okay without further Ado I want to introduce tonight's speaker Dr Miriam MOA and I'm really excited to welcome Professor MOA here tonight for for at least two reasons um first her research and her work are are absolutely fascinating Professor MOA currently works as director of programs for the center for Jewish history in New York City and is an adjunct assistant professor at Sunni Albany uh Professor MOA is also the managing curator for the museum and laboratory of the Jewish Comics experience
at the Center for Jewish history and is co-creator of the juice Comics convention her her research J WCE uh her her uh her research extends Beyond comic books indeed her first book carrying a big stick Jewish culturation and masculinity in the 20th century will be released from Wayne State University press in 2024 and the second reason I'm really excited to have Professor Mora speak to us tonight is that it's a homecoming of sorts she grew up in an arbor and before earning her PhD at Wayne State
University in 2019 Professor Mora was the well then not Professor uh Mora was the engagement director at Hillel at emu for two years and also in an arbor worked as the Assistant Director of Education at Beth Israel congregation for a year so please join me in welcoming Professor MOA to the podium hi everybody can you hear me okay okay great thank you so much uh to Bob for that really generous introduction when you lay out everything you've been doing in that fashion it sounds uh I was like wow
this is an impressive uh this is an impressive person so uh so thank you for that and thank all of you for coming out tonight um through this inclement weather and which is I guess is going to be worse when we leave so I'll try and be you know super fast now um it is it is it's a a real privilege to be back at emu um where I was a student 20s years ago and uh and worked as as Bob said as Hillel engagement director um just at the time when the Jewish studies Department was being founded um by Mar
ty schikman I think I actually as you know as as a Hillel employee drove the first few speakers to and from the airport so I mean I I I'm really honored to be uh to be here as as one of them now especially hearing that amazing lineup of events it's just amazing to hear how far this um this program has really come it's a it's awesome so um as Dr erne said I'm a I'm a historian I'm an immigration and ethnic historian focusing on Jewish America so my my book that's coming out is on Jewish masculine
identity it is not about Comics this is a totally different project although if anyone has any questions about masculinity in comics boy would I love to talk with you about that too um but tonight I'm going to give you um a sort of Crash Course on the Jewish Comics industry uh as as he said I I curated this exhibit on Jews and Comics which is currently on display in New York it's actually been extended a few times but is I believe really finally going to close next month um which is a bit of a
shame I'll show you a few pictures very very few from the exhibit but um you can also visit it uh online we're going to be doing a whole digitized version hopefully and the exhibit's going to travel uh so hopefully it'll make its way somewhere in Michigan and and you know I'll send all of you alerts so so by when I say a crash course on Jewish Comics history what I really mean by that is I'm going to talk to you about really three things one is I'm going to talk about the Jewish origins of the i
ndustry and just how many of the guys and gals were Jewish and what that tells us about the industry and reciproc reciprocally what it tells us about Jewish life in America at the time at the turn of the 20th century then I'm going to talk about the ways that Jewish Comics creators wrote Jewish identity and culture into their comics from the beginning of the industry to the present and lastly I'm going to look at the Contemporary moment that we're in now and talk about Jewish identity in comics
and how it's changing what that looks like and what I hope it's going to look like in the future um not that that's really that's more just conjecture and and excitement um and what that says about this moment in the experience of being Jewish in comics and being a Jewish Comics writer and reader so that's a whole lot of ground to cover from the 195 time period to the future but we'll do the best that we can and and hopefully have some time to chat at the end so just as a as a bit of a warning I
'm not going to be listing every single Jewish character that I like and have read so please don't be offended if I don't mention your favorite uh we can always chat about them at the end it is literally my favorite thing to talk about so uh so I'm here for that excuse me so the comics industry um on the whole was founded by uh Jewish immigrants and the children of Jewish immigrants and there's a number of reasons for this one is that the industry really grew out of other forms of publishing and
New York City was the home of much of the Contemporary publishing industry as well as the country's largest je Jewish population so we're talking about nearly exactly a century ago at the end of the Mass migration period between 1820 and 1924 over that 100-year span there's this increasingly steady flow of Jews Coming to America culminating in huge sums of immigrants at the turn of the century so they're driven primarily out of out of Europe by economic hardship persecution massive social and p
olitical upheavals of the 19th century so we're talking about industrialization overpopulation urbanization and millions of European Jews left their Homeland and came to the US so to give you an idea of just how tremendous this increase in the Jewish population is during this period there's almost a hundredfold increase in the Jewish population in the United States between 1820 and 1880 before the turn of the 20th century uh there's an increase from 3,000 Jews in the United States to 300,000 the
n from 1880 to 1920 over that Next 40-year Period there's another 10-fold increase to roughly 3,500,000 so this is a really rapid population change so of course New York being the primary Landing site for Europe's Jews is full of Jewish immigrants and their children at the turn of the century and the earliest ones Grand grandchildren as well and these people are fighting for a future for a better life and looking to make their Mark and survive just like all other immigrants in the city and anti-
Semitism kept a lot of young Jewish men from getting jobs in the early 20th century um in a lot of Industries but particularly in Industries about kind of putting more materials into the world like publication um in Hollywood and certain forms of politics uh even careers in the military and lots of other venues which again I can talk about masculinity excessively here but it's uh it's not as good of a a fit for this so um as for the invention of comics of course people have been telling stories
with pictures since prehistoric times but what we would recognize as comic books have really only existed since the early 20th century so it really began with newspaper Comics strips appearing in the late 19th and early 20th century uh the first one being generally agreed upon first one being Richard oakal the yellow kid which you see at the top and this is one of the most famous the strip showed life in the Immigrant uh Irish slums of downtown Manhattan so this one was not a Jewish comic um but
