Why Are There No Great Israeli Superheroes?

Age of Ultron, this year’s Avengers film sequel, has generated $1.4 billion worldwide at the box office so far, a number likely to be matched or exceeded by Dawn of Justice, next year’s eagerly anticipated Batman vs. Superman film. Not an unimpressive achievement for characters originally created by the children of poor Jewish immigrants.

Yet while the caped inventions of (mainly) American Jewish cartoonists have excited the imaginations of people around the world, Israeli Jews have never produced anything comparable. The Hebrew Superhero (original Hebrew title Hagibor-ha’al ha-ivri), a new documentary film by the directors Shaul Betser and Asaf Galay (whose previous film was reviewed in Mosaic by Ruth Wisse), asks why.

It’s the wrong question to ask, as I’ll explain in a moment, but this shouldn’t distract from what is otherwise an informative and charming film. Using interviews with comic-book creators and brief animated sequences that bring the characters to life, the film searches, in vain, for an Israeli equivalent of Superman and Spiderman. Along the way, it tells the story of Israeli comics from the period of the British Mandate to the present, uncovering a number of interesting tidbits (like the fact that the term sabra to denote a native-born Israeli took shape in children’s comics produced in the 1930s by the illustrator Aryeh Navon and the poet Leah Goldberg). And The Hebrew Superhero does propose a few candidates, if not terribly impressive ones, to justify its title.