Superhero media keeps failing its Jewish audience

For years, it’s felt like superhero media has left much to be desired when it comes to Jewish representation. From the Jesus-ification of Superman in Zack Snyder’s Man of Steel to Martin Stein’s death at the hands of Nazis in the Arrowverse’s Crisis on Earth-X crossover, Jewish representation in the superhero genre has been inconsistent or just plain bad.

The way the genre has fumbled the Jewish identity is shocking, to say the least when you consider who created the genre in the first place: Jewish people.

Superman was created by Jewish comic book writers Jerry Siegal and Joe Shuster and debuted in Action Comics #1 in 1938. Siegal credited the stories of oppression and slaughter of innocent Jews at the hand of Hitler during WWII as the inspiration for sharing Superman with the masses.

He wanted to create a hero that could inspire hope, and found that “Superman was the answer.” Similarly, Stan Lee’s Jewish roots inspired the stories he told with characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men.

With superheroes so rooted in Judaism, it’s hard to believe that there isn’t more representation in our overly-saturated superhero media landscape. Most recently, The CW’s Batwoman spectacularly failed in providing Jewish representation with titular hero Kate Kane before she was written off the show entirely.

In a moment that is still cringe-worthy, Batwoman and her father, Jacob Kane, were locked in a courtroom that got turned into a gas chamber during season 1 episode 6, titled “I’ll Be Judge, I’ll Be Jury.” Not only was putting two out of three of your Jewish characters into a gas chamber simply in poor taste, but the gas chamber debacle was also one of the only times throughout the first season’s 20 episodes to allude to the Jewish identity of the titular character. This is a far cry from her comic book roots, which sees her identity deeply tied to her Judaism.

To make matters worse, when Ruby Rose left the show in the COVID-forced break between seasons 1 and 2, the series decided to do away with Jewishness almost entirely by writing off Kate and Jacob Kane by the end of the season.

While Ryan Wilder is a wonderful character providing representation for another under-represented community, Batwoman’s erasure of Judaism from their show, after not handling it well in the first place, left Jewish fans feeling rightfully burned.

While DC has fumbled its Jewish representation, the MCU isn’t doing much better. In fact, in their most recent Disney+ show Moon Knight, the MCU entirely rewrote Marc Spector’s backstory, erasing the importance of his Jewish identity within his origin.

The MCU is known for its less-than-accurate translations from comic to screen, but this particular change feels more pointed than the rest. In the comics, Marc Spector is the son of a Rabbi living in Chicago, and his Dissociative Identity Disorder is caused by an encounter with a Nazi serial killer.

The villain Ernst posed as Rabbi Yitz Pearlman to draw in Jewish victims, and Marc was one of the only people to fight back and survive. This encounter, first told in Moon Knight #194, was the traumatic event that caused Marc to develop DID, creating Steven Grant and Jake Lockley to deal with the trauma.

In the Moon Knight series, Marc’s Jewish identity takes a backseat and essentially becomes a footnote in his story rather than a defining characteristic.

The series establishes that Marc’s DID is caused by the accidental death of his younger brother, and the subsequent beatings and verbal abuse he took from his mother afterward. She blamed young Marc for her other son’s death, and Marc created Steven Grant to cope.

The MCU is known for changing character backstories, but the removal of Judaism from Marc’s feels particularly tone-deaf. While Moon Knight’s comic backstory simply could not be told without Marc’s Judaism, if you took any and all Jewish content out of Moon Knight episode 5, the story would remain the same.

In a time when antisemitism is on the rise across the nation, cutting Marc’s deeply rooted connection to his religion feels irresponsible at best and downright cruel at worst.

While the Fox X-Men films succeeded in portraying a Jewish comic book character with Magneto, fleshing him out and translating his deeply Jewish roots into the films strikingly and effectively, there’s clearly still a long way to go before Judaism is accurately and properly portrayed in superhero media.

As more and more superhero stories are brought to the big screen, it’s more important than ever that these stories are diverse and portray our reality as it is in the real world. By fumbling the Jewish identity within the superhero genre over and over, Jewish audiences are being robbed of seeing themselves as superheroes.

This feels particularly brutal, considering they can find representations of the Jewish identity within the pages of comic books, but find those elements stripped in translation to the superhero media we see on screen.