there is nothing outside spidah-man's glorious pizza utopia of america, you sillies
idk why the new movie made up all these fictional worlds for the class to go to
I don't blind date I make the direct market vibrate
The question is popular enough that it came up in Wired's autocomplete interview (about 9:15 in)
Sincerely,
Thomas Mets
"He's pure power and doesn't even know it. He's the best of us."-Matt Murdock
"I need a reason to take the mask off."-Peter Parker
"My heart half-breaks at how easy it is to lie to him. It breaks all the way when he believes me without question." Felicia Hardy
That's cool, I had no idea! I didn't realize you guys played American football. I need to learn about Australia, my only "knowledge" comes from Ozzie Man Reviews on YouTube.
Australia is currently number four on my to-travel-to list... will probably make it there in 2021. Any particular city you would recommend?
Back on topic (sorry for the detour) I asked a Jewish friend of mine if he thought of Peter as Jewish. He said kind of, when he was a kid, but thought that might have just been him trying to relate to Peter and also his seeing real life groups of people in much more broad stokes when he was young. He also thought some of the kind of Jewish traits he saw as a kid (guilt, socially awkward, intellectual as opposed to sports inclined) are stereotypes that he finds to ring less and less true of less and less Jewish people as he matures.
Melbourne is beautiful in summer or winter. Perth has beautiful beaches
Thought it might be interesting to revive this thread. What are everyone's thoughts on this topic after Riesman's Autobiography of Stan Lee?
I think the book proves that Spider-Man ultimately wasn't intended to be Jewish in the same vein as The Thing.
I mean, if Ditko is the true creator of Spider-Man, that kinda already kills the rumor since Ditko wasn't Jewish. But even if Stan was the main creator, it's hard to imagine Stan intending Spider-Man to be Jewish after everything Riesman described.
Last edited by Kaitou D. Kid; 04-08-2021 at 07:25 PM.
There is a section on the the Marvel Database page that goes into this. Was raised Protestant but at some point became an atheist.
Religious Views
Peter Parker was recruited by Goddess as a member of her group of religious heroes,[357] and has expressed Protestant Christian beliefs in the past,[358] and allegedly attended sermons.[359] This may in part be attributed to his Aunt May, who has always been a devout Protestant Christian.[360][361] He was since shown to hold firm atheist beliefs after renouncing his religion at an unknown time;[362] however, things culminated in the appearance of the apparition of his Uncle Ben from the afterlife, and subsequently the Santerians urged Peter to resolve his crisis of faith, the first step of which was a visit to the confessional at Saint Patrick's Cathedral.[363]
The biography confirmed what I long suspected and argued, Stan Lee did not intend Spider-Man to be Jewish and so Spider-Man as a character is not originally or inherently Jewish the way Ben Grimm absolutely was, and the way Kitty Pryde unabashedly was introduced as.
That doesn't mean of course that Jewish readers or for that matter readers of any other faith or ethnicity cannot claim Spider-Man as important to them and find value in his story applicable to their experience. That's 100% fair and valid. It's just that we can't claim Spider-Man as Jewish solely because Stan Lee grew up Jewish and see the character as a biographical reflection of one of the credited creators of Spider-Man, and certainly not the one with the greater role in shaping and defining Spider-Man.
Riesman, who is Jewish himself, argued and elaborated on this in a separate article for a website:
https://jewishcurrents.org/this-is-n...y-of-stan-lee/
Yet over the course of my research, I found virtually no instances of Lee publicly invoking his Jewishness. Late in life he told an interviewer, “Jewish people—and I include myself—I think we think a certain way.” In private correspondence, he sometimes jokingly invoked bar mitzvahs or peace in the Middle East, and there’s an anecdote about him once yelling at a bird that was bothering him, “For the Gentiles, you sing!” But those examples are the exception to the rule. In his co-written 2002 memoir Excelsior!: The Amazing Life of Stan Lee, Lee fleetingly identifies his forebears as Jewish—but never himself. Describing his and his wife’s struggle to adopt a child in the 1950s, he wrote, “My parents were Jewish and Joan is Episcopalian, and in those days it was more difficult to adopt in a mixed marriage.” The problem, in his telling, wasn’t his Jewish identity—it was others’ perception that he had one at all.
[...]
How should we read the comics Lee was credited on, in light of this ambivalent inheritance? (I say “credited on” rather than “wrote” because there is another complicating factor here: The Marvel stories to which Lee signed his name were in fact written collaboratively, and it seems likely that Lee’s underlings were in fact their primary writers.) It is reasonable to speculate, as the writer Michael Chabon did in his popular 2000 novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, that mid-century Jewish comics artists poured their own anxieties about assimilation into superheroes who, paradigmatically, had to hide their identities to make it in a world hostile to their true natures.
But some critics and fans have made wild leaps of logic, employing a sort of Talmudic exegesis of the comics attributed to Lee—a variation on the critical mode of philosopher Leo Strauss, long influential in conservative circles, in which great works harbor secret teachings, with exoteric meanings available to anyone and esoteric meanings available only to a chosen few. Spider-Man is an alienated neurotic who lives in Forest Hills, Queens, so these fans hold him up as a crypto-Jew—in fact, one recent Spider-Man movie features an alternate-universe version of Spidey who is implied to be Jewish. But there were a lot of alienated neurotics in 20th-century Queens, plenty of them non-Jews. It’s likewise true, as Leibovitz points out, that the intellectual Silver Surfer grapples with the godlike Galactus in a manner not wholly unlike Abraham arguing with the God of the Hebrew Bible. But attempting to negotiate with divinity is in no way a solely Jewish endeavor. The closest hit in this search for Lee-era Marvel’s Jewishness is the rocky-carapaced Thing, who spoke in a Lower East Side brogue and, many decades later, was canonically identified as Jewish. But in the days when Lee was working on the character’s stories, none of that was explicit, and any streetwise social reject could conceivably find themself in him. Yes, Lee’s Jewishness may have informed these tales; no, we should not fall into the trap of an overly literalist reading of these comics.
[...]
To posthumously conscript Lee into a Jewishness he did not want is to play an intellectually dangerous and narcissistic parlor game. Let him dwell in the liminal spaces of Jewishness in death, as he did in life, joining all the other fascinating Jews of assimilation who have come before and since. Even if Lee was, in some ways, one of us, he does not really belong to us.