The Common Man Is Coming into His Own

Michael Kobre considers the Fantastic Four superhero “The Thing” and Jack Kirby’s relationship to his own Judaism.

By Michael KobreAugust 4, 2025

• Comics

• Film

• Philosophy & Religion

IN 1975, JACK KIRBY, the “King of Comics” whose wildly kinetic art and sweeping visions had shaped the whole universe of Marvel Comics, sent a Hanukkah card to a friend, a young fan Kirby had met a few years earlier at a New York comics convention. At the time, Kirby had been living in Thousand Oaks, California, where he’d joined a Conservative synagogue, Temple Etz Chaim. An active temple member, Kirby occasionally read Torah portions at Shabbat services, visited the Hebrew School to demonstrate the art of drawing comics for the students, and later fulfilled a lifelong dream when he joined a congregational trip to Israel. So there was nothing remarkable about him sending a Hannukah card—except, that is, for the image Kirby drew on the card, which showed Ben Grimm, “the Thing,” the monstrous member of the Fantastic Four with a body that looks like it’s made of orange rocks, dressed for Shabbat services himself, in a coat and tie and wearing a yarmulke and prayer shawl. In fact, Kirby liked the image so much that he hung a copy on the wall of his studio. When guests would ask him about it, as his friend and biographer Mark Evanier remembered, Kirby would just say, “It’s a Jewish Thing.”

Fifty years later, Kirby’s Thing is once again appearing on-screen, in Marvel Studios’ Fantastic Four: First Steps. In early 2023, comics and film websites revealed that Marvel wanted to cast a Jewish actor as the Thing, before Ebon Moss-Bachrach (whose father is Jewish) was announced for the role in February 2024. As Entertainment Weekly reported in April 2025, Ben Grimm’s old neighborhood, Yancy Street, would be depicted in the film as “a fictionalized version of Kirby’s own childhood neighborhood [the Lower East Side], complete with kosher groceries and a synagogue.” Yet for all of the intent of the filmmakers to depict Ben Grimm’s Jewish identity, the process by which it became a part of his character unfolded over decades and was complicated in ways that reflect larger patterns of generational change in American comic books and the culture at large.

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Created for Fantastic Four #1 in 1961—with Kirby and Stan Lee co-plotting, Kirby drawing and pacing the entire story, and then Lee adding dialogue and captions—the Thing was the first character to embody the new approach to superheroes that would later define Marvel Comics. Transformed by cosmic rays into a monstrous being with tremendous strength, Ben Grimm’s torment at being trapped in a grotesque, rocklike body represented a radical break with the conventions of the superhero genre up to that point, in which characters typically exulted in their powers and saved the world in adventures that were blissfully free from inner conflicts.

There was nothing, for instance, in a Superman or Flash comic like the sequence in Fantastic Four #4, which came out in early 1962. The Thing briefly changes back to his human form, just long enough to rejoice at the restoration of his old self—“A man! I’m a man! A normal human being!”—before the effect reverses in a final triptych of panels, as the orange scales reappear on Ben’s skin and he sinks to his knees, his head in his arms in the last panel, too devastated to even open his eyes, while he transforms, in his words, “Back into … into … a Thing!”

Ben Grimm’s agony created the template for all of Marvel’s anxious, conflicted heroes who would be introduced in the next few years. Over time, his character would evolve, tempering the rage and self-loathing of the early issues, and Ben would become a more avuncular presence in the family structure of the team—alongside Reed Richards, Mr. Fantastic, the nominal father figure; Sue Storm, the Invisible Girl, who would become a wife and mother; and Johnny Storm, the Human Torch, as the literally hotheaded kid brother. Yet Ben’s pathos as a man in a monster’s body would always be a defining aspect of his character.

