The Jewish Thing
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The Jewish Thing
August 2, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: If wrestling is indeed a passing obsession for the nation's youth, let's move on to a more durable one -- comic book superheroes. Remember The Thing? The crimefighter made of stone from the Fantastic Four? Well-- he's Jewish! Marble Comics revealed that detail this summer in Volume 56, titled Remembrances of Things Past -- apologies to Proust. The Thing was born Benjamin Jacob Grimm, and before the encounter with cosmic rays that transformed him into an ugly but lovably heroic piece of rock, he was working his way through life in New York City's Lower East Side. The Thing has been a part of the Marvel Comics universe since 1961, so why are we just finding out he's Jewish? Fantastic Four editor Tom Brevoort joins me to answer that question. Welcome to the show.
TOM BREVOORT: Thank you very much. It's very nice to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So-- The Thing is Jewish?
TOM BREVOORT: Yes, The Thing is Jewish.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How do you know?
TOM BREVOORT: The, The Thing is Jewish, and one of the reasons we know this and one of the reasons we believe this -- it's always sort of been a tenet of the Marvel characters that they're more fully-formed, more fully realized, more real, more true to life than other comic book superheroes. That's always been the case, going back to the birth of the Marvel universe in 1961. That --what Stan Lee [sp?] and Jack Kirby did then was create characters that had feet of clay and dealt with ordinary human problems. They had to deal with paying the rent and soap opera-esqe romantic difficulties in addition to catching the bad guys. And Stan Lee and Jack Kirby drew a lot from their own backgrounds. In the case of, of Jack who was born Jacob Kirtzberg [sp?], in his home, over his hearth, he had done just for himself and his family a drawing of The Thing in a full rabbinical uniform with yarmulke and, and so forth. The Thing draws a lot of the particulars of his background from, from Kirby's. So it seemed like a fairly natural extension --particularly having become aware of this piece that Kirby had done -- to believe okay, The Thing is Jewish and, and at least one of his two co-creators had that in the back of his mind.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well there is one Jewish archetype to which The Thing seems to conform. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
TOM BREVOORT: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And that is of the Golem -- the man made of earth to protect the Jewish people in the ghetto.
TOM BREVOORT:It's definitely a parallel, and it's something that we even pointed out in the course of that issue of Fantastic Four. Whether or not there was anything specific there that Stan and Jack were thinking -- you know, only Stan or Jack who himself has passed away could answer that for certain. But there's definitely an interesting parallel there, and it only kind of helps to support the argument.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But why The Thing? Why not Spider-Man? Or, as Jon Stewart likes to call him, Spider-Man [LIKE OMBUDSMAN].
TOM BREVOORT:[LAUGHS]! Well there's, there's no specific evidence either way to indicate whether Peter Parker is Jewish or not. We've never really seen anything that indicates a particular religious bent in his case.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But it was that drawing of Jack Kirby that inspired you to ascribe that religious identity to The Thing.
TOM BREVOORT:It was specifically that. Other creators over the course of years have somewhat intimated that, that The Thing's full given name is Benjamin Jacob Grimm which has a, a Jewish flavor to it. The way his, his home life in his pre-Thing days had been depicted had sort of the, the flavor of a typical Jewish immigrant family without ever actually coming out and saying so. And so the elements were all there, and it may have been that in times where what was allowable in a comic magazine, what was considered acceptable subject matter to be dealt with wasn't as permissive as it is today. Various creators wanted to ascribe these tendencies to the character, and just could go only so far in depicting this world or depicting this background.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But I still don't understand why. Do you think that it'll bump up sales? I mean do you think that saying the Shamah [sp?] [LAUGHTER] in one of the later panels will attract a, a new group of readers?
TOM BREVOORT:It wasn't intended at all as, as a sales ploy. If it had been, we would have [LAUGHS], we would have talked about it a lot more before the book came out rather than afterwards. All of the stories that we tell in the course of Marvel Comics combined fantasy with reality, so the, the goal specifically wasn't let's do a story where The Thing is Jewish. It was let's do a story about this character and where he comes from and the events and the circumstances that made him what he is -- not just as the big rocky powerhouse, The Thing --but what made him Ben Grimm, the man before he became The Thing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you plan to endow any other Marvel superheroes with spiritual identities like make Storm Amish?