it kind of laid the groundwork and there were some strips in these really early days that were Jewish that were written by Jews and had Jewish themes Jewish characters uh one of those was what you see in the middle which is uh Harry Hirshfield's AB the agent has anyone heard of this one no it's not popular anymore obviously it was a it was a humor strip about an immigrant Jewish car salesman named Abraham kabble and as you can imagine it doesn't really age very well well you know a lot of the h
umor is a little racist and a lot racist um and the stereotyping of Jews is not great either but if you're interested in that a new book is actually about to come out on AB the agent from Ruckers University press so I'm pretty excited about that where the Jewish content is really uh really coming out is in the Yiddish papers at the time and that's what you see on the bottom is a a Yiddish comic and so these these Yiddish papers which were published in abundance in Manhattan uh in the early 20th
century they adopted various aspects of American print culture to assist in the guided acculturation and adjustment of yiddish-speaking Jewish American immigrants so Comics were one of these things that they were kind of putting out there just along with being a daily newspaper which wasn't common um in Europe either so it's one of these things and it included um you know more silly humor some political commentary um and particularly Jewish themed gags and gaffs and stuff like that so though the
se had already been popular for decades by the time we're really going to focus on which is like the origin of the superhero construct and the beginning of the golden age of comics um so they'd been popular for a while actually AB the agent at one point in 1917 he was written joining the Army right to fight for America so they kind of yeah so we know it's been around for a while I'm not sure exactly what year it started um but one thing I'm going to I pulled up these two for a reason I know it's
probably too far away for a lot of you to read and some of you don't read yish but the first one is AB has bought a restaurant and I picked the two of them because they're both restaurant themed which I think is interesting because it says something about Jewish restaurant tours in New York but he's uh he's adopted this policy in his restaurant of yelling out people's orders because it makes other people order more but then he says at the end like oh I'm not going to yell out that order because
I'm not going to yell out anything that's under 25 cents so like a bit of a negative stereotype we've got the same thing happening in yish papers but I'd argue a bit more sophisticated um so this one this Yiddish comic which remember it's Yiddish so it reads from right to left not from left to right um but we've got this this man who's in this restaurant and he orders it says vegetarian restaurant and he's ordered a vegetarian fish and he says oh this fish is so good um you know it's just amazi
ng that it's vegetarian you know what I'll go ahead and try the chicken too and then you see in the kitchen and there's a woman slaughtering these um chickens so it's it's it's all kind of about the uh the the poor business practices of of this community so it's not it doesn't hold up very well in that way um but moving on getting into actual you know what we think of as comic books uh in 1929 we see the stock market crash and ushering in the Great Depression which creates a need for cheap dispo
sable consumable entertainment and it also creates economic conditions where young Jewish creators are able to use whatever skills they have uh in these budding Industries to support their families and help try and bring them out of these kind of dire circumstances um here we go there are a lot of people primarily men a product of the time and you know the workforce who were responsible for the Comets industry I want to hire I want to highlight a few of the most influential all Jews um some of t
hem immigrants themselves some children of immigrants several refugees so if you're asking why this matters to yourself why does it matter that these founders of the industry are Jewish really in the history of the medium I would remind you of the state of the world for Jews at the time uh and how deeply influenced this first wave of popular Comics the entire superhero genre really is filled with Outsider Heroes fighting for justice and championing the oppressed so it's very much a product of th
ese people at this time and among the first public that's not to say that they weren't also opportunists right trying to make a living which they certainly were and among the first Publications that we'd recognize as comic books were compilation of early newspaper strips things like what we saw in the last the last slide um assembled by a news newsprint salesman named Maxwell Ginsburg who had become known as Max gains you'll notice almost every name that I put on slides has been changed that's p
art of the Immigrant process part of a culturation part of forced assimilation you know and forced I mean self enforced assimilation they want to sell their goods you know they want to succeed in business so gains invents the Saddles saddle bitched pamphlet which became the standard comic book form um for the American Comics industry he founded All American Comics which is responsible for Heroes like um Wonder Woman Green Lantern Hawkman later he founded educational Comics EC Comics which we'll
come back to later on because it's a really important one and during this period pulp magazines were already very popular they were called pulps because they were made of this incredibly cheap paper and you could see the wood pulp you know in the sheets and these were the precursor to Comics um featuring stories with particularly genre fiction uh like westerns detectives stories and science fiction which is one of the reasons I put up um this Luxembourg born Jewish immigrant Hugo gbck who coined
the term Ceno fiction science fiction in his pulps uh like amazing Stories which I think the first issue of which debuted D Buck Rogers on the front and uh he had lots of these sci-fi pulps Amazing Stories modern science and I think about 20 others and he followed up with with dozens and dozens of these magazines and stories and is still regarded as the father of sci-fi which is why the Hugo Awards the Sci-Fi awards are named for him there was a pope writer named Malcolm wheeler Nicholson not J
ewish um which isn't why he's not pictured he wasn't as important but he is still important um who founded National Allied Publications in 1934 and published the first comic book book to feature entirely uh new material rather than compiled comic strips from other places and he joined forces with these two pictured together uh on the bottom left Jack Liebowitz and Harry donenfeld who is previously a pornography publisher and as National opportunistic Industry right and as National they created a
nd distributed detective and Action Comics which some of you have probably heard of if you're at all into Comics um those are the precursors to DC com coms so they'd all roll into what would Become dc so the first Action Comics as we'll see is Superman right he was debuted in action one and though this would become one of the biggest two uh in the industry the other started by another pulp uh publisher Moses Martin Goodman who was born in Brooklyn son of Jewish immigrants he saw the success that
National was having with their two biggest earliest hits which were Superman and Batman and uh and this led him to enter the comic book business and start right in with superheroes so he called his Comics timely comics and his 1939 debut the first comic was called Marvel comic so you can see what they would be renamed later and that first issue uh featured the debut of Submariner which they're still writing Submariner and the Human Torch still writing Human Torch right so really lasting charact
