Did Marvel’s ‘Captain America: Brave New World’ really make an Israeli superhero Russian?
Uproar over changes to Shira Haas’ character Sabra have prompted online outrage — but are they true?
Many are wondering if Shira Haas, who will star as Ruth Bat-Seraph in the new Captain America film, will still be Israeli. Photo by Sylvain Lefevre/Getty Images
By PJ Grisar July 16, 2024
These days everyone’s boycotting Sabra, and I don’t just mean the hummus.
Well before the current war in Israel, Marvel Studios’ Captain America: Brave New World came under fire for including the little-known Israeli superhero Sabra. Born Ruth Bat-Seraph, Sabra was raised in a state-run kibbutz, had bulletproof skin, an anti-gravity cape and worked for the Mossad. But following the debut of a teaser trailer and fresh details from the upcoming film, it seems as if her origins with Israeli intelligence may no longer exist, with some claiming Disney has caved to pressure from pro-Palestinian activists and test audiences to scrub the character of any link to the Jewish state.
Sabra courted controversy from the moment she was named as a new player in the MCU. In 2022, when Marvel announced the casting of Unorthodox’s Shira Haas as the character in the latest Captain America, many noted it was days before the 40th anniversary of the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre, in which Israel’s allies, the Christian Phalange, killed Palestinians and Lebanese Shiites at refugee camps in Beirut. The timing was bad, but Sabra predated the massacre by two years, launching in an admittedly racist 1980 issue of The Incredible Hulk, and was in no way named for the tragedy, but instead for the nickname of native Israelis, taken from the Hebrew word for the prickly pear cactus.
Even so the backlash was swift, prompting Marvel to say they were taking a “new approach” to the character. The fate of this white-and-blue-spangled superheroine was left in further speculative limbo following Israel’s war in Gaza. The production for the retitled Captain America: Brave New World (the current name followed blowback for the initial title New World Order, which some complained hinted at a popular conspiracy theory) underwent extensive reshoots and delays.
With the debut of the teaser trailer last week, we know Haas is in the film if not togged out in Sabra’s usual uniform. But an official trailer breakdown accompanying the teaser has many accusing Marvel of bowing to criticism to change her role, as it notes that Haas “joins as Ruth Bat-Seraph. A former Black Widow, Ruth is now a high-ranking U.S. government official.” Notice how there is no mention of Mossad or Israel or her codename “Sabra.”
The 326-word trailer synopsis, and little else, inspired headlines like “Marvel removes Jewish superhero Sabra’s Israeli identity for new Captain America movie” and “Marvel strips Jewish superhero Sabra of her Israeli identity.” Zionist writer Hen Mazzig posted to X that “Sabra is being forced to change her nationality to appease antisemites.”
But that may not be the full story. Columnists and Israel influencers are assuming that naming Ruth a Black Widow indicates that she, like the most famous Black Widow, Natasha Romanoff (played by Scarlett Johansson in the films), now hails from Russia, where the state-operated “Red Room” raised young women from childhood to be assassins as part of the Black Widow program.
They could be right, but then there aren’t many folks in Russia with a patronymic like “Bat-Seraph,” especially not ones that are groomed to be elite killing machines in an initiative developed by the Soviet Union, which was sorta infamous for suppressing Jewish identity.
It’s entirely possible, given what we know, that Haas’ Ruth may have made aliyah like many Russian Jews, changed her name and then came to the U.S. Or maybe she was born in Israel — as the moniker Sabra would imply — and moved to Russia at some point to train and eventually came stateside for a government job. (Reached for comment about whether Ruth remained Israeli or was now Russian, Marvel Studios did not immediately reply.)
A kink in the theory that Haas’ Ruth is now just a Russian export can be found in a July 12 Hollywood Reporter article, which, while noting Haas’ character won’t be called Sabra in the film, described her is “an Israeli (italics mine) former Black Widow who is now a high-ranking government U.S. official.”
The intimation could be that the concept of the Black Widows was never limited to Russia and Marvel, rather than introduce the Mossad, is instead expanding its films’ existing lore. If Ruth was a part of an Israeli Black Widow program, this places her in much the same position as where she started in comics canon — reared under the watchful eyes of the state as part of its intelligence entity.
If her Red Room is less Winter Palace with guns and ballet barres and more kibbutz for mutants, little will have really changed for the character’s backstory, even if she may not name drop Mossad, have the alias Sabra or resemble a flying flag (Sam Wilson’s Captain America sorta has that last angle covered anyway).
Removing the comics’ familiar signifiers changes Ruth substantially, like the “new approach” promised in 2022, but doesn’t necessarily mean she’s been “de-Zionized” or Russified as many now claim. And, for whatever it’s worth in these fraught times for Israel’s global image, those who prematurely panicked that another marquee Jewish character, Marvel’s Moon Knight, would be shorn of his chosen bona fides for his Disney+ series, were in the end proven wrong in a major way.
We won’t know until Valentine’s Day 2025, when Brave New World comes to theaters, just how Israeli Ruth remains in the final cut, but even if she is retconned to be Russian, it’s unlikely to stop a boycott from Israel’s critics.
People refused to see Wonder Woman because Gal Gadot, like Haas, is Israeli — it didn’t matter that her character came from the mythic island of Themyscira.
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