In a 2002 issue of “The Fantastic Four” titled “Remembrance of Things Past,” The Thing, the superhero with superhuman strength whose real identity is Benjamin Jacob “Ben” Grimm, revisits Yancy Street, the fictional Lower East Side street where he grew up.
We get to see his childhood bar mitzvah and watch him recite the Shema. For the first time, we get confirmation of a conjecture many a “Fantastic Four” fan had made in the past: The Thing is Jewish.
And now, for the first time in Marvel movie history, The Thing, created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in 1961 as an integral part of their “Fantastic Four,” is being played by a Jewish actor in a Marvel film.
Ebon Moss-Bachrach, known for his celebrated role as Richie in “The Bear,” is playing Grimm in “The Fantastic Four: First Steps,” now out in theaters.
While The Thing was first dubbed by Jewish actor Paul Frees in the original “Fantastic Four” cartoons, he has never been played by a Jewish actor on the big screen. And not only that, but the movie also literally takes us to Yancy Street.
If that’s not enough to be thrilled about, his love interest in this new movie also seems to be Jewish-coded. She’s a newly invented character named Rachel Rozman, a teacher played by Jewish New York icon Natasha Lyonne. (Jewish star Julia Garner is also in the film as Shalla-Bal/Silver Surfer.)
This isn’t the first time Moss-Bacharach, whose father was raised Jewish in the Bronx, has played a Jewish Marvel character.
The actor played hacker David Lieberman, known as Micro, in Netflix’s “The Punisher,” opposite Jewish actor Jon Bernthal, who will co-star with him in an upcoming production of the play “Dog Day Afternoon.” Lieberman’s grave in the show has Hebrew writing on it.
But while Moss-Bachrach is the first Jewish actor to play this particular role, he is not the first Jewish actor to be interested in it.
David Krumholtz, who grew up on Marvel Comics, campaigned for the role, and met with director Matt Shakman personally about it. “I think Ebon Moss-Bachrach is a really great choice,” the “Oppenheimer” and “The Studio” star — who is about to play Superman’s uncle in the upcoming “Supergirl” — conceded. “It makes way more sense in some ways.”
If “Superman” is based on the story of Moses, then many can see the golem, a mythical Jewish creature, in The Thing. His job is to protect, and despite his disfigurement, The Thing always remains Ben Grimm — full of fierceness and personality, if a little rough around the edges.
This new movie pays tribute to “The Fantastic Four”‘s original creator, Jack Kirby, who, like Grimm, was born on the Lower East Side. In honor of the new film, the corner of Essex and Delancey was renamed Jack Kirby Way, or Yancy Street.
Kirby grew up Conservative, went to Hebrew school and was bar mitzvah-ed. He grew up witnessing antisemitism — “a lot of it. They were confrontational days when people of different backgrounds had to live together. And it hasn’t changed. There’s antisemitism today,” he said in a 1990 interview with the Comics Journal.
The artist, who changed his name to Kirby from Jacob Kurtzberg is — and this is no hyperbole — one of the greatest comic book artists of all times. He is dubbed by some as the King of Comics, and in Grimm’s story, you can find echoes of his own story: the son of immigrants, raised on the Lower East Side, witnessing a lot of roughness.
The character bears Kirby’s father’s name, Benjamin, and his middle name is the artist’s birth name. Kirby even drew Grimm with a kippah on his family’s Hanukkah cards. And while he never made the character explicitly Jewish, he did indeed see himself in The Thing.
“I suppose I must be a lot like Ben Grimm,” he said in the same 1990 interview. “I never duck out of a fight; I don’t care what the hell the odds are, and I’m rough at times, but I try to be a decent guy all the time. That’s the way I’ve always lived. Because I have children… In other words, my ambition was always to be a perfect picture of an American.”
After seeing DC’s “Superman” played by very nice Jewish actor David Corenswet, it feels like such a treat to get yet another exciting and nostalgic superhero played by a Jewish actor in the same month – especially one of the rare heroes who is actually, explicitly Jewish.