The new Superman movie, which opened July 11, stars David Corenswet, whose Jewish background has been something of a hot topic since his casting was announced back in June, 2023.
The Jewish press covered it extensively, as did several mainstream outlets like Rolling Stone and CNN. They wondered how Jewish Corenswet is (per JTA: paternally Jewish, from a family with strong generational ties to a reform shul, who married a Catholic in a ceremony co-officiated by a rabbi, and spoke at a Jewish Pride event), and whether that matters to the film.
The reason for this interest, for those not in the know, is that Superman is Jewish. Not the one on the page—he’s an alien from planet Krypton who was raised in Kansas. He’s canonically Christian, usually depicted as a nonpracticing Methodist or Protestant. The one in the real world—he’s a Jewish character.
Created by two Jewish teenagers, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, the sons of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Superman was the very first superhero, the archetype, the urtext. He’s where superhero tropes like capes and tights and briefs worn as outer layer come from. He’s also the point source of core themes like secret identities, tireless pursuit of truth and justice and dedication to the community. This arguably makes the superhero genre a Jewish creation, too.
These origins, as well as the comic book industry’s heavily Jewish history and modern-day questions of Jewish representation, were the subject of a 2023 exhibit at the Center for Jewish History (of which AJHS is a partner), JewCE: The Jewish Comics Experience, as well as two conventions. The exhibition is travelling internationally through 2028, and has inspired an award-winning short documentary of the same name.
Corenswet’s Jewish heritage may not be important to the film, but the attention it’s gotten shows a meaningfulness. After 87 years, Superman being played by a Jewish actor is a homecoming of sorts.
More interestingly, however, and less touched upon, is whether Superman’s Jewishness is reflected in the new film. Or in previous films, for that matter.
Genesis
Superman’s mythology has evolved over the years, but its Jewish themes and signifiers have been part and parcel since his debut in June 1938’s Action Comics #1.
His origin story is perhaps the clearest example: to save their baby from impending doom, his parents place him in a small vessel and send him adrift to an unknown fate. He’s found by people not his own, renamed and raised as a stranger in a strange land. In adulthood, he reclaims his heritage and becomes a miracle-working savior. It’s the story of Moses.
As I detail in my book, Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero, his Kryptonian birth name is Kal-El, “El” meaning “god” in Hebrew. It’s a theophoric suffix found in the Biblical names of angels and prophets, like Gavriel, Raphael, Daniel, Israel and others.
Superman’s cocreator Jerry Siegel wrote in his unpublished memoir that he was inspired by Samson, the biblical judge with super strength, and the Golem of Prague, an indestructible champion of the oppressed.
Siegel and Shuster both also acknowledged in interviews that Clark Kent, Superman’s alter ego, was largely autobiographical. They were both bespectacled, nebbishy, neurotic and painfully aware of their otherness. Superman was their wish fulfilment, while Kent was their reality. He was also an exaggeration of the Jewish stereotypes they begrudgingly fit.
Superman, then, can be read as the story of an immigrant who comes over from the Old World, anglicizes his Hebraic name, and interacts freely with humans through a disguise because he looks enough like them. He’s a Jew passing for a gentile. He wears his super-suit, the ethnic garb sent with him from Krypton, under his clothes, like a tallit, and he can change identities at a whim – both personal and racial – Clark to Superman and human to alien. He’s the ultimate assimilation/assertion fantasy.
In his early comics, he was also a forceful propaganda figure for Jewish interests, from immigration reform to intervention in WWII.
Ensuing creators continued to build on Superman’s Jewish themes, like 1961’s Death of Superman and 1984’s Miracle Monday stories. But, as Superman leaped in a single bound from page to screen – focusing here on the silver screen – these themes gradually faded away, replaced by Christian allegory.
First flight
Superman’s cinematic debut was a 17-episode animated serial by Fleischer Studios, released between 1941 and 1943, simply titled Superman.
