I have been asked to comment on a short piece that was published yesterday on CBR.com, which I have to agree calls out for a response and fact-check. The piece announced that Frank Miller has said in an New York Comic-Con interview that he wants to “tackle one of the oldest, but oft overlooked, origin stories in the entire industry: Superman’s Jewish heritage.” The article then goes on to make a few questionable claims, many of which I have seen before, in my research on Superman and the so-called “Jewish-comics connection.” This notion holds that Superman, and – depending on who you read – the superhero genre, the US comics industry, or the comics medium itself, were created by Jews and has a sort of “Jewish essence.”

Let us return to the quoted line about Superman’s supposed, but “oft overlooked” origin story and Jewish heritage. It does not take much effort to poke a hole in the claim that this is an overlooked topic. In the past ten years alone, numerous books have been published that have this issue as their central focus: in 2006, Rabbi Simcha Weinstein published Up, Up, and Oy Vey! How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero; in 2007, comics writer and writing teacher Danny Fingeroth published Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero; in 2008 comedian and journalist Arie Kaplan published From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books; and in 2012 masculinity scholar Harry Brod published Superman is Jewish? How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth Justice, and the Jewish-American Way. On top of this, there are several other books about Superman or Jews and comics more generally, as well as innumerable newspaper and online articles, in which claims about Superman’s “Jewish origins” are similarly made. Let us also not forget that what Miller proposes has already been done; in 1998, for Superman’s 60^th anniversary, DC put out a series of Man of Steel comic books in which the superhero traveled back in time to face the Nazis and in which Siegel and Shuster’s Jewish heritage got a nod.

As entertaining and interesting reading as the books and articles mentioned may provide, they suffer from a lack of support for their arguments, and rely mostly on recycling the same tropes and claims in a sort of internal feedback loop. This has led to a collection of common assumptions about what Superman “is,” based on nothing but the fact that his creators were Jewish. But once you shine a light on these claims, they start to fall apart. I will not go into a more general charting of these books or their claims here – for that, you can check out my forthcoming book on the subject or this post on my old, now-defunct blog – but will focus only on the latest article.

“Superman was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster in 1938,” writes the CBR author, who goes on to note, without any attribution, that he “is considered to be a direct response to the heinous imprisonment, torture and murder of Jews by the Third Reich before and during the war.” First of all, Superman was not created in 1938; he first appeared in that year, but that was after years of languishing in publication limbo. There are numerous versions of how his creation played out, but in all likelihood, the story that appeared in that first issue was more or less ready to go in summer 1934. Reading the early Superman historically suggests that he was most directly a response to the Great Depression, not Nazism, and nowhere in the pre-war years did he seem to show any particular sorrow or concern for European Jews under Nazi oppression. Moreover, the flattening of the Holocaust and its projection back to 1938, years before the Nazis implemented their so-called “Final Solution,” betrays a type of ignorance of the historical Holocaust that has caused historian Alvin Rosenfeld to publish his worries about “the end of the Holocaust.”

The author then goes on to claim that in Superman’s early years, “the parallels [between the superhero and the situation in Nazi-occupied Germany] were so apparent that, in 1940, Reich Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels publicly denounced Superman and Siegel.” There is no evidence to support this particular legend, but it is true that the SS publication Das Schwarze Korps published an article that was critical of one particular Superman story. The CBR piece is not the first time the Nazi-authored article has been used to bolster claims about Superman’s Jewishness, but it never gets less strange to see it used in this way; if you read it, you will see that it is not in any significant way an article about Superman’s “Jewish heritage.” It is a vile piece of anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda that presents Superman as an expression of supposed Jewish cultural parasitism, where the Nazi author tells readers that, “[a]s you can see, there is nothing the Sadducees won’t do for money!” This article should never be used to claim anything about Superman and his creators’ Jewishness, because – let me say this again so that it is clear – it was a vile piece of anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda.

