Jewish Life Digital Edition September 2015 | Page 40

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Superman or
Jews and the creation of the comic book
superhero I By Ilan Preskovsky

Unless you’ve been living under a rock for
the past 15 years, you may have noticed a
certain trend that has been dominating
pop culture in this early part of the 21st
century. No, not selfies, auto-tune or even
Twitter: I’m talking, of course, about superheroes. It doesn’t particularly matter
whether you’ve actually seen The Avengers, The Dark Knight or the Flash, let
alone read the comics on which they’re
based, these (usually) brightly-clad characters have jumped from cultural obscurity to a place in the public consciousness
that they haven’t enjoyed in decades –
and they’re showing absolutely no sign of
going anywhere, anytime soon.
What you might be perhaps less familiar
with, though, are the very Jewish roots of
these American modern day mythological
archetypes. By this point, it’s pretty much
common knowledge that Superman was

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created by a couple of Jewish teenagers in
the 1930s, but the ethnicity of Messrs Siegel and Schuster is really only the tip of
this particularly strange and very Jewish
iceberg (“iceberg” – it even sounds Jewish).
To truly understand superheroes and their
Jewish connection, however, we must first
understand the art form that originally
spawned them – the humble comic book –
and to do that we need to go all the way
back to the early and often very dark days
of the 20th century.

The Birth of an American
Art Form

Between the end of the 19th century and
the beginning of the 20th, the United
States of America saw a large influx of
Eastern European Jews arriving on its
shores; Jews who were weary of the ever
increasing anti-Semitism in their home

countries and were hoping to forge a new
and better life in this Land of Opportunities. And, indeed, though America was
hardly free of virulently anti-Semitic elements, its ‘melting pot’ society was far
more accepting of Jews than the increasingly inhospitable Europe, with its pogroms and general climate of Jew-hatred.
Between the end of the World War I and
the beginning of the World War II, these
new immigrants faced a new, or at least
more advanced, challenge to the prosperity
of their new lives. First, the increasingly
tumultuous economy of the 1920s finally
collapsed at the end of the decade, with
the stock market crash that kicked off the
Great Depression and a decade of extreme
economic hardship to the American people
in general, but, most especially, those who
had only just recently started new businesses or new jobs. Along with this, the
dark spectre of anti-Semitism, which was
only hiding just out of sight until then,
made itself known with a vengeance in one
of the more anti-Semitic periods in the
United States’ history.
It was in this period that both the comic book and the superhero were born, out
of a combination of poverty, hardship and
their creators’ desperate need for survival
in an antagonistic landscape. The first
comic book, which consisted of reprints
of the “Sunday Funnies” bound together
in a very cheaply, mass-produced package,
was created by Maxwell Gaines (formerly
Maxwell Ginsberg). A struggling Jewish
novelty salesman, he combined his desperate need to feed his family with his
love for old comic-strips into something
he believed he could sell as “promotional
items” to major publishers.
Named “Funnies on Parade” and first
published in 1933, this cheaply produced
novelty product soon kicked off a new
craze that saw the creation of companies
fully d evoted to the burgeoning art form.

photographs: BIGSTOCKPHOTO.COM

Supermensch?