Superman was secretly a symbol of Jews standing up to Nazi bigotry

“The literary narrative is a place where theory takes place,” author Barbara Christian asserted. I would add that science-fiction provides the occasion to stretch the possibilities, to transcend the constitutive bounds and constraints by providing a context in which theory can function unencumbered.

I often think of the figure of Superman, that immigrant from a distant planet who came to Earth with powers far beyond those of moral humans.

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Superman can be interpreted as a Jewish man passing as an Anglo Gentile on a number of levels. Two young Jewish high school friends from Cleveland, Ohio created the comic strip. Though Jerome Siegel (1914 – 1996) and Joseph Shuster (1914 – 1992) fashioned their superhero in 1934—one year after Adolf Hitler’s ascendancy to power in Germany—they would wait four long years until a comic book publisher, D.C. Comics would pick up the strip and introduce their super-powered man to the public.

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Siegel wrote the text, and Shuster illustrated their creation. Both science-fiction fanatics, Siegel and Shuster graduated from Glenville High School in 1934, at a time in world history of extreme moral crisis, a time that signaled the beginning of the end of European Jewry as they had known it.

Siegel and Shuster took the name “Superman” from Nietzsche’s “Über Mensch,” which Adolf Hitler had distorted for his own purposes in his ultimate rise to power. The “S” embroidered on the chest of Superman’s garment also stood for “Siegel” and “Shuster”—the Jews behind their brainchild. 

Superman (born Kal-El), is a Kryptonian immigrant from the planet Krypton. Just before his doomed planet exploded into fragments, the scientist Jor-El (El is the Hebrew equivalent for “God”) and his wife Lara placed their infant son into an experimental rocket-ship and launched it toward Earth, as Moses’s kin launched their child down the River Nile for his protection as their world was crashing around them.

Both Kal-El and Moses would eventually become forces of righteousness in their new lands.

As a fierce storm loomed darkly above the horizon (read impending Holocaust of the Jewish populations of Europe), his eventual Earthly adoptive parents—Jonathan and Martha Kent of Smallville, Kansas, the middle of middle America—were preparing to close up their house when they witnessed an object shoot from the sky and falling into a nearby field.

(Quite a number of European Jewish parents sent their children on the Kinderstransports or to the countryside in hiding to live with Gentile farmers and trades people in hopes of saving their children’s lives during the impending storm of persecution).

As he was rocketed from his native planet, a glowing green substance, Kryptonite, attached itself to Kal-El’s space craft. This potentially deadly substance would plague the would-be “Superman” throughout his days living in his newfound land. The green material was a metaphor not only for antisemitism, but also the destructive power of atomic energy, especially if Germany had first harnessed its potential.

The Kents adopted young Clark—an immigrant suffering from diasporic displacement. They warned their new son to conceal his superpowers (read as his Jewishness) from everyone to prevent others from becoming suspicious and frightened.

As many politicians heeded the U.S. Ambassador to England, Joseph P. Kennedy’s, warning not to actively campaign on behalf of European Jewry and to involve the U.S. in World War II, the early creators of Superman did not write overt anti-Nazi stories, and very few stories of World War II itself.

There is an irony to this: Clark Kent, serving as a reporter for the newspaper, The Daily Planet, in Metropolis was effectively inhibited from reporting on areas of greatest concern during those horrific times. Some of the covers of the Superman comics, however, are very explicitly connected to the war.

One cover (Superman #17) in fact, showed Superman firmly positioned on the Earth lifting Hitler and Emperor Hirohito by the scuff of their necks and shaking them both as if to shake some sense into them.

And in Superman #23, we witness a visibly enraged Superman as seen through the periscope of a German U-Boat, swimming in angry determination toward the submarine after it had apparently sunk an ally vessel.

Here the previous U-Boat image—the metaphor of Jews in hiding—is literally turned on itself. Superman, as an undisguised Jew, is about to obliterate the power that compels his compatriots to go into hiding.

Was it mere coincidence that this Jew in disguise worked for a man named Perry White at a time in the history of Europe and the United States when Judaism was most profoundly (re)inscribed as a racialized “other,” not only in Europe, but in the United States as well?

Clark’s performance as the “mild mannered,” bespectacled, slightly slouching Gentile with slicked-back hair “passes” on a number of levels. Beneath this rather clumsy, non-athletic, geek, awaits the Jewish super Nazi hunter.

There is, though, a contradiction here. While he attempts to pass as Gentile, we can read this, as well, as a parodic reinscription of stereotypical constructions of the Jewish male: the gender variant, “feminized,” docile male. In his expression(s), he is reinscribing and redeploying the ideology of the gender binary frame—a “feminized” Clark Kent, and a hyper-masculinized Superman. This in itself could be considered as parody redeployed.

