Roy Schwartz. Is Superman Circumcised? McFarland, 2021. 374 pp. $45. ISBN
978-1-4766-6290-9. https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/is-superman-circumcised/
Reviewed by Leonard (“Labe”) Rifas
Despite its catchy title, Is Superman
Circumcised?, Roy Schwartz’s “complete Jewish history of the World’s
greatest hero,” says almost nothing about the possibility that Superman’s
genitalia had been ceremonially trimmed. The title serves simply as a different
way of asking whether Superman is Jewish, a question which has been raised and
investigated, jokingly and seriously, briefly and at book-length, since at
least 1979. (15)
Even with a question so tightly
circumscribed, it would be impossible to keep up with all the pertinent
literature. McFarland Press, the publisher of Schwartz’s book, currently lists
another 158 books of comics scholarship in its catalog, including ten
little-known titles that seem directly relevant to Superman’s possible roots in
Biblical mythology, but which Schwartz does not mention. Out of that unending
flood of publications, I chose to read Is Superman Circumcised? for
three reasons. First, as someone who teaches and studies comics history, the
topics of Superman and the superhero genre that he inaugurated seem both
obligatory and inescapable. Also, as a circumcised American Jew (whose Jewish
grandparents had immigrated from Russia and Poland to Chicago about a hundred
years ago), I find discussions of Jewishness in relation to comic books
interesting. Finally, and most importantly, when my sister alerted me to this
book, I looked to see whether it mentioned anti-comic book activist Fredric
Wertham (whose work I have championed), and this book elaborates on a
dunderheaded theory that I was eager to look at more closely. I read the entire
book because the subject of Superman’s ethnic identity raises so many important
questions.
Schwartz introduces himself as an
Israeli-born, lifelong Superman fan who grew up on Superman movies, television
shows and comic books. Then he moved to New York to attend college and became
an immigrant. After writing a senior paper on “Superman as a Christ Figure,” he
was electrified to discover that Superman, rather than a Christ figure, was
Jewish, and that revelation led eventually to his graduate thesis and this
book. (2)
Although Schwartz’s “central thesis – that
Superman is a Jewish character” seems old hat, he makes three claims to
originality: that he examines evidence of Jewish content in Superman up to the
present rather than stopping in 1960 (or sooner) as earlier writers had done;
that he explores the Jewish parallels more deeply; and that he focuses
exclusively on Superman. (3, 5) The books that he acknowledges as the
foundation on which he built Is Superman Circumcised? are well-known
studies by Danny Fingeroth, Rabbi Simcha Weinstein, and Arie Kaplan.
Although too much has been written about
Superman to read it all, one book stands out as conspicuously missing from
Schwartz’s sources: Martin Lund’s Re-Constructing the Man of Steel
(2016, based on Lund’s dissertation of 2013). Lund’s scholarly,
foundation-shaking research directly and cogently challenges Fingeroth,
Weinstein and Kaplan’s arguments about the “so-called Jewish-Comics connection”
behind Superman’s original creation. Unfortunately, Schwartz’s book repeats
examples that illustrate the entire list of methodological pitfalls that Lund
had catalogued.
***
Is Superman Circumcised? has a chapter
“Superman vs. The Mad Scientist” which casts Fredric Wertham as the “mad
scientist.” Understandably, Schwartz seems particularly outraged when Wertham
“missed the point entirely” about Superman, and interpreted his comics as
promoting fascism. Schwartz quotes Wertham’s snide expression of gratitude that
at least Superman is not a member of Nazi Germany’s SS (Schutzstaffel). (191,
194) He proposes that Wertham must have been a calumniator with a defective
personality who harbored an elitist scorn for comic book publishers because
they were descended from East European Jews rather than German Jews like
himself. (194-6)
The SS in Nazi Germany had published their
own article about Superman in April 1940. It responded to the two-page story
“How Superman Would End the War” which Superman’s creators had done for Look
magazine. (115-118) Schwartz helpfully includes both that two-page story (as
one of the book’s 85 black and white illustrations), and the SS column about
it. The unnamed SS author asserts that the comic book Superman originated when
the “circumcised… Israelite” Jerry Siegel heard about “the resurgence of manly
virtues” in Italy and Germany, and “decided to import” these ideals “and spread
them among young Americans.” (115) Then, like a nitpicky comics fan, the
reviewer criticizes Siegel and Shuster for showing out-of-date military
uniforms, an unconvincingly posed figure, for making the German pilot sound
like “a Yid,” and for ignoring the “laws of physics, logic, and life in
general.”
