Suermensch

by Alan E. Oirich
The Man of Steel has always been Jewish, and in his newest film, Superman returns to his roots

uWay back in the 1930s, teen science fiction buffs Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster became known for creating a legend.
You may have heard this story:
It took place in their 25th century. Faced with a world-shaking catastrophe, a parent placed a baby boy in a small craft, hoping he'll be propelled to somewhere safe. The boy was found and adopted and grew up incognito, eventually revealed in adulthood as a world-saving hero. But he still had his alien heritage to explore.
2448 was the Jewish year. The small craft was a basket, and the baby was Moses who was found, adopted and grew up incognito, eventually revealed in adulthood as a saving hero. His alien heritage: the Jewish upbringing that was denied to him.
While Siegel and Shuster were -- by any measure -- original thinkers, their origin of the last son of Krypton was a science fiction retelling of the rescue of Moses from Pharaoh's infanticide.
Like Moses' mother Yocheved before him, Superman's father, Jor-El, saved his baby son from doom by placing him in a small conveyance (a mini-spaceship) and sending him off to be adopted, to be raised with an assumed identity and become a hero known the world over.
Superman Returns
In the blockbuster Superman Returns, he really returns. The Man of Tomorrow has a burning need to know about his 'yesterday.' He needs to go back to the place his parents were born to explore who he really is. He needs to know about the destruction that was visited upon his homeland and ancestors.
The Man of Tomorrow has a burning need to know about his 'yesterday.'
His search for self -- like a young Jew who goes off to learn about Israel and his Jewish identity -- is a necessary journey that becomes transformative in its affirmation of who he truly is. While Superman Returns tells us little about what he actually saw in the five years he was away (the film begins with his return), it is made clear that it was something of such deep significance to him that he felt the need to leave his widowed mother, his newspaper job as Clark Kent, his friends, his entire life, including Lois Lane.
While he's gone, the machinations of Lex Luthor have manifested themselves in an ironic evil. Superman's absence enables Luthor's escape from multiple life sentences in prison and allows the criminal to invade Superman's private haven to hijack stolen Kryptonian technology for his own destructive purposes.
Superman knows better than anyone about the urgency of being vigilant before evil; but his personal discovery -- knowing who he is and where he comes from -- is what enables him to face evil head on and defeat it.
Jewish Connections
Superman is Kal-El of the family that had been known on Krypton as "The House of El," in Hebrew Beit El, which means "The House of God." Over the nearly seven decades since Superman first appeared, there have been numerous Jewish connections from Jewish creators Siegel and Shuster to Jewish director of Superman Returns, Bryan Singer.
The story has been told that 16-year-olds Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster didn't work on their comic strip on Thursday nights. They had nothing to draw on. Mama Shuster needed her challah board.
In addition to the Moses connection, Superman also had a firm basis in the story of Samson. Despite his present panoply of abilities, his original powers were much more focused on heroism through tremendous strength alone. Long before there was x-ray vision, super-breath, or even flying, the best Superman could do when Superman was first created was jump an eighth of a mile or, as they used to put it, "leap over tall buildings in a single bound." As the stories grew over the years, so did Superman's powers, but his first encounters with criminals -- and with Nazis -- in the 30s and 40s had him behaving more like Samson than the Superman we know today. Mostly land bound, he lifted cars and tanks and shook out the bad guys. Bullets couldn't hurt him, but exploding mortar shells could.
"It wasn't Krypton Superman came from, but the planet Minsk."
In the meantime, Superman was becoming a metaphor for the Jewish American dream. He was from a far away, strange place, but managed to maximize who he was and who he had become into a synthesis good for himself and for his adopted homeland. Famous cartoonist Jules Feiffer has said: "It wasn't Krypton Superman came from, but the planet Minsk." And true enough, Clark Kent was his less alien, more assimilated self.