Adult Ed – American Culture and Comic Books
As comic book superheroes flood movie theaters and generate billions of dollars in profits for media conglomerates, it’s worth remembering the characters’ humble beginnings as products of fly-by-night publishers in a junk medium — and as the creations of artists and writers who were overwhelmingly Jewish.
Superman and Captain America might not look Jewish, but both characters (and many others like them) were created by first-generation American Jews who infused their work with their own fantasies of assimilation and transformation.
Learn about this important aspect of Jewish and American cultural history in a series of talks by Michael Kobre, a professor of literature at Queens University of Charlotte, sponsored by Havurat Tikvah and Queens’ Hillel chapter.
The first talk, “Aliens, Immigrants, and Secret Identities,” will take place at 7:30 on March 24, and the second talk, on the contemporary comics masterpiece Maus by Art Spiegelman, will take place on April 14 at 7:30. Both talks will be held in Ketner Auditorium in the Sykes Learning Center on the Queens Campus and are free and open to the public.