(Jewish Group) The New Post-Racial Spiderman Ignores His Jewish Superhero Roots
(THIS IS THE JEWISH GROUP!)
Is Peter Parker, your friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, Jewish?
In the new film, “Spider-Man: Homecoming,” the answer is an emphatic “no.” Tom Holland, who plays Peter, is of Irish and English descent; in the film he and his Aunt May (Marisa Tomei) are Italian. Spider-Man isn’t Jewish canonically in the comics either; when his religious or ethnic background comes up, he’s generally represented as loosely mainline Protestant.
Spider-Man’s first appearance in comics, however, is more ambiguous about his Jewishness. Hints of anti-Semitism help define the character’s traumatic and frankly grim origin story. “Spider-Man: Homecoming” is a much cheerier vision of the possibilities of assimilation. But it gets to that multi-cultural vision in part by simply erasing Jewish content altogether.
Many early superhero comics creators in the 1940s were Jewish, and it’s easy to read iconic early characters as fantasies of Jewish assimilation. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s Clark Kent is a nebbishy Jewish stereotype who puts on circus tights to become an Aryan=American archetype of manliness. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Steve Rogers is a nebbishy Jewish stereotype, unfit for combat, until he takes the super-soldier serum and becomes a fit, confident symbol of Americanness, decked out in red, white and blue.
Marvel creators were often Jewish as well, and again many of their heroes, like the (once again) nebbishy Bruce Banner, or the working-class ethnic Ben Grimm, can be read as Jewish stand-ins. By the 60s, though, the civil rights movement had raised questions for white creators about assimilation into American whiteness, and about American justice and tolerance in general. Scholar Martin Lund told me via email that, “the Civil Rights movement made some Jewish Americans leerier about whiteness, in a dual sense. On the one hand, there was a strong commitment among many Jewish Americans to the movement, at least up to a point, because it was just and because rights for one minority would also mean rights for another. On the other hand, too strong a commitment was problematic, because during the Cold War, activism of this kind was often claimed to be a communist front, which of course meant that the old anti-Semitic canards of “international Jewry” and “Judeo-Bolshevism” were never far from the surface.”
Read more: http://forward.com/culture/jewishness/375974/the-new-post-racial-spiderman-ignores-his-jewish-superhero-roots/
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I am big comic book fan, mostly DC, but the history of Jews in the comic business is VERY interesting.
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