Superman

by Larry Tye

  Noble words, but can a comic book character actually move readers to change their behavior and lift their horizons? He can, says Emilio Ramos, Jr., if that character represents not just an abstract notion of good but the good in each of us, the way Superman does. Ramos grew up in the “slums and ghettos” of Holyoke, Massachusetts, with few men to model himself after. He got his first Superman comic at age six and was hooked. “I’ve never had alcohol, never smoked, never done a drug in my life. People are surprised with that because of the environment I was exposed to growing up. People are even more surprised when they asked how I turned out the way I am and I just say one word: ‘Superman,’ ” says Ramos, who is twenty-nine now and training for a career in law enforcement. “Superman definitely drew me into that field.” The Man of Steel taught Peter Lupus how to defend himself and others. “Up until I was fourteen everybody in the neighborhood beat me up for practice,” recalls the seventy-nine-year-old actor who was the muscleman on TV’s Mission: Impossible and later played Superman in commercials for the U.S. Army. “I started working out to overcome that bullying. Superman was my guy. I could equate with the Clark Kent–to–Superman transformation. I felt maybe I could go through life trying to help the underdog.”

  Superman changed Tom Maguire’s life, too, especially his spiritual side. “I had what I considered to be too much religion in my life as a youngster. I found it confusing. Which was the true god, my grandmother’s Armenian Orthodox god, my father’s Irish Catholic god, my best friend Bobby Barwald’s Jewish god, or my other friend Marty Pushkowicz’s Catholic god? Was the true god the Muslim god, the Muslims that my Armenian grandmother escaped from at age 12 to come to America? It was all so confusing to me as a child growing up in the ’60s. And then there was Superman, who provided an escape for me as a young reader. Superman didn’t ask me to believe in a god,” says Maguire, a fifty-six-year-old environmental regulator in Boston. “For 10 cents and later 12 cents an issue, Superman was an escape for me from those who asked me to believe in their god. Superman protected the oppressed and downtrodden and the poor, regardless of their religion or race. And my family was downtrodden at the time. I’m agnostic today, in part because of Superman.”

  AS WE EXPLORE SUPERMAN’S FAITH, it helps to consider what, if anything, he had in common with his vengeful crime-fighting compatriot Batman. What did Batman share with his archenemy the Joker? Was there anything other than superhero status that bound Superman and Batman to the Spirit, Green Lantern, Captain America, Spider-Man, the Incredible Hulk, the Fantastic Four, the X-Men, the Human Torch, and the Boy Commandos?

  All were the products of fertile Jewish imaginations. The midwives to the biggest and boldest comic superheroes and supervillains were young men with names like Lieber, Eisner, Finkelstein, Kurtzberg, Katz, and the dynamic duo of Siegel and Shuster. These aspiring writers and artists went into comics for the same reason bright Jewish doctors in the early 1900s practiced at hospitals like Beth Israel and Mount Sinai: It was the only option open to them. Anti-Semitism barred Jews from advertising agencies, which were lily-white and mainly Protestant, while the lack of a college diploma kept many out of other lucrative careers in publishing. Desperate for an outlet to display their wares and pay their bills, they turned to the nascent comic book industry. Comic books were to the high-end magazines and newspapers of the day what the shmatte, or rag trade, was to high-style clothiers, but that didn’t bother these young writers, most of whose parents or grandparents had been in shmattes. The comics offered a toehold and a paycheck. Jewish mothers may not have bragged about their son the cartoonist, but it was a way to earn a living and, in a surprising number of cases, fame and fortune.

  History equipped them for the task. Jews have been fine-tuning their storytelling skills since the days of Abraham, four thousand years ago. They did it first and best in the Torah, which is the first five books of the Hebrew Bible. Biblical commentaries were collected in the Talmud, rabbis’ sermons were published in the Midrash, and mystics’ tales found their way into the Zohar. No wonder Muhammad called them the People of the Book. While much of that writing was on esoteric matters of religious practice and legal dictates, it was told with such flair and essence that the books have remained in print for thousands of years, and telling stories still is an esteemed calling for Jews.

