No, but neither is “Jack Kirby”.
So you think “Steve Rogers” wasn’t his birth name? They’ve left that little detail out of all the comics I’ve read…
Maybe. Or maybe his dad had it changed back at Ellis Island. It’s been known to happen.
Yeah - I remember reading all about the waves of Irish Jews forced to change their names to assimilate…
I’m fairly certain that there was a quickly forgotten storyline from, say, the mid-to-late '70s where it was heavily implied that Steve Roger’s family was Jewish or part-Jewish. Possibly a Steve Gerber story or maybe an Engelhart story from the gawdawful “Snap” Wilson period. Same story also gave Steve an older brother and a deeply unpleasant dad. It was retconned in about 12 seconds and I might be misrembering the whole thing. The story was awful and I haven’t read it since it came out.
Marvel, tone-deaf as usual, offers up a Memorial Day tribute with Steve Rogers featured, and gets predictable blowback :
His dad’s “currently” a violent alcoholic, as seen in the flashbacks of Steve getting recruited by Hydra. But that could be part of the Red Skull’s reality rewrite.
Traditionally his dad’s been largely non-existant and his mom died when Steve was in his mid-teens (and they lived in a tennement(?) in Brooklyn or the Bronx) and there was occasionally a much younger brother who died of something.
The Gerber rewrite had him in the Maryland suburbs with the quasi-abusive dad and the bullying jock of an older brother and Steve was artsy and honestly kind of effeminate. I kind of wanted to pop him one and say “Geezus boy, Man Up already” But he went off to New York to become an artiste and hang with bohemian types in coffee houses. And then joined the war effort because his older brother was blowed up at Peal Harbor (despite Cap having been around for 2 years prior to that)
The Stern/Byrne deletion of Gerber version is that it was a fake cover identity so if he was captured by the Japanazis, he’d tell them his fake background history rather than his real history because if they knew he’d grown up in Brooklyn annd not Maryland…they would have something-somethinged. Um…because of reasons. It wasn’t a really good retcon but everyone universally hated sensitive, sissy Maryland Steve and wanted scrappy (if weak) Brooklyn Steve
Steve Englehart reminisces with Newsarama about his original Secret Empire Story :
Bleeding Cool posts a few snaps from the interiors of Secret Empire tie-ins today :
Please note the panels from Secret Empire : Uprising #1 which depict a ‘Hydra Youth’ rally, with a literal banner reading ‘Hydra Youth’.
So was the Marvel Comic line taken over by a bunch of Alt-Righter Writers?
Is the secretly unfrozen head of Walt Disney running the show there?
Did they honestly think this was going to end well?
:nods: Much like Clark Kent and Peter Parker, he can easily be read as Jewish despite writers occasionally telling us that he isn’t. It’s a function of (Jewish!) writers (from NYC!) consciously avoiding strong religious identification, so that a wide variety of readers will identify with the character. (Of all characters, Batman in the last few years has had a little bit of continuity imply that he has a Jewish mother.)
I certainly hope I wasn’t using “Nordic” to imply that Captain America doesn’t at least have a Jewish grandmother, but I can see how one would infer it.
I have always read him as a WASP, even though his original comics bio suggests Celtic & Catholic.
As for MCU-Cap: There’s something about this quote that doesn’t scan as Jewish at all, to me: “There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that” - just seems like something a Protestant would say.
[QUOTE=MrDibble]
I have always read him as a WASP, even though his original comics bio suggests Celtic & Catholic.
As for MCU-Cap: There’s something about this quote that doesn’t scan as Jewish at all, to me: “There’s only one God, ma’am, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t dress like that” - just seems like something a Protestant would say.
[/quote]
Heh. I’m now picturing a devout Jew leaving the synagogue and being told by a Protestant that God had a son, who (a) is also a god, and (b) is this long-haired carpenter standing right here, clad in a robe and some sandals. And, like any good monotheist sticking up for the first commandment by dismissing an idea as mere blasphemy, he draws himself up to his full height and says…
Are you kidding? Strongly monotheistic *and *sarcastic - you can’t get more Jewish than that!
The Jews I know wouldn’t be insistent on the absolutism of their own God/monotheism to any non-Jews present. That’s much more of a Christian trait IME. YMMV.
IME, both are also strongly Irish characteristics too.
Wow, that’s dumb. Sam Wilson would have been better, or better again, Captain Marvel.
The decline continues, as Secret Empire loses one of its last boosters at Bleeding Cool :
He makes the point that the story would be a lot better out of the mainstream continuity, and in a less serialized format, instead of being a slow-moving crawl that corrodes dozens of beloved characters over the course of the year.