It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s a Jewish Guy Playing Superman!

Superman is a character who needs no introduction. The iconic superhero has had a prominent presence in pop culture for decades, with dozens of actors portraying the so-called Man of Steel on television and the big screen. This July, a new actor will be donning the red cape in director James Gunn’s Superman, the first film in the new DC Universe franchise. The Kryptonian superhero will be played by David Corenswet, known for his roles on the Netflix series The Politician and HBO’s We Own This City. 

While Corenswet has the classic Superman look —shiny black hair and the signature kiss curl, strong jaw, above average height and a chiseled body—he is the first Jewish actor to play Superman. And yet the Jewish connections to Superman go all the way back to the original comic book. 

Corenswet hails from Philadelphia, PA (a city whose metropolitan area has the third highest percentage of Jewish people in the country). The actor’s Jewish heritage was passed down by his father, John Corenswet, an actor turned lawyer from New Orleans. Even though the Jewish faith is typically passed down matrilineally, Judaism seems to be important to Corenswet. According to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, his family has ties to Temple Sinai, Louisiana’s oldest Reform Synagogue. “The Corenswet family is well known and loved,” Rabbi Daniel Sherman told JTA. While David was not raised in New Orleans himself, he has kept strong ties to Temple Sinai and to his faith. For example, when Corenswet got married in 2023 to actress Julia Best Warner, they had an interfaith wedding in New Orleans that honored her Catholic roots and his Jewish roots and was officiated by both a priest and Edward Cohn, rabbi emeritus at Temple Sinai. The couple subsequently moved to Philadelphia to raise their daughter. According to Cohn, the couple is “definitely intending to affiliate with a congregation.” 

Corenswet graduated from Juilliard in 2016, where he got a BFA in drama. His first leading film role was in 2018 in the political thriller Affairs of State. Other roles include the aforementioned TV dramedyThe Politician (2019-2020) and the police drama We Own This City, along with the romantic comedy Look Both Ways and supporting roles in Twisters and the miniseries Lady in the Lake, which starred Natalie Portman as a Jewish investigative journalist. While Corenswet already has a substantial filmography, stepping into Superman’s red boots, as well as alter ego Clark Kent’s wingtips, means the actor will only get bigger from here.

While it may be a coincidence that a Jewish actor was chosen this time around to be Superman, Judaism is connected to Superman’s origins. For starters, the creators of the original Superman comic book character, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, were both children of Jewish immigrants. Roy Schwartz, author of the book Is Superman Circumcised?: The Complete Jewish History of the World’s Greatest Hero, believes that the men’s backgrounds influenced the character. “Among the different elements in their cultural orbits that they borrowed to create him were Jewish tradition and Jewish figures of legend,” says Schwartz. “Superman very much has the DNA of Moses and Samson and the Golem in him.” Schwartz also notes that, “With Clark Kent and Superman, the concept of a secret identity is very much an assimilationist fantasy that these two kids, one an immigrant and one the child of immigrants, lived out through the comics—the ability to be Jewish and also the WASPy norm at will.”

Samantha Baskind is a professor of art history at Cleveland State University who has done extensive research on the connection between Judaism and Superman, particularly in her book The Warsaw Ghetto in American Art and Culture. She also cites the influence that Siegel’s and Shuster’s backgrounds had on the conception of the character, pointing out that Superman was “created during the rise of Nazism, with the first Superman comic in Action Comics #1 coming out in June 1938.” She notes that “a lot of their comics have Superman fighting the Nazis, rounding up Hitler,” which apparently upset members of the Third Reich.

Schwartz explains:  “On February 27, 1940—two years before Pearl Harbor…when  more than 90 percent of Americans opposed intervention[in WWII]—Siegel and Schuster published a two-page story in Look magazine called ’How Superman Would End the War.’” In this story, he says, “Superman basically declares war on Hitler and Stalin following the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact. He twists Nazi canon into pretzels. He grabs Hitler and picks him up by the collar and says, ’I’d like to land a strictly non-Aryan sock on your jaw, but there’s no time for that; you’re coming with me.’ That is a very curious choice of words from somebody who is very much an Aryan ideal.” Schwartz recounts that the SS newspaper, Das Schwarze Korps, published a full-page tirade in response, which some historians have attributed to Joseph Goebbels. It accused Superman, Schwartz say, “of being a Jewish conspiracy to brainwash impressionable American youth with false Jewish values, saying that ’Superman’s sense of justice sews hate, suspicion, evil, laziness and criminality.’”

[Further reading: “Superman’s Jewish Roots”]

In addition to the interesting backstory of Jewish influences on Superman and the story’s new leading man, the upcoming Superman film has another, albeit tangential, Jewish connection. Lois Lane, the intrepid Daily Planet reporter and Superman’s love interest, is played by Rachel Brosnahan. While Brosnahan is not Jewish herself, her portrayal of the very Jewish and hilarious Midge Maisel on The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel has garnered the actress an Emmy award, along with four more nominations. Critics consistently praised the series and Brosnahan for its accurate Jewish representation. 

Finally, along with Superman, there’s another superhero with Jewish connections headed to the big screen: The Thing, aka Ben Grimm, from the Fantastic Four series. The Thing comes from the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and while his Judaism was not made clear in his first comic book appearance, his heritage was revealed over time. “He actually revisits his Jewish past,” says Baskind. “He goes back to the Lower East Side to apologize to somebody (for stealing a Star of David from the man’s pawn shop as a child). The person gets injured and dies, and The Thing says the Shema for him. This is in a comic book for the general public.” And, like the new Superman, The Thing will be played by a Jewish actor, Ebon Moss-Bacharach, in the upcoming blockbuster The Fantastic Four: First Steps. Moss-Bacharach is a two-time Emmy winner for his role in The Bear. 

Between Corenswet and Moss-Bacharach, you could say Jewish actors are having their time to shine in big blockbuster superhero films. Is this of super importance? “It may not be important,” Schwartz says, “but it is meaningful because Superman is a Jewish character, he’s a Jewish creation. He is made up of Jewish influences and he is a metaphor for the Jewish experience. So, that he is finally, after 85 years of existence, being played by somebody of a Jewish background, in a way it’s coming back full circle.”

Top image: David Corenswet as Superman (credit: Erik Drost (CC BY 2.0)).

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