The serial glossed over the origin story – included only in the first episode as a 55-second narration – and didn’t explore the themes of alienation, loss, trauma, and duty (though these were largely developed in the comics during the 1950s, post-Holocaust).
Otherwise, however, it stayed true to the comics, depicting a meek but cerebral, socially rejected Clark Kent who transforms into the heroic and assured Superman, both voiced by Bud Collyer.
The 1948 Columbia Pictures 15-part Superman serial, starring Kirk Alyn as the first live-action Superman, did depict his Moses/Kindertransport origin story, but little else.
Alyn’s Clark Kent was nothing more than the accouterments of glasses and a fedora, with the same personality as Superman. He was at ease, confident, assimilated.
So was George Reeves, whose Kent wasn’t just indistinguishable from his Superman, but even wore the same muscle padding under his suit.
Reeves first played the role in the 1951 Lippert Pictures film Superman and the Mole Men, which would serve as the launchpad for the famed TV series. Though there’s little about his performance that can be said to be Jewish-coded, the plot of the film centers on Superman stopping a mob from lynching a group of short, hairy, scientifically advanced mole men.
Superman reminds the townsfolk that he, too, is a strange visitor from elsewhere. He lectures them that fear of the unfamiliar is the cause of prejudice and that good people can perpetrate evil if swept up in a tide of hate. A timeless lesson, but never timelier than soon after the Holocaust.
Messiah of Steel
1978’s Superman: The Movie, starring Christopher Reeve, marks both what is arguably the high point of Jewish themes in the Man of Steel’s cinematic oeuvre and the beginning of his transformation into a Christ figure.
The film portrays in poignant detail the harrowing destruction of Krypton, young Clark’s struggle to fit in at Smallville, and a schlemiel-schlimazel Kent in Metropolis who’s truer to Siegel and Shuster’s original version than any on-screen iteration before or since.
The film is also full of evocative language, like when Superman’s father Jor-El, about to send him away, tells him, “Live as one of them, Kal-El… but always hold in your heart the pride of your special heritage.”
It’s the wish of every parent whose immigrant child is embedded in a new culture, to see them integrate and thrive but also preserve the identity and traditions of their heritage. Much like the unprecedented success Jews found in the US during the 20th century, Superman succeeds because his two cultures are compatible, and because he can flit between them.
More pointedly, when Clark turns 18, he leaves Kansas and crosses the North Pole to find his destiny. What he encounters is the Fortress of Solitude and Jor-El’s hologram, manifested out of ice crystals. The bright apparition reveals to him his true identity and calling, sending him back into the world as a mighty savior.
This, too, is the story of Moses. At age 18 or 20 (though exegetically debated), Moses leaves Egypt and crosses the Sinai desert to Midian, where at Mount Horeb he encounters the burning bush. God manifests out of the fire and appoints him to return and save his people, empowered with signs and wonders.
The fire bush and ice hologram’s speeches are even similar. Take the movie;
“I am Jor-El. I am your father … they can be a great people, Kal-El. They wish to be. They only lack the light to show the way. For this reason above all, their capacity for good, I have sent them you, my only son.”
Now take Exodus;
“I am the God of your father… I have surely seen the affliction of my people… I have come down to deliver them… come now, and I will send you…that you may bring my people, the sons of Israel.”
According to the Midrash, God also spoke to Moses in the voice of his birth father in order not to frighten him, further cementing the analogy.
This chapter in Superman’s life was first introduced in the film, but has since been folded into the comics canon and become an integral part of the mythology.
At the same time, however, the movie introduced several Christological elements, beginning with a luminous-white Jor-El, like God in Medieval and Renaissance art, telling his child, “The son becomes the father and the father, the son,” and “I have sent them you, my only son.”
It’s a paradigm shift in Superman’s lore, changing him from a baby refugee sent to Earth by parents desperate to save him to a son sent benevolently to Earth to become its destined savior. Interestingly, this became a recurring theme in subsequent films, but not in the comics.
