I grew up Catholic, in a neighborhood with only one Jewish family that I can recall, so I didn’t have much exposure to Jewish culture or traditions until after college. But I did read a lot of comics during those early years, and I read a lot of books about the history and evolution of comics too. So by the end of the 1980s, I had a pretty good understanding of the superhero as a pop-culture construct that emerged from Jewish tradition.
Author Simcha Weinstein distills this concept into a short, breezy and fun book called Up, Up, and Oy Vey! How Jewish History, Culture, and Values Shaped the Comic Book Superhero (Barricade Books, 2006). My son passed his copy to me a few years ago after he finished reading it for a high school class on popular culture, and I finally sat down and read it a couple weeks ago.
Up, Up, and Oy Vey! examines the origins of Superman, Batman, Captain America, and several other four-color heroes who emerged between the late 1930s and the 1960s. Every one of these characters were brought to life by young Jewish artists and writers, many of whom got in on the ground floor of the comic book industry just as it started to take off like a speeding bullet with the advent of Superman in the spring of 1938. Weinstein’s premise is that these young creators’ religious, ethnic and cultural traditions were among the primary building blocks of their stories.
Superman, it turns out, is a modern-day Moses, according to Weinstein. In the Old Testament book of Exodus, Jochebed is a young Israelite woman who puts her baby in a basket and sends him down the Nile in the hopes that he might be spared a life of slavery under the Egyptian Pharaoh. The child, Moses, is found by the Pharaoh’s daughter and raised among the Egyptians until he learns of his destiny as the emancipator and the great lawgiver of the Israelites.
Fast forward a few thousand years to the 1930s, when Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster – two teenagers in Cleveland, Ohio – concoct a story of a baby on a doomed and distant planet whose parents strap him into a rocket and send him millions of miles to Earth, where he is adopted by a kindly farm couple in middle-America and eventually fulfills his destiny as the world’s protector. There’s no telling whether Moses ever crossed the minds of Siegel and Shuster during the making of Superman, but the collective unconscious is a persistent and powerful thing. Just ask Carl Jung.
Weinstein describes Captain America, created in 1940 by Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, as a mid-20th century version of the Golem, a figure in Jewish folklore that is created from clay by a rabbi, then brought to life by stamping a letter on its forehead. Cap’s circular shield with a five-pointed star at the center is a pop-culture variation of the six-pointed Jewish symbol known as the Magen David (“Shield of David”).
The author also explores the back story of Benjamin Jacob Grimm, a character created in 1961 by Kirby and writer-turned-Marvel-figurehead Stan Lee. Grimm grew up in Manhattan’s rough-and-tumble lower east side – primarily a Jewish community at the time – before transforming into The Thing, the powerful but irreversibly grotesque member of The Fantastic Four. (Years later, before his death in 1994, Kirby would reveal that he created Ben Grimm as a comic book version of himself.)
Weinstein surveys other popular superheroes that resonate with Jewish tradition. The Hulk, a different interpretation of the Golem, is a misunderstood outcast. Spider-Man is driven by the need to atone. The X-Men, much like the Hulk, are a genetically enhanced subgroup of humanity that is often persecuted for merely existing (and their recurring nemesis, Magneto, is himself a survivor of Auschwitz). These and other examples throughout the book are reminders that there’s more cultural resonance to comics than just do-gooders in tights and capes and masks.
Up, Up, and Oy Vey! is a fun and easy read, with a solid premise that’s thoroughly researched. I was familiar with some of the ideas and themes before I read it, but there was plenty in here that I didn’t know, and Weinstein – a rabbi with a degree in film history, go figure – does a great job of tying it all together in a way that makes sense without being scholarly or stuffy. Whether you’re Jewish or not, whether you’re a hardcore comic book aficionado or you’ve never read a comic book in your life, it’s a book that’s informative and entertaining at the same time.
“No matter how dark the world becomes,” Weinstein says in his final chapter, “no matter how ascendant evil and corruption seem to be, the Jewish belief in the triumph of good over evil and of light over darkness is as unshakable as, well, Captain America himself.”
And like any good rabbi (a word that literally means “teacher”), he leaves his readers with an assignment – one that’s as inspirational as it is aspirational:
“After you put this book down, I ask you to stop and reflect on the real you – the unassailable, essential you. As you go out into the world, go out without any masks and with an embrace of all your unique inner powers. Touch the lives of others, ennoble the lives of others, transform the lives of others, and better yet, transform the world – in spandex or not.”