May 2018
May Birthdays!
5/1 Brian Hendrickson
5/1 Rick Tanenbaum
5/2 Marilyn Litoff
5/3 Benjamin Brough
5/3 Susan Goldman
5/3 Sylvia Rex
5/7 Ralph Berger
The Avengers: Building on a Jewish Comic Book Legacy
Marvel Studio’s latest blockbuster, Avengers: Infinity War, is banking on the superhero genre conceived in the early 1930s by two Cleveland Jewish high school students, writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster.
Superman actualized the adolescent power fantasies of these two Depression-era kids, who craved a muscle-bound redeemer to liberate them from the social and economic impoverishment of their lives and, in the tradition of the Golem of Prague, to fight anti-Semites.
The narrative is rich in Jewish symbolism. Superman’s parents sent him to Earth in a tiny rocket ship, reminiscent of how baby Moses survived Pharaoh’s decree to kill all Jewish newborn sons. In the context of the 1930s, the story also reflected the Kindertransports – the evacuation to safety of hundreds of Jewish children from Nazi-occupied Europe to lands of the British Commonwealth.
With America’s entry into World War II, Superman, Batman, and other superheroes were pressed into action. “As comic writers,” says Stan Lee (born Stanley Martin Lieber), “we had to have villains in our stories. And once World War II started, the Nazis gave us the greatest villains in the world to fight against.”
Jewish illustrators and writers entered the emerging comic book field because other areas of commercial illustration were virtually closed to them. “We couldn’t get into newspaper strips or advertising; ad agencies wouldn’t hire a Jew,” explains MAD magazine cartoonist Al Jaffee. “One of the reasons we Jews drifted into the comic book business is that most of the comic book publishers were Jewish. So there was no discrimination there.”
Most of the first-wave comic book artists and writers never emerged from poverty. They were underpaid wage slaves with no rights or royalties; the characters they created were owned and trademarked by the comic book publishers. Even Siegel and Shuster earned a paltry $130 for the first Superman story and had to negotiate for meager financial and creative participation in subsequent Superman strips and spinoffs.
In 1961, Lee was tired of being perceived as being at “the bottom of the cultural totem pole” with little financial promise, so he decided to consider a career change. But before he made his move, his boss called Lee into his office and asked him to come up with a new superhero concept that would outperform DC Comics’ The Justice League of America (which combined the revamped Flash and Green Lantern with mainstays like Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman to form a team of superheroes). Lee took up the challenge, and what happened next may have saved the comic book industry.
Lee and artist Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurzberg) unveiled Fantastic Four #1, a new crime-fighting series featuring four heroes who, for the first time in comic book history, exhibited a broad range of human emotions. Readers could empathize with such characters as Benjamin Grimm (who’d been transformed by cosmic rays into a monstrous pile of orange rocks) despite – or, perhaps, because of – their flaws. To his fellow superheroes, Ben could be a hotheaded jerk, but comics fans attributed his distemper to his being trapped in repulsive orange skin and could feel compassion for him.
Like many Marvel characters, the emotionally challenged Ben became a metaphor for Jews and other minority outsiders who faced discrimination because of their skin color or ethnic roots.
The Fantastic Four quickly built up a large readership, and Marvel Comics soon introduced titles featuring physically and emotionally challenged heroes, such as Daredevil, Thor, and The Incredible Hulk. Thus began the Marvel Age of Comics, marked by Lee and Kirby’s brilliant seven-year collaboration.
The next major breakthrough for Marvel came in September 1963, when Lee and Kirby introduced The X-Men, a superhero team of five men and women born with an extra “mutant” gene that endowed each with a different superpower (telepathy, strength, flight, and the ability to emit deadly optic blasts). From their base at Professor Charles Xavier’s “School for Gifted Youngsters” in Westchester, N.Y., the five set out to fight injustice. The X-Men was a hit among college students active in the civil rights struggle of the 1960s, who may have viewed pacifist Professor X’s battle against the militant mutant Magneto as a metaphor for the divergent ideologies of the non-violent Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and the militant Malcolm X.
The Jews who pioneered this art form, often for little material reward, are superheroes in their own right, for they have created enduring icons of popular culture. And they did so with an eye toward Jewish values.
