Roy Schwartz is a pop culture historian and critic. He is a board member of the American Jewish Historical Society, the author of Is Superman Circumcised? The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero, and co-producer of the documentary JewCE: The Jewish Comics Experience. Follow him on royschwartz.com and Twitter, Instagram and Facebook @RealRoySchwartz.
Roy Schwartz
By Roy Schwartz
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Culture Every Jewish thing you need to know about Batman (and there’s a lot of it)
“The Batman,” starring Robert Pattinson, is the 11th live-action film for the Caped Crusader. He’ll also return later this year in “The Flash,” where both Michael Keaton and Ben Affleck reprise their roles as alternate dimension versions of the character. Batman is the property of DC Comics and parent company Warner Bros. He’s one of…
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Culture In an overlooked comic from the early 1970s, the most Jewish superhero story ever told
“Eternals,” a movie based on a Marvel comic about immortal agents of giant space gods, arrived on Disney+ Jan. 12. The “Absolute Fourth World by Jack Kirby Vol. 2” comes out Jan. 18. It’s an omnibus collection of DC Comics’ sprawling saga about warring alien gods. Though these comics are by rival companies, they’re actually…
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Culture How Adolf Eichmann murdered Superman — and was sentenced to death for his crimes
Sixty years ago, on Dec. 15, 1961, Nazi war criminal Adolf Eichmann was sentenced to death, following one of the most publicized trials in history. Improbably, it became the basis of a Superman comic book. A chief architect of the Holocaust, Eichmann oversaw the Jews’ deportation to the extermination camps. After the war, he fled…
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Culture Why Green Lantern is one of the most Jewish superheroes of all
Wait, Green Lantern is Jewish too? The answer, surprisingly, is yes. Sort of. That most superheroes were created by Jews is nothing new. During the Depression, young Jewish New Yorkers, mostly first-generation Americans, couldn’t get work in creative industries like advertising and book publishing that were closed off to them. So they invented their own…
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Culture ‘The Eternals’ is Marvel’s most Jewish story — that may be the most interesting thing about it
The heroes of “Eternals,” Marvel Studio’s latest movie, are a band of immortals (genetically altered humans in the comics, something else in the film) sworn to protect humanity against the mutant Deviants. They answer to the Celestials, colossal space gods that create and tamper with life throughout the cosmos. It’s based on a comic created…
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