Superman is Jewish?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way by Harry Brod (review)

As a lover of comics, I thoroughly enjoyed this engaging book, which chronicles the remarkable history of Jews in the comics industry. Within, Brod offers some suggestions about why this might be so, along with insights on comics ranging from Superman to Mad magazine to graphic novels such as Joe Kubert’s Yossel, Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. Superman is Jewish? is not a scholarly book written in academic prose, nor did Brod intend it to be. Rather, published by a commercial press, ten short, sometimes-conversational chapters are written in an accessible style without a plethora of footnotes, and certainly not any expository ones. I did regret the absence of an index and more notes to guide the reader to past scholarship, limitations likely imposed by a mainstream press. For example, a number of recent books have taken up the same material, including Paul Buhle’s Jews and American Comics: An Illustrated History of an American Art Form, Danny Fingeroth’s Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero, Arie Kaplan’s From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books, Simcha Weinstein’s Up, Up, and Oy Vey: How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero, and my own co-edited volume with Ranen Omer-Sherman, The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches. Other recent books look more specifically at Superman, and more broadly than in a Jewish context, such as Larry Tye’s Superman: The High Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero and Rick Bowers’s Superman Versus the Ku Klux Klan. Even if there is some overlap in material and interpretation, Brod’s pleasant excursion into the connections between the origins and evolution of comics and the history of American Jews is a welcome addition to this flourishing avenue of investigation.

Brod’s story of popular culture’s intersection with American Jewry begins with an attempt to define what it means to dub a comic “Jewish.” In different incarnations, this question has preoccupied scholars. As early as the Fifth Zionist Congress in Basel in 1901, Martin Buber mounted a special exhibition of Jewish art, which explicitly aimed to identify and define Jewish elements in visual art. Like Brod, other critics have argued over whether Jewish cultural contributions (art, comics, literature, and so on) should be limited exclusively to any work made by a Jew, independent of content, or whether both the artist and the artwork must be identifiably Jewish, expressly engaging the Jewish experience, religious or worldly. Brod believes that the designation “Jewish” must come from the work, either explicitly or implicitly, rather than solely the identity of the creator, and throughout, he aims to flesh out how some of the less obviously “Jewish” comics in his book are in fact Jewish. To that end, Brod accurately characterizes his project as “an exercise in reclamation.” (xxvi)

As the book’s title suggests, Superman’s oft-parsed Jewish identity provides impetus for a longer study of Jews and comics. For this reason, and logically considering that Superman initiated the superhero craze in the United States, and was famously created by two sons of Jewish immigrants, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the opening chapter focuses on the first superhero. Indeed, chapter one chronicles the road to Superman’s appearance in 1938 in Action Comics, various links to Judaism and American Jewish life, and the caped crusader’s connection to Moses, the boy dispatched by his parents in a small vessel, much like Superman’s mode of transport to America. Brod points to, among other details, Superman’s birth name, Kal-El, translated in Hebrew as “all is God,” and Superman’s arrival as an “immigrant” from an old world about to be destroyed to the safe haven of America. Most interesting is Brod’s discourse...