Stan Lee summed it up like this: “To me you can wrap all of Judaism up in one sentence, and that is, ‘Do unto others.’ All I tried to do in my stories was show that there’s some innate goodness in the human condition. And there’s always going to be evil; we should always be fighting evil.”
Arie Kaplan is the author of From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books. He has also written for MAD magazine, Time Out New York, Entertainment Weekly, and the MTV series Total Request Live. This article was adapted from “Kings of Comics,” a three-part series in Reform Judaism magazine.
May 2018 Worship Schedule
May 4 & 5
Friday: Lag BaOmer
Dinner at 6:00 pm
Saturday: Cinco de Mayo Tisch with Rabbi & Carrie
9:30 am
May 11 & 12
Friday: Service at 7:30 pm
Saturday: There will be no Saturday Morning Service
May 18 & 19
Friday: Kabbalat
Shabbat 6:00 pm,
Refreshments at 5:30
Saturday: Morning Service 9:30 am
May 25 & 26
Friday: Kabbalat
Shabbat 6:00 pm,
Refreshments at 5:30
Saturday: Morning Service 9:30 am
FROM THE HEART WITH RABBI LIEBOWTIZ
Whoever looks at four things, ought not to have entered this world: what is above (heaven) what is below (the afterlife) what is in front (the future) and what is behind (the origins of the Universe). Talmud Hagigah
Dear Friends,
As the holiday of Shavuot beckons, we Jews turn our attention to spiritual questions. Indeed, the seven-week period that begins on the second night of Passover, our counting of the Omer, has been seen as a mystical period of contemplating what was called the Sefirotic Tree. This imagining from the Zohar, our mystical Midrash on the five books of Moses, dabbled in explorations regarding God’s nature as expressed in various emanations. Quite complex and at times most mind-boggling, the Sefirotic tree has amused, puzzled and elevated Jewish minds and hearts for nearly a thousand years. The mystics warned that we would be wise to postpone its study until one is well grounded in observance, which was typically seen as being forty years of age. One well-known passage from the Talmud speaks of four rabbis who entertained mystical practices in search of Paradise or the heavenly abodes. In that venture, one became mad, another heretical, a third died, and only Rabbi Akiba entered and returned whole.
Questioning and exploring is a main feature of the Jewish mentality. The Talmudic spirit encourages investigation, not only of observance but of the nature of the divine. Very few limits! Only on rare occasion does the Talmud say “When the Messiah arrives.” (Meaning he alone could answer such a question. Live with mystery!) I have noticed in my teaching young people, mostly of the Protestant Christian faith, mystery is often taken to extremes to the point that it is verboten to question. Sometimes, it is seen as quite sinful to delve into realms best let unexplored. Such a posture, in my judgement has given many persons of faith a permission slip to accept unquestioningly the tenets of their faith, with portentous consequences.
Judaism has sought to strike a healthy balance between being so questioning that we may tread our way into being nihilistic and being so accepting that we fail to have a deeper understanding of the divine. Shavuot is not only a time of cheese blintzes, but a time for earnest review of our connections to God, true spiritual nourishment. So many of us (as am I) are taken with the gifts of science that we avoid looking for God, favoring only material explanations. Shavuot then is a badly needed antidote to excessive rationality. The great scholar Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put this simply in the title of one of his most moving books; “I asked for wonder!” Let us then through the gift of our holiday cycle also look for wonder as we delve into regions often left unexplored!
Rabbi Yossi Liebowitz D.D.
May Events at a Glance!
Last Day of Hebrew School: Wednesday, May 2
Lag Ba-Omer Cookout: Friday, May 4 at 6:00 pm
Saturday Service & Tisch with Rabbi & Carrie: 9:30 am May 5-Cinco de Mayo
Sunday School: May 6 beginning at 9:30 am with Hebrew,
Last Day of Sunday School
Kabbalat Shabbat: Friday May 11 at 6:00
Saturday Service: May 12 at 9:30 am
Mother’s Day: Sunday, May 13
Sisterhood Sabbath: Friday, May 18 at 7:30
Saturday Service: May 19 at 9:30 am, Erev Shavuot
Yizkor Service & Blintzes: Sunday May 20 at 6:00 pm,
Shavuot Day 1
Temple Board Meeting: Monday, May 21 at 6:00 pm
Kabbalat Shabbat: Friday, May 25 at 6:00