The Penguin, starring Colin Ferrel, Cristin Millioti, and Rhenzy Feliz, released its first episode this week to much praise. A televised sequel/spinoff of Matt Reeves’ 2023 film, The Batman, it plans to show viewers Oswald Cobb’s rise to power in the criminal underworld following the death of Carmine Falcone, aka The Roman. The 8-episode series is set in Gotham city weeks after the end of the first film, it shows a city in shambles, still trying to get its footing following the Riddler’s terrorism and the flooding of Gotham city’s most vulnerable neighborhoods. Gotham is a city loosely based on a smattering of cities in the New York/New Jersey area. Some might say Gotham is supposed to be NYC itself, a claim that the current cast and crew of both ‘The Batman’ and ‘The Penguin’ would agree with seeing as many of the on location scenes are filmed in Brooklyn, New York. Such a setting, and its adaptation of comic book characters created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger raises a question; where are the Jews?
Now, this question isn’t being asked purely out of a chauvinist urge to make everything I like about Jewish people (though that is definitely part of it), but because Batman and many of the most famous of his mythos’ secondary and tertiary characters were invented by, and in some cases are Jews. Batman, Bruce Wayne, is Jewish through his mother, Martha Kane, the sister to Jacob Kane, a Jewish ex-marine, and aunt of Katherine Kane, the Batwoman, who is an open and proud Jewish lesbian. Both Bob Kane and Bill Finger, the co-creators of characters Bruce Wayne, Dick Grayson, Selina Kyle, and of course, Oswald Cobblepot (among many many others), were both Jewish men. As were the creators of other extremely famous comics characters like Superman, Captain America, and Spider-man to name a few.
This history is often lost on non Jewish comic book fans and creators, whose interpretation of these characters lack the nuance or understanding of that Jewish heritage, often leaving them to fill in the blanks of who the characters are using the tenets of their own, often, Christian backgrounds. Zack Synder’s Man of Steel’s not-so subtle-Jesus imagery comes to mind as one example of this. Of course, these characters belong to everyone and it’s wrong to police how one creator might see a character as tied to their own background as opposed to another. But, this ignorance of the Jewish heritage of these stories and characters has led to confusion and frustration for many Jewish comics readers and fans of their adaptations. Jewish fans are often left begging for scraps of representation, and praising what feel like allusions to allusions as ways of filling those gaps of portrayal. The commotion caused by a blurry Zohar sitting on a shelf behind the Wayne family in the promotional images for The Batman (2023) is a frankly, embarrassing, example of this.
Jews exist in these stories, and not just as cameos or blurry images. As mentioned previously we have Batman and Batwoman, but there’s also Harely Quinn who is a half-Jewish, half-Irish queer woman. In fact, in the animated show that shares her name, The Penguin himself is portrayed as a Jew, whos nephew’s bar mitzvah is the setting for many shenanigans in Season 1 Episode 2 “A High Bar” wherein which Harley and Poison Ivy crash the bar mitzvah boy’s party to get at the Penguin. The occasional dregs of representation we get only reinforce the question at hand, if all these characters have Judaism in their origins and are often Jewish themselves, then why don’t we ever see it?
Like the history of any minority in America, Jewish history in the United States is rocky. Avenues to wealth were few and far between, often through professions considered unbecoming of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant Americans. As Jewish immigration to the United States increased rapidly at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th centuries, many laws and discriminatory attitudes barred Jews from traditional paths toward financial stability and wealth. This made it so that they were pigeonholed into pursuing professions industries like garment making, stage acting, music, and other “lower” forms of business and art. Vaudeville was overflowing with Jewish people, though few advertised it to their largely Christian audiences. And when Vaudeville transformed into the creative mainstays of Broadway and Hollywood, Vaudevillians took their Judaism with them to New York and California, growing ever more secure in their religious and ethnic identity. Though for illustration and visual arts, Jews were often forced to take a back seat, if they were even allowed into those spaces at all.
