How Superman Explains the New Anti-Judaism

The double bind of left antisemitism

At the end of Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill: Volume 2, the titular Bill delivers an extended monologue to his former lover, The Bride, regarding the mythology of the Superman comics. “A staple of the superhero mythology is, there's the superhero and there's the alter ego,” Bill says.

“Batman is actually Bruce Wayne, Spider-Man is actually Peter Parker. When that character wakes up in the morning, he's Peter Parker. He has to put on a costume to become Spider-Man. And it is in that characteristic Superman stands alone. Superman didn't become Superman. Superman was born Superman. When Superman wakes up in the morning, he's Superman. His alter ego is Clark Kent. His outfit with the big red "S" – that's the blanket he was wrapped in as a baby when the Kents found him. Those are his clothes. What Kent wears – the glasses, the business suit – that's the costume. That's the costume Superman wears to blend in with us.”

Bill uses Superman as a metaphor for his wife’s unshakeable identity as a killer assassin; but Tarantino leaves out one important piece of context about the Superman mythology: it was conceived by Jewish Americans. Superman’s origins in 20th century Jewish immigrant culture is crucial to understanding the uniqueness of the Clark Kent alter ego. The historian Gary Gerstle notes that “Superman's creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Jewish American artists from Cleveland, located him within the civic nationalist discourse of the New Deal. In fighting for "truth, justice, and the American way," Superman saved workers from coal mine explosions, urban residents from slum housing, and consumers from shoddily produced automobiles.” Here is how Gerstle puts it, in his book American Crucible:

Siegel and Shuster play in fascinating ways with the benefits and costs of alienage. On the one hand, Superman's extraterrestrial birth endows him with extraordinary powers; on the other, it subjects him to a marginal status, unable to marry, to raise a family, or even fully to disclose his true identity and thus to enjoy real intimacy. But the connection between this mythological immigrant and the real immigrants in Cleveland, New York, and elsewhere is deeply submerged…his assimilation into America occurs in the countryside under the loving care of the Kents, a rural farm couple who…are steeped in "true" American values. Through this Nordic (Yankee) upbringing, Superman comes to understand the "American way." He also gains a new identity that is "authentically" American. Clark Kent can "pass" anywhere, his alienage tightly concealed even as it remains a source (literally) of great strength. Exposure is a constant worry, however, because it will increase his vulnerability to his enemies, who have learned that Kryptonite strips him of his superhuman powers. Superman's immigrant story is, in short, a triumphant saga of a Nordic Americanization, although it carries a harsh warning about the consequences of having one's real alien identity uncovered.

Superman, like his mid-century Jewish creators, passes as white, but it’s a disguise. The alter ego is straight, white, male, Clark Kent.

An alien who passes as white.

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More than eight decades after Superman’s inception, it’s difficult to shake the sense that American Judaism has become a victim of its own success. As the pressure to assimilate into a mid-century civic nationalism – what Gerstle calls “Nordic Americanization” – gave way to a post-1960s multiculturalism and shift toward identity politics, Jews were finally free to define their identity independent of the larger culture; we could be as assimilated or as un-assimilated as we pleased. As Gerstle describes it, this post-60s shift resulted in Jews abandoning “their own hair-straightening efforts and began celebrating their curls…Orthodox Jewish men became more willing to display their religiosity in public, especially through the wearing of yarmulkes,” while “young Jewish parents began giving their newborns biblical names rather than Christian or "American" names that their parents had given them.” In this sense, America was unique for Jews, and different from anywhere in the diaspora that came before: it was no longer merely a safe-haven, but now a place that ensured our liberation. And insofar as America provided not only unprecedented safety, but the freedom for Jews to define themselves on their own terms, it also posed a challenge to Zionism; if Jews were not only safe in America, but also free to express their identity as they pleased, of what use is a Jewish state? A generation of triumphant Nordic Americanization, followed by another of multicultural pluralism, has resulted in a subset of young, though predominantly secular American Jews whose assimilation has been so thorough – and safety so guaranteed – they are unable to conceive of any need for a Jewish state, whether in the past or present; indeed, this now constitutes a core part of their identity, which they advertise proudly.

But in this era of Trumpian politics and ascendant right-wing nationalism – where the post-60s consensus has fractured, and its national story of triumphant pluralism has given way on the left to a new national story animated by guilt and pessimism – the journey of Jewish assimilation into “whiteness” is transformed into an inexorable stain of Jewish culpability. Once evidence of America’s unrivaled capacity for integration and capaciousness, Jewish assimilation is now reinterpreted as yet another data point of unsalvageable Jewish wrongdoing. The Jews who made America their home in the last century paid the price of assimilation in order to guarantee a place for themselves in this country; for a seat at the table of “whiteness.” But on the social justice left, which shuns assimilation and views whiteness with suspicion, this sacrifice itself is now a cudgel wielded against us.

And so we are back in a political relationship with our Judaism. In the year and a half since October 7th, 2023 the acceptable forms of Jewish expression have become smaller and smaller on the left; what began as calls from activists to separate Judaism, a religion, from Zionism, a political project, have now transformed into demands that expressions of Jewish religious observance come with disclaimers against Israeli war crimes. Hanukkah candles, like identifiably Jewish people themselves, must be presented alongside a watermelon; Passover seders must “decenter” Jewish history. The acceptability of Jewish identity itself is now conditional in these spaces, pending approval of a Jewish person’s or institution’s feelings regarding “Zionism.” (The shifting goal-posts, encouraged by Jews and non-Jews alike, are a concession to the challenges of fully disentangling Judaism and Israel – spiritually, historically, and filially.)