ers and these would be the Main Stays of Goodman's company even when it became known in later years as Marvel Comics so I want to begin back at Action Comics with the start of the superhero genre and that really means going back to these guys seagull and Schuster so Jerry seagull and Joe Schuster two Jewish kids from a particularly Jewish neighborhood in Cleveland children of immigrants created what you see here these are sci-fi fan magazines they read amazing stories they watch Metropolis they
were super into sci-fi I thought this was the coolest ever they met when they were 10 years old they created these fanfic magazines and I say fanic which is a contemporary term but that is absolutely what they are uh in high school together so this is actually a picture from the exhibit I have up um so that's a case we have up in uh in my Museum in New York right now in this this Jewish Comics uh exhibit those are all five issues of this fanfi magazine they put together called science fiction th
e advanced guard of future civilization the third issue is open in the center and it's open to a page of this of the story where they first mentioned Superman it's called the reign of Superman so they had written these themselves typed them up on a typewriter brought them into school and according to Legend bribed the school secretary to let them use the mograph machine to photocopy them incredibly few copies of this exist because they're so cheaply made they're stapled together they fall apart
um so it was it was amazing that we managed to get our hands on some of the Library of Congress has scans of them so they're not you know going to be gone forever but uh you can see in the first story I don't know how how well you can see it at this size but in the upper left is the first issue and you can see there's no illustrations right it's it looks like the cover of a school essay um but as they kind of progressed throughout the year they really started putting in illustrations and and in
in the fourth issue there's um photos of them and biographies and they were both using pseudonyms and I mean it's really uh it's really great stuff so in this third issue which was 1933 the boys were I think I think 14 um they created this story the reign of Superman about a uh bald telepathic villain who is intent on world domination so it's not the Superman that you know um but it is kind of like Lex Luther except for the whole telepathy thing um in that third issue uh the Superman is nothing
like he was going to be in future years like what we would see but it's really heavily influenced by gbck and CCI and the Sci-Fi magazines he put out so Schuster originally by the way scherwitz so again a name change um he himself wasn't very Jewish religiously but uh but seagull was and the whole creation that they did together was very influenced by Jewish history Jewish experience um and uh and Jewish storytelling and both of their parents had left Europe Lithuania and current day Ukraine res
p itively to escape persecution so that's where a lot of this story kind of comes from and Superman debuted as we know him in Action Comics number one in 1938 published by national later DC and the character was an immediate hit and established the hero as a Mainstay of Pop Culture right which he still is in 1996 uh this is one of my favorite quotes about Superman and jewishness I'm just going to read from Jules feifer who's uh himself an amazing cartoonist and he said quote it wasn't Krypton th
at Superman came from it was the planet Minsk or ludge or Vila or Warsaw unquote so he so he saw Superman as this very thinly disguised Jewish immigrant and in Superman number one in 1939 so the first comic that gave him his backstory uh it tells us this Refugee story right this is a reflection largely of this moment in history where they're writing it but it also the actual backstory is very comparable to a lot of traditional Jewish stories right um putting a baby saving a baby from certain dea
th by putting him in a little basket and sending him away in the traditional garb of his people to be picked up and taken in by Outsiders and to carry his uh the lessons of his people with him and make the world a better place it's a very Jewish story right that's the story of Moses in so many ways um and actually it is in the comics that that suit the superhero suit with the S the Superman outfit is supposed to be the Garb of Krypton that's supposed to be his Garb from home so he keeps it close
to him even when he's disguising himself as Clark Kent when he's you know assimilating and playing this role of this you know um immigrant other ways that the story is particularly Jewish I mean there's there's entire books about this which I'll recommend so you know you can you can really dig to the depth of that you want to on the subject but his name his Kryptonian name Kalel in Hebrew means voice of God jorel his father's name actually is just a an anagram for Jerome seagull Joe seagull who
wrote it so that one's not as that one's not as fun as you'd think um but you know he also comparatively similar to um Samson right who was described as being able to LEAP these tremendous Heights and who was a judge and who fought for justice there's a lot of kind of biblical stories in here and then there's also a lot of Golem comparisons right protecting his people protecting everybody um calling upon someone to bring truth and Justice into the world it's a it's a very Jewish story in a lot
of ways but it's also kind of an all immigrant story in a lot of ways and that's this moment that we're talking about where SEO and Schuster created Superman it's a moment where universalism was so important making these stories accessible to everyone was incredibly important and less so was it important to them to highlight that that he was Jewish right these were important Progressive ideals they wanted to put out so I want to bring your attention to a few more images here um because this is o
ne of my favorite interactions as seagull and Schuster Drew on a lot of Inspirations right a lot of Jewish stuff a lot of contemporary sci-fi but really kind of the biggest uh the the momentum behind their creating the character was the rise of Nazism right and the the rise of Hitler which is why they looked at that original Superman illustration the evil Superman and they said you know what we don't need any more villains in the world right we need someone good so they changed their Superman an
d they made him someone who could arguably defeat Hitler and uh they wanted him to fight Hitler directly as oppos as he was supposed to represent you know the best and the most worthwhile heroic qualities of humanity and almost 2 years before the US entered the war when most Americans still opposed intervention Superman declared war on Hitler and Stalin and he did so not through the comic publisher but in look magazine in this uh this image right up here excuse me and uh I I blew up one of the f
rame so you could see one of one of the greatest quotes I think where he says he says I'd like to land a strictly non- Arian sock on your jaw which is really kind of as close as Superman gets to saying he's not a white dude right which he's obviously not because he's not from the planet Earth but um but such was their kind of mission um this comic bothered the Nazis so much that they responded with a full page editorial in the official newspaper of VSS which is what you see right here um and it