  Whimsy was another critical attribute for the cartoonist and another rich vein in Judaism. Jews have been cracking jokes for centuries. It was a way to stay sane in the face of repressive Spanish inquisitors, marauding Cossack horsemen, and all the other faces of despotism. Oftentimes the humor was self-mocking, as in the saying that any Jewish holiday can be summed up this way: “They tried to kill us. We won. Let’s eat.” Sometimes it teased the holy one, Yahweh, the way Moses supposedly did on Mount Sinai: “Let me get this straight. We cut off the tips of our penises and You promise to take care of us until the end of time. You better put that in writing.” By one count in the 1970s, more than 80 percent of America’s best-paid comics were Jewish, even though Jews made up less than 3 percent of the population.

  Telling a good story and making people laugh were good starting points for writers of comic books. But stories about superheroes required prototypes, and there were slim pickings for those in a world of Jewish milquetoasts. Yes, there was Samson, yet it was his very singularity that fueled our interest and his legend. The key, it turned out, was knowing where to look, and a good place to start was with the Golem. A he-man shaped from clay, this mythic character emerged repeatedly throughout history to safeguard Jews from aggressors. In some incarnations he was dim-witted and turned on his creator; at other times he was eloquent and loving. Always, he was big, powerful, and just the thing for a people in trouble. So was Siegmund Breitbart, a flesh-and-blood Polish-Jewish circus performer known to his landsmen as Zishe and to everyone else as the Strongest Man in the World. He could pound nails into wood with his fists and pull a wagon full of people with his teeth. He was becoming famous across America at the very moment that the Jewish creators of Superman, Batman, and other heroes-to-be were coming of age and looking for role models.

  Will Eisner was one of those creators. He went to the mainly Jewish, all-boys DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx, where his classmates in the 1930s included two teenagers who would invent Batman and two more who would reshape Superman. Eisner was confident that comics could become his vocation based on his writing and drawing for the school newspaper, literary magazine, and yearbook. He also knew from an early age that organized Judaism meant nothing to him and that God was take it or leave it. He was right about the former: He dreamed up the quickly successful crime-busting comic strip The Spirit, inspired generations of comic artists and writers, and, at the ripe age of sixty-one, wrote his first graphic novel and a landmark of the form. As for Judaism, its God and heroes became the centerpiece of his novels and he became a standard-bearer for the American Jewish experience. “I write about the things I know,” Eisner explained late in life. “I know about Jews.”

  Eisner was not the only comic book creator who was ambivalent about his Jewish identity. His fellow writers and artists were routinely reshaping their proud Russian and German Jewish names into monosyllabic, ethnically vanilla ones. So Stanley Martin Lieber became Stan Lee, Max Finkelstein was now Carl Burgos, and Jacob Kurtzberg rebranded himself as Jack Kirby, an appellation that suggested roots in Ireland, not Austria. Green Lantern artist Gil Kane lost not just his Latvian name, Eli Katz, but his arced nose; both changes were conditions his then-girlfriend set for marrying him. Eisner, meanwhile, wrote his early stories under four pen names—Willis B. Rensie, W. Morgan Thomas, Erwin Willis, Wm. Erwin—none of which sounded remotely Jewish. His sensitivity to ethnic appellations, like his compatriots’, grew out of boyhood pain. Will’s younger brother was named Julian—which neighborhood bullies sounded out as “Jewleen.” Will tried fighting for his brother’s honor, then settled for convincing Julian to become “Pete,” arguing, “That’s a better name for
around here!”

  Their names may not have sounded Semitic, but their writing did. Jack Kirby and his collaborator Joe Simon, also Jewish, created Captain America, the first major comic book hero to declare war on Hitler and the Nazis. Marvel Comics kingpin Stan Lee brought in imaginary characters like Willie Lumpkin and Irving Forbush, whose names were as unmistakably Jewish as Lee’s had been. More to the point, he brought to life stars like Spider-Man, whose working-class beginnings, childhood persecution and alienation, and purposeful life mirrored the experiences of Romanian-Jewish immigrants like Celia and Jack Lieber, Stan’s parents. Lee, however, resists reading too much into his characters or his own actions. He chose the name “Lee” to preserve “Lieber” for the Pulitzer Prize–winning novel he knew was in him, he says. As for suggestions that his characters came out of his past, “I never consciously added any Jewish qualities or elements.”