TOM BREVOORT:[LAUGHS]! I don't think Storm will becoming [sic] Amish any time soon, but Marvel characters come from all walks, all cultural backgrounds, all countries -- and so it's, it's not like this is something that, that's new that we're doing for the first time. It's I guess a little more significant in that this is a character that's been around for 40 years and an element to his background that really hasn't been discussed or addressed before. I don't know that this will be a specific trend any more than just trying to tell stories that, that somehow touch on the human condition and that people can relate to beyond just you know punching and hitting and chasing the bad guy.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:As you explained, Jack Kirby gave you some indication through that drawing before he died that probably The Thing was Jewish, and of course he drew The Thing.
TOM BREVOORT: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well Stanley wrote The Thing. Did you ever talk to him? What do you think he thinks about all this?
TOM BREVOORT: I'm-- we never spoke to Stan about this largely because, as I say, doing the story we just-- we didn't think it was as big a deal as it seems to be. In the case of Stan and what he was thinking about this way back when and what he thinks of it now, I, I can't speak for Stan. I guess you'd have to speak to him directly.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Tom Brevoort is an editor at Marvel Comics. Fantastic Four is just one of his charges. Thank you so much.
TOM BREVOORT: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:Joining us now is Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man, The Silver Surfer, the Fantastic Four including The Thing and many, many other characters. Stan, welcome to OTM.
STAN LEE: Well it's good to be here.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, first off -- The Thing. He doesn't look Jewish.
STAN LEE: [LAUGHS] You know I didn't-- intend for him to be [LAUGHS] Jewish. I wrote the Fantastic Four for the first hundred issues or so, and then years ago I gave it up and there have been many, many writers who did it aft--after I had left the series. So recently one of them decided to make Ben Grimm Jewish, which is fine. The reason I didn't -- I never made any of the characters of any specific ethnicity or religion because I wanted them to be-- enjoyed by people all around the world of varying faiths and so forth, and-- I tried to keep everything kind of neutral. But I guess the guys thought it might be fun to make him Jewish, and that's, that's fine with me.
BOB GARFIELD:Is it possible that somewhere deep in the back of your mind, in the hidden recesses of your consciousness you knew that Ben Grimm was Jewish all along? That he, The Thing, this rock being is a Golem? Or is he just a Thing.
STAN LEE: No, no I-- I wanted to write four superheroes -- one was a girl, one was a handsome guy, one was a teenager, and I wanted the fourth one to be something different, and it occurred to me I would try to make him sort of a tragic figure. I would turn this guy into somebody ugly. I never thought for a minute what their religions [LAUGHS] were.
BOB GARFIELD:Now there have been some explicitly Jewish characters in, in the history of comics. Izzy Cohen [sp?] was a character in Sergeant Fury's Commandoes.
STAN LEE: Right.
BOB GARFIELD: X-Force [sp?] had a character named Bermuda Schwartz [sp?].
STAN LEE: Mm-hm.
BOB GARFIELD: And the two - two of my favorites -- actually I just ran across them-- hadn't hitherto known that there was a Greenberg [sp?] the Vampire and a-- and Shapiro-Man [sp?] [LAUGHS]. Am I missing any big ones?
STAN LEE: Well Greenberg the Vampire is very funny. I had never heard of Bermuda Schwartz, but I think that's hysterical. Izzy Cohen was a character I created for Sergeant Fury and his howling commandoes which was this World War II series about a platoon headed by Sergeant Fury. I wanted him to have a multi-ethnic platoon, so he had Izzy Cohen; he had a black man named Gabriel Jones; he had a gay man named Percival Pinkerton. He had an Italian, Dino Minelli, and so forth. I mean it wasn't an effort to play up a Jew; it was just an effort to play up all the various racial types.
BOB GARFIELD:Jewish culture is nonetheless a rich vein in the comics world. You and artist Jack Kirby, Jerry Segal [sp?] and Joe Schuster [sp?] of Superman fame; Julius Schwartz [sp?]-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
STAN LEE: Bob Kane [sp?], Batman.
BOB GARFIELD: Bob Kane. How did this come to pass, and how much has Jewishness do you think informed the medium?
STAN LEE: You know I have no idea. I, I never really thought of it, and it seems to me I'm [LAUGHS], I'm sure there are plenty of people who aren't Jewish in the field, but it is strange when, when you mention it that the--perhaps the best-known of all the characters -Spider-Man, Superman and Batman - were done by Jewish writers. I, I guess that is an odd thought.
