Disguised as Clark Kent Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero

Jewish identity is historically about the push and pull toward and away from that very identity. As immigrants with a history of persecution, Jews came to America with their heads down but their eyes open, finding themselves presented with unprecedented freedom and opportunity. Still, there were limits, spoken and unspoken, which often pushed Jews into fields with a hint of "second-class-ness" to them. Among these was the comic-book industry, until then minus the breakout hit that would put the medium on the map. That phenomenon would be the superhero - specifically Superman - and the flood of others that followed, including Batman and Spider-Man. In Disguised as Clark Kent, Danny Fingeroth explores how the creators' Jewish backgrounds helped make superheroes the most familiar popular-culture icons of all, far beyond the comic books that spawned them - on TV, in movies, in electronic media - and in our very ideas about what it means to be a hero.