Wait until Fox News learns the Superman symbol is from a foreign planet. Photo by Ian Walton/Getty Images
By PJ Grisar
July 9, 2025
I’ve heard conservatives rail against “illegal aliens,” but this is getting a bit ridiculous.
In response to director James Gunn’s recent claim that his forthcoming Superman film is about “an immigrant that came from other places,” the right-wing media is having a conniption, with Fox News labelling the DC tentpole “Superwoke” and Jesse Watters joking that Supe’s cape now has MS-13 written on the back.
The backlash is nothing new. Pundits and even diehard fans have long sought out ways to grouse about superhero films’ efforts at inclusion, and damned studios for inserting politics into a medium that has, since at least that Hitler haymaker on the cover of Captain America No. 1, always been political.
That said, I understand the outrage a bit more when it comes to the Man of Steel.
Superman is the ur-superhero, created by a duo of underachieving Jewish teens from Cleveland — one, Jerry Siegel the child of Lithuanian immigrants to the U.S., the other, Joe Shuster, an immigrant from Canada whose parents hailed from Rotterdam and Kyiv. As such, the character’s original development wasn’t exactly a work of deep social commentary, even as his arch nemesis proved to be an Elon Musk-like captain of industry.
While his creators introduced him as a “champion of the oppressed,” it is easy to read Superman as a simple avatar for “truth, justice and the American way” as advertised in his 1942 radio serial.
He heaves cars over his head, wears tights, fights an albino ape and is nigh invincible. He doesn’t have the vigilante angst of Batman or face the moral dilemmas of Marvel heroes like Spider-Man, whose heroism was born out of a moment of extreme selfishness and loss. (Shades of grey have been added in Supes’ nearly century-long history, but if you look at a list of worst things he’s done, high on the list is ruining a used car salesman’s livelihood.)
Perhaps because Superman is so two-dimensional, great efforts have been made to Hebraize him, justifying not just his greater significance, but the Jewish inspiration behind the birth of a multi-billion dollar genre.
Jules Feiffer, in a remembrance of Siegel in the New York Times Magazine, put forth the idea that in Superman, Siegel and Shuster created the “ultimate assimilationist fantasy.” That beneath the clumsy, bespectacled journalist Clark Kent was the Last Son of Krypton, “the smart Jewish boy’s American dream.”
“It wasn’t Krypton that Superman came from; it was the planet Minsk or Lodz or Vilna or Warsaw,” Feiffer argued, never mind that Siegel came from Ohio and Shuster from Toronto.
Feiffer makes a better case when he argues that these boys in the heartland must have sensed their otherness, much as Feiffer did and Clark Kent (aka Kal-El) must have.
But as author Eddy Portnoy noted in his review of the growing library of “Superman Got Israel Bonds at his Bris”-type literature for Marginalia Book Review, the case for their alienation falls apart when you realize Shuster and Siegel may have been outcasts, but it was among their coreligionists at Glenville High School, a Jewish epicenter.
No, Superman is likely simpler than all that. While created by liberals, and regarded by some as an unruly “violent socialist” in his earliest appearances, the character is effectively — and this explains someone like Ben Shapiro’s fondness for the character — an expression of a simplistic American ideal that at its core is conservative, if not inherently nativist.
There’s a reason Superman’s space pram lands on a farm in a town called Smallville where the young Kryptonian is raised by kindly farmers. This, to Siegel and Shuster, was America. For many it still is — hence the affinity and the knee-jerk revulsion some conservatives may now be feeling at the film’s embrace of a progressive message.
How dare James Gunn tarnish this pure American property, built on cornfed values and resting on the rippling shoulders of an unelected, all-powerful being committed to the rule of law and answerable to no one?
But it’s doubtful Shuster and Siegel would have ever anticipated that Superman being an immigrant — and an undocumented one, too — would prove to be controversial. Or, maybe, that was the one bit of polemic they allowed for.
In the late 1930s of Superman’s debut, racist quotas closed the door on refugees, dooming Europe’s Jews. This policy, for those looking to overhaul immigration, is not a flattering parallel. And yet for so many seeking asylum the threats are undoubtedly existential.
Superman — a refugee from natural disaster — has been vilified, accused of wreaking havoc and racking up billions in property damage in his time. He is also, as Clark Kent, undeniably well-assimilated into American culture, somehow passing detection as anything remarkable by a simple slouch and thick-rimmed glasses built from the spaceship he rode in on. (Admittedly, given the current climate, he may be suspect since he’s a member of the press, but it’s unlikely anyone suspects he’s from anywhere other than Kansas).
Any honest accounting shows this man is a net good for America, and indeed the entire planet.
So the real question for those opposed to Gunn’s vision is this: If Superman isn’t the “right kind” of immigrant, who in the world is?