explained and I'll quote translation quote Superman's sense of justice well suited for imitation by the American Youth uh quote was it says was they said it was a conspir a Jewish conspiracy to quote to so quote hate suspicion evil laziness and criminality in their young hearts unquote this is how they describe Superman and supposedly this was written by Joseph Geral the minister of propaganda there's no confirmation of that uh but it was in the official SS paper and meanwhile the creators SEO a
nd Cher are getting hate mail and threats and all kinds of things for their you know attack on Hitler and look magazine because they were supposed to be staying out of it right American Press was staying out of it American Publishers were staying out of it Hollywood was staying out of it so in uh Superman number 25 which came out after the SS article they responded to it by spoofing it and that's what you see uh in these two images right here um they spoofed the article by making Superman is rea
ding a comic in the comic so this is very meta um where there's a superhero named gizer and gizer has made Hitler The Laughing stalk of the world and infuriated in the comic the Nazi agents triy to kill the creators of gezer but then they're thwarted by Superman dressed as gezer so it's all it's highly meta but it was really it's really terrific so Superman you know they do this through humor and they do it through you know this kind of light lightness defeating Darkness um he's the epitome of g
ood and hope but what's going on in Europe and what's going on with uh you know to the Jews of Europe sparked really different responses in different areas of this industry as well um so I also want to look at some of that so in 1939 uh what would become DC Comics publishes another uh another very very popular hero written by two Jewish kids from the Bronx Bob Kane and Bill finger and they contrast uh it really contrast this very light world of Superman which saw hope in defeating evil and conta
ined So Many Happy Endings and so much Justice Kanan finger's book really reflected the idea that the world had gone dark right that everything had darkened um in November excuse me in November of 1938 with the destruction of Jewish businesses and homes and houses of worship in Germany in what would become known as Christal the KN of broken glass and they saw this as kind of the the potential end of of Jewish Europe and they wanted to show that darkness in the Comon so in Batman uh it everything
is kind of living in this Shadow filled brutal night that that is what the world had become for the authors after after Christal so unlike The Shining Metropolis and Superman inspired by the like bright sci-fi of the time Kanan finger created Gotham City which is dark and it's just in the comic if any of you have read the early it's really always seems to be night right and Batman unlike Clark Kent uh is not a mild manner reporter but a detective he's a very influenced by the Shadow and the kin
d of detective stories of the time and everything is just just a level darker his parents are murdered in front of him so he goes through the same process process of his world darkening um as the larger World seemed to uh for the authors and according to Jerry Robinson who was the Jewish creator of the Joker Batman he saw Batman as an immigrant fantasy figure right so he's not an immigrant he's not a Jewish character uh but he is self-made and he Strikes Back at all these people who have hurt hi
m and abused others and less fortunate people in the city but he was never coded as Jewish in the ways that Superman was but ironically this year technically last year because it's 2024 Batman became Jewish um he was rcon Jewish I believe accidentally do you know the term rcon it's short for retroactive continuity so when you take established Cannon and you change it and you say okay well now Batman's always been you know left-handed or whatever right but because his cousin um Katherine Cain bat
om she's been identified as is Jewish for some time but one of the authors I believe a non-jewish author explained her lineage casually and it turns out that if you trace it helically by how her mother now Batman's Jewish too so that's pretty great how fun is that so in the meantime while these Comics are are coming out we've got Martin Goodman who I mentioned at timely Comics he hires two young American Born Jews children of immigrants to produce Comics in- house along with the many Freelancers
that he was working with those were haime Joe Simon and Jack Kirby born cburg who were uh from Manhattan's Lower East Side and Simon was the editor and Kirby was the art director but they both wore a lot of hats they were both great writers they were both great artists so they kind of had their hands in everything and together they created and debuted Captain America in uh they created them in 1939 he debuted in 1940 uh Joe Simon said about his creation quote we knew what was going going on ove
r in Europe world events gave us the perfect comic book villain Adolf Hitler with his ranting Goose stepping and ridiculous mustache so we decided to create the perfect hero who would be his foil unquote so although Superman attacked Hitler one time you know in look magazine this was the whole intention of Captain America right punching Nazis was his game so this was a full year before Pearl Harbor when 93% of Americans still opposed entering the war and the german-american Bund uh inundated Sim
on and Kirby and the timely offices with hate mail and calls um they threatened to hang them from lamp posts in Time Square um it took the intervention of the mayor uh LaGuardia they before uh he intervened and ended up posting um police officers in the lobby of timely Comics every day um so it really says something about how it felt to be a young Jew in the city at the time speaking out about about this kind of thing and about what was happening in Europe and they really were speaking out um I
mean I you you probably see in the very first I put this is from the cover of the very first Captain America you know the debut he's punching Hitler in the face I know at least 10 people including myself who have this printed as a poster on their wall you know very classic um but this is actually my favorite cover and this is a cover from 1945 the reason I love this cover is that at the time even at the end of the war American presses were really downplaying what was going on in Europe has anyon
e been to the Holocaust museum in Washington DC I think one of the most amazing parts of their permanent exhibit is the the when it examines the press and you look at how many mentions were there of the persecution of Jews in Europe and it's shameful right I mean the American Press was very intentionally kind of glossing over and ignoring and trying to keep things positive on the front of the page and um and here we have Captain America directly confronting what's going on in Germany and not jus
t by punching Hitler in the face so this cover is my favorite because it shows how much was really common knowledge about the Holocaust by the end of the war you can see um in this image inmates being marched at gunpoint into um into ovens you can see human remains coming out of the other side with you know human parts sticking out of the ashes it's very dark it's very visceral um and it shows just how much was really known so this character of Captain America and his Antics because of the uh mi
