That question does sound like clickbait — but it’s not. In fact, the book titled Is Superman circumcised? is surprisingly rather academic and serious. Author Roy Schwartz explores the history and sociology of the Superman character with an emphasis on a Jewish context. CAUTION: This is not an “easy read.” Although it is unexpectedly enjoyable, it reads a lot like a dissertation for a PhD in Folklore & Mythology (the third least popular major among my undergraduate college class, by the way, unaccountably beaten out for that distinction only by Statistics and by Sanskrit, for reasons known only to the guardian gods of 1969). Each chapter is like a thesis statement, heavily annotated and well-written. It took me a while to get through it — but you are likely smarter than me, so enjoy!
Anyhow, the subtitle, as usual, is more informative than the title: The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero. But I’d better avoid burying the lede, in case it’s not clear here, namely that Superman is Jewish. Really.
I can imagine three different reactions to this assertion:
- Of course Superman is Jewish. Everyone knows that.
- Pshaw! He’s the embodiment of the perfect American male, so he can’t possibly be Jewish.
- Since Superman isn’t real, it’s meaningless to say that he is (or isn’t) Jewish.
Let’s take these reactions in reverse order:
- The last is easy to dispose of: fictional characters may not be “real” in a literal sense, but they are real enough to their readers/viewers. No one would deny that Tevye is Jewish, or Leopold Bloom, or Rabbi Small, fictional though they may be.
- The second reaction, though surely one that many Americans would have, is not worth responding to. It is naive at best, antisemitic at worst.
- The first reaction is one that I might have now, but not as a kid. It just wouldn’t have occurred to me one way or the other at the time.
It turns out that I’ve written a couple of related blog posts in recent years. In 2018 I wrote a post that was both about a biography of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster (the creators of Superman) and about a book titled Superman Is Jewish?: How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice, and the Jewish-American Way. And five years before that I wrote about The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic-Book Scare and How It Changed America. The latter is also discussed in Schwartz’s opus, in which he says:
You can’t have a book dealing with comics and not mention Dr. Frederic Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, which hobbled comics for many years. Now it’s known that Wertham’s book was not exactly fact based (I suppose he was one of the first to use “alternate facts”). Schwartz exposes Wertham’s blindspot. “It also didn’t occur to Wertham to correlate the supposed rise in juvenile crime with the absence and death of fathers sent off to wars, the militarization of culture during wartime, secularization, the baby boom growth in youth population, urban crowding or simply the increased interest and reporting capacity of the media.” [p. 287]
Finally, some comments on the new Superman movie:
Learning Strategies 