BOB GARFIELD:Superman seems to be loosely based on the story of Moses. The boy on the Planet Krypton's the, the infant's name was Kal-El [sp?] which I believe means something like the vessel of, of God and Superman was sent by his parents to be saved from extermination as Moses was down the Nile and only to be a force of good versus evil in his new life. I'm sure you've noticed the parallel. Do you think readers notice these parallels? [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
STAN LEE: You know, I haven't. This is the first I've heard of it. [LAUGHTER] Now that you mention it, it does sound like there's a parallel, but no, no -- it never, never occurred to me until this very moment.
BOB GARFIELD:Back on the Marvel Comics side, X-Men are said to be somehow archetypes of the American Jewish experience -- admired for their gifts but viewed with suspicion by outsiders and maybe even fear. Does that scan with you?
STAN LEE: Well when I, when I started the X-Men, I did after a while decide that it made a good metaphor for, for bigotry and the, the ills of, of hating people who are different than you. Again, I personally did not think of it in terms of Jewishness. It just seemed like a good theme to, to use for the, for the X-Men.
BOB GARFIELD:Well, how about bigotry -- and I'm not trying to be a smart aleck here, but I notice that both you and Jack Kirby de-Judified your pen names. You were Stan Lieber [sp?]-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
STAN LEE: I can't speak for Jack. I have no way of knowing why he did it. I did not attempt to de-Jewify it. My name was Stanley Martin Lieber which I think is a beautiful name. I'm very sorry I changed it. The reason I changed it was when I went in to the comic business, nobody had any respect for comics in those days. I, I was embarrassed to be doing comics, and [LAUGHS] I didn't want to use my real name for the comics! And I never expected to stay in the field more than a short time, to get some experience and then get out in the real world. What happened was I remained in comics -- I built my whole career in comics -- and after a while life was too confusing -- more people knew me as Stan Lee -- which was the name I used to write the comics -- than they did as Stanley Lieber.
BOB GARFIELD: Well listen, it's really been a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us.
STAN LEE: Hey, it was a pleasure for me too. I hope I didn't spoil your whole show.
BOB GARFIELD: Not at all.
STAN LEE: Okay. Take care. Bye.
BOB GARFIELD: Stan Lee is the creator of Ben Grimm, The Thing, and chairman emeritus of Marvel Comics.
August 2, 2002
BROOKE GLADSTONE: If wrestling is indeed a passing obsession for the nation's youth, let's move on to a more durable one -- comic book superheroes. Remember The Thing? The crimefighter made of stone from the Fantastic Four? Well-- he's Jewish! Marble Comics revealed that detail this summer in Volume 56, titled Remembrances of Things Past -- apologies to Proust. The Thing was born Benjamin Jacob Grimm, and before the encounter with cosmic rays that transformed him into an ugly but lovably heroic piece of rock, he was working his way through life in New York City's Lower East Side. The Thing has been a part of the Marvel Comics universe since 1961, so why are we just finding out he's Jewish? Fantastic Four editor Tom Brevoort joins me to answer that question. Welcome to the show.
TOM BREVOORT: Thank you very much. It's very nice to be here.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: So-- The Thing is Jewish?
TOM BREVOORT: Yes, The Thing is Jewish.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: How do you know?
TOM BREVOORT: The, The Thing is Jewish, and one of the reasons we know this and one of the reasons we believe this -- it's always sort of been a tenet of the Marvel characters that they're more fully-formed, more fully realized, more real, more true to life than other comic book superheroes. That's always been the case, going back to the birth of the Marvel universe in 1961. That --what Stan Lee [sp?] and Jack Kirby did then was create characters that had feet of clay and dealt with ordinary human problems. They had to deal with paying the rent and soap opera-esqe romantic difficulties in addition to catching the bad guys. And Stan Lee and Jack Kirby drew a lot from their own backgrounds. In the case of, of Jack who was born Jacob Kirtzberg [sp?], in his home, over his hearth, he had done just for himself and his family a drawing of The Thing in a full rabbinical uniform with yarmulke and, and so forth. The Thing draws a lot of the particulars of his background from, from Kirby's. So it seemed like a fairly natural extension --particularly having become aware of this piece that Kirby had done -- to believe okay, The Thing is Jewish and, and at least one of his two co-creators had that in the back of his mind.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well there is one Jewish archetype to which The Thing seems to conform. [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
TOM BREVOORT: Yes.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: And that is of the Golem -- the man made of earth to protect the Jewish people in the ghetto.
