Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and Creation of Superhero Danny Fingeroth. Foreword by Stan Lee: New York: Continuum, 2007. If we accept Hebrew Bible as historical source, persons of identity have forever debated how that identity is or should be parsed into its components of ethnicity, nationality, and religion. In past decade, writers have renewed this dialectic through a sharpening focus on ethnicity as a strand of superhero comics. Michael Chabon's novel, Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000) explored angst and feelings of impotence over Hitler's Europe. Gerard Jones's Men of Tomorrow (2005) roots birth of comics not only creators but also somewhat shadowy enterprises of Harry Donenfield and Jack Liebowitz. Rabbi Simcha Weinstein's Up, Up, and Oy Veh! (2006) sifts through superhero comics to celebrate story analogues and religious impulses. Danny Fingeroth, who knows comics scholarship well, brings to this ethno-religious arena unique background that informed Superman on Couch (2004), which explained appeals and evolution of different story types superhero comics. Like his earlier book, Disguised as Clark Kent shows a deep familiarity with principals and particulars of comics as a trade involving many hands and minds. Fingeroth's previous career at Marvel, creating stories for Dark Hawk, Hulk, X-Men, and serving as Group Editor for SpiderMan Comics, lends his treatments a rare authority. How many authors can cite, as Fingeroth does, precisely relevant interview materials with seminal figures like Will Eisner? A reader also finds here a personal dimension rare comics scholarship. Fingeroth, self identified as a New York Jew with eastern European roots, is trying to reconstruct culture of persons from a recently lost world of immigrants foreign and so strange as to take on air of fairy tales (22). Rather than listing important Jews comics as a tribal celebration, Fingeroth aspires to present superhero fantasy's Jewish inflections, as he puts it, trying to separate them from elements found predecessors such as Gilgamesh, Hercules, Zorro, or Lone Ranger. He realizes that this story is strongly interpretive rather than straightforwardly factual. Even Stan Lee (Stanley Martin Lieber), who writes book's Foreword, emphasizes that Fingeroth's attribution of ethnic values is speculations and conclusions (11). Lee and his cohorts felt in front of our minds that we were just trying to make best action-adventure comics we could (10-11)-not attempting to portray or project Jewishness and certainly not noticing it. In other words, they saw themselves as assimilated and making popular American stories process. Conceding this sort of resistance, Chapter 1, Secret Identities, collects a number of these denials by creators. As regards their creative intent, is relevant to mark a difference, employed by Fingeroth, between portrayalwhere there is congruency between creator's conscious intention and creative product-and expression, where symbolic values (and symptoms) may be projected absence of, and perhaps contrary to conscious purpose. Jules Feiffer made point well his New York Times obituary for Jerry Siegel, The Minsk Theory of Krypton, suggesting it wasn't Krypton that Superman really came from; was planet Minsk or Lodz or Vilna or Warsaw (qtd. Disguised, 24). At time of Superman's genesis, Siegel likely saw himself stretching Utopian science fiction (published his own magazine, Science Fiction: Advance Guard of Civilization), but Feiffer and Fingeroth argue for psychic layers of secret superhero birth linked to existential fears shared by 1930s Jews. Siegel himself gravitated toward such a perspective 1975 when he spoke of his great urge to help downtrodden masses, who included the helpless, oppressed Jews Nazi Germany (qtd. …