By Laurie Baron
SAN DIEGO — Marvel Comics founder Stan Lee died Monday. As a memorial to him, here’s an excerpt from an article I wrote in 2003 about the first X-Men movie:
The creators of the X-Men comic book series belong to the generation of American-born Jews who sought acceptance and social mobility through assimilation. Their childhood Americanization, the rise of Nazism in Germany, and World War Two provided the formative experiences which shaped both their faith in American democracy and their fear of the demagogic appeal of antisemitism and racism.
Jacob Kurtzberg was born in 1917 to a family of Austrian Jews who had settled on the Lower East Side of New York. He recalled that he desperately “wanted to break out of the ghetto,” and his talent as an illustrator enabled him to achieve this goal. He initially signed his work as an animator and comic strip artist with several Gentile sounding names before he decided to call himself Jack Kirby. Kirby collaborated with Joe Simon of Timely Comics, the forerunner of Marvel Comics, to create Captain America. The cover page of the first issue of Captain America, which hit the racks in March of 1941, showed the patriotic superhero clad in a red, white, and blue costume punching Hitler in the face while German soldiers fired their guns in vain to protect their Fuehrer. The casting of the Third Reich as the archenemy of the United States had been a consistent theme in Marvel publications since 1940, in part because its owner Martin Goodman and many of its staff members were Jewish. Drafted into the Army in 1943, Kirby ended up being dispatched to the European Front shortly after D-Day. Scouting occupied German territory in 1945, he met an elderly Jewish man who led him to a small labor camp where the emaciated inmates, mostly Polish Jews, had been abandoned by the camp’s guards. As he told this story to an interviewer over 40 years later, Kirby remarked, “Just thinking about it makes my stomach turn. All I could say was, ‘Oh God.'”
Stan Lee’s parents were Romanian Jews who immigrated to the United States and resided in New York City. At the age of 17 years old, Stanley Lieber was hired in 1940 by Timely Comics to assist Simon and Kirby in the preparation of the first installments of Captain America because Lieber’s cousin was married to the company’s owner Martin Goodman. He rapidly rose from being a proofreader and errand boy to writing dialogue for comic books. He adopted the moniker of Stan Lee for his Storyboards because he aspired to write “the great American novel” and did not want to besmirch his real name with what he considered “silly little comics.” Several months prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor, Lee incorporated Timely’s crusade against Nazism in his first original character, the Destroyer, a superhero dedicated to defeating the Third Reich. When Kirby and Simon left Timely to work for rival DC Comics, Lee was promoted at Timely to the position of editor and art director. He enlisted in the Army in 1942 where he eventually served as a screenwriter for training films. Lee returned to Marvel Comics in 1945 and subsequently authored a pamphlet about the company’s prewar and wartime “policy of telling the readers the truth about the Nazi menace.”
Rejoining the Marvel Comics staff in the late 1950s, Kirby teamed up with Stan Lee in the early 1960s to launch a slew of successful new comic book series including The Fantastic Four, The Incredible Hulk, and The Mighty Thor. In 1963 Kirby and Lee devised the premise of the X-Men. The X-men were endowed with a variety of superhuman telepathic and physical powers which resulted from either random genetic mutations or exposure to radioactivity. Aiming to attract adolescents who could identify with such outsiders, Kirby and Lee depicted the key X-Men as teenagers whose unnatural abilities first manifested themselves during puberty.
When the public in the X-men stories became alarmed by these “freaks” of nature, a political movement emerged to register them and restrict their civil rights. Erik Magnus Lehnsherr, aka Magneto, was a Jewish mutant whose entire family perished in the Holocaust, as portrayed in the opening scene of the X-Men movie. He believed history would repeat itself unless the mutants struck first and genetically transformed homo sapiens into mutants to abolish the disparities that fanned the flames of human prejudice. The dialogue in the X-Men Comic books is more explicit than the film in forging the linkage between the slaughter of European Jewry and Magneto’s paranoia about the eventual fate of the mutants if human speciesism is left unchecked. For example, in one issue of the series, Magneto comments, “I endured one death camp in Auschwitz. I will not see another people fear what they do not understand and destroy what they fear.” Magneto generated enormous magnetic force fields that could collapse anything constructed with steel and deflect bombs, bullets, and missiles in mid-air.
Dr. Charles Xavier functioned as Magneto’s nemesis. As the son of a nuclear technician, Dr. X was exposed to radiation that left his brain with amazing telepathic powers. Though mentally superior, Xavier is confined to a wheelchair, having lost the use of his legs in a childhood accident. Whether Kirby or Lee intended it, they devised a Gentile hero who fit the traditional stereotype of Jewish males as intellectuals with weak bodies. In the comic book series, Dr. X originally met Magneto in Israel where the latter worked in a psychiatric hospital for Holocaust survivors. The doctor envisaged a world in which mutants and humans could live in harmony, but failed to convince the embittered Magneto that humans would not persecute the mutants whose superior abilities threatened their dominance of Earth. While Magneto organized the Brotherhood of Evil Mutants to overthrow humankind, Dr. X founded a school to teach mutant teenagers, in his words, “to learn to use our powers for the benefit of mankind … to help those who would distrust us if they knew of our existence!”
Dr. X’s mission to acculturate the mutants and train them to defend their host society mirrors the integrationist strategies pursued by many of the first generation of Jews born in America. Mathew Smith has argued that the ethnic minorities who dreamed up the original comic book superheroes projected their own social insecurities onto their creations by depicting them as aliens or physically distinctive beings who gladly relinquished “their heritage, in part or in full, for assimilation into the American melting pot.” The longing to fit in stemmed not only from memories of persecution in the Old Country, but also from the exacerbation of American antisemitic sentiments by the Bolshevik Revolution, the Great Depression, and the appeasement of Nazi Germany between the two World Wars. This historical context lends plausibility to Helena Frenkil Schlam’s thesis that “feelings of Jewish anxiety” motivated Jewish cartoonists like Stan Lee and Jack Kirby “to imagine a solution — the existence of all-powerful protectors for the vulnerable in society.”
American Jewish sympathy for the mainstream of the Civil Rights Movement also left its mark on the characters and plots of X-Men and other Marvel comic books. Stuart Svonkin traces the identification of many American Jews with the African-American struggle for political equality to the postwar theory postulated by progressive social scientists that European antisemitism and American racism had similar psychological and social roots which produced demeaning stereotypes, discriminatory legislation, and violence against minority groups. Stan Lee articulated this liberal point of view in a 1965 “soapbox” column about the politics of Marvel Comic Books:
“We’d like to go on record about one vital issue — we believe that man has a divine destiny, and an awesome responsibility — the responsibility of treating all who share this wondrous world of ours with tolerance and respect— judging each fellow human on his own merit, regardless of race, creed, or color.”
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Excerpted from Lawrence Baron, “X-Men as J-Men: The Jewish Subtext of a Comic Book Movie,” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies Vol.22, no.1 (Fall 2003), pp.45-48.
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Baron is professor emeritus of history at San Diego State University. He may be contacted via lawrence.baron@sdjewishworld.com.