Shiksappeal
1980’s Superman II continued to build on both the Jewish and Christian themes, though the latter more extensively and overtly.
Superman’s adversary here is General Zod, refashioned from the comics to resemble the popular image of the devil from Goethe’s Faust—widow’s peak, sharply manicured beard, black and crimson outfit—and given the backstory of Lucifer Morningstar in Milton’s Paradise Lost. He is the leader of Krypton’s army who attempts an overthrow, is jailed in a hellish dimension by the celestial Jor-El, and pursues vengeance against his earthly son.
The Clark Kent/Superman metaphor for Jewish-American identity is still present, as is an amusing, unscripted moment in which an old lady witnesses Superman rescue someone and exclaims, “What a nice man, of course he’s Jewish!”
But the real Jewish signification can be found in the film’s subplot, which sees Superman give up his powers and very identity to be with Lois Lane.
After he reveals his secret identity to her, he brings her to the Fortress of Solitude and introduces her to the hologram of his mother, Lara. But Lois is a human, and so his Yiddishe mama disapproves.
To be with a woman not of his people is to abandon his duty to them, a duty with which he’s been entrusted as the last son of Krypton. He’s a chosen people of one, shouldered with a grave responsibility, and to shirk it is to betray his lineage. His dilemma is the quintessential Jewish guilt trip.
But he’s in love, and so chooses to become the fully human Clark Kent, an assimilated persona, renouncing his powers and true ethnicity as Kal-El. He soon regrets it, though, realizing that there’s not much to Kent without Superman. His heritage is part of what defines him.
In the director’s cut of the film, he calls out to his father for forgiveness, “I’ve failed you, I’ve failed myself, and all humanity. I’ve traded my birthright.” Jor-El of course does forgive him, as parents do. He restores his son’s powers, and with them his heritage, by extending his arm like God in Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam – a rebirth and a new covenant.
History has shown that Jewish immigrants Americanized with eagerness. But the acceptance they sought, once gained, became a threat to their Jewish identity. The Jewish metaphor found in Superman II is that to relinquish this special heritage, and the spiritual and intellectual powers it bestows, is to no longer be super.
Truth, Justice, and the Judeo-Christian Way
After a two-decade hiatus from the big screen (1983’s Superman III and 1987’s Superman IV: The Quest for Peace offer little to be discussed here), Superman returned in 2006’s appropriately titled Superman Returns, starring Brandon Routh.
Post-9/11, in a new century begun with a religious act, religion in popular culture moved to the forestage. What was subtle allegory in the Reeve films became, in Superman Returns, clear and consistent allusion.
The film’s Christian themes reach their culmination in the finale, where Superman endures a Passion at the hands of Lex Luthor’s goons, who use Kryptonite to viciously beat him, and is stabbed in the waist like Jesus by the Holy Lance. He then nearly sacrifices himself to save the world, falling in a crucifixion pose, which firmly established him as Christ in a cape.
The Jewish themes of the film are more understated, and likely less deliberate, but also more profound.
The movie opens with Superman returning from a long visit to the ruins of Krypton, which he wanted to see firsthand – a somber family tree tour to a destroyed old world that’s all too familiar to Jewish immigrants and their descendants, who visit the European shtetels, towns, and camps where their people once lived and were killed.
The Man of Steel soon finds out that Lois’s son, Jason, is his. Visiting Jason, he repeats Jor-El’s sendoff from Superman: The Movie; “You will see my life through your eyes, as your life will be seen through mine… the son becomes the father, and the father becomes the son.”
The parallel to a heavenly father’s divine mission becomes tenuous here, since Jesus had no son of his own to bequeath his to. But what it does mirror is an immigrant father’s hope for his child, to succeed while also carrying on his heritage. Kal-El is no longer the last son of Krypton; he’s the last father. Jason is equally alien and human, a first-generation American with the blood of a race from elsewhere but no direct connection to its people. It’s the question of Jewish continuation in the Diaspora, particularly in a mixed family.
