This is a tricky one, because you need to start from a place of understanding Jewish subtext in film and other media, so I’m going to do a very TLDR version of this history:
Back in the 1920s and 1930s, the Hollywood studio system was dealing with a “family values” backlash, and one of the ways in which the “family values” crowd liked to bash Hollywood was to bring up the fact that a lot of the people who ran Hollywood were Jewish immigrants and were thus alien to the values of the American heartland (which of course got revived during the Cold War with the Black List and the McCarthy hearings).
One of the ways that Hollywood dealt with this, in addition to instituting the Hays Code was to really de-emphasize Jewishness in its products. Not that Hollywood didn’t continue to make products that came out of Jewish theater – the Marx brothers, for example – they just didn’t identify characters as Jewish and used circumlocution and veiled metaphor to discuss Jewish themes. Hence, even when you could fight the caution of the studio bosses to get them to greenlight an anti-Nazi picture like Casablanca (as late as 1942!), the screenwriters and directors had to smuggle in Jewishness under the radar:
So in 1941, when Jack Kirby and Joe Simon introduced us to Captain America and the name of the scientist who gave him his powers was Professor Reinstein at a time when the most famous Jewish emigre scientist in the world was Albert Einstein, the subtext was clear: Captain America’s serum is the result of Jewish emigre science, here to save us from the threat of Nazism. And while it’s changed somewhat in the last 60-70 years, the fact that the 2011 film has Doctor Abraham Erskine be both a scientist and a quasi-rabbinical figure, the subtext is still there:
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