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This is a guest essay by Barak Sella, one of the leading Israeli experts on U.S.-Israel relations and world Jewry.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
The new Spider-Man film, “Brand New Day,” just posted the biggest opening weekend in the history of American cinema — $360 million domestically — and crossed $2 billion worldwide in three weeks.
This is more proof of Spider-Man’s tremendous popularity, but not everyone knows that one of the most sympathetic superheroes is perhaps a Jew. Yes, Peter Parker is probably a good Jewish boy from Queens.
The comic book industry, like many industries in the United States, was greatly influenced by young immigrants hungry for food, money, and success. In the comics industry, a significant portion of these immigrants were Jews who sought a professional path in writing and illustration, but more institutionalized workplaces, such as newspapers and magazines, were often closed to them.
Compared to journalism or playwriting, comic books were considered inferior and therefore open to Jews, who took the opportunity to create a disproportionate share of the world’s most beloved comic book characters: Superman (Joe Shuster and Jerry Siegel), Batman (Bob Kane, originally Kahn), Captain America (Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, originally Jacob Kurtzberg) and, of course, the godfather of geeks all over the world, Stan Lee (originally Stanley Lieber). Lee, along with his associates, created many characters that entered the Marvel pantheon: Fantastic Four, X-Men and, of course, Spider-Man.
An industry full of Jews led to many influences of Jewish identity, whether conscious or not, on the characters and stories — from Superman (whose story is practically a palimpsest of Moses growing up as an Egyptian) to Magneto (the anti-villain of the X-Men series, a Holocaust survivor from Auschwitz who is torn between his hatred of human beings and his love for his people, which evolves from Jews to mutants).
Superheroes expressed the ultimate dream of assimilation. Jewish children, perceived as weak and on the margins of society, could put on a mask and become powerful, all-American heroes who save the world.
Like the superheroes, the Jewish creators also had to change their names and identities in order to be accepted into society. Through the comics, they created a space where they could fulfill their personal dreams, but also the dreams of young children, Jews and non-Jews, all over the United States and the world: the dream of moving from the fringes of society to center stage, while remaining true to one’s values and making a significant contribution to the whole world.
Nobody has put it better than Jules Feiffer, the Pulitzer-winning cartoonist who grew up on those comics and later wrote their first serious history. In the New York Times Magazine in 1996, he traced Superman’s origin back past Krypton and into his own neighborhood:
“Superman was the ultimate assimilationist fantasy. The mild manners and glasses that signified a class of nerdy Clark Kent’s was, in no way, our real truth. Underneath the schmucky facade, there lived Men of Steel! Jerry Siegel’s accomplishment was to chronicle the smart Jewish boy’s American dream. Acknowledge that, and you can better understand the symbolic meaning of the planet Krypton. It wasn’t Krypton that Superman came from; it was the planet Minsk or Lodz or Vilna or Warsaw.”
In the case of Spider-Man, it’s hard not to see in him the alter ego of his creator, Stan Lee. On the surface, Peter Parker is another generic representation of a white Protestant teenager. But a closer look reveals his clear Jewish coding.
Peter grew up an orphan without parents (like many Jewish immigrants who fled the pogroms or the Holocaust) and was raised by his uncle and aunt, Ben and May, both of whom have “Old World”-style names.
Unlike Superman’s Clark Kent, who was only a nerd as a disguise, Parker was a true nerd who suffered from social exclusion at school. He seems to be ostracized for no apparent reason, suggesting the antisemitic motives of the main bully who harasses him, Flash Thompson, always portrayed in the comics as the ultimate white American. And Peter comes from the Forest Hills neighborhood in Queens, a demonstrably Jewish neighborhood (about 50 percent of the population).
The executive producer of the 2002 Spider-Man film, Avi Arad (born in Ramat Gan, Israel), claimed that Parker’s family “are practically shtetl Jews living in Queens.” Michael Chabon (a Jewish-American writer and Pulitzer Prize winner), who co-wrote the story for Spider-Man 2, describes Spider-Man as a crypto-Jew in his biographical background and character.
In addition to his recognizable superpowers, Spider-Man has another trait often associated with New York Jews: a sharp, cynical sense of humor. Danny Fingeroth, one of the top scholars of Jewish identity in comics, calls him a kind of “Seinfeld with webbing.”
But perhaps Spider-Man’s most Jewish characteristic is guilt. Superman was motivated by justice, and Batman by vengeance. Both were great and almost inhuman characters. Peter Parker is meant to be one of us: an ordinary boy who struggled with failed relationships, school problems, social exclusion, and economic hardship.
His origin story is that, after receiving his powers, he decides to use them for financial gain, and one night he lets a criminal escape instead of stopping him. The same criminal eventually kills his Uncle Ben. That event changes Spider-Man’s world, and he decides to dedicate his life to fighting crime. The last panel in Spider-Man’s first comic ends with the sentence: “With great power comes great responsibility.” In the 2002 cinematic version, Uncle Ben says it to Peter Parker before his death.
Sam Raimi (also a Jew), who directed the original Spider-Man in 2002, put it this way:
“Spider-Man is a character that spends his life trying to pay down his guilt. The only difference is that it’s caused by his uncle, not his mother. That’s a real classically Jewish quality — to be very aware of your sins in this life and try to make amends for them in this life.”
Stan Lee claimed that he never intended for Spider-Man to be explicitly Jewish, but he took inspiration for the superhero from the biblical King David, and noted that he instilled Jewish values in his characters. Lee said:
“To me, you can wrap all of Judaism up in one sentence, and that is, ‘Do not do unto others [what you would not have them do unto you].’ All I tried to do in my stories was show that there’s some innate goodness in the human condition.”
Another Jew involved in the Spider-Man films is Andrew Garfield, who played Peter Parker in “The Amazing Spider-Man” series. In interviews before the second film, released in 2014, he said Spider-Man is a Jew, and that as a Jew himself he plays the part accordingly. “He ums and ahs about his future because he’s neurotic,” Garfield said. “He’s Jewish. It’s a defining feature.”
Another expression of Spider-Man’s Jewish identity comes covertly in the successful 2018 film “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse,” which features several versions of Spider-Man from parallel worlds. We meet one of them, Peter B. Parker, after another Parker variant is killed. He is divorced from his wife, and in a flashback we see him breaking a glass at their wedding, a very recognizable Jewish tradition.
Rodney Rothman, the film’s co-director, has said he thinks this Parker, implied to be the “original” version, is probably Jewish. Elsewhere in the film, Peter B. Parker, voiced by Jewish actor Jake Johnson, shows a great love for bagels, a typical New York Jewish dish.
Without spoiling the new Spider-Man film, there isn’t much evidence in “Brand New Day” that the lovable protagonist is Jewish. But across the entire Tom Holland run, the (Jewish) guilt motif sits at the center of every plot, and hints at Spider-Man’s Jewish identity keep getting carefully placed in the background: a Star of David prominently positioned in one of No Way Home’s closing scenes.
And, most interesting of all, a fleeting shot of a newsstand where you can glimpse a copy of the Forverts, the Yiddish daily that has been the paper of American Jewish immigrants since 1897, with Spider-Man on the cover and a headline reading Iz dos gut far yidn? — meaning, “Is this good for the Jews?”
I also grew up in Forest Hills in Queens NY