  Conscious or not, those elements were there in the adventures of one superhero after another. Who better to empathize with the fight for the underdog than Jews who had grown up reading signs saying NO NIGGERS, NO JEWS, NO DOGS? And who better to join that battle than the heroes they spawned, such as Lee and Kirby’s Mighty Thor and Carl Burgos’s Human Torch? The Jewish writers were outsiders by birth. They were conflicted, with one foot in their parents’ shtetl and another in their brave new universe of opportunity. They gave life and shape to heroes whose very names, from Batman to Captain America, reflected their creators’ reach for the otherworldly and the all-American. Yet the themes and the characters they brought to life grew out of the very past they were trying so hard to escape.

  JERRY SIEGEL SHARED THE Old World Jewish heritage of his comic book comrades and he grew up in the same American ethnic melting pot. His father and mother met and married in Kovno, in southern Lithuania, and that is where they had their first two children, Rose and Minnie. The family name then was Sigalowitz; Jerry’s dad was Michel, his mom was Sore. Michel took a ship to America in 1900, planting stakes in New York with guidance from his wife’s brother, who had arrived earlier. Sore came with the girls two years later. In between, the family name got shortened to Segal; no one knows why, but it didn’t happen at Ellis Island, where complicated names often were butchered, and it wasn’t to whitewash their religion, since Segal was almost as transparently Jewish as Sigalowitz. The alteration likely arose from a Yiddish-speaking immigrant trying to avoid spelling a long name in a strange tongue. Whatever the motivation, the effect, as her ship’s manifest indicates, is that Sore Sigalowitz was met at the dock by her husband M. Segal.

  The continuing evolution of their names offers a window into their continuing adjustment to life in a very different land, where they tried their best to fit in and nearly managed to. Sore picked a name that worked better for an American and a Jew—Sarah—and she stuck with it. Michel changed both his names with each new census: from Moses Sigel in 1910 to Michael Siegel in 1920 to Michael Sigel in 1930. Dual death records and dueling obituaries went back and forth between Michel and Michael (although all agreed on Siegel); some stories since then have called him Mitchell. During their brief time in New York, Michel and Sarah had either one or two more children, depending on which census they filled out accurately. Then they headed to the Midwest the way lots of Jewish families were doing, pulled by family or pushed by the German-born Jews who ran the New York community and disdained the poor migrants from Eastern Europe.

  The Shusters had more stops and fewer name changes on their way to Cleveland. Joe’s father, Julius, was from Rotterdam, in Holland, where Julius’s father was a successful hotelier catering to immigrants and where he met his wife, Ida, who was from Russia. The family was doubly blessed: Julius and his brother met Ida and her sister and the outcome was two weddings. All four young newlyweds ended up emigrating to Toronto, where they shared a flat and split their salaries right down the middle. Julius and his family couldn’t have made it otherwise, given his difficulty finding work. Later, when his brother and sister-in-law moved with their kids to Niagara Falls, Julius, Ida, and their three kids followed. In May 1924 Julius headed to Cleveland, where a job was waiting. Ida and the children followed in August.

  New York and Toronto had been thriving Jewish communities that more than matched in spirit and numbers those the Siegels and Shusters left behind in Europe, but neither family knew what lay ahead in Cleveland. They need not have worried. Cleveland back then had 85,000 Jews, which was more than 10 percent of the city’s population, and nearly half of them lived in the Glenville area, where the Siegels started out and the Shusters moved later. Gentiles were a minority in the neighborhood, which was 70 percent Jewish, and they were even rarer at the high school, which had the highest median IQ in the city. Most dads were small businessmen like Julius and Michel. Few moms were as active as Sarah, who volunteered with the Jewish Consumptive Relief Society, the Orthodox Orphan Home, the B’nai B’rith community service organization, the temple sisterhood, and the benevolent society. The Jewish Center, which was on its way to becoming the largest Conservative synagogue in America, had a basketball court and a huge swimming pool; neither Jerry nor Joe had much use for either. When the boys went outdoors it was Yiddish, not English, they heard from the ragman, the bread man, the iceman, and the fruit and vegetable men. When the boys said they didn’t grow up very Jewish they meant they didn’t go to synagogue much, but Glenville then was like Israel today: Just being there, breathing in the culture and street life, was living a Jewish life.