What I enjoyed most about reading Is
Superman Circumcised? were the small discoveries that I made while studying
its source materials closely and not Schwartz’s interpretations. The SS piece
had quoted Superman as crying “Strength! Courage! Justice!”, but I noticed that
none of these words appeared in that two-page story. The rallying cry of
“strength, courage, justice” had been the motto of the “Supermen of America
Club” which the early issues of Action Comics and Superman’s radio show promoted.
Apparently, the SS writer had based his opinion of Superman on more than those
two magazine pages.
Looking at some forgotten articles and
book reviews that Fredric Wertham wrote in the years when he was also studying
comic books would have revealed how deeply Wertham had been shaken by the
recent Holocaust in his native land, and his fear that nothing seemed to rule
out the possibility that the United States would also succumb to fascism.
Seeing Wertham as centrally motivated by anti-fascism (rather than as
“monomaniacally fixated” on comic books) would have brought into sharper focus
how his so-called “crusade” against comic books fit with his other concerns.
Comparing Superman’s methods to fascism, though, was Wertham’s least original
contribution to the anti-comic book movement.
The argument that vigilante superhero
comics were conditioning their young readers to prefer quick and effective
fascist solutions over the slowness and imperfections of democratic law and
order had been a central part of the anti-comic book movement from the moment
it started with Sterling North’s May 8, 1940 column “A National Disgrace.”
Schwartz quotes from North’s column, but, like other scholars, overlooks that
North’s criticism of comic books grew from his response to Superman. North
begins by describing comic books as “a poisonous growth of the last two years.”
Two years earlier, Superman had first appeared, in Action Comics #1.
North calls the comics that he criticizes “the action ‘comics’” and criticizes
that genre’s “Superman heroics.” During those two years between 1938 and 1940,
American newspapers had warned repeatedly against the current crop of
“supermen” dictators (especially Adolf Hitler) and the Nazi ambition to build a
race of “supermen.” Beginning with North’s widely republished column, American
opposition to anti-democratic real-life “supermen” expanded to opposing lawless
comic book supermen as well.
Schwartz interprets North’s reference to
“cheap political propaganda” in that seminal column partly as a complaint
against Superman’s “interventionist” support for fighting the Nazis. (165.) Last
week I was surprised to discover that in March 1940, a Superman comic strip was
banned from appearing in Canadian newspapers because it made war look
ridiculous at a time when Canada (but not yet the United States) was at war
against Nazi Germany. Superman’s first comic book stories had similarly
expressed the mainstream, American resistance to getting sucked into another war.
I have not found any evidence that Sterling North opposed interventionism. To
the contrary, North thought that anyone foolish enough to try to appease Hitler
had not read Hitler’s book Mein Kampf.
Roy Schwartz admits that the
identification of Superman as a fascist has a superficial plausibility and
agrees that superheroes arose out of despair with the apparent inadequacy of
democracy and the rule of law. (169, 92, 175) Notwithstanding these
concessions, he strenuously counter-argues that Superman was the opposite of a
fascist and the enemy of the Nietzschean übermensch. For example, Superman
“never kills, maims or employs [violence] beyond what is necessary to stop an
aggressor – […] he’s no more a fascist
than any agent of law enforcement.” (171)
***
Anti-comic book activists, in addition to
their concerns about Superman supplanting the legal system in the manner of the
Ku Klux Klan’s “hooded justice,” also occasionally expressed a worry about
Superman usurping the place of religion.
Schwartz celebrates the ways in which Superman “took the place of” Bible
stories in American popular culture. (12-16, 23, 47, 218) He does not dwell on
possible downsides of substituting a secularized commercial product (an
intellectual property) for Judaism’s and Christianity’s traditional teachings.
He does, though, briefly mention a few instances of Christian resistance to
Superman becoming a religious figure. For example, when the Jewish writers,
director and producers of the 1978 film Superman: The Movie played up
Superman as a Christ allegory, the director received serious death threats for
this “sacrilege.” (244-246) In 2013, when the Jewish director and Jewish writer
of the Man of Steel made that film into a blatant retelling of the
gospels featuring Superman in the role of Jesus, and the studio aggressively
marketed the film to “the Christian faith-based demographic,” some Christians
“found the equivalence of Superman and Jesus in a movie saturated with violence
disconcerting.” This equivalence became especially “disconcerting” when
Superman broke the neck of his adversary, Zod. (41-2)
As a source of ethical teachings, Superman
has a major shortcoming. As Schwartz says, “Superman can’t be made to face the
complex issues of the real world without the fantasy falling apart. Realism is
his true Kryptonite.” (173) Is
Superman Circumcised? describes a rare instance in which DC abandoned its
editorial policy of deliberate disengagement from reality and let its
superheroes comment on a real-world leader. In a 1989 comic book:
“Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Khomeini
himself […] rewards the Joker by appointing him as the Iranian ambassador to
the UN, under full diplomatic immunity (a twist that, given the regime, only
slightly strains credulity). The Clown Prince of Crime gives a rambling speech
at the General Assembly […] then predictably tries to kill everyone with his
laughing gas. Superman, attending undercover, saves the day.”
