He wrote the history of Jews in comics. Now he’s making Jewish comics history
At the annual JewCE con in Manhattan, Arie Kaplan, who exposed the industry’s Jewish roots, discusses the rise of overtly Jewish characters and what an Oct. 7 comic might look like
NEW YORK — At this year’s JewCE: The Jewish Comics Experience, some attendees walked right past the plain table where Arie Kaplan sat without realizing his astronomical impact on the culture of comic books.
For over a half-century after the comics industry’s birth in the late 1930s, its Jewish roots remained buried until Kaplan’s 2002 columns in Reform Judaism Magazine exposed the industry’s secret origin. These columns led to his 2008 book, “From Krakow to Krypton: Jews and Comic Books.”
Almost two decades later, Jewish culture and stories are celebrated throughout the comics industry, in superhero tales starring Jewish characters and autobiographical stories about everyday life, the Holocaust, Hamas’s October 7, 2023, massacre and the war in Gaza. Colleges teach courses on Jewish graphic novels, and there is even a comic book convention, JewCE, held this year on November 10 at the Center for Jewish History in Manhattan, where Kaplan recently served as a special guest.
Other guests blanketed their tables with their accomplishments, but Kaplan simply sat in his booth inconspicuously, his hair slightly tousled, wearing a gray zippered sweater. His desktop was empty other than a name card, a stack of business cards, a pen, and two copies of his newest book, “The Day I Became a Potato Pancake,” a story about a kid who accidentally turns himself into a latke and likes the attention it gets him.
Today, the industry “is more diverse and inclusive than it ever has been,” Kaplan told The Times of Israel, “and that was really a long time coming, and more work needs to be done.”
At the con, Kaplan is in esteemed company. Sitting at the table behind him is Josh Neufeld, a New York Times bestseller, and Dean Haspiel, who won an Emmy Award for his work on the HBO series “Bored to Death.” At the table next to Kaplan’s is FairSquare Graphics, which released an anthology telling the tales of a Jewish-Laotian refugee, an Ethiopian-Israeli woman and a trans Jew.
Kaplan is now a part of Jewish comic history, having written for Mad Magazine, Star Wars comics, Simpsons comics, Archie comics, and Scholastic, where he authors all-ages stories starring Batman, the Avengers, and Spider-Man.
The room throbs with geeks of all ages and sects, and many attendees are in the comic business themselves, getting inspired by each other’s work. Jeff Newelt, the editor of the Pekar Project and former comics editor at Heeb Magazine, stopped by Kaplan’s table after purchasing a copy of his book from a nearby vendor.
“I should get you to sign my latke,” Newelt said, sliding Kaplan the book before a prolonged “Jewish goodbye” — that is, bidding farewell and then sticking around to schmooze.
Many of the early creators, such as Will Eisner, Stan Lee and Bill Finger, knew each other, and many attended the same two high schools: DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx or the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan. Yearning to escape poverty, they dreamed of launching into established fields like newspapers and advertising but were turned away due to their Jewish backgrounds. Meanwhile, the nascent comics industry, run predominantly by Jewish immigrants, happily purchased their work (often without giving proper credit).
“Comics from that era look a little same-y,” Kaplan said. “Everyone’s sort of marinating in each other’s experiences.”
The early creators didn’t write openly Jewish characters “because no one’s going to publish that,” Kaplan said, but at an “unconscious level,” they processed the world surrounding them through their art.
Superman serves as a sci-fi quasi-Moses, cast off from his family into a foreign society in a spaceship rather than a basket. DC Comics dictator Darkseid, whose name is intentionally spelled in Germanic style, ruled a dystopian planet similar to “a concentration camp,” Kaplan said, with “billowing plumes of smoke everywhere. People are being literally worked to death.” And nearly a year before the United States entered World War II, Captain America smashed Hitler in the face on the cover of “Captain America Comics #1.”
Similarly, today’s superheroes grapple with current events through metaphor. There were no Hamas massacres in the Marvel universe. Instead, the X-Men fought to protect the mutant homeland Krakoa from genocidal bigots known as Orchis, while the world blames the mutants for their own suffering.
“Let’s say Marvel did publish an October 7 comic,” Kaplan said, referring to the October 7, 2023, massacre that saw 1,200 people in southern Israel brutally slaughtered by Hamas-led terrorists and 251 kidnapped to the Gaza Strip.
“Some people love it, and some people think it’s offensive, because how dare you. And some people say, ‘Well, you’re Americans, this happened in Israel, we’d rather that Israeli cartoonists tackle the subject,’” he said.
Diversity ripple effect
By the time Kaplan’s book came out in 2008, “American culture became more welcoming of diversity,” Kaplan said, adding that when a culture prioritizes diversity “it has this ripple effect” that helps everyone.
Across television and movies, there were more Black, Latinx, Asian, Muslim, and LGBTQIA+ characters, and, suddenly, on shows like “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “House MD,” and “Glee,” there were outwardly Jewish characters.
This spread to comics, too. The 2000 film “X-Men” opens with a scene of Magneto as a child, bellowing as his family is torn from him in a concentration camp. Two years later, the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm, aka The Thing, a craggy character who was born in the Lower East Side, was revealed as Jewish to pay respect to his co-creator, Jack Kirby (born Jacob Kurtzberg).
“There was the perfect storm culturally” for people to recognize the Jewish contributions to the art form, Kaplan said, especially after Michael Chabon’s book “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay” fictionalized the story of the medium’s birth using characters of Jewish ancestry; it won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 2001.
Fifteen years after Kaplan’s book was released, it’s still in print, and numerous attendees stopped at Kaplan’s JewCE table hoping to secure a copy. (He didn’t bring any, mentioning many times during the interview, often mid-yawn, that he isn’t a morning person and woke up way earlier than he’d have liked to in order to get to the convention.)
One former librarian described discovering Kaplan’s book as being “like jumping into a well of which I had no prior knowledge.” After reading it, he used comics to inspire reluctant readers.
“When you write anything, the big fear is no one’s ever going to notice this,” Kaplan said. “The fact that it did come out and it made a dent of any kind is extremely gratifying.”
He’s excited to continue to see representation flourish in the comics world. No longer are there only a handful of token Jews. Today, little details are thrown into characters’ stories winking at their heritage, such as when an alternate version of Spider-Man stomped on a glass at his wedding in “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” or when Kate Bishop visits her aunt’s apartment on an episode of “Hawkeye” and there is a menorah on a shelf.
Marvel Studios even cast Shira Haas of “Unorthodox” as the Israeli superhero Sabra in the movie “Captain America: Brave New World,” set to be released in the United States on February 14, 2025, though there has been debate about whether they erased her heritage.
“Don’t freak out about it,” Kaplan said, recommending people hold their tongues until it’s released. “You don’t know if she’s Israeli or not.” Casting her is “a brave move,” he said, one that would upset people no matter how they portray her.
It’s good not everyone in comics is from the same high school anymore, he said. “It needed to happen, frankly, a long time ago.”
He hopes to see the portrayals of minorities continue to broaden. “There definitely needs to be more Jews of color in comics,” Kaplan said, recognizing that the majority of characters are filtered through an Ashkenazi lens. “Obviously, part of that is having more people of color and Jews of color specifically write comics.”
Kaplan is grateful to be a member of the comic-creator tribe.
“I don’t take it for granted at all,” he said. “Yes, I’m good at this, and I’ve worked really hard at my craft, but along the way, there were a lot of people helping me out and giving me a shot.”