The CBR author goes on to write that “[s]igns of Superman’s Jewish heritage have largely fallen away over the years, replaced, at times, with Christian imagery.” It is true that Superman has often been presented in Christian terms. This dates all the way back to the 1942 novelization of Superman by George Lowther, a producer and announcer of the Superman radio serial. Since then, there have been writers and artists who have tended toward a Jewish framing of the character, toward a Christian framing, and toward numerous other kinds of framings. This is only to be expected. Superman is not a character that exists independent of his various writers and artists. To claim that one version is ”real” and that all others are somehow not will only lead into irresolvable contradictions. (Siegel and Shuster’s ”original” Superman was a verbally vicious and physically brutal bully who killed or let people die numerous times. As the recent outrage over Man of Steel shows, this characterization does not sit well many self-professed Superman ”purists” today.)

At the end of the article, the CBR author states that Superman nonetheless ”enjoys a decidedly Jewish origin, from his name, Kal-El, which sounds similar to ’voice of God’ in Hebrew, to the ship in which he escapes the dying planet Krypton, which bears a resemblance to the Star of Bethlehem.” The Kryptonian name Kal-El is one of those common assumptions I alluded to above. Numerous writers have claimed it as Hebrew. The problem there is that since the name has never been written in Hebrew, it is impossible to know what root word is could stem from or what vocalization should be applied to it. Thus, the ”Hebrew” reading is open to a whole host of interpretations, many of which are less God-friendly. Ultimately, however, the name doesn’t really belong in a discussion of Siegel and Shuster’s Superman; when they named the character, it was as Kal-L, in conjunction with a science fiction name – Jor-L – that they had used in an earlier comic strip. ”Kal-L” became ”Kal-el” only at George Lowther’s hand, and the capital E in El was added even later. As for the reference to the Star of Bethlehem, I have to admit that I am completely stumped; the Star of Bethlehem is central to the narratives of Jesus’s birth in the Gospel of Mark, named as such there, even if its appearance has roots in interpretations of Jewish scriptures.

By repeating this type of claim, the author does not honor Siegel and Shuster or their Jewishness, he does not consider their experiences as Jewish Americans in a period when Americanization of immigrants was the sought-after norm and US anti-Semitism was at its historical apex, or their experience as young men with a love of popular culture. It helps add another layer of simple and attractive myth to a history that is much more complex and, at times, disturbing.

Writes the CBR author to end his piece: ”If Miller does eventually get the gig, he would effectively be returning the Man of Steel to his roots.” This is echoed by the publishers of the interview (which could just as easily have been similarly dissected): ”Watching Superman, who hasn’t previously been asked to confront or comment on what about him is Jewish, deal with the realities of Nazi Germany and Hitler’s death camps, sounds like an unprecedented experience for comic book readers. If anyone were to pull it off, it would likely be Miller.”

I have to disagree. It is true, as the CBR writer claims, that Frank Miller “has tackled his fair share of complex themes in his writing over the years.” But his track record on that kind of “tackling” is something that should be considered with at least a little more depth.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: Further, just one year ago, Miller was reported as saying how much he hated Superman, since “who wouldn’t hate someone who could fly, someone who is just loved by everyone, was the handsomest guy who could get all the dates.”]

From the conventional mid-1980s “Japan-bashing” in Ronin, to the racism embedded in 300, to the misogyny of Sin City, to the rampant Islamophobia of Holy Terror!, to Miller’s unhinged rants about the Occupy movement and beyond, we have seen time and time again the way he treats those different from himself. The fact that he lacks both empathy with his Others and a sense of proportion is clear from, for example, his saying in a 2002 conversation with Will Eisner, that when Miller entered the comics industry in the 1970s, “there was this constant sense that we [comics creators] were the ‘niggers’ of entertainment–and I think that persists and hasn’t changed.”[1] (Eisner doesn’t challenge Miller on his claim, and elsewhere in the same interview introduces his own racialized rhetoric about comics, but that’s another story.) Given Miller’s track record, his manifest racism, and his penchant for conspiracy theories, the Holocaust seems to me very much to be a topic that he should not go near. The murdered do not need Frank Miller to send Superman to “face a death camp,” and they sure do not deserve him or his vicious brand of “storytelling.”

[1] This is not to say that US comics history does not contain a strain of anti-comics backlash, as David Hajdu has ably traced, but for any minor similarity the types of marginalization might share, they are of such different kinds, extents, and depths that the comparison is as dishonest as it is distasteful.

[EDITOR’S NOTE: CBR.com has credited Brandon Staley with writing the Miller piece.]