Throughout their genre-defining run on Fantastic Four, however, Kirby and Lee never even hinted that Ben Grimm was meant to be Jewish. Except for Izzy Cohen, the Jewish member of the squad of ethnic stereotypes in Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos, whose Jewish identity was rarely mentioned, none of Marvel’s characters, as far as its readers could know, was Jewish or professed any particular faith at all, other than acknowledging the Norse gods who occasionally walked the earth in The Mighty Thor (the thunder-god-as-superhero was introduced in Journey into Mystery in 1962). Though Kirby and Lee—the former Jacob Kurtzberg and Stanley Leiber—were both first-generation American Jews (like so many other creators who built the American comic book industry), Judaism exists as a kind of lacuna in their published work, a fact of both men’s backgrounds that’s conspicuous by its absence. Even a late autobiographical story by Kirby, Street Code from 1983 (first printed in Argosy in 1990), which is set in the Lower East Side of his youth, has no images of Jewish life or references to Kirby’s Judaism. No wonder, then, that when Kirby drew a picture of a Jewish Thing, it was only created to be circulated privately and displayed on the wall of his studio.

In important ways, though, Kirby’s work was intensely personal. “I told in every story what was really inside my gut,” he said in a 1990 interview. If his Jewish identity is reflected at all in his published work, it’s coded, inscribed as a subtext to be deciphered later. “My generation lied to survive,” Kirby told a group of fans in a 1972 conversation when he was explaining why he changed his name from Jacob Kurtzberg. “When I tell you my generation lied or died I’m not kidding,” he said, going on to explain how he was perceived as “a total alien” by the kind of men from the Midwest or Texas with whom he served in the army, even citing one soldier from a small rural town who refused to believe Kirby was Jewish because he didn’t have horns. Like his Americanized name, Kirby’s avoidance of any explicit Jewish content in his published work might have been another of those “lies,” concealing a deeper truth beneath the surface.

Certainly, no other character in all of Kirby’s work embodies that sense of feeling like a total alien as much as the Thing, whose very name as a superhero denies his humanity. Even if Benjamin Jacob Grimm—whose name is a conflation of Kirby’s own, Jacob, and his father’s, Benjamin—was never formally identified as Jewish in Kirby and Lee’s 102-issue run on Fantastic Four, he’s infused with a Jewish sensibility and with much of Kirby’s own personality. “Everybody seemed to associate me with the Thing because he acted like a regular guy,” Kirby said in that same interview from 1990. “I suppose I must be a lot like Ben Grimm. 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.”

Like Kirby too, who was driven to support his family by working 12 to 14 hours a day turning out page after page of artwork in a basement studio that his family called “the dungeon,” the Thing was the workhorse of superheroes, often depicted lugging gigantic pieces of machinery around the Fantastic Four’s headquarters for Reed Richards’s futuristic technology or bearing the brunt of the damage in the team’s battles. In one of Kirby’s last stories for Marvel, “What If the Fantastic Four Were the Original Marvel Bullpen?”—published in 1978 in the 11th issue of Marvel’s anthology title exploring parallel realities, What If—Kirby even drew himself as the Thing, imposing his own features, complete with a cigar jammed in the corner of his mouth, on the Thing’s rocklike facade.

But in a way that extends beyond Kirby’s own identification with the character, the Thing, in his sense of alienness, of otherness, embodies aspects of the cultural legacy of those first-generation American Jews, the descendants of the shtetls, who created the comic book industry. Like the parents and grandparents of Jacob Kurtzberg and Stanley Leiber, from Austria and Romania respectively, Ben Grimm exists in a world where he’s constantly reminded that other people view him as grotesque and monstrous, reinforcing a deep discomfort in his own body—as, for centuries, from the Middle Ages onward, monstrous images of Jews pervaded European culture and were internalized, in turn, by Jews themselves.