Superman, the “Man of Steel” could more “authentically” be called the “Mensch of Shtetl” (Mensch: a good person of integrity and honor; Shtetl: communities, primarily in Eastern Europe, inhabited largely by Jews)—the ultimate alien, the pale stranger from a distant planet who was more likely from the Russian Pale of Settlement: that expanse of territory set aside in Tsarist Russia for the social, religious, political, and economic containment of Jews. This was the same birth home of most of the Jewish movie moguls who created the Hollywood film industry.  

Superman was the champion of the oppressed. He practiced a central Talmudic injunction of Tikkun Olam: the transformation, healing, and repairing of the world so that it becomes a more just, peaceful, and perfect place.

He also observed the notion of Tzedekah (“righteousness”)—a strong philanthropic imperative to take care of the Jewish community, and in so doing, calling as little attention to oneself as possible—hence Clark Kent’s modest self-effacing ways. 

Though there were, indeed, numerous instances of Jews standing up and fighting back against their oppressors, the stereotype of the meek Jews marching off docilely to their execution is a reiterative discourse in the long history of antisemitic constructions.

Superman offered a competing, potentially subversive, contraction to this narrative.

As the announcer alerted his radio listeners when Superman first hit the airwaves in 1940:

“Faster than a speeding bullet” [read as faster and more potent than oppressive laws]. More powerful than a locomotive [read as more powerful than the reiterative antisemitic normalizing discourses]. Able to leap tall buildings in a single bound [read as able to subvert and transcend linguistic fictions]. Look? Up in the sky [to that not-so-distant future of our freedom and liberation]. It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman?”

Lex (Latin for “law”) Luthor was an early evil enemy in the Superman strip as Martin Luther was to Jews. Hitler stated that the works of Martin Luther had a profound effect on his “understanding” of Jews as evil, as inferior, and as “race” polluters. Luther’s words had a profound impact on Hitler’s solution to “the Jewish question.”

Luther’s 1526 pamphlet entitled “On the Jews and Their Lies” has been referred to as the first work of modern antisemitism. In it, he argued that, “Beloved Christians, apart from Satan himself, you possess no more deadly, poisonous, and dreadful enemy than a real Jew.”

He went on to recommend that “their synagogues should be set on fire,” and Jewish prayer books should be destroyed, and rabbis forbidden to preach. The homes of Jews should likewise be “smashed and destroyed” and their residents “put under one roof or in a stable like gypsies, to teach them they are not master in our land.”

For the creators of Superman, to vanquish Lex Luthor is to defeat the law—the antisemitic worldwide norm—as reiterated and redeployed by Martin Luther, the law that affected and influenced Adolf Hitler in his rise to power, the law that transformed Jews into a racialized “Other.”

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As the movie moguls projected their vision of America—or at least of America’s potential—the Jewish creators of Superman did likewise. Superman was a symbol for the “American way.” According to Comic Book researcher, Wallace Harrington:

I’m sure that on some warm summer night in 1941, there must have been a couple of kids sitting on a hill overlooking a small town in Kansas who stared at the stars and dreamed, “If Superman were real, he’d show those Nazis what for.” They would have dreamed, like every other kid who tucked a bath towel into their t-shirts and pretended to fly around the room, that Superman was real. And that if he somehow appeared and stood before them, right then, he would most definitely do the right thing because he was Superman. For he could “change the course of mighty rivers” and “bend steel bars in his bare hands” and then, as now, Superman was a symbol of truth, justice, and the American way.

During the growing tensions during the Cold War and as the anti-Communist U.S. investigations consumed the nation—led by Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy and his grand inquisitors on the House Un-American Activities Committee—the creators of Superman released a poster in which Superman, surrounded by teachers and students stated:

“And remember boys and girls, your school—like our country—is made up of Americans of many different races, religions, and national origins, so, if you hear anybody talk against a schoolmate or anyone else because of [their] religion, race, or national origin—don’t wait: tell them that kind of talk is un-American.”

Superman’s words are as relevant today as they were during World War II and throughout the Cold War, especially for anyone who continues to demonize and dehumanize immigrants of all nations.

If the Israeli government had imagined the Jewish tradition of Tikkun Olam emphasized by Superman’s young creators, and, along with the leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Houthis had engaged in proportional responses and continual good-willed negotiations rather than merely vengeance and death, maybe, just maybe, we might come to a day where a unified, democratic, and equitable nation brings Jews, Palestinians, and all others together as family, friends, and trusted neighbors.

We can erase the Kryptonite of hatred of division.

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