nor role of the industry at the time right this is really just when it's getting big they flew largely under the radar I mean of course the the German American Bund was pretty unhappy but but they kept putting this stuff out so they were permitted in some ways to engage in the kind of commentary that Hollywood had officially banned um in the leadup and throughout the war and in spite of all the hate mail and you know breaking the silence and entertainment about what was going on in Europe Captai
n America was still one of the best selling Comics or magazines of its era which I think is pretty uh pretty incredible now after World War II ends it ends with atomic explosions in Hiroshima and Nagasaki and in terms of the comics the reverberations of those explosions continued for decades cuz we see this whole roster of superheroes created by radiation right so the still just pushing that the war and everything that's going on so dictates what's going on in these books but before that the end
of the war also started to the decline in the popularity of the superhero while Superman and Batman and Wonder Woman continued to appear in print um the public really wanted to see something different in their Comics so new comic genres emerge one of the most popular was romance Comics which was pioneered by uh Simon and Kirby who had now moved on from timely horror and crime crime Comics became really popular uh but by the time before they left Simon and Kirby had hired their boss's cousin by
marriage a 17-year-old named Stanley Martin leaper uh to be their assistant and he stayed on he was the oldest son of Romanian Jewish immigrants and he would soon change his name to Stanley so that's how he came in before uh before Simon and Kirby left so horror and crime Comics really had this Heyday with EC Comics um which I mentioned earlier which was Max gain's company and it had passed to Max gaines's son uh when Bill or sorry passed to Max gaines's son Bill Gaines when Max died uh in a boa
ting accident I think and he had a different vision for the company Bill did um he wanted to save it from bankruptcy CU at this point things were kind of declining in the industry he kept the initials EC but he changed the name from educational Comics to entertaining comics and with his uh then editor Al feldstein uh with whom he wrote coote a lot of stories he focused the company on producing a variety of different genres especially crime horror and science fiction and these stories often had a
lot of you know embedded morals and ethics and and kind of lessons in them and they were really really popular they got a lot of attention from fans but they also got a lot of attention from sensors when censorship really started cracking down during the Red Scare so for a time most Comics were governed by the self-censoring comics code which you might have heard of or recognize the stamp that's often in uh the corner of old Comics excuse me the comics code was modeled on a similar cone code th
at bound the uh the film industry during the war and it was in this context when all they were specifically targeting these horror comics and things uh because they had um really graphic violence and some of them had kind of lewd themes arguably I mean not by today's standard even remotely but you know um because of this DC Comics editor Julius Schwarz and I'm throwing out some random names just to just to to show you they're all still Jewish right at this point um Julius Schwarz decided to see
if there was a market for updated versions of the superheroes which had gone out of style a few years before so he relaunched um The Flash which had been so popular in the' 40s uh he relaunched it in 1956 in and this kicks off the start of what would become known as the Silver age of comics so the popularity of this revival of The Flash led to revamps and lots of other superheroes including Green Lantern and the atom and eventually a lot of DC's Heroes would team up as the Justice League uh whic
h became a huge hit and the Justice League inspired more team Comics like the challengers of the unknown which was led by the company that would become Marvel um The Fantastic Four right which was which was uh which was also launched through Marvel and became it was a very New York Comic and that's how it was kind of described it's a very New York Comic which is in a lot of ways code for being a very Jewish comic um it was Jewish in tone and that there was a lot of kind of ironic humor um very b
orch belt kind of style humor a lot of that was from Stan Lee excuse me there was a lot of concern in the plots of Fantastic 4 specifically with these kind of tangentially theological topics like um the the appearance of St the standin god Galacticus right it's like these very Godlike figures and decades later some of the characters particularly Ben Grim the thing would be revealed to have been Jewish the whole time um but we're going to talk about that's that's a rcon and we're going to talk ab
out that a bit more in the next slide um but Fantastic 4 success LED Marvel to increase the line of superheroes even more and we see more superheroes created by with even more Jewish themes like Spider-Man who was created by Stanley and Steve G ditco uh for 1962's Amazing Fantasy and this was the most successful and this I'm referring to kind of I refer to this as like the Stanley Generation Um because we see a change in the way that jewishness is depicted and defined and interpreted so we're go
ing to talk just for a minute about Peter Parker who's this ostracized brainy teenager living with his impoverished aunt in Forest Hills Queens and he was read at the time and still by a lot of people as being pretty heavily coded as Jewish if you're Jewish in reading this comic you knew it was Jewish because you know what fish ler means you know um so he he has this very famous origin story where he allows a burglar to escape a a crime scene leading to his uh beloved Uncle Ben's murder and he t
akes the lesson from that with great power uh comes great responsibility which is arguably also a variant on the biblical lesson about being your brother's keeper uh he uses as I said he uses Yiddish like he uses in the first few issues I think he uses kibitzer schle and Ketch um so again very borch belty um and perhaps what's most Jewish about Spider-Man which was true of a lot of the heroes created by Jews of his time was that his Origins lay in traumatic loss right we see that a lot in this p
eriod so we've got Peter Parker's loss of his father figure Batman's loss of his parents Superman's loss of his entire planet and culture the ex-men another Stanley and Kirby creation were all neglected persecuted traumatized by their exclusion from larger society so arguably a lot of of um I don't want to say just Jewish themes because so many people you know have these experiences uh but they're coming out of a lot of Jewish sources and these profound losses can also I think be related to espe
cially in the case of Superman to loss of the Old Country right to loss of their way of life um and traumatized by exclusion from larger society so in this light You could argue and I'm not actually making this argument that all superheroes are Jewish but what's really new in this time is the degree to which Jewish creators were writing jewishness into their characters for those in the no right they weren't coming out and saying these are Jewish characters but you know any Jewish kid reading Spi
der-Man knew that kibitz was a Jewish word so you know but others didn't it was just oh some gibberish you know and that's how that's how kids do tend to read um which is a miracle of being a child right you just fill in blanks and you move forward uh so Jewish fans did know and this coding of Jewish characters really create continued for decades and it was done by non-jewish creators as well especially as they picked up the titles of pre-existing characters and wanted to keep their identities y