In Disguised as Clark Kent by Danny Fingeroth, the author describes how Jewish artists, often barred from more traditional spaces in the visual arts world, flocked to comics illustration as a way of being able to express themselves while still getting paid. Fingeroth describes a burgeoning American-Jewish reality during and after World War II of an almost “don’t ask, don’t tell” culture. Judaism as an identity was private, uncommented on, even amongst each other Jews for fear that drawing too much public attention to that identity would cause issues with their gentile neighbors. To take it to a place of Marvel for a second, we see this idea reflected in the initial run of X-Men comics by Jack Kirby (a Jew) and Stan Lee (a Jew). Five teenagers, who are presented to the viewer as white and otherwise normative, have a secret other heritage that causes them to be discriminated against and persecuted by world governments and the people around them. Drafted by Charles Xavier, Professor X, they take on a perspective very much in the vein of Tikkun Olam, fighting to save a world that hates and fears them. All while keeping their identities hidden from the public. The parallel becomes even more apparent with Magneto and the revelation of his own Jewish identity, and the addition of Kitty Pryde (the first openly Jewish comic book character) by writer Chris Claremont (another Jew) in the late 70s and 80s.
Batman, and by extension many other characters at DC Comics like Superman, the Flash, or even the Green Lantern (who’s initial iteration, Alan Scott, was created by a Jew and the later successor to the role, Hal Jordan, is canonically Jewish) can be seen as microcosms of this attitude. Regular men who, despite the appearances they keep, dawn capes and masks to reveal a hidden part of themselves bent on the pursuit of truth and justice, even at great personal risk to themselves and their livelihoods. Even if the creators of these stories never once thought consciously of their Judaism in their work (as many of them have claimed) the subconscious has a way of reflecting the truth of the mind in one’s writing and art. Maybe they didn’t perceive their art as particularly Jewish, but art in its base form is a reflection of the self. It is a mirror, showing its audience a captured reflection of its maker. Because of this, Judaism and the Jewish identity that existed in America, can be seen all throughout the earliest comics creations. However, antisemitism and the general need to appeal to as wide an audience as possible, made it so that identity was rarely commented on, either on panel or off.
As the dawn of the 21st century becomes an early morning light, it is up to Jews in these spaces, who enjoy these works of art, to insist on our presence and part in them. Comic books are quintessentially Jewish, an art form that, like Rock n’ Roll, has had its roots in a persecuted minority community slowly erased, not by any direct malice on the part of creators, but by a general culture of bigotry in America and beyond that would make highlighting those roots uncouth and bad for business. Audiences deserve better than this. They deserve to see themselves. Jewish audiences deserve to see themselves in a medium our community helped pioneer, and the same goes for all audiences of all backgrounds. Of course, things are getting better. Zoe Kravitz, a Jewish woman, played Selina Kyle in The Batman (2023) and potentially its 2026 sequel. David Cornsweat, a Jewish man, has been cast as Superman in James Gunn’s upcoming 2025 film. However we have yet to see if their Judaism will be of any consequence to the stories being told, or if the identities of these actors and origins of their characters will simply remain a fun fact found in the early life section of their respective wikipedias.
In a podcast discussing his role as a young Bruce Wayne in the TV series “Gotham” David Mazouz described a scenario in which an executive on the show was openly hostile to his Jewish roots and identity. Mazouz says “The creators really loved me, it was a Warner produced show and the executives really loved me, and most of the Fox executives really loved me, there was one who said that ‘I look too Jewy’ to be Bruce Wayne. Eventually he was overridden, but I almost didn’t get Gotham basically because I had curly hair, which is why my hair is straight in the show.” This example of discrimination by an actor, someone who is Jewish and portraying a canonically Jewish character, is a clear example of the erasure of Jewish representation in comics and adaptation of comics. The fact that an actor can even be described in such an overtly antisemitic way by someone who holds power over these properties is indicative of a larger trend to downplay and gloss over the Jewishness of comics within adapted media. It’s an example of a Jewish actor who was forced to hide his own identity for the sake of white audiences and an executive who believed that Jewish people should not be seen in the genre that they themselves built. What a slap in the face that revelation is, not only to Mazouz, who is a great actor and carried the role of young Bruce Wayne in the show, but also to the generations of Jewish creators who have been at the forefront of the Batman mythos since day one.
