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Hi! Let's do something annoying and talk about Spider-Man! More specifically, modern Spider-Man, and the erasure of his Jewishness.
Let's start this out by talking about who created Spider-Man: Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. Now, Ditko put a lot himself into Peter, but so did Lee! A lot of comics characters at the time were based off people in the Marvel offices, or people that they knew.
A lot of the big names in Marvel at the time were Jewish: Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, the list goes on and on. You couldn't really confirm a character was Jewish at the time. Look at Ben Grimm, one of the most famous Jews in comics, who wasn't confirmed as Jewish until 2002!
There was a lot of coding done with Peter: He grew up in Forest Hills (a historically Jewish neighborhood, one of the biggest Jewish centers in NYC), he's incredibly poor, his relationship with G-d is relentlessly Jewish, and he uses Yiddish like no one's business.
Here's some panels of Peter using Yiddish:
Here's some panels of Peter's relationship with G-d (notice how he talks to G-d in a very personal way, with the occasionally mild antagonism):
This is from early Spider-Man, and this amount of internal guilt-tripping coupled with imagined Mom guilt-tripping is EXTREMELY Jewish.
You'll notice how two of the panels of him using Yiddish are from Ultimate Spider-Man, Bendis has said that every Peter Parker he writes is Jewish!
Modern Spider-Man doesn't really have Peter use Yiddish anymore, he rarely talks to G-d, if at all, and there's not a lot of acknowledgement of his poverty, and his humor's not very pointed anymore: Peter is funny, yes, but in a decidedly pointed, sarcastic, and RHYTHMIC way.
It's a trait that most Jewish readers will pick up on that Goys just won't, because they don't have that same cultural experience.
The MCU movies are probably the guiltiest of erasing Peter's Jewishness, he's not from Forest Hills because it's too "antiquated" (whatever THAT means), his poverty isn't acknowledged, and his humor isn't used in the way that it used to be.
The best modern acknowledgment (and one of the best acknowledgements in general) of Peter's Jewishness is ITSV with the wedding scene, Peter steps on glass at his wedding, a Jewish wedding tradition.
Anyways, that's my thread. Hope you've enjoyed, and Goys, PLEASE listen to Jewish people more. Thanks for reading!