ou know so we have a lot of non-jewish Writers come into the industry and write for characters is trying to you know maintain that kind of Jewish sound um so I want to I want to go beyond this uh but beyond the superhero and coding of Jewish characters uh which is in many ways I think where this actually starts to get interesting so a half hour and what sorry about that so oh for the for for further reading uh these are these are all books that cover the golden and silver age of Jewish comics so
um I've worked with all these authors they're all amazing um but I can tell you is Superman circumcised is the newest one that came out last year and it is phenomenal it is a deep deep dive just into Superman and if you like Superman you know even a cter as much as I do and he's not my favorite superhero it's fantastic so I strongly recommend it um but they're all great so um superhero comics movies shows even merchandise around them have continued to contend with this issue of uh ethnic and re
ligious identity right because it's character development and they do so so much more openly now than they did in the previous generation so I want to talk about two key issues here with Jewish representation in the superhero genre and uh and after that I will I will leave you to enjoy this lovely spread of food so first I want to talk about oshka normativity and then we're going to talk about trauma as identity so on this slide you'll see a few recognizable characters moonight from left to righ
t we've got moonight Harley Quinn Kitty pride and ragman um and Below at the bottom you'll see a foot hovering over a glass that's when uh Peter Parker officially became Jewish in a flashback and into the spiderverse I said oh yeah then I married Mary Jane step on a glass what now he's Jewish but it's an alternate reality so you know but we'll take it um so um so these are all characters uh who have been who are officially Jewish and these are all pages where they're discussing their jewishness
in some way right and excuse me recently I've run across a lot of criticism um about this Trope of characters being outed as Jewish and then not really having Jewish stories and you know the argument is that characters like Kitty Pride are Jewish and I quote this in name only right she wears a star of David but what is her Jewish story right how do we get to see more about her being Jewish and I take issue with that particular argument for a number of reasons but the most significant gets to the
core of the problem of Jewish representation I think which is how do you make a character particularly Jewish right should she be excusing herself from missions on chabas should she be covering her head after her wedding into Colossus you know they didn't actually get married spoiler they didn't actually get marri or conversely is the issue that she looks insufficiently ethnically Jewish should she be drawn with a more dramatic nose should her hair be curly should she uh have darker skin I mean
I think it's obvious what the answer to these questions are right which is if you get really heavy-handed then you're making a caricature you're not really creating a character so though I've heard this complaint a lot that characters aren't Jewish enough if you you know if you think it's not just about Jewish characters but about any like oh you know they they said that they've revamped this character as being you know Latin but they're so light-skinned and who knows you know it's what's the w
ay to make that better because that's a really difficult argument to make so the issue I take with this is not only that it's impossible to do in a really heavy-handed way and well at the same time but the problem is that the it highlights the real problem which is that they're all passing because they're I mean they can all be white passing because they're all ashkanazi so I said ashka normativity as a problem right and this is a real problem the world of Jews is not a white world the world of
Jews is diverse there are Asian Jews there are black Jews there are mrai Jews there are Safari Jews and there is a you know largest amount still of ashkanazi Jews but when characters are Jewish in comic books they are ashkanazi and a lot of that is because they're rcon Jewish later Magneto was not written as Jewish initially he was actually Roma Cindy and then he was retconed as Jewish later which is easy to do if the characters you're reconing are white and you're going to make all your Jewish
characters ashkanazi so it's something to think about right just along that line as they're all ashkanazi they're also all uh acculturated Americans and they're also all secular as I said Kitty pride has never excused herself from an X-Men mission for shabas like not once um but it's not a complaint either because a lot of Jews are ash ashkanazi and secular right so the question is where are all the other Jews right that's the real question that I think people should be asking themselves um so d
iversity could manifest Jewish diversity and really representative Jewish diversity could represent manif in a number of ways you could have instead of throwing out Yiddish terms they could throw out Lino terms I mean PJ Library publishes books in Lino now um so it's you know it's a it's something that could be done judeo Arabic languages could be spoken Hebrew could be spoken um they could have different forms of practice instead of just kind of being American reformed Jews they could be Orthod
ox they could be hered they could be Safari uh they could have any other form of modern practice and location they could not be from New York City they could not be from Western Europe right they could be from somewhere else so excuse me so the way that these characters are generally introduced as Jewish is I would argue the core of the problem in the more traditional superhero genre which is whether they're roning them or not they're identifying them as Jewish through trauma and when you ID ide
ntify as Jewish through trauma you're doing a number of things one is you're almost inevitably invoking the Holocaust the Jewish people are shocker not defined by the Holocaust right but it's not just the Holocaust it's the idea that to identify a character as Jewish you have to make them suffer in some way um and we see that time and time and time again and I think these two problems are tied together right because we see characters made Jewish through trauma it's almost always about Western Eu
rope or American Lower East Side discrimination and therefore they're also ashkanazi so the problems are really close um I know we're running out of time so I was going to go through some more of these uh but I'll just I'll just quickly say that the the Ben Grim formal reccon was in 2002 and he runs into a shopkeeper uh from you know his neighborhood who he thinks is dying on the floor and he says he says the shama over him which is an incredibly Jewish way of roning him then later he has a bar
mitzvah and there's like a whole thing it really happens um the area that is doing this well is uh nons superhero comics has had really Jewish content that is not fully about trauma although I recognize I put Mouse up there you know which is a very important com uh comic um but we have you know will Eisner creating contract with God which is a very personal and very Jewish story um there's so much memoir personal comic um I put Aline Kaminsky crumb up there and Joe cubert um and of course after
