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From Kal-El
To Clark Kent
The Jewish origins
of Superman.
Larry Tye
Special to the Jewish News
H
e didn't look Jewish. Not with
his perfect pug nose, electric
blue eyes and a boyish spit
curl that suggested Anglo as well as
Saxon. No hint in his sleek movie-star
name, Clark Kent, which could only
belong to a gentile and probably one with
a lifelong membership at the country club.
The surest sign that Kent was no Semite
came when the bespectacled everyman
donned royal blue tights and a furling
red cape to transform into a Superman
with rippling musdes and magnifying
superpowers. Who ever heard of a Jewish
strongman?
The evidence of his ethnic origin
lay elsewhere, starting with Kal-El,
his Kryptonian name. El is a suffix in
Judaism's most cherished birthrights,
from Isra-el to the prophets Samu-el and
Dani-el. It means "God." Kal is the root of
the Hebrew words for "voice" and "vessel':
Together they suggest that the superbaby
rocketed to Earth by his dying father was
not just a Jew, but a very special one.
Like Moses. Both babies were rescued
by non-Jews and raised in foreign cultures
— Moses by Pharaoh's daughter, Kal-El
by Kansas farmers named Kent — and all
the adoptive parents quickly learned how
exceptional their foundlings were.
Clues mounted from there. The three
legs of the Superman myth — truth,
justice and the American way — are
straight out of the Mishnah, the codi-
fication of Jewish oral traditions. "The
world:' it reads, "endures on three things:
justice, truth and peace: The explosion
of Krypton conjures up images from the
mystical Kabbalah, where the divine ves-
sel was shattered and Jews were called on
to perform tikkun olam by repairing the
vessel and the world.
The destruction of Kal-El's planet and
people also rings of the Nazi Holocaust, as
well as the effort to save Jewish children
through Kindertransports, both brewing
when Superman creators Jerry Siegel and
Joe Shuster were publishing their first
comics.
Larry Tye
A last rule of thumb: When a name
ends in "man:, the bearer is Jewish, a
superhero, or both.
Superman had even stronger cultural
ties to the faith of his founders. He started
life as the consummate liberal, champion-
ing causes from disarmament to the wel-
fare state. He was the ultimate foreigner,
escaping to America from his intergalactic
shted and shedding his Jewish name for
Clark Kent, a pseudonym as transpar-
ently WASPish as the ones Siegel chose for
himself.
Kent and Siegel had something else
in common: Both were classic shlep-
pers. Kent and Superman lived life the
way most newly arrived Jews did, torn
between their Old- and New-World iden-
tities and their mild exteriors and rock-
solid cores. That split personality was the
only way Kent could survive, yet it gave
him perpetual angst. You can't get more
Jewish than that.
Was that what Siegel and Shuster had
in mind when they created Superman?
Neither was religious or attracted to
organized Judaism. Some of Superman's
Jewish accents — spelling his name
Kal-El versus Siegel's more streamlined
Kal-L — were added by later writers and
editors, the preponderance of them also
Jewish.
But Siegel acknowledged in his memoir
that his writing was strongly influenced
by the anti-Semitism he saw and felt
and that Samson was a role model for
Superman. What Siegel did, as he said
repeatedly, was write about his world,
which was a neighborhood that was
70 percent Jewish, where theaters and
newspapers were in Yiddish as well as
English, and there were 25 Orthodox
shuls to choose from but only one option
— Weinberger's — to buy your favorite
pulp fiction.
It was a place and time where every
juvenile weakling and wheyface — and
especially Jewish ones who were more
likely to get sand kicked in their face by
Adolph Hitler and the bully down the
block — dreamed that someday the
world would see them for the superhe-
roes they really were. ❑
Larry Tye, a former reporter at the Boston Globe and author of five
previous books, including Home Lands: Portraits of the New Jewish
Diaspora, will speak about his new book, Superman: The High-Flying
History of America's Most Enduring Hero (Random House) at 11:30 a.m.
Sunday, Nov. 11, at the JCC's Jewish Book Fair in West Bloomfield. Free
and open to the public. www.jccdet.org .
This side-splitting comedy is about the writing, fighting and wacky
antics in the writers' room of a weekly variety show circa 1953,
It follows the antics of the star of "The Max Prince Show" and his
ongoing battles with NBC executives who fear his humor is too
sophisticated for Middle America. The characters are based on
Neil Simon's real-life co-workers (Mel Brooks, Carl Reiner,
Sid Caesar, Larry Gelbart and Selma. Diamond) when he was a
comedy writer for the television program "Your Show of Shows."
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November 8 • 2012
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