This represents something new and unprecedented in my lifetime, but it does hearken back to the days of Superman’s Jewish creators, when erasing oneself in order to conform to “Nordic Americanization” – white, patriarchal, heteronormative – was the price of entry into American life. The discourse within the contemporary activist left represents a sort of “back to the closet” moment for American Jewish life, in which those unwilling to invoke their Jewish identity in service of the Palestinian cause – and in precisely the manner prescribed by the cause – shouldn’t bother living their lives openly as Jews at all.

But asserting one’s identity on the terms dictated by the majority is not asserting one’s identity at all. Today, we understand that demands to assimilate – in the form of conversion, passing, or what sociologist Erving Goffman called “covering” – are forms of bigotry. In his book of the same name, the legal scholar Kenji Yoshino describes covering as demands to “tone down a disfavored identity to fit into the mainstream.” (Think of Black women who are asked not to wear their hair in cornrows, or gay men asked not to “flaunt” their queerness at work. Yoshino distinguishes between passing and covering: “dont’ ask don’t tell” is passing; being openly gay, but pressured to conform to straight-acting norms is covering.) Unlike conversion or passing, Yoshino observes that covering “directs itself not against the entire group, but against the subset of the group that fails to assimilate to mainstream norms. This new form of discrimination targets minority cultures rather than minority persons. Outsiders are included, but only if we behave like insiders – that is, only if we cover.”

One of the promises of the identity-based movements of the past forty years was the unshackling of these cruel and unjust demands of conformity. But within leftist spaces, that openness – to live freely and openly as Jews, without concessions to the non-Jewish majority – is becoming conditional, which is to say that it is being withdrawn, even as other identity groups maintain their claims to these categories and the authority and prerogatives that come with them. (My focus here is on the left, but similar assimilationist pressures are at work on the right.)

This presents a problem for the activist left: how does a movement that resists assimilation and champions self-definition impose its own definitions upon one particular minority culture? The solution is a perverse inversion of covering: Jews must flaunt their Judaism, but only in the manner prescribed by the movement.

The result is the humiliation and indignity visited upon Jewish life and history over the last year and a half. Jews are asked to invoke their Jewishness from a position of privilege, since, the thinking goes, they are white, and white people need to advocate for those less fortunate than them, to “pass the mic.” If a Jew speaks “as a Jew” within the Palestine solidarity movement, they must invoke their victimhood as something that happened in the past — a historical artifact, a lesson to be learned from. If a Jew invokes their status as a victim in the present, however (by say, asking to extend empathy to murdered Jews, or the hostages, or calls for solidarity against antisemitism in the diaspora), there is no room for them in the movement. Indeed, Jews who bother to speak out against rising Jew hatred in these spaces are told to stop “centering” or “victimizing” themselves. But the movement celebrates Jews who “center” and “victimize” themselves, insofar as it is in service of it’s sanctioned political agenda; indeed these assertions of Jewish identity and victimhood are essential to the movement, both because of the authority it confers upon the speaker, and in turn, as the shield it provides to the movement’s non-Jewish majority. Any other kind of “centering,” however, is understood as bad-faith propaganda. In this view, the mere existence of Jewish suffering, whether in the diaspora or Israel, is a carefully coordinated, cynical Hasbara campaign to justify Israeli atrocities. Jews, and Jews alone, must be at the vanguard of relinquishing the bonds of kinship with their own people; their victimhood is no longer their own, but rather understood as a universal moral imperative locked away in the past and applied squarely, and selectively, against their own people in the present.

This also represents something new about the current iteration of left-wing antisemitism. While a racialized understanding of Jews has always been the provenance of right-wing Jew hatred, the new left antisemitism is increasingly reliant on these crude racial categories, taking analytical frameworks intended to describe mutable, ever-changing categories like “whiteness” and “privilege” and reducing them down to fixed and essential traits. Both right and left jump at the transgressive thrill of exposure: the right says “Clark Kent isn’t white, he’s alien” while the left says, “We knew it, Superman really is white, male Clark Kent.” In this view, Jews are the whitest of the white, “Whiteness’ crystallized, undislodgeable core,” as David Schraub puts it. To add insult to injury, these Jews have the audacity to pretend otherwise, to try and fool us, to cry victim.

This is the double bind of the new antisemitism: Jews are guilty for assimilating into American whiteness, while the Jews who weren’t fortunate enough to ever have that opportunity — the refugees from the Middle East and North Africa, the desperate boats of Jews turned away from America during the Shoah, the survivors denied entry after, the Soviet emigres — are guilty of being Israeli settler-colonists.

The assimilated Jews of America are guilty and the unassimilated Jews – of Crown Heights, Tunisia, and Tel Aviv – are guilty; Jews are sinners for their inclusion in American privilege and for their exclusion from it. Jewish desperation itself is understood as a crime. No matter how you cut it, Jews are culpable. 

The movement demands the assimilated American Jews to then reclaim their Jewishness by speaking in opposition to the very Jews excluded from American power and privilege. This is the only way in which Jews may reclaim their identity as Jews within the movement. This is now the price of entry. Another word for “the price of entry” is assimilation.