Superheroes Are Jewish: Superman, Erasure, Appropriation, and the Shoah

Taking Our Torah, Land, and Even Jesus and Ann Frank Wasn’t Enough; Now They’re Claiming Superman

Racist and ignorant forces appropriate everything Jewish: Our culture, our history, our archeology, our nation, our Torah, our inventions, and even our bodies
Much has been written about Superman’s Jewish creation and connections; a vile piece by Slow Factory—an antisemitic, revisionist rag—adds Holocaust inversion on top

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If the internet is to be believed, the new, hit Superman blockbuster is about Palestine.

Actually, the same voices claim EVERYTHING is about Palestine. No exaggeration: Collective Liberation. Blaming Jews *cough cough* Israel for global warming, sexism, US policing, lack of health care in the US, and more.

In the very beginning of the new James Gunn-helmed movie, Superman is being condemned for intervening in international politics for the first time. At issue is a powerful European nation invading its powerless neighbor. Very quickly, we see the culprit, despite made-up names, is clearly meant to be Russia. Goofy accents, wigs, and onion-shaped domes clearly convey this. The victim nation is clearly Ukraine, but the film chooses to portray them as brown-skinned people armed with whatever they can find.

Clearly, an allegory for Palestinian resistance fighting the Big Bad Zionists who attack them for no sane reason whatsoever! Every rag claiming this would have you believe Palestine consists only of civilians in tatters armed with rocks. Iran and Hamas would like a word; meanwhile, in reality, Israel and the US have foiled multiple attacks on Jews globally by the Iranian regime, and the day this horrifically offensive imagery from Slow Factory was posted was the anniversary of Hezbollah (cough, Iran) blowing up 84 ~~Zionists~~ Jews in Argentina in 1994.

If you’ve been on the Jewish internet at all these past few years, you probably have heard at least once that superheroes—yes, all of them—are of Jewish origin. As with Hollywood itself, the Superhero genre is dominated by Jewish creators and ideas. Stan Lee created everything from the X-Men to Spider-Man; in his universe, Spider-Man is Jewish. Superman was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Jews, in the 1930s, and his very name—Kal-El—comes from Hebrew. The story of Superman borrows from the tale of Moses, a baby sent away to be adopted, only to discover a very special purpose.

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And there’s more; in Jewish folklore, a Golem is a powerful creature that can be conjured to defend Jewish life when in danger. This is the very purpose of both Moses and Superman, and he was created specifically to empower Jews—including Superman’s creators—when pogroms were rising across Eastern Europe. The Holocaust would soon follow.

In Superman’s early days, he smashed Nazis on the page, while his visage graced planes and tanks during World War II. American soldiers read the comics while fighting the real-life Nazis, and the Nazis responded with the expected hatred of the clearly Jewish character.

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Which is why this image from Slow Factory this week is so fucking offensive:

Co-opting Superman’s image—and probably using AI to rip off Superman’s original Jewish-created art to do it. Taking the image of a Moses-inspired Superman created to protect not just innocents, but Jews—as well as to empower us—is an act of antisemitic violence.

Slow Factory, which makes such bold claims as Israelis and Jews are white and Israelis have no culture, here appropriates and inverts the Superman figure, making him not just anti-Israel but visibly anti-Jewish. He’s not shown fighting Zionists or Israelis; these helmets have a Star of David on them, not an Israeli flag. This isn’t a mistake. And as with the “End the Genocide” tag, nothing here is accurate or anti-Nazi. Quite the opposite.

The keffiyeh they put on Kal-El, as well as similar images featuring Jesus and Anne Frank together, originates not from Palestine, but from Iraq; it was popularized by Yasser Arafat, who was not Palestinian. He was an Egyptian who died in France, and his PLO stemmed from the Muslim Brotherhood, which itself was supported by the Nazis. The first leader of Palestine?

The Grand Mufti, first leader of Palestine, palling around with Hitler, riding the war out in Berlin, where they made plans to bring the Final Solution—and death camps—to the MENA (Middle East and North Africa)

The Holocaust Inversion involved in calling Jews Nazis is vile. It makes a mockery of the Shoah and of Jewish lives, and it compares a war with some 20-30,000 civilian casualties over 21 months, somehow similar to the Holocaust, where that many Jews were slaughtered in 2-3 days.

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This appropriation and erasure of all things Jewish is the oldest affront to our people. It began with the Ancient Roman genocidal colonizers, who destroyed Jerusalem entirely, with some 100,000+ Jews murdered. They then renamed the region Palestina, after the Philistines, who were also European colonizers and the ancient nemesis of the Israelites. If you’re keeping track, the only people in this story thus far from the region are the Jews (and Samaritans).