TOM BREVOORT:It's definitely a parallel, and it's something that we even pointed out in the course of that issue of Fantastic Four. Whether or not there was anything specific there that Stan and Jack were thinking -- you know, only Stan or Jack who himself has passed away could answer that for certain. But there's definitely an interesting parallel there, and it only kind of helps to support the argument.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But why The Thing? Why not Spider-Man? Or, as Jon Stewart likes to call him, Spider-Man [LIKE OMBUDSMAN].
TOM BREVOORT:[LAUGHS]! Well there's, there's no specific evidence either way to indicate whether Peter Parker is Jewish or not. We've never really seen anything that indicates a particular religious bent in his case.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But it was that drawing of Jack Kirby that inspired you to ascribe that religious identity to The Thing.
TOM BREVOORT:It was specifically that. Other creators over the course of years have somewhat intimated that, that The Thing's full given name is Benjamin Jacob Grimm which has a, a Jewish flavor to it. The way his, his home life in his pre-Thing days had been depicted had sort of the, the flavor of a typical Jewish immigrant family without ever actually coming out and saying so. And so the elements were all there, and it may have been that in times where what was allowable in a comic magazine, what was considered acceptable subject matter to be dealt with wasn't as permissive as it is today. Various creators wanted to ascribe these tendencies to the character, and just could go only so far in depicting this world or depicting this background.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: But I still don't understand why. Do you think that it'll bump up sales? I mean do you think that saying the Shamah [sp?] [LAUGHTER] in one of the later panels will attract a, a new group of readers?
TOM BREVOORT:It wasn't intended at all as, as a sales ploy. If it had been, we would have [LAUGHS], we would have talked about it a lot more before the book came out rather than afterwards. All of the stories that we tell in the course of Marvel Comics combined fantasy with reality, so the, the goal specifically wasn't let's do a story where The Thing is Jewish. It was let's do a story about this character and where he comes from and the events and the circumstances that made him what he is -- not just as the big rocky powerhouse, The Thing --but what made him Ben Grimm, the man before he became The Thing.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Do you plan to endow any other Marvel superheroes with spiritual identities like make Storm Amish?
TOM BREVOORT:[LAUGHS]! I don't think Storm will becoming [sic] Amish any time soon, but Marvel characters come from all walks, all cultural backgrounds, all countries -- and so it's, it's not like this is something that, that's new that we're doing for the first time. It's I guess a little more significant in that this is a character that's been around for 40 years and an element to his background that really hasn't been discussed or addressed before. I don't know that this will be a specific trend any more than just trying to tell stories that, that somehow touch on the human condition and that people can relate to beyond just you know punching and hitting and chasing the bad guy.
BROOKE GLADSTONE:As you explained, Jack Kirby gave you some indication through that drawing before he died that probably The Thing was Jewish, and of course he drew The Thing.
TOM BREVOORT: Right.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Well Stanley wrote The Thing. Did you ever talk to him? What do you think he thinks about all this?
TOM BREVOORT: I'm-- we never spoke to Stan about this largely because, as I say, doing the story we just-- we didn't think it was as big a deal as it seems to be. In the case of Stan and what he was thinking about this way back when and what he thinks of it now, I, I can't speak for Stan. I guess you'd have to speak to him directly.
BROOKE GLADSTONE: Okay. Tom Brevoort is an editor at Marvel Comics. Fantastic Four is just one of his charges. Thank you so much.
TOM BREVOORT: Thank you.
BOB GARFIELD:Joining us now is Stan Lee, creator of Spider-Man, The Silver Surfer, the Fantastic Four including The Thing and many, many other characters. Stan, welcome to OTM.
STAN LEE: Well it's good to be here.
BOB GARFIELD: Okay, first off -- The Thing. He doesn't look Jewish.
STAN LEE: [LAUGHS] You know I didn't-- intend for him to be [LAUGHS] Jewish. I wrote the Fantastic Four for the first hundred issues or so, and then years ago I gave it up and there have been many, many writers who did it aft--after I had left the series. So recently one of them decided to make Ben Grimm Jewish, which is fine. The reason I didn't -- I never made any of the characters of any specific ethnicity or religion because I wanted them to be-- enjoyed by people all around the world of varying faiths and so forth, and-- I tried to keep everything kind of neutral. But I guess the guys thought it might be fun to make him Jewish, and that's, that's fine with me.
BOB GARFIELD:Is it possible that somewhere deep in the back of your mind, in the hidden recesses of your consciousness you knew that Ben Grimm was Jewish all along? That he, The Thing, this rock being is a Golem? Or is he just a Thing.
