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This Is Not a Secret Jewish History of Stan Lee
IN HIS RECENT BOOK
Stan Lee: A Life in Comics, the conservative columnist Liel Leibovitz proposes a skeleton key for understanding the life and work of Stan Lee, the legendary Marvel Comics creator, who died in 2018. In Leibovitz’s telling, the superheroes of the Marvel pantheon that emerged in the early 1960s must be read “as characters formed by the anxieties of first-generation American Jews who had fought in World War II, witnessed the Holocaust, and reflected consciously or otherwise on the moral obligations and complications of life after Auschwitz.” At length, he compares Spider-Man to Cain, the Thing to a golem, Mr. Fantastic to a dybbuk; he even goes so far as to argue that the Incredible Hulk and his alter ego are akin to the two versions of the biblical Adam theorized by the rabbinic scholar Joseph Soloveitchik. Leibovitz is not alone in his pursuit of Marvel’s Jewish undertones. In Lee’s twilight years and after