Following this, the young Jewish cult that became Christianity survived by becoming codependent on Roman power itself; they did this by rejecting Judaism and any ties to the land of Israel. In doing so, they paved the way for Christianity, a religion of conquest and colonization, to spread alongside the blood libel that Jews killed G-d—Jesus—himself, the embodiment of all the world’s sins, but especially the Jewish ones. The Wandering Jew—Judas, whose very name evokes the Jews and the land of Judah—would never have a home and would always be synonymous with Jewish treachery and statelessness. All of this, combined with the core notion that the only path to spiritual redemption is through (a) Dead Jew(s), was inherited by Islam as well. Both faiths spread by sword and slaughter.

And here we are, 2,000 years on, and the modern Jewish manifestation of Moses himself is being weaponized against us, blindly asserting that Jews must be stopped again. Jews can’t ever have power, an army, a state. People Love Dead Jews.

And here we are, 2,000 years on, and the modern Jewish manifestation of Moses himself is being weaponized against us, blindly asserting that Jews must be stopped again. Jews can’t ever have power, an army, a state. People Love Dead Jews.

All of this is lost on Slow Factory et al—the multibillion-dollar Palestinianism industry—who call Jews and Israelis “European White Colonizers” while claiming our land, symbols, and Torah via the vehicles of European and Muslim colonization. The Christians have long held that Torah is null, superseded by the Gospel of Christ; to radical Islam, which held the Jewish people in their lands as 2nd and 3rd-class citizens for 1,400 years, it doesn’t matter where Jews came from. We must all be stripped of power, and ultimately (per the Koran), of our lives.

There’s one last Jewish aspect of Superman at play here, and it’s relevant more than ever in America, Europe, and the Middle East: that of the refugee. Superman was a refugee, the ultimate symbol of Jewish diaspora and displacement. The racists co-opting his image to apply exclusively to Palestinians have no concept that every Jew in the world is a refugee or descended from them. Israel is a refugee state, as is America; all refugees deserve safety and security, not just those whose cause is dependent on where on the propaganda-reality spectrum your understanding may fall.

The racists co-opting his image to apply exclusively to Palestinians have no concept that every Jew in the world is a refugee or descended from them. Israel is a refugee state, as is America; all refugees deserve safety and security.

The fact that most Israelis are brown-skinned, Middle Eastern refugees and their kin forced from their homes of centuries (or 2,000-2,500 years) by the same Islamist supremacist mindset that wants Israel destroyed is lost on the slow Slow Factory consumers. They see modern Israel and Palestine, two nations that could not be more different, and side with the one that they project all their Western worldview on; Jews aren’t European, we survived Europe, and 40% of us did not.

Modern, renewed Israel was rebuilt brick by brick over the last 150 years, after centuries of continuous presence and attempts by hardworking Zionists. It is a modern, diverse tech hub despite daily efforts to tear it down; its neighbors chose terrorism, chose permanent “refugee camps”—also made of bricks, not tents—rather than nation-building. The randomly drawn Middle East borders (thanks, Britain and France) are why the region remains a violent mess, but Jews, as always, adapted and thrived.

The haters would have you believe Lex Luthor is the Jew of the story. He’s literally the whitest guy in the lore; he represents the most removed from G-d: his head FULLY exposed—literally bald—the historic opposite to the humble Jew in a kippah (yarmulke). He is the Roman of the story; in each of the latest entries in the movie franchise, he takes part in an alien (read: colonizer) destruction of Metropolis with the aim to rebuild it brick-by-brick into his own image. I think of the ancient Romans taking Jerusalem apart, including our temple, and building the Coliseum from the ruins. Not only were Jews massacred and dispersed and our home renamed Palestina, but we were forced to witness mass-death-as-entertainment in the ancient games (Jewish slaves possibly included).

The Nazis did this too, literally paving streets with Jewish headstones. The modern anti-Israel movement is constantly calling for our mass-death-as-entertainment; enter Hamas with their GoPros, and both paid and unpaid comments on social media, calling for Jerusalem to be dismantled—a fifth? Sixth—time.

What these people have in common is they’re goosestepping in the comments sections and in the streets, when they bother to get off the couch, in lockstep with neo-Nazis and jihadists.

Don’t get your Holocaust education from the “see, raising a flag means Palestine!” crowd, whose supporters, leaders, and emblems all do and say the same things: Calls to exterminate Jews, while calling US the N*zis.

So go see the new Superman flick. It’s fast and fun, and the idiots calling it anti-Israel, alongside anything and everything they can get their mitts on—will continue to be on the wrong side of history, twisting Jewish history to weaponize against us. Don’t let them pave over our stories.

Oh, and from here on, Superman can only be played by a Jew. We insist.