way during the period. Art Spiegelman did not want to take the ethic risk of representing the issue of racism directly, so he follows the form of Disney cartoon with their way of transfer aspects of racist to entertaining way, which was an American mass culture in the twentieth century. He used different animals to differentiate the race. For example, he used cat and mouse, which are innate antagonism, to metaphor for that Nazi Germany’s duty was to wipe them out. In the book, he depicted Jews as mice, Germans as cats, Poles as pigs and Americans as dogs. Art Spiegelman vivid represents the relationship between Jews, Germans and Poles by using food chain, like cat and mouse. Art Spiegelman shows a more pleasant way to differentiate the race characteristics during the period of the Holocaust by using animal imagery but not human
Between the years 1920 and 1930, many stereotypes of Jews developed in Europe. All Jews were seen as large nosed, wealthy, obese, dirty, ugly, smelly, dishonest, greedy, and deceitful people. They were also seen as drunk, perverted, and seducing people. In fact any bad point you can say about anybody, they were classed to be. “The only thing that Jews could understand was the whip.” There was a lot of propaganda in Der Sturmer, a German magazine/ newspaper about the Jews. A good example of that is a cartoon of a stereotypical Jew hugging what could be taken for a young Aryan woman. There is a bottle of alcohol on the floor. This shows the Jew to be a perverted, alcoholic user. Looking at the propaganda on the Jews, all of the visual pictures of the Jews had elderly people on them instead of young Jews. They used old people because it is easier to make an older person look uglier than she/he actually is.
The Holocaust was a time of darkness that was focused on the persecution of the Jewish community. However, it was also a war machine which persecuted people from all sorts of backgrounds such as Russian war criminals. In “The Supper” the Russians are abhorrently treated and discriminated against. Their bodies “stood out incredibly clearly [...] as if carved in ice;” which is a stark contrast to the German kempt uniforms (153). Borowski portrays the Russian status beneath that of the German perfection. Throughout WWII the Germans use this disparity of status in society to
The Maus series of books tell a very powerful story about one man’s experience in the Holocaust. They do not tell the story in the conventional novel fashion. Instead, the books take on an approach that uses comic windows as a method of conveying the story. One of the most controversial aspects of this method was the use of animals to portray different races of people. The use of animals as human races shows the reader the ideas of the Holocaust a lot more forcefully than simply using humans as the characters.
On their way to the concentration camp, a German officer said, “’There are eighty of you in the car… If anyone is missing, you’ll all be shot like “dogs” ”’ (Wiesel 24). This shows that the Germans compared the Jews to dogs or animals, and that the German have no respect towards the Jews. Arrived at the concentration camp, the Jews were separated from their friends and family.
Art Spiegelman’s Maus is a novel about the Vladek and his experience as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust. It narrates the reality of the Holocaust wherein millions and millions of Jews were systematically killed by the Nazi regime. One of the themes in the story is racism which is evident in the employment of animal characters and its relationship with one another.
In the novel Daniel’s Story, a book by Carol Matas, the obvious theme is prejudice. However, it did come along with lots of loss too. You can see this throughout the book, because the story is about a first person perspective with a boy named Daniel, and his experience of the Nazis taking over Germany and killing millions of Jews. One big part of the book portrays giant amounts of killing, specifically in the crematorium in Auschwitz where “[Daniel sees] corpses of every size turning black from heat. And [he realizes] that people [he knows are] in there, that they were not just bodies but each one a human being” (93).
...urvivors crawling towards me, clawing at my soul. The guilt of the world had been literally placed on my shoulders as I closed the book and reflected on the morbid events I had just read. As the sun set that night, I found no joy in its vastness and splendor, for I was still blinded by the sins of those before me. The sound of my tears crashing to the icy floor sang me to sleep. Just kidding. But seriously, here’s the rest. Upon reading of the narrators’ brief excerpt of his experience, I was overcome with empathy for both the victims and persecutors. The everlasting effect of the holocaust is not only among those who lost families÷, friends,
Racism is based on the belief that one’s culture is superior to that of others, and this racial superiority provides justification for discrimination. Racism begins with categorising by race, and therefore stereotyping particular cultures. A simple definition of prejudice given by St Thomas Aquinas states prejudice as “thinking ill of others without sufficient cause” (1. pg 21). Racism is a major issue in today’s society, affecting a large number of the world’s population and causing political and social turmoil. To evaluate the true meaning, effects and views concerning racism in today’s world, a number of literature sources were researched including novel, films, short stories, poetry, song lyrics, textbooks and magazine articles.
Anti-Semitism, a hatred of Jews, has been present for centuries in many places. However, the term ‘Anti-Semitism’ itself only came into use in the nineteenth century, and along with it came an ideology which fuelled this deep psychological hatred to develop into a political movement which culminated in Nazism. Throughout history, the reasons for Anti-Semitism have differed and in Imperial Germany, it was a combination of religious, racial and political factors which led to such hostility toward Jews. However, the economic state of the nation is often thought to be the main reason behind the way in which Jews were treated during this period.
Many racial and ethnic groups are treated cruel, which contributes to the problem of discrimination. The inhumane treatment inflicted onto different racial and ethnic groups is provoking horrific violence around the world. The film The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, gives us an insight to the cruel treatment endured by Jewish people in World War II. Jewish people were taken from their homes, separated from their families, and placed in concentration camps where they were expected to die. They were exposed to extreme levels of abuse, such as starvation, physical beatings, and emotional torture. The fear and terrorizing the soldiers used on the Jews is shown in the scene when Lieutenant Kotler catches Shmuel eating a cookie: “Are you eating? Have you been stealing food?
This shows how low the guards in the camps treated the Jews. They treated them like animals; they treated them as if they were not selves. The whole experience was extremely dehumanizing. I have never experienced anything so horrific in my lifetime but I have been through a dehumanizing affair. I was in high school when many of the boys would make comments about my womanly features in a derogatory fashion. Although they were just being playful and possibly trying to flirt, god-forbid, I would tell them off or sometimes just ignore it but it made me realize how insignificant those boys were and how that’s not all I was. I was and still am more than the derogatory terms they would call me. It pointed out more important things like intellect, and intelligence instead of physical image. It also made them look like animals. The primal concern for animals is pleasure and survival, the same for rational animals but they also strive for success, and finally people, our primary motivation in our lives is the search for meaning. That is first nature to us.