2013’s Man of Steel, starring Henry Cavill, further developed Superman’s cinematic Christology, and with greater bluntness. Gospel narrative parallels and iconography are woven throughout, as when Clark Kent visits a church, its background filled with an image of Jesus in a cape-like red mantle. Later, Jor-El’s hologram tells his son, “You can save all of them,” as Superman floats above the Earth in a crucifixion pose.
Jewish themes can still be found in the film, however. Chiefly, young Clark’s struggles to fit in with his adoptive community and his burden of keeping his true racial identity a secret lest he be rejected and persecuted.
The opening on Krypton features a council of elders, whose refusal to acknowledge the coming cataclysm and endless deliberations condemn their race. An element from the comic dating back to Siegel and Shuster’s earliest stories, also present in the 1978 movie but more developed here, it can be seen as a critique of similar councils in Jewish shtetels who failed to act in the face of pogroms and the Holocaust.
The villain is General Zod again, this time not a power-hungry despot or vengeful devil, but a Nazi-like genocidal race-purist looking to expand his lebensraum.
The film even introduces new Moses parallels, though drawing them is more a playful exercise than meaningful argument. Before Clark becomes Superman, he responds to three plights: he saves roughnecks from a burning oil rig, schoolmates from a sinking bus, and a waitress from harassing truckers. Moses likewise helps in three instances before becoming his people’s hero: he saves a slave from a taskmaster, stops a fight between two Israelites, and defends women at a watering hole from bullying sheepherders.
Like Moses, Superman in the movie is reluctant to be exposed, as well as to assume his birthright when Jor-El calls upon him to, eventually doing so because he is the only one who can save his people (though adoptive).
Man of Steel’s sequels, 2016’s Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and 2017’s Justice League, expand Superman’s Christian themes even further, including a self-sacrifice, death atop a hill in a crucifixion pose, a resurrection, and a horned adversary from a fiery domain commanding “Parademons.” Neither film contains any Jewish themes to speak of, beyond the point that Jesus’s story itself is Jewish.
A Super mensch
The recently released movie, Superman, is refreshingly bereft of religious symbolism, Jewish or Christian. But in its almost subversive embrace of the comics – the prime texts – some of the Jewish themes resurface.
Unlike Reeve and Routh’s saintly Superman and Cavill’s godlike Superman, Corenswet’s Superman is an everyman. Despite his gifts and finetuned moral compass, he’s as imperfect and fallible as anyone. Much like Siegel and Shuster’s version, he’s even impulsive and headstrong.
This places him more in the tradition of Jewish biblical heroes, all deeply flawed yet ultimately valiant, like the drunkard Noah, the lascivious David, the wayward Solomon, and the hot-tempered Moses, than that of Jesus.
That Superman wrestles with moral dilemmas throughout – what to do, not just how to do it – also makes him something of a Talmudic action hero.
The main theme, however, is that of the conflicted immigrant. The film forgoes the well-trodden origin story, but Superman’s alien racial and cultural heritage, and the struggle to balance his identities, are present throughout. His otherness is something of which he’s constantly made aware, both by his birth parents’ views on Earth and the US government’s mistrust of him.
His immigrant otherness is also what ignites the rage of Lex Luthor, who is consumed with unreasoned, paranoid, and xenophobic hatred. Luthor denies Superman his humanity, stating that, “He’s not a man, he’s an it,” while Lois tells Superman, “You think everything and everyone is beautiful.” The message is that every person, no matter where they are from, is deserving of dignity, appreciation, and kindness. An important message from a Jewish character, in 1938 and today.
Siegel and Shuster didn’t create their personal avatar as a Christ figure. Superman was gradually Christianized over the decades, mostly on screen. But his movies, as well as numerous TV shows and cartoons, have also reflected, to varying degrees, the Jewish inspirations and themes that Siegel and Shuster imbued him with.
Ultimately, whatever the underlying metaphor, Superman is a powerful symbol of a simple concept; tikkun olam.
