If Superman had had his way, Hitler would have wound up begging for mercy before the League of Nations in Geneva in 1940, and there would never have been an Auschwitz.
A major new exhibition, which opened at Berlin’s Jewish Museum, argues it was no coincidence that the biggest superheroes including Superman, Spiderman, Batman and the Hulk were all created by Jewish comic artists.
“Heroes, Freaks and Superrabbis — the Jewish Color of Comics” looks at 45 of the most successful comic creators, overwhelmingly children of European Jewish families who had emigrated to New York.
PHOTO: AFP
As comic books entered their golden age in the 1930s and 1940s, the most iconic superheroes were products of those troubled times, even taking on Adolf Hitler and his Nazi henchmen before the Americans did.
“The point of the exhibition isn’t to say comics are a Jewish speciality,” said Anne Helene Hoog, one of the curators. “Rather, it looks at the question why so many Jews became comic artists, and what issues preoccupied them.”
In February 1940, nearly two years before Pearl Harbor, How Superman Would End the War by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster has the Man of Steel making quick work of the diminutive Nazi leader.
“I’d like to land a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw, but there’s no time for that!” Superman tells a groveling Hitler as he dispatches him to Switzerland to face justice, along with Stalin to boot.
A month later, Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg) and Joe Simon’s Captain America thwarts a Nazi plot to invade the US with a wallop to the Fuehrer’s nose in a legendary cover sketch.
Hoog said the superheroes were often depicted, like their artists, as outsiders who, with an immigrant’s deep patriotism, battle to save their adopted home country from an outside threat.
That image resonated powerfully at a time when the world appeared to be falling apart, Hoog said.
“In light of the failure of democracy in Europe, it was clear that young people — particularly the children of immigrants, poor people, refugees — confronted with misery, fear, violence, injustice and finally extermination, were alarmed by what was happening in the world,” she said.
“In the 1930s, there was a deep need for superheroes,” she added, and Jewish artists were happy to oblige.
Although none of the major superheroes were overtly Jewish, their heroic journeys were often steeped in Old Testament imagery, noted Jewish Museum program director Cilly Kugelmann.
“Like Moses, Superman was discovered as an apparently abandoned baby and raised by the people who found him,” she said, adding that the character also had roots in Greek mythology, Germanic tales and the story of Jesus Christ.
Even “Shazam,” the magic word that turns young Billy Batson into 1970s-era Captain Marvel, had quasi-Jewish roots. The word is an acronym for the legendary heroes who inspire him and the first letter, “S,” stands for wise King Solomon of Israel.
Many of the comic artists worked as paper boys when they were young in the 1920s, selling newspapers amid the tenements on New York’s Lower East Side, where their love for the “funnies” was born.
After the war, with time Jewish graphic novelists began confronting the Holocaust, tentatively at first, and culminating in the harrowing Pulitzer-prize-winning Maus series by Art Spiegelman.
In the two volumes published in 1986 and 1991, Spiegelman tells the story of his Shoah-survivor father, a Polish-born Jew, and the author’s own feelings of guilt and rage toward him as he was growing up. With his literary ambition, Spiegelman revolutionized the genre.
Comics also accompanied the counterculture movement of the 1960s, with Mad magazine and subversive “comix” by Jewish women such as Trina Roberts and Aline Kominsky-Crumb.
Hoog said a current of irony runs through many of the works, highlighting Steve Sheinkin’s The Adventures of Rabbi Harvey and Rabbi Harvey Rides Again about a Jewish cleric superhero in the Wild West.
Punctuating the point, a caped Superman statue outside the museum shows him crashed into the pavement, with Krypton blood trickling from his head. The sculpture is called Even Superheroes Have Bad Days.
MONEY MATTERS: Xi was to highlight projects such as a new high-speed railway between Belgrade and Budapest, as Serbia is entirely open to Chinese trade and investment Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic yesterday said that “Taiwan is China” as he made a speech welcoming Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) to Belgrade, state broadcaster Radio Television of Serbia (RTS) said. “We have a clear and simple position regarding Chinese territorial integrity,” he told a crowd outside the government offices while Xi applauded him. “Yes, Taiwan is China.” Xi landed in Belgrade on Tuesday night on the second leg of his European tour, and was greeted by Vucic and most government ministers. Xi had just completed a two-day trip to France, where he held talks with French President Emmanuel Macron as the
With the midday sun blazing, an experimental orange and white F-16 fighter jet launched with a familiar roar that is a hallmark of US airpower, but the aerial combat that followed was unlike any other: This F-16 was controlled by artificial intelligence (AI), not a human pilot, and riding in the front seat was US Secretary of the Air Force Frank Kendall. AI marks one of the biggest advances in military aviation since the introduction of stealth in the early 1990s, and the US Air Force has aggressively leaned in. Even though the technology is not fully developed, the service is planning
INTERNATIONAL PROBE: Australian and US authorities were helping coordinate the investigation of the case, which follows the 2015 murder of Australian surfers in Mexico Three bodies were found in Mexico’s Baja California state, the FBI said on Friday, days after two Australians and an American went missing during a surfing trip in an area hit by cartel violence. Authorities used a pulley system to hoist what appeared to be lifeless bodies covered in mud from a shaft on a cliff high above the Pacific. “We confirm there were three individuals found deceased in Santo Tomas, Baja California,” a statement from the FBI’s office in San Diego, California, said without providing the identities of the victims. Australian brothers Jake and Callum Robinson and their American friend Jack Carter
CUSTOMS DUTIES: France’s cognac industry was closely watching the talks, fearing that an anti-dumping investigation opened by China is retaliation for trade tensions French President Emmanuel Macron yesterday hosted Chinese President Xi Jinping (習近平) at one of his beloved childhood haunts in the Pyrenees, seeking to press a message to Beijing not to support Russia’s war against Ukraine and to accept fairer trade. The first day of Xi’s state visit to France, his first to Europe since 2019, saw respectful, but sometimes robust exchanges between the two men during a succession of talks on Monday. Macron, joined initially by EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen, urged Xi not to allow the export of any technology that could be used by Russia in its invasion