  Just how fully they had absorbed that worldview became apparent in a comic book Jerry and Joe collaborated on in 1948. Funnyman was about, as historians Thomas Andrae and Mel Gordon tell us, “America’s first Jewish superhero.” Comedian Larry Davis battled mobsters and goons not with super-strength but with wisecracks, wit, and comedic contraptions, the way Jews had been doing for centuries. No carefully sculpted body or small, straight nose on this champion. In costume he wore a Jimmy Durante schnozzola to go with baggy polka-dot pants and blue plaid tails; in street clothes he was drawn to look like the carrot-topped Jewish comedian Danny Kaye. No need for these stories to be scrubbed of their ethnic flavor, which was part of their appeal. One episode centered on a pain-in-the-rump character with the Yiddish handle Noodnik Nogoodnik, while another featured a medieval magician named Schmerlin. In this series the unlucky, awkward schlemiel was no longer the hidden half of our protagonist but the hero himself. It was not just Larry Davis who was showing his true ethnic self, but Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster.

  Jerry says he dreamed up Funnyman when he was in the Army. Joe’s sister says it was Joe’s idea. The truth is that both had been hams at least since their boyhood days of imagining characters like Goober the Mighty. Jerry had gone so far as to co-write with Joe’s brother a 134-page manual entitled How to Be Funny: A Practical Course of Serious Study in Creative Humor and to cook up the Siegel-Shuster School of Humor. By the time they created Funnyman, Joe and Jerry had learned their lesson on giving up control of their character to a corporation and were determined not to do that again. The postwar era, they reasoned, was the right moment for the country to laugh again and forget about being heroic. They were sure they could rebottle the magic of Superman. Unfortunately, they weren’t as funny as they thought. Without backing from deep-pocketed publishers like Jack and Harry, the new comic book lasted just eight months, and the syndicated strip stopped the next year. It would be Jerry and Joe’s last collaboration, but it was their most joyous.

  The Jewish inflections in Funnyman were also there in Superman, although finding them meant looking closer, the way a Torah scholar might. Superman was a refugee who had escaped to America from a world about to explode, just as the Shusters and Siegels did in fleeing Europe before the Holocaust. His parents rocketed him to Earth in hopes he would find a new beginning. He adhered to ethical guideposts as unbending as those of the tzadik, or righteous man, in the Old Testament tradition. Clark Kent was Superman trying to assimilate. Superman was the real thing—as
muscle-bound as Siegmund Breitbart, as indestructible as the Golem, and an inspiration to every Jewish schlump who knew there was a super-being inside him. Even kryptonite radiated with symbolism: It showed the influence his homeland still had over its Last Son, threatening to upend his life in the diaspora.

  Joe and Jerry were living that immigrant experience alongside their hero. Joe had been hoisting weights for years, building up his body in hopes of snagging a girl. No worries if she wasn’t Jewish, so long as she was tall and a dish. Jerry bought a big house, went to restaurants that saved him their best table, and adopted pen names more white-bread than Clark Kent’s. Joe and Jerry wanted to fit in, to be all-American big shots. They also wanted it both ways. What they were running away from was not their Judaism but their nebbishness. They hoped people would see that they had been special before they became famous.

  One thing that made them special during the war years was the belief that Hitler himself was after them, even if that wasn’t entirely true. The German American Bund did send Joe hate mail in the years leading up to the war, and its members picketed outside Detective Comics’ headquarters. The SS newspaper did write a story attacking Jerry and Superman after Look ran the Superman story in which he defeated the Führer. That was where the facts ended and the media frenzy began. Each time the story was reported in a newspaper or book it got ratcheted up: Now propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels was angrily attacking Jerry in the middle of a Reichstag meeting, and Adolf Hitler was threatening to exterminate him. Hitler and Goebbels didn’t, but their ally Benito Mussolini did ban from Italy Superman, along with every American comic book with the exception of Mickey Mouse.

  Those years on either side of World War II were ones in which Jerry and Joe evolved alongside their cartoon characters. Their confidence grew as they were celebrated for their work and sought out by other artists. That made it easier for them to experiment with formats like humor, which had always been there in Superman and took center stage in Funnyman. They did the same with their Jewishness, which became more pronounced when their hero was a comedian instead of a strongman. They had only been willing to reveal so much about Superman’s ethnicity, but it was more than anyone else had done with an all-American superhero.