I did read the article pal, and I don’t appreciate the statment that I didn’t.
For the record, I’d been aware that Kirby had drawn Ben Grimm in Jewish regalia for several years (I’ve seen one of Ben in a Tallis with a yarmulke…I don’t think it’s the same one that the article writer saw: Ben wasn’t holding a Torah in the one I’d seen. he was holding a prayer book.) I believe it was in one of the “The Kirby Collector” magazines, but I’m not positive.
I understood that Lee and Kirby wanted Ben Grimm to be Jewish but after 40+ years and who knows how many references to the fact that he’s not Jewish, this story was jarring and ineffective. Sometimes lost opportunities can’t be regained. (For the record, as far as I know, Izzy Cohen from Sgt Fury and the Howling Commandos was the first explicity Jewish character in comics…and was a Lee and Kirby creation)
For 40+ years he’s been played as an Irish Catholic: I’m positive I’ve seen him in a confession booth and I’m pretty certain he’s take communion. We’ve seen parallel earth versions of Ben get married, always in a Christian ceremony. To wave a wand and say “Poof!. He’s Jewish and always was.” undermines the history of the character and, if Judiasm really is that unimportant to Ben (as the story implied), then who cares?
I don’t care, particularly, how good Waid’s (?) intentions were, the story was mediocre (I could see him returning the Star of David (or was it a Chai?) a mile away) and the damage done to the character’s backstory was horrible.
While I’m interested in the historical background as well as Lee and Kirby’s intent, I’m more interested in The Story. And for me, the ham-handed retcon didn’t work. It was nearly as jarring as if Grimm had “suddenly remembered” that he was really a middle-aged black woman before his transformation. Or, to use an even better example, imagine if, 2/3ds of the way through Return of the King, as he’s wrestling with Gollum on top of Mt. Doom, Frodo had “suddenly remembered” that he was really an Elf and not Bilbo’s nephew (or even a Hobbit) after all.
I’d have liked it better if Ben had been going through his parent’s belongings and he’d discovered that his mother had been born Jewish and covered it up for some reason. He could still go through the “Gee! I’m Jewish” routine without damaging his backstory so badly.
I agree it’s spiffy that society has changed enough that they can make Ben “always have been” Jewish. But just because they can doesn’t mean they should.
The other thing I don’t like is that, like Colossal Boy’s Jewish-ization, I’d be willing to bet outside of a few unsubtle references here and there, it’s never mentioned again, once the current team leaves.
It’ll certainly never be mentioned again in a substantive way, except when it’ll be dragged out to do a “Very Special Issue” (“Ben learns the TRUE MEANING of Passover!”).
We’re not gonna see Ben lighting the Shabbat candles, he’s not gonna be giving dreidles to Franklin and Valeria, we won’t see him lighting the Yortzeit candle and saying Kaddish for his parents. We won’t see him nailing a mezzuzah to the doorframe next time the Baxter Building’s destroyed and rebuilt. So why bother damaging an already shaky backstory (if he and Reed weren’t in WWII fighting alongside Nick Fury, how’d Nick know to trust them when the Hate Monger first appeared) with something that’s already a non-issue?
It’s possible to make a character Jewish retroactively: Magneto had no backstory whatsoever and I found the idea that he was a Holocaust survivor to be effective and moving (the butchery done later notwithstanding (“He’s a Jew!”/“NO! He’s a Gypsy!”/“Isn’t!”/“Is!”) ) and worked just fine for me. But the Ben Grimm one? Not so much.
Besides the “J” in Benjamin J. Grimm comes from Ben’s uncle Jake who’s still alive (We saw him in FF #240-something and in several issues of The Thing). Jews traditionally name their children after deceased relatives, not living ones.
And Porky? You’re just plain wrong about one thing (I note that the article writer didn’t make this mistake): Stan Lee has denied on multiple occasions that he changed his name “to avoid being punished by an intolerant USA”, he changed it because he’d wanted to someday write a novel under his own name and didn’t want the stigma of being “just” a writer of funny-books attached.
Given that Martin Goodman, Stan’s cousin-in-law ran Marvel/Timely, it wasn’t real likely that Lee wouldn’t get a job, is it? And Larry Leiber (Stan’s brother) was somehow able to find work at Marvel as an artist during Marvel’s early days under his own name and it didn’t much hurt his career (his lack of drawing skills however…) I also don’t recall that Eisner was particularly hurt by his Jewish name either. I was tempted to make a “If you’d actually read comics history…” type comment, but I refrain.
Fenris