Roy Schwartz - Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the Worlds Greatest Hero

In a manner, I started writing this book when I was in grade school. I spent the formative years of my education filling out school notebooks in nearly every class with stories and comics and what I would later come to realize were essays. Theyd feature my favorite fictional characterstypically superheroes, usually Superman or Captain Americafighting the good fight against neer-do-wells like aliens, Nazis, terrorists and, when theyd reach the Boss Level, some variation of my ogreish homeroom teacher, Mrs. Yaakobi.

But I was interested in more than just the action and spectacle of it. My heroes speech balloons and my narrator captions were often large, taking up half the page, filled with deliberations on all kinds of things. For example, neither Superman nor Cap cared much for Rambo and Robocops eagerness to kill their enemies (it was the 80s, so childrens cartoons and toys were naturally based on R-rated movies), and whenever theyd team up to battle villains theyd also debate the use of violence, sanctity of life, and subjectivity of good and evil. As far as I remember no consensus was ever reached, though they all made some good points. Of course, to my teachers all this was just silly doodling I was wasting my time on when I should been paying attention. But I knew better.

I started reading and collecting comic books around the age of nine. I knew of them earlier, mainly through the superhero genre I loved so much on TV and in movies, but as an Israeli, born and raised in Tel Aviv, my English wasnt good enough until then to read them (comics are actually how I learned English, which is why Im comfortable using words like swell). As I delved deeper into comics over the course of my tweens and teens I found that, contrary to popular misconception, they were far from fatuous. The cartoons based on them may have been aimed at young children, and campy movie maladaptations didnt help, but the comics themselves were often sophisticated, pithy, avant-garde and sometimes filled with gravitas. Like the rest of my generation I was an avid consumer of all things pop culture, but my parents also instilled in me a love of fine arts and literature. In comics I found the perfect mix of both.

My interests hadnt changed much by the time I moved to New York to attend college. I spent most of my time as an English major trying to convince my professors that Uncanny X-Men had no less depth and was worthy of the same critical examination as Pride and Prejudice . My freshman essay was titled Worlds Finest: Superman and Batman as Didactic Utopian and Dystopian Figures. My sophomore essay was Absolute Power: Ethics and Geopolitics in the Squadron Supreme Graphic Novel. In junior year I wrote Starship Storm Troopers: Themes of Propaganda and Indoctrination in Paul Verhoevens Starship Troopers . And my senior paper was Identity Crisis: Superman as a Christ Figure. It was this last paper in particular that helped me make a case for academic inquiry into sequential art and that started the line of thinking which culminated in this book.

From grade school to grad school, whatever else held my interest, I kept reading and writing about comics. But while bachelor studies at the freethinking New School University might have accommodated my flights of fancy, the level of academic rigor expected at an NYU masters program was a different story. I had to demonstrate, convincingly, scholarly merit in the examination of the works of Siegel and Shuster, Kane and Finger, Eisner, Lee, Kirby and others.

Superman, as the paradigm for all superheroes, was the logical place to start. I also felt a special kinship with the character. I too was an immigrant, and shared his alienation, loneliness and sense of mission. As luck would have it, around then books about comic books started becoming popular, including several discussing the Jewish background of early creators. It then struck me, like a lightning bolt striking a forensic scientistSuperman isnt a Christ figure at all. Hes Jewish!