STAN LEE: No, no I-- I wanted to write four superheroes -- one was a girl, one was a handsome guy, one was a teenager, and I wanted the fourth one to be something different, and it occurred to me I would try to make him sort of a tragic figure. I would turn this guy into somebody ugly. I never thought for a minute what their religions [LAUGHS] were.
BOB GARFIELD:Now there have been some explicitly Jewish characters in, in the history of comics. Izzy Cohen [sp?] was a character in Sergeant Fury's Commandoes.
STAN LEE: Right.
BOB GARFIELD: X-Force [sp?] had a character named Bermuda Schwartz [sp?].
STAN LEE: Mm-hm.
BOB GARFIELD: And the two - two of my favorites -- actually I just ran across them-- hadn't hitherto known that there was a Greenberg [sp?] the Vampire and a-- and Shapiro-Man [sp?] [LAUGHS]. Am I missing any big ones?
STAN LEE: Well Greenberg the Vampire is very funny. I had never heard of Bermuda Schwartz, but I think that's hysterical. Izzy Cohen was a character I created for Sergeant Fury and his howling commandoes which was this World War II series about a platoon headed by Sergeant Fury. I wanted him to have a multi-ethnic platoon, so he had Izzy Cohen; he had a black man named Gabriel Jones; he had a gay man named Percival Pinkerton. He had an Italian, Dino Minelli, and so forth. I mean it wasn't an effort to play up a Jew; it was just an effort to play up all the various racial types.
BOB GARFIELD:Jewish culture is nonetheless a rich vein in the comics world. You and artist Jack Kirby, Jerry Segal [sp?] and Joe Schuster [sp?] of Superman fame; Julius Schwartz [sp?]-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
STAN LEE: Bob Kane [sp?], Batman.
BOB GARFIELD: Bob Kane. How did this come to pass, and how much has Jewishness do you think informed the medium?
STAN LEE: You know I have no idea. I, I never really thought of it, and it seems to me I'm [LAUGHS], I'm sure there are plenty of people who aren't Jewish in the field, but it is strange when, when you mention it that the--perhaps the best-known of all the characters -Spider-Man, Superman and Batman - were done by Jewish writers. I, I guess that is an odd thought.
BOB GARFIELD:Superman seems to be loosely based on the story of Moses. The boy on the Planet Krypton's the, the infant's name was Kal-El [sp?] which I believe means something like the vessel of, of God and Superman was sent by his parents to be saved from extermination as Moses was down the Nile and only to be a force of good versus evil in his new life. I'm sure you've noticed the parallel. Do you think readers notice these parallels? [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
STAN LEE: You know, I haven't. This is the first I've heard of it. [LAUGHTER] Now that you mention it, it does sound like there's a parallel, but no, no -- it never, never occurred to me until this very moment.
BOB GARFIELD:Back on the Marvel Comics side, X-Men are said to be somehow archetypes of the American Jewish experience -- admired for their gifts but viewed with suspicion by outsiders and maybe even fear. Does that scan with you?
STAN LEE: Well when I, when I started the X-Men, I did after a while decide that it made a good metaphor for, for bigotry and the, the ills of, of hating people who are different than you. Again, I personally did not think of it in terms of Jewishness. It just seemed like a good theme to, to use for the, for the X-Men.
BOB GARFIELD:Well, how about bigotry -- and I'm not trying to be a smart aleck here, but I notice that both you and Jack Kirby de-Judified your pen names. You were Stan Lieber [sp?]-- [BOTH SPEAK AT ONCE]
STAN LEE: I can't speak for Jack. I have no way of knowing why he did it. I did not attempt to de-Jewify it. My name was Stanley Martin Lieber which I think is a beautiful name. I'm very sorry I changed it. The reason I changed it was when I went in to the comic business, nobody had any respect for comics in those days. I, I was embarrassed to be doing comics, and [LAUGHS] I didn't want to use my real name for the comics! And I never expected to stay in the field more than a short time, to get some experience and then get out in the real world. What happened was I remained in comics -- I built my whole career in comics -- and after a while life was too confusing -- more people knew me as Stan Lee -- which was the name I used to write the comics -- than they did as Stanley Lieber.
BOB GARFIELD: Well listen, it's really been a pleasure. Thank you very much for joining us.
STAN LEE: Hey, it was a pleasure for me too. I hope I didn't spoil your whole show.
BOB GARFIELD: Not at all.
STAN LEE: Okay. Take care. Bye.
BOB GARFIELD: Stan Lee is the creator of Ben Grimm, The Thing, and chairman emeritus of Marvel Comics.
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