(Jewish Group) Superman was secretly a symbol of Jews standing up to Nazi bigotry [View all]

“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.

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.

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.

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