As Sander Gilman details in his groundbreaking study The Jew’s Body (1991), Jewish bodies were routinely represented throughout Europe as stunted, misshapen, diseased, and weak. “[T]here is no category of supposed human beings which comes closer to the Orang-Utan than does a Polish Jew,” an 18th-century Bavarian intellectual declared,

covered from foot to head in filth, dirt and rags, covered in a type of black sack … their necks exposed, the color of a Black, their faces covered up to the eyes with a beard […] the hair turned and knotted as if they all suffered from the “plica polonica” [a dermatologic disease endemic to Eastern Europe].

Immersed in a culture in which such images were pervasive, Jews began to believe them too. “The Jew’s experience of his or her own body,” Gilman writes, “was so deeply impacted by anti-Semitic rhetoric that even when that body met the expectations for perfection in the community in which the Jew lived, the Jew experienced his or her body as flawed, diseased.” They were monsters, in a way, like Ben Grimm, who, no matter how many heroic deeds he performed, would always be just a Thing. “Maybe this is the real me!” he wondered at the end of one of Kirby and Lee’s most iconic stories, “This Man … This Monster!” from Fantastic Four #51. “Maybe Ben Grimm is nothin’ more than—a dream!”

In some ways too, the Thing is a kind of golem—Ben is a Jewish monster whose rocklike form resembles the hardened clay of the golem’s body. Golems were rampant in the New York Jewish zeitgeist in the 1920s. In 1921, when Jacob Kurtzberg was four years old, Paul Wegener’s film The Golem opened in New York City for a record-breaking 16-week run that ignited what one writer in a Yiddish newspaper would later call “a kind of golem-cult” in the Jewish community. In addition to Wegener’s film, there were at least two new stage productions of the golem legend in Yiddish theaters, including a musical version. Jewish audiences from the Lower East Side flocked to the opulent Criterion Theatre on Broadway to see the film, in a showing that included a live concert of Jewish music before the movie, a dance performance, a cartoon, and a Buster Keaton comedy afterward. So it’s tempting to imagine that those audiences might have included Benjamin and Rose Kurtzberg—and if they’d gone to a matinee, when tickets were half-price (50 cents), perhaps they brought their son Jacob too. And if Jacob had seen the film—or only heard his parents talk about it or about one of the stage productions inspired by the film—what did he think? How might its images have haunted him? Kirby, after all, loved movies and drew inspiration from them throughout his life.

In later years, long after Kirby and Lee’s run on Fantastic Four had ended, subsequent creative teams contrived stories in which Ben fought with or against (or both, as in typical Marvel battles) various golems, including one who starred in a short-lived series of his own as part of Marvel’s introduction of a host of monster titles in the mid-1970s.

If the Thing can be seen as a kind of golem, he echoes the legend in significant ways. A monstrous figure of great strength, he uses that strength, like the golem in the most familiar versions of the legend, to defend others. But like the golem too, his strength can be dangerous and difficult to control. In an 1847 version of the story by Leopold Wiesel, the clay giant runs wild on Shabbat, tearing up the Jewish quarter of Prague and disrupting the observance of the sabbath, when his creator, Rabbi Loew, forgets to erase the magic word that brought the clay giant to life. In another Yiddish version by Isaac Leib Peretz in 1893, the golem can’t stop killing after he has defeated the oppressors of the Jewish community, and the monster fills the streets of Prague with corpses. Similarly, in the early issues of Fantastic Four, the other members of the team worry about Ben’s bitterness and fear his strength. “Reed, how much more of this can we take!” Sue exclaimed in #2. “Sooner or later, the Thing will run amok and none of us will be able to stop him!”

Even after his character evolved into a kind of gruff uncle in the team’s family structure, the danger of the Thing going rogue never went away. He was turned against the others by the alchemist Diablo in #30 (1964), who promised to restore Ben Grimm’s human form. In another instance, he was stoked into a murderous rage—twice even, in two different storylines years apart—by the mind control devices of the Wizard, the leader of the Fantastic Four’s evil counterparts, the Frightful Four. When the Thing growls in rage at Reed in the climax of “The Brutal Betrayal of Ben Grimm!” in #41 (1965), it