In the past decade, comic-book characters, and especially those created by Marvel, have come to dominate the movie business. “The person who has had the most impact on superhero comics” is Marvel’s Stan Lee, writes Michael Weingrad in his review of a recent biography of Lee by Liel Leibovitz. Born Stanley Lieber, the creator of Spiderman, Iron Man, and others, was the offspring of Jewish immigrants—and in this, he was not alone:
Even in comparison with so many other contributions to American popular culture and entertainment, comic books are an especially Jewish story. In addition to Superman’s creators [Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster], Bob Kane (born Kahn) created Batman, and Jack Kirby (Jacob Kurtzberg) and Joe (Hymie) Simon invented Captain America. The comic-book format itself was pioneered by the promotional publisher Maxwell Gaines (Ginzberg). Kane and Lee attended the same high school as the great comic-book artist and early graphic novelist Will Eisner.
Even René Goscinny, the cocreator of France’s most successful comic-book hero, Astérix, spent the late 1940s sharing a tiny New York City artist studio with MAD magazine’s creator and fellow Jew Harvey Kurtzman. All this reflected an immense midcentury unleashing of Jewish American creativity—as well as the refusal of many advertising firms to hire Jews.
As Leibovitz explains, for all Lee’s corniness as a prose stylist, his heroes were self-reflective, morally complex city dwellers. Often unhappy, their powers caused as many problems as they solved. This sensibility reflected the ebullient pressure cooker of mid-20th-century anxieties and hopes that were simultaneously American, Jewish, and personal. Leibovitz further suggests, but does not quite fully explain, that Marvel’s morally engaged yet unredemptive vision was a vital Jewish end-run around the longstanding Protestant cultural stalemate between fundamentalist and progressive visions of salvation. I am more inclined to think of a favorite Yiddish saying of my grandmother that could stand as the motto of Marvel in contrast to DC: es geyt nit in di kleyder (it doesn’t go in the clothes). In other words, it’s not about the costume.
Read more on Jewish Review of Books: https://jewishreviewofbooks.com/articles/7054/super-stan/