It’s widely known that Jews have made significant contributions to global art, culture, science and commerce over centuries.
Less well understood is that American Jews, particularly in New York and Cleveland, played a big role in the invention of comic books and superheroes, whose stories often include submerged references to Jewish life, faith and struggles.
“Icons in Ink, The Jewish Comics Experience,” on view at the Maltz Museum in Beachwood through Aug. 23, is a revelation and a celebration, albeit with some limitations and questionable aspects.
The show’s core material is conveyed through colorful, large-scale graphic layouts resembling magazine pages that reach from the height of one’s knee to above one’s head. The layouts are filled with text and reproductions of pages from comic books. It’s an eye-grabbing approach that produces visual overload at times. Also, transitions from one section of the show to another occasionally lack continuity and flow.
But when it comes to the core goal of highlighting Jewish contributions to comic book history, the show delivers fascinating and sometimes surprising insights.
Organized by Roy Schwartz, a New York-based pop culture historian, the exhibition opened in 2023 at the Center for Jewish History in New York and is now in the middle of a five-year national tour.
It brims with Schwartz’s zeal to highlight the Jewish roots of what he described in an interview as “a unique American art form,’’ and “the bastard child of literature and art.’’ His expertise includes having written the 2021 book, “Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World's Greatest Hero.’’
For Cleveland, Schwartz and the Maltz expanded the show to highlight the city’s role in the evolution of comic books, in collaboration with Samantha Baskind, the Cleveland State University professor of art history known for her extensive scholarship on Jewish contributions to the visual arts.
Hidden meanings of Superman
Naturally, Superman, the brainchild of Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two Jewish high school students in Cleveland’s Glenville neighborhood who invented the “Man of Steel’’ in the 1930s, is a major focus.
Superman’s birth on the doomed planet Krypton and his parents’ effort to save him by launching him to Earth is a familiar tale. It may not be widely appreciated, however, that the story echoes that of the finding of Moses, and that Superman’s name at birth, Kal-El, is a Hebrew phrase often interpreted as “voice of God’’ or “vessel of God.”
Superman’s powers evoke the myth of the Golem, a massive, Samson-like humanoid purportedly molded in clay by a 16th-century rabbi Prague to defend Jews from pogroms.
As the show points out, Jewish fans have certainly understood such signals.
American cartoonist and writer Jules Feiffer (1929-2025) dubbed Superman “the ultimate assimilationist fantasy’’ because he concealed his true identity behind a façade of gentile normality as a newspaper reporter. In a word, Superman found a way to pass.
“The mild manners and glasses that signified a class of nerdy Clark Kents was, in no way, our real truth,’’ Feiffer said, according to a wall text in the show. “Underneath the schmucky facade there lived Men of Steel! Jerry Siegel’s accomplishment was to chronicle the smart Jewish boy’s American dream.”
A Cleveland-centric version
The extensive Superman material in the show includes a life-size maquette by Cleveland sculptor David Deming for the new Superman monument outside the Huntington Convention Center Downtown. A terrific video display focuses on five superbly restored 1940s Superman animated cartoons produced by the Fleisher Studios, founded by Jewish brothers Max and Dave Fleischer.
Jerry Siegel’s writing desk, a small, modest and well-worn piece of Art Deco-style furniture, is on loan from the Cleveland Public Library. A large, rarely exhibited publicity painting of Superman made by advertising artist Hugh J. Ward in 1940 is on loan from Lehman College in New York City. It depicts the superhero in a wide stance with arms akimbo and his red cape blowing in the wind.
Also featured in the Cleveland section of the show are printed works and original drawings from Harvey Pekar’s ironic and self-deprecating “American Splendor” series, Peter Kuper’s hilarious “Spy vs. Spy” episodes in Mad Magazine and Terri Libenson’s Jewish-centered narratives in series, including “The Pajama Diaries.”
Cleveland Heights native Brian Michael Bendis is represented by outstanding works including a spectacular 2006 ink drawing for an Avengers episode depicting an explosion on a crowded street in what could be Downtown Cleveland.
Acknowledging roots
Conspiracists and paranoiacs might see the show as piling on more evidence for the hate-filled fantasy that Jews supposedly control everything from Wall Street to Hollywood.