uh Bill gains had had left EC Comics he focused on his Humor Magazine mad com Mad Magazine right which you're familiar with which was also you know Al jaffy who um just passed away this last year full of Jewish humor uh this one of in the very first issue is this com this cartoon GFS right which is like the these these Jewish gangsters these kind of Shame Shame of the Jewish people it's very funny um so there's there's lots of Jewish content uh that is not about about that trauma but not so much
in superhero comics and what I want to leave you with today because I know I've thrown a lot at you is this uh the kind of contemporary what I why I titled this talk what I did which is coloring Jewish Comics we're seeing a moment that I think is really important in the present uh it's important to recognize it and support it and the creators who are making it happen and that we're seeing real Jewish diversity come out in a number of different uh graphic genres of sequential art right what will
Eisner called sequential art when he was arguing for a legit you know making this a legitimate form of literature um this you know we have so much representation in so many of these Comics um this is a a a um uh sorry converso story about a pirate ship you know named the young audiences this is a kind of fantasy comic about a written by and about a a Mexican Jewish um American two tribes just came out by Emily Bowen Cohen is this wonderful story about a Native American Jewish kid kind of coming
to terms with themselves um hereville is about an orthodox girl who learns to fight dragons there's just a tremendous amount of Jewish content and it's all coming out very much under the radar and not in the field of uh Jewish superheroes which is one of the things that you know I can't bring the whole exhibit to you today but it's one of the things that we focused on um when I when I put together the exhibit I have this whole section with photo booths where people could create their own Heroes
and the real challenge is can you make yourself look like a Jewish superhero without becoming a caricature you know what can your clothes and your identity and the way you present say about yourself and how would you introduce yourself in a story and say who you were without boiling yourself down to your trauma or your Hebrew school upbring or like whatever um so that's really what I wanted to uh what I wanted to leave you with today and I know I've gone over what I intended to in time but I co
uld talk about this endlessly so uh thank you all for your patience and I'd be happy to answer any questions thank you Professor Mora for that really fascinating conversation and we have time for questions and I'll just let you call sure yeah yeah are there any questions yeah what can you say about Israeli Comics oh so I did put one Israeli comic or no several actually um so there's do you mean specifically about superheroes or other Israel coms there are some I didn't hear anything about Israel
i Comics I'm interested in Israel so fantastic uh so there are some especially contemporary really great Israeli honestly all the Israeli Comics I read from the 70s are just really really bad um and this it's just they were trying to get into the superhero genre they created saber man which was just it's not that you know I mean all whatever politics it just wasn't a good comic uh so I would not recommend that you read it although I did put it on display as an artifact in the exhibit um but ther
e are so ru modan is an amazing comic artist who's uh operating out of Israel um she did this comic all the way on the right tunnels um and she did a comic called the property which was really fantastic it's a a lot of it is about grappling with you know being an Israeli in the world today and her relationship with you know her family abroad and her relationship with Palestinian neighbors and I mean and it's really fantastic so I strongly recommend it um in my research on Safari Comics I've come
across a few artists coming out of Israel that are really excellent um Asaf Hanukah uh is living in Tel Aviv and he publishes a comic called the realist which is really amazing um very contemporary very autobiographical I think it started as a web comic um and it's and it's really excellent um so I would recommend him too the the the real question I think around superheroes in Israel is and this is a hard to discuss without just my opinion but it's about Marvel Sabra so there's been a lot of di
scussion lately about the fact that Sabra is entering the MCU has anyone heard this you read about this you heard about this no um so Sabra was a character that was introduced in the 80s and 70s um and is problematic for a number of reasons um a lot of the Contemporary complaints are that the word Sabra itself you know because of Sabra and Chilla and that it's got its own kind of issues um my problem is that I think it's a terrible character I just don't think she was ever very well written I th
ink she was revamped too many times I think they're probably going to do the wrong one so that's that's an opinion thing um but apparently she is she is entering the MCU so that'll be an it it'll be interesting to see what happens there um but there are actually right now I know um so I was I also I know that Bob mentioned this during my introduction um but I also ran this Jew Jewish Comics convention in New York in November and we were scheduled to have a whole slew of Israeli artists there and
of course it was early November and and none of them U made it but to the sorry none of them made it to the convention um but a lot of the creators that I've been working with including um gorf who's a gor angle who was in charge of Batman for like I think he edit the Batman for like 20 years uh he's actually in Israel right now doing a tour of um cartooning workshops to like help bring up the next generation of Israeli um cartoonists to write about the write about what's happening so there are
there are interesting things happening there right now in in comic yeah what what do you think about the Israeli actress playing Wonder Woman I mean so that's that's really an you know a question of opinion I think I think I think it was funny I was amused more than anything when the movie came out how many people who um clearly didn't know Israelis were like wow she nailed that mysterious accent like like no she definitely sounds Israeli you know um I mean I think she I I I think that I think
she was very good I think she was you know gorgeous which I think was one of their priorities for Wonder Woman um I think it's very interesting that she's become this kind of like the female Jewish superhero because Wonder Woman is one of the few that was not created by Jews although her creation story is fascinating um if you ever read about that the her creators were into some really interesting stuff um look up the whip you know it's it's its own thing a very very interesting backstory on her
but I think it's funny that she's kind of now been reccon Jewish just by the casting yeah yeah I have so many questions but and this is a great talk um I'm really interested if you can tell us a little bit if you know anything about um the reception the way that audiences responded to these in terms of um the coding and and potentially any kind of um negative or positive responses that were specifically kind of tuned into um the emergence of superheroes with the implicit jewishness in there or