Although
this comic book, Batman: A Death in the Family, received major news
coverage, as I remember it, no one in the mass media challenged its propaganda
content. In actuality, Saddam Hussein’s Iraq had invaded Iran in 1980 and began
using poison gas in 1983, eventually causing tens of thousands or more Iranian
deaths. Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Iran responding with its own
chemical weapons, and chose instead to use diplomacy at the United Nations in
an attempt to bring Iraq’s war crime to an end.
A person does not have to be a fan of Khomeini’s theocratic regime to
worry about the effects of this kind of twisted comic book story on young
readers’ understanding of complex world events.
Like most authors of nonfiction, Schwartz
keeps himself out of the picture. He never reveals his own religious background
or beliefs. He does make plain, though, that he had found in Superman stories,
beginning with Superman: The Movie, the kind of hope that religions have
offered, and found in stories about a character with a secret identity a way of
working through issues regarding his public self and private self. He explains
with evident feeling how Superman expressed concerns that had been especially
acute for Jewish immigrants and their children.
***
The main changes beginning in 1960 have
been that the popularity of Superman’s comic books sank; the comic book
industry became less Jewish; superheroes starred in many blockbuster films; and
the indicators that linked Superman stories to specifically Jewish (and
Christian) experiences, traditions, and beliefs became more overt. In this turn
toward including explicitly Jewish characters, superhero comic books
participated in a larger cultural shift from assimilation to identity politics.
Schwartz sees the current resurgence of
anti-Semitism and White nationalism as an argument for Superman’s continuing
relevance and value, as the embodiment and promoter of the values of pluralism,
tolerance, co-existence, and inclusion. The superhero is “by definition a
celebration of difference.” (311-2) Schwartz imagines that notwithstanding the
comic book industry being “now almost entirely owned by multinational
corporations,” it nevertheless has “continued to be transgressive, at the
vanguard of social justice advocacy.” As evidence, the industry now includes
“more women, people of color and LGBTQ readers, creators and characters,
demonstrating its continued role as a tool of inclusion.” (311-2)
Even restricting our gaze to matters of
inclusion, though, the superhero genre has not held a vanguard position.
Fortunately, many years ago the gentile-led underground comix movement
reinvented the comics medium as a personal form of artistic and literary
expression. This led to works like Maus (the “pinnacle of Jewish subject
matter in comics”), which in turn helped to inspire today’s thriving global
market in graphic novels and webcomics, through which cartoonists from many
backgrounds have been exploring the issues at the heart of Schwartz’s book: how
to grow up and take part as a member of a broader society while maintaining a
particular immigrant, ethnic, religious, (or gender, sexual,
disability-related, body-size, or other) identity.
The old, homogenized, white American society that Superman was portrayed in for the
first half century of his life does not represent a historical reality that
could be recovered,
but
an assimilationist’s fantasyland. Nevertheless, it does imagine a world that
white ethnonationalists might yearn for.
***
For those who feel the need for an “icon”
to guide us through these times of fear and despair, Superman does not seem
like a particularly Jewish solution. Judaism has been anti-iconic, all the way
back to when Abraham smashed the figurines in his father’s shop (Midrash
Bereishit 38:13). Still, we do need some powerful story if we
are to revive the American dream of a government of, by and for the people; to
unite across our differences; or to get through the atomic age, the Holocene extinction
and the climate crisis with the least lasting damage. In an image-saturated
society, for better or worse, we want to know what that story would look
like.
I did enjoy that
Roy Schwartz commands a larger working vocabulary than mine, including in
Yiddish, which like me, he uses one word at a time. He employs his writing
skill to explain how the character of Superman incorporates some fundamental
tensions, between “red” and “blue,” insider and outsider, vigilante and
upholder of the law, role model and savior, which have provided raw material
for eighty plus years of storytelling. As he admits, the results have often (but
not always) been stiff, stodgy, tedious, dull, or corny, and yet talented
writers and artists continue to rework the character of Superman as an
important part of an unfinished mythology.
A version of this review will appear in IJOCA 23:2.