“What’s the big deal about telling these Jewish stories?” asked someone boldly from the audience as I was sitting on a panel about Jewish comics at San Diego Comic Con, alongside fellow comics creators whose work is explicitly, proudly Jewish.
Although I might not have had the chutzpah to ask it, there was a time when I wondered the same thing. I knew that the Jewish founders of Hollywood and the pioneers of early comics shied away from explicitly telling Jewish stories. But since then, and especially in the last 30 years, the floodgates seem to have opened. The Jewish humor baton passed from Woody Allen to Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David, and with “Schindler’s List,” Steven Spielberg transformed the film industry’s attitude about the Holocaust as a viable subject for a work of entertainment. That trend trickled into comics, too: Magneto’s backstory revealed his Jewish roots in the early 2000s, and in 2018, The Thing had a Jewish wedding. In summer 2023 when I spoke at Comic Con, the massive convention that draws huge crowds from all over the world featured at least three panels on Jewish subjects. What, indeed, was the big deal?
The auditorium grew silent as the crowd waited for someone—anyone—on the panel to respond. In the midst of that silence, I searched my own memories for an answer. Why did I tell Jewish stories?
Initially, the impulse was opportunistic. If I dug a little deeper than the Holocaust or Borscht Belt tropes, Judaism was a narrative goldmine! That’s how I came upon the history of Jewish piracy in the 16th century Caribbean—a piece of history that I explored in a short film (The Pirate Captain Toledano) and a subsequent graphic novel (José and the Pirate Captain Toledano).
“Judaism has great narrative potential” should have been enough of an answer for this guy, but while making that pirate film, I stumbled on another, more urgent reason to tell Jewish stories: “If we don’t tell our own tales, others will tell them about us.” Prior to my short, Jewish pirates had never been depicted on screen, and were rarely discussed by historians. When I researched “Jewish pirates,” I didn’t have to scroll far before I found antisemitic blog posts instead of historical essays. Jewish pirates are part of our elaborate history, but we didn’t tell their stories, and left a void for bigots to fill. “What’s the big deal?” It’s our story—we should be the ones to tell it.
But this answer left some important questions unanswered, like: Why are Jewish stories being distorted to begin with? And why aren’t the many stories we do tell enough to counter that distortion? From The Jazz Singer to Schindler’s List, haven’t we told our story already? Why do people still vilify us?
It was another experience that helped me understand that no, in fact, we’ve barely told any of our story at all. After a screening of Toledano, a man approached me, his eyes glistening. “Thank you,” he said, “for putting a Sephardi character on screen.” He was right—it hardly ever happens. For more than a century, popular Jewish films and comics depicted only Ashkenazi Jews.
I started to pay closer attention to the types of Jewish stories that were being told in popular media, and soon realized that no matter how many films I watched or comics I read, they kept telling the same story over and over! It’s the story of an Ashkenazi Jew whose Jewishness is a liability. In “The Jazz Singer,” it’s religious Judaism that’s a social liability. In Woody Allen’s early films, even secular Judaism threatens his characters’ social standing. And in any film about antisemitism or the Holocaust, being Jewish can get you killed.
“What’s the big deal?” the guy in the audience asked. The paper-thin way that Jews have been depicted seemed like a big deal to me, but it wasn’t until that awkward silence in an auditorium in San Diego that I put these two experiences together, and an image formed in my mind.
I leaned into the microphone, and said, “Imagine you’re a little kid, in your bedroom, at night.” The audience must have been bewildered, but they went along with it. “There’s a night light in the corner, but the rest of the room is dark. And there’s a closet. The door is cracked open, and through the door, it’s inky black.”
I could imagine the scene as I described it.
“When you’re a kid, what do you see in the dark of that closet?” I asked.
Monsters. Everyone knew it. Some people said it out loud. A few people nodded, as if they already understood. For the rest, I went on to explain.
The night light in the corner? That’s like the media we already have. Holocaust stories are valid, real stories. That secular Ashkenazi New Yorker with anxiety issues? Sure, it’s an archetype, but we all know someone who fits that description. The trouble is, that’s not even a fraction of who we—Jews—are.
Most of the world is not Jewish. Most people, in fact, have never had an opportunity to meet a Jew, let alone to get to know us in a deep and meaningful way. Most of what people know about us comes from that night light.
And the rest of the room is dark.
Do you see it now?
What’s the big deal about telling these stories about diverse, eclectic and multifaceted Jews, and in which Judaism is a culture, a religion, a tribal identity—and not a liability? These stories dispel the darkness.
In the past few years, it has become so much more important to find ways to shine our light, not to drown out anyone else’s, but to push back against darkness. The Jewish story, like every people’s story, exists alongside other histories of suffering, displacement, hope and survival. Telling our stories fully makes us more capable of recognizing the humanity of others, and having our own humanity recognized in return.
Arnon Z. Shorr is a filmmaker, screenwriter and author. In the three years since that Comic Con panel, he has created or published numerous comic books, a graphic novel, a novel, a short film and several screenplays—all Jewish. He is a 2023-24 fellow of the Jewish Writers Institute, a founding fellow of the PJ Library Sephardic Stories Initiative, and a student in the inaugural class of the new MFA in Creative Writing at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America. For more, visit www.arnonshorr.com, and follow him @arnonshorr on Facebook and Instagram.