even just because they are collaborative and you see non-jewish people picking up those stories was there a struggle for control ever around those aspects of identity um as you're sort of anticipating audience responses that's a fascinating question and what I would have to ask the creators um you know whether there was tension around like the continuity of a character I think I think there's something very interesting about having characters as longlasting and um important to American culture a
nd World culture as Superman and Batman you know you've got these characters that have been written by literally dozens and dozens of people over a hundred years X-Men you know um I can tell you just going to the kind of beginning part of your question you know the Public's reaction to the jewishness and the Jewish implications of like Superman and Captain America I mentioned right which is that they were protested and threatened and got hate mail um but that was specifically when their characte
rs were attacking Nazism at a time when America was still wounded from World War I and people were you know I mean by comparison not as wounded as Europe right from World War I but people were still suffering um and coming out of the depression and didn't want to enter the war so I think that the the response there was really tied up in that I think if there was more um you know anti-Semitism as a response that came out of characters being Jewish it was really tied in with the comics code which
I don't think was in itself explicitly anti-Semitic but a lot of the kind of themes that are in the that were in the comics that people were complaining about I think were themes that were tied to political struggles and socialism and I mean a whole slew of things that were yeah um but for the most part by the Silver age the comics were being written as I said very coded so to you know people who are familiar with yiddishisms and with Jewish practice it's like oh yeah these characters are Jewish
sure um or some of you know arguably a lot of people probably recognize it but didn't think about at all um like oh they're from New York of course they know yish right which is which could certainly have been the case um spoke huh Mar spoke yeah well his mother was a safari Jew oh most people don't know that I just learned that recently um but I think I I I do think that uh that you know for the most part not every one of them but for the most part when a new writer picks up the mantle of one
of these really classic characters they go in one of two ways this is all opinion by the way this is just my like my read they go one of two ways they're either just happy to be on the project and they just kind of do what they think other people have done or they change the character and make it their own in a way that makes it really special um you know Chris Claremont on X-Men he he created Kitty Pride right and he's also Jewish and he brought these Jewish characters in um and and Magneto you
know is introduced as Jewish at this time too because he brings Kitty Pride to a reception at the United Holocaust Memorial Museum I think I have this on one of the slides uh and they talk he's recognized by other survivors from the camp who say like oh you helped save us right so there's like and again trauma drama right but a lot of that was put in but I I don't think there was a super negative response to it because you're tying it into trauma and they're still white they're still white pres
enting they're still American they don't seem particularly Jewish so I think I think it just kind of slid off people but he he took the comic and he made it his own he took Stanley's unstated Jewish comic made it statedly Jewish and then you know in this one on the left this is a more contemporary Kitty pride and she's she's saying in this Frame you know I am Jewish I want people to know I'm Jewish I'm proud of being Jewish you know if people are going to hate me let them hate me which I still p
ut on this panel because more trauma right she talks in this Frame about her like the boy she was in love with in high school turning out to be an anti-semite or you know um but she was passing so you know so more I I think different different writers confronted in different ways um but I can tell you now there is a lot of backlash about everything in the world so we are seeing more you know there's a new Daredevil villain introduced last year and there was a huge outcry that he was anti-semitic
because it was an old man you know he painted as an old man with a long beard and horns could also have just been a demon with a beard you know hard to say it did look like an anti-semitic caricature but it's not like they said he was Jewish also so it's you know like hard argument to make but people are reacting that way a lot more now so I think it's a very different time isn't X-Men just inherently trauma like the whole the whole thing is coded Jewish like anti-Semitism hating mutant and all
that jazz so it's not super surprising that the Jewish characters are showing trauma right yeah I think that's true but they're showing specifically Jewish drama I mean they're also showing you're absolutely right X-Men is like every character who's in introduced they're like Hi here's my trauma right like that's absolutely how yeah cuz they're all outcasts and that's how they show up you know on the doorstep of the school right so absolutely there is that um but these characters have to come i
n with extra levels of trauma you know when they're Jewish they also have experienced anti-Semitism or they're also the survivors or their parents were survivors or you know so there's an added element but yeah I think you're right it's definitely tied in there I think we have time for one more question no okay uh this is just slightly involved but I'll keep it as as simple as I possibly can for youen in the last I I guess maybe 30 40 years is something we've seen the big growth of uh franchise
movies that are connected to superheroes so Hollywood uh and my question I'm an old movie fan particular dearly like in the 30s and the 40s and so forth and back in those days most of the major Studio heads were Jewish did you come across anything or do you know anything that says something about the The Glory Days of the studio system on Hollywood did those men like lb mayor and the Warners and so forth did they show any interest at that time in developing this as a thematic approach to some mo
vies or or is that something that just came later that's a great question thank you um it really is and it's what I'm absolutely going to look into now I don't I mean I don't know I can tell you the first few adaptations to film were not that popular um I mean now obviously they're the most popular films there are but like the um the Captain America movie from the 70s for example while cap was still a huge deal but has anyone seen the Captain America movie from the 70s the red skull's head is li
ke this B off I mean comically bad and I don't think it was well received at the time either I think I mean this is probably just this is definitely just conjecture but I think that the reason that they're so big now is that the technology makes it possible to make you know they're not just flying around on ropes and stuffology yeah yeah but I I honestly don't know because because they did do like you know movie versions of of you know the other pop sci-fi right sci-fi was was huge um so it's it
would be really and detective detective stories went you know across medium and um crime stories and so it's a great question but I don't know I don't know the answer thank you all right well in let's all thank Professor B presentation and in honor of Peter Parker please let's stay around in hibits and have some uh we've got plenty of of food
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