Certainly, the show underscores that in America, with its emphasis on freedom and opportunity, the impact of Jewish immigrants and their descendants has been felt across many spheres, including that of comic books.
But the exhibition’s real message is that acknowledging one’s roots while trying to assimilate is an experience anyone could appreciate in a nation of immigrants.
As a commercial endeavor, comic strips represented opportunities for innovation and advancement starting in early 20th Century New York at a time when elite professions and social institutions sometimes barred Jews.
For a time, Jewish comic-strip creators maintained an inward focus in their communities. The show includes examples of Yiddish strips popular in the 1910s in publications such as “Forverts,” known in English as “The Forward,” still one of the most influential Jewish news and cultural publications in the U.S.
A genre is born
It wasn’t until 1933, according to the show, that M.C. Gaines, an unemployed Jewish New Yorker born as Maxwell Ginzberg, came up with the idea of licensing previously published comic strips from newspaper syndicates and republishing them in the form of a comic book.
Full-fledged comic books soon followed. Jewish creators who joined the industry infused their work with inter-generational awareness of centuries of trauma along with fears aroused by the rise of fascism in the 1930s and the ongoing persistence of anti-Semitism.
Spider-Man, for example, was a co-creation of Steve Ditko and Stan Lee (1922-2018), born as Stanley Martin Lieber. Lee envisioned the character as the secret identity of an orphaned teenager named Peter Benjamin Parker who was raised by his aunt and uncle in Queens, New York, and who gained mysterious powers after having been bitten by a spider.
Parker’s backstory and those of other superheroes “echoed the losses that many Jews experienced in fleeing the ‘old country’ to the United States and later learning about the murder of the relatives who stayed behind,’’ the show says in a wall text. “Seen in this light, the entire superhero genre can be seen reflecting the turmoil of modern Jewish history.’’
Lack of flow and a missed opportunity
Aficionados will appreciate the way the show explores its subject with vintage editions of comic books and exquisitely drawn and inked original comic book pages.
A first edition copy of Gaines’ “Famous Funnies,’’ with “100 Comics and Games-Puzzles-Magic’’ is on display. So are other collector’s items including “Action Comics #1,’’ the original Superman edition published by National Comics, later DC Comics, and an original No. 1 edition of “The Amazing Spider-Man,’’ published by Marvel in March 1963.
Yet for all its strengths, the show often feels breathless and hyperactive.
It jumps, for example, from initial displays on superheroes to comic strips from 20th century Sephardic diaspora communities across the Middle East, where Jews settled after having been expelled from Spain in 1492.
Such juxtapositions demonstrate the diversity of comic books as a form of Jewish cultural expression across the global diaspora. But the show’s sub-sections, credited to the diverse curators who worked with Schwartz, sometimes feel like a series of discrete mini exhibitions that fail to connect smoothly.
Updates needed
It’s also striking, given its attention to the social and political context of comic books in prior decades that “Icons in Ink’’ doesn't bring its story fully into the present.
The show’s generally triumphal tone feels oddly off-key amid the recent uptick in anti-Semitism on the left and right, and the post Oct. 7 backlash against Israel.
Debate over Israel’s military conduct in Iran, Gaza and Lebanon, or settler violence against Palestinians in the West Bank, has inspired authors and pundits of all political persuasions.
“Icons in Ink’’ hasn’t been updated to reflect the turmoil. It could be said that because the show was organized in 2023, there hasn’t been enough time for a significant response to current events from Jewish creators of comic books or graphic novels to warrant attention.
But it seems to be a missed opportunity that the show doesn't mention the conflicted feelings about Israel that Pekar explored in “Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me,’’ published in 2012 as one of his last books.
There’s also no mention of the three-page spread criticizing Israel’s conduct in Gaza published in The New York Review of Books in February 2025 by Joe Sacco and Art Spiegelman, the Pulitzer Prize-winning creator of the Holocaust-related graphic novel “Maus,’’ whose work is otherwise lauded in the show at Maltz.
Such publications and others like them represent an intriguing opportunity to revise “Icons in Ink’’ as it continues to travel. The exhibition argues successfully that the Jewish experience in comics needs to be understood more deeply.
Given that goal, some freshening could make the show even more relevant and up-to-the-minute. After all, as the exhibition demonstrates, Jewish comic book creators and graphic novelists have been pulling no punches for decades in messages both overt and subtly coded.
