In an article on April 25, 1940, the SS mouthpiece, Das Schwarze Korps, labeled Siegel a “crafty Israelite,” who was using Superman as a tool to corrupt American youth. That may sound like exegetical overreach, but even the Nazis recognized the Man of Steel’s suspiciously Jewish cosmopolitanism. “The explosion of Krypton conjures up images from the mystical Kabbalah, where the divine vessel was shattered and Jews were called on to perform tikkun ha-olam by repairing the vessel and the world.” “The three legs of the Superman myth - truth, justice, and the American way - are straight out of the Mishna, ‘The world endures on three things: justice, truth and peace,’” Tye posits. “Clark Kent was Superman trying to assimilate,” insists Larry Tye, an American journalist and author, in his first-rate popular history, “Superman: The High-Flying History of America’s Most Enduring Hero.” Superman, Tye argues, “was the ultimate foreigner, escaping to the US from his intergalactic shtetl and shedding his Jewish name.” His very birth name, Kal-El, is reminiscent of biblical Hebrew and is routinely rendered by fans as “the voice of God.”
And, as many Jews have felt compelled to do throughout the ages, Kal-El hides his real identity behind a carefully maintained public persona - Clark Kent, a mild-mannered journalist and brainy misfit with an Anglicized name.
Like Moses, he’s saved from certain death by being sent to an unknown fate in a tiny spacecraft, a futuristic reed basket of sorts, to wind up in a foreign land where he’s adopted by kindly strangers and takes on a transformative role by becoming a messianic figure. Yet despite his impeccably Anglo Saxon looks, the Man of Steel is profoundly Jewish - or so some Superman folklorists believe.
He’s also the quintessential comic book superhero, blazing a trail for Spider-Man, Batman, Iron Man, and all the rest of the ever-growing pantheon of angst-ridden and tortured souls with a penchant for vigilante-style justice and world-saving heroics. Superman is the archetypal all-American hero - an orphaned immigrant (literally, an alien called Kal-El) who arrives from the ravages of his birthplace, embraces the American Dream, and remakes both his own destiny and that of his adopted homeland. Superman's double identity hides more than just a Clark Kent/Man of Steel duality.
0 kommentar(er)
