Willow Zimmerman is a 16-year-old activist. When she isn’t in school or holding up a picket sign, she can be found batch-baking rugelach or splitting a Reuben with a stray Great Dane she named Lebowitz (after Fran). But Willow has a secret set of extracurriculars. She helps run an illegal poker game for one of…
In the first episode of “Loki,” the titular God of Mischief learns what Kafka proposed long ago: the world is controlled not by deities and strongmen, but by the soft totalitarianism of paper pushers. Trapped in the municipal-looking headquarters of the TVA (Time Variance Authority — any resemblance to DMV seems thuddingly intentional), Loki encounters…
A lot of people know that Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were Jewish. But according to Roy Schwartz – author of “Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero” – the question of Superman’s Jewishness hasn’t been discussed deeply enough. “Many things that are relevant and interesting have been…
(JTA) — This article originally appeared on Alma. I was Jewish to everyone but the Jews. That’s what it felt like to grow up the son of a Cuban mother and Jewish father. I looked exactly like my dad, with his curly hair and deep-set eyes, and I had his last name, Steinberg, stitched on…
For the Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman, comics — for all their pulpy origins — are a political art form. Spiegelman, author of the serialized graphic novel “Maus,” is something of an elder statesman of the form. He’s also a scholar of its history. So when the Folio Society, a London publisher of glossy illustrated…
Editor’s Note: Legendary comic book creator Stan Lee, who passed away this week, took a strong interest in the Holocaust in recent years. His final published essay appeared as the introduction to the recent book “We Spoke Out: Comic Books and the Holocaust,” by Neal Adams, Rafael Medoff, and Craig Yoe (IDW/Yoe Books, 2018). “We…
Dark times call for a great hero, and Gotham might just get one. We need her but have done nothing to deserve her: a Jewish, female, queer, justice-loving, semi-nocturnal vigilante with strong ties to bats. The CW has announced that it is working on a “Batwoman” TV show for its 2019 season, created by the…
I don’t know much about superhero movies, but I do know that if the brilliant director Ava DuVernay is going to direct a DC movie based on comics by Jack Kirby, the Jewish artist who created Captain America, that means we’re all going to see a superhero movie. Fresh off directing the major undertaking “A…
100% of profits support our journalism
