The talented Noah Berlatsky recently wrote a piece for The Forward where he challenges many of the semi-religious attributes assigned to Superman — in particular, the closeness of the hero’s link to Judaism.
The truth is that Siegel and Shuster, like many Jewish Americans in the 1930s, had little investment in Jewish religion or in Jewish history. Brad Ricca wrote in “Superboys: The Amazing Adventures of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster” that Siegel and Shuster were both disinterested in the Jewish religion and culture of their “old world parents.”
This reading of Superman aligns much more closely with scholarship produced just two years ago by Martin Lund, entitled Re-Constructing the Man of Steel, than it does the work of The Forward‘s own Larry Tye or that of Harry Brod’s 2012 book Is Superman Jewish?
In many ways, Bertlatsky’s article counters another recent piece by The Forward, that of Marcy Oster’s “Making Superman Jewish Again” in February. This increasing intensity and variety of takes on the Man of Steel strongly suggest that his religious symbolism, particularly with a Jewish lens, remains a hot site of debate.
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