Essay 4898

From The Miami Herald…

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Exhibit traces comic industry’s Jewish origins

By LEONARD PITTS JR.

It was 1940 and the Jews were dying. Shot down on cobblestone streets, starved in barbed-wire enclosures, frozen in winter snows, racked with disease. All seemed lost.

Then, from up in the sky, like a bird, like a plane, came Superman. With ridiculous ease, he captured the tyrants Joseph Stalin and Adolf Hitler. “I’d like to land a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw,” the Man of Steel told the Führer. He settled for delivering both men to the League of Nations in Geneva, Switzerland.

It did not happen, of course, except in the pages of a short comic-book story in Look magazine in 1940. In real life, Hitler and Stalin lived for years more and consumed millions of lives. But hey, a kid can dream, can’t he?

Visit the Jewish Museum of Florida in Miami Beach between now and April and you will find that Superman tale in an exhibition honoring the dreams of those kids. Of course, they’re not kids anymore. They are men long ago grown old or dead. But in the years of war and rumors of war, they were young men and boys who daydreamed. In the process, they dreamt up an icon as fully expressive of American values as baseball, jazz and a cheeseburger, side of fries, with a large Coke.

He was the superhero. Faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive. And Jewish, too.

Indeed, the first superhero, the aforementioned Superman, first published in 1938, was created by two Jewish boys from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Batman followed in 1939, brought to life by two Jewish men, Bob Kane (born Robert Kahn) and Bill Finger. Captain America, born in 1940, was the brainchild of two Jewish artists: Joe Simon and Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg). In the early 1960s, Kirby, along with writer Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber) reinvented the superhero genre with the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, Thor, the Hulk and (with a non-Jewish artist named Steve Ditko) Spider-Man. And so on. In fact, one could argue that had there been no Jews, there might have been no superheroes.

Marcia Jo Zerivitz, founder, executive director, and chief curator of the Jewish Museum, says that pioneering role was news to her when she happened to see Zap! Pow! Bam! The Superhero: The Golden Age of Comic Books 1938-1950, at The William Breman Jewish Heritage Museum in Atlanta a few years ago. “When I saw it,” she says, “I fell in love with it. First of all, I didn’t know that these [characters] were created by Jews. I figured if I didn’t know, a lot of other people aren’t going to know.” So she arranged to bring it to South Florida.

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