Superman’s new origin story is no less than a blood libel

Trumpsters and fanboys are slamming this summer’s Superman as “woke” because he’s kind, thoughtful, and decidedly not native-born. Into a United States where innocents are snatched from their homes, workplaces, and citizenship interviews by masked thugs, then disappeared into back-country detention camps; a US whose Marines have been deployed on native soil to reinforce immigrant-hunters; a U.S. whose Congress just voted $75 billion to build an armed force better funded than the IDF explicitly to hunt aliens – into this troubled land, James Gunn, the writer, director, and, as head of DC Studios, impresario of “Superman,” has dropped a movie superstarring the ultimate immigrant, the symbol of all the goodness and grandeur former foreigners have brought to these shores.

That’s great news, right? As true believers (sorry, Marvel fans). As insiders know, Superman is of the tribe. Created by two Jewish cartoonists in Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, delivered to the public by a Jewish publisher scuttling in the disrespected margins of US culture (what chutzpah Harry Donenfeld had, calling his cheap comic books “magazines”!). Superman is so Jew-ish that Goebbels banned him from Hitler’s Germany.

His parents, Jor-El and Lara, launch their son, their only son, whom they love, from dying Krypton in an interplanetary replay of Yocheved sending baby Moses off in a basket of reeds – a doubly Midrashic move by Siegel and Shuster. The child is named Kal-El, pigeon Hebrew for “simple/God.” The American Jewish experience frames his adopted identity. Raised on a farm in the exquisitely named Smallville, Kansas, he grows up as strapping a pseudo-shaygetz as any jock in Philip Roth’s Weequahic. He finds his way to bustling Metropolis and, like contemporaries in Roth, Bellow, and Malamud, takes up life as a writer. Like them, he passes – apparently White, apparently all-American, but wearing his black spectacles or not, fundamentally Other and at risk of exposure: in Superman’s case, literal exposure to the substance of his origin, kryptonite.

This mythological structure was comic-book gospel for 87 years until James Gunn took command. Here, I am required by current practice to warn that I’m about to reveal a key turn in Gunn’s story structure. The spoiler, however, is James Gunn, not me. Doing good, loving Lois Lane, and keeping Darkseid at bay weren’t motive enough for the new boss. Gunn believes a hero needs a personal crisis.

To conjure that crisis, Gunn retconned Superman’s biological parents. Instead of rocketing their child off-planet to save his life, to preserve Kryptonian culture (in his Arctic Yavneh, the Kal-El of the comics maintains Krypton’s last surviving city in a big glass jug), and to return his new world-home’s generosity through service, James Gunn’s Jor-El and Lara intend for the boy to conquer Earth. He’s meant to produce a Kryptonian majority through serial insemination. He lands in Smallville, not in peace, but with a sword.

James Gunn is on thin ice here, and not only because sticklers like me defend the canon. He risks his own pro-immigrant message by duping Trump’s portrayal of the undocumented as alien invaders. Oh, wait, no: because Trump says foreign lands send the US their scum, not their best and brightest. Who on Earth would ever suggest that immigrants like Superman – super-smart, super-talented – would want, as the Proud Boys put it in Charlottesville, to “replace us”?

Uh oh.

It gets worse. In Gunn’s revision, this super-Semite achieves closure by renouncing Jor-El and Lara and embracing Martha and Jonathan Kent of Kansas as his true, spiritual parents. Gunn’s prescription for the challenges of migration is “Assimilate!” Ironically, this is enacted in IMAX by David Corenswet, the first ever actually ethnically Jewish Superman.

We live in confusing times. The charge of antisemitism is deployed by known Jew-haters against institutions that have nurtured Jews and our culture for decades. (I write as a Harvard alumnus, a fourth- or fifth-generation participant in the university’s Hebrew and Jewish history program.) Activists calling upon Israel to act ethically, to renew its promise as a Jewish democracy, are tarred as antisemites for their toil. You want to be careful with that characterization these days. You want, so to speak, to keep your powder dry.

So I won’t contend that James Gunn had anything more in his mind than a gimmick. He’s a screenwriter, not a sociologist, and I’m sure he has lots of Jewish friends. Perhaps word of the White supremacist “Great Replacement” theory hasn’t made it to his mansion in Bel Air. He maybe missed those Tiki-torch-toting incels stormtrooping through Charlottesville, chanting “Jews will not replace us”.

Gunn’s gimmick, nonetheless, is a Great Replacement. The crisis he’s created is not merely personal to Superman, a simple defamation of his parents. Treacherously, subtly, even if through ignorance or inattention, Gunn promulgates a potent and very much living blood libel: The Jewish will to subjugate the world. Only by believing such poison, accepting that it penetrates his very roots, and draining it, only by being born again as nothing but Kansan, can Gunn’s Superman resolve his trumped-up crisis. The solution for the immigrant is simple: Erase your heritage. Don’t be such a Jew.

Trolls whining about a new, woke Superman have it backward. There’s nothing new about a Superman so kind he’ll save the life of a squirrel or a giant, scaly, fire-spewing, building-crushing, lab-concocted kaiju. It’s not revisionist to make him an immigrant who contributes far more to America than he ever could take. This “Superman” is not woke: It’s benumbed.

At a moment when dog-whistles (sorry, Krypto) have consequences, Gunn manages, even if inadvertently, to impugn the very immigrants who gave Superman to the world. He may fancy himself immigrants’ champion, but he slanders them and, worse, advances the lie that a migrant must forsake his past to join in America’s future. Superman’s legacy may be fraught, but it is fundamentally bicultural. As guardian of that legacy, James Gunn shows himself asleep at the wheel.