Jews in the early days comics and beyond were pioneers of the medium and industry, but there were also many Italian creators at the same time and later, as industries began to be desegregated, we saw the emergence of brilliant artists and writers of color who pioneered a new wave of comic books and cultural staples like Dakota Comics and its breakout character, Virgil Hawkins aka Static.
Comics as a medium were and continue to be pioneered by minorities and otherwise marginalized people. In recent years, Ta Nehisi Coates’ Black Panther run revolutionized the mythos of the character as well as the fictional civilization of Wakanda, and Brian Michael Bendis’ Spider-man run is to many considered required reading for the character. The Jewish creators of the golden and silver ages led to the popularization of comics among all people leading to the diversity of creatives in the industry, many of whom were able to see their own realities as marginalized people reflected in the comics they read. As an industry, comics and the movies and television that spawn from them, need to break free of the embarrassment of their origins among these communities. Beyond Jewish erasure in the Batman mythos, the MCU (Marvel Cinematic Universe) has repeatedly white washed many of their characters including the Scarlet Witch, who is a brown Romani woman in the comics. A more recent instance of MCU erasure is the casting of Joe Locke and Patti Lupone in “Agatha All Along.” Locke plays a character ‘Teen’ who is an adaptation of Billy Kaplan, a Jewish superhero known as Wiccan. It remains unclear if the character will be Jewish in the show, but the casting of a Non-Jewish actor and the lack of Scarlet Witch’s own Jewish identity in the MCU points to his Judaism most likely being erased or otherwise disrespected. LuPone’s character is an adaptation of the Romani character, Lilia Calderu, who’s Romani heritage is central to her character and role in the comics despite that identity being completely left out of the show. In the Fox Studios New Mutants movie and wider X-men properties, Roberto DeCosta, who in the comics is Afro-Latino, has had his Black-Brazilian heritage repeatedly erased both in movies and in the recent X-men ‘97 TV show.
In a time where fascism and bigotry are rising, it’s up to artists, editors, publishers, and executives at the forefront of entertainment to push back against this and create culture that not only tolerates marginalized people, but actively celebrates them. Recent endeavors by both DC and Marvel comics to publish comics celebrating the heritages and queer identities of their characters have been successful in allowing artists who share those identities to spotlight and celebrate characters who have otherwise been ignored. However, even those comics have fallen short of their goal, often leading to queer characters only being seen in the context of Pride month special comic book issues or Black characters only being seen in Black History month specials. Surprisingly there has been no Jewish iteration of these very special comics, though there is much demand among Jewish audiences. Perhaps next May (Jewish American History Month) we might get a Marvel Voices highlighting their Jewish characters and history of the publisher or maybe DC will beat them to the punch. In any case, these characters deserve to have their identities be core parts of their characters, and diverse audiences deserve to be able to see themselves in diverse characters, beyond once a year specials coinciding with whatever month it happens to be. Audiences of color deserve better, Jewish audiences deserve better, all audiences deserve better.
P.S. For Jewish fans of comics or fans of Jewish comics, the second annual JewCE convention (Jewish Comics Experience) is being hosted in Manhattan in November of this year. It features panels and booths hosted by Jewish comics creators showcasing comics, Jewish culture, and the intersection of the two. Names like the previously mentioned Brian Michael Bendis and Danny Fingeroth are on the guest list, as well as a plethora of other passionate Jewish comics creators. If you’re a fan of comics in the NYC area or are willing to make the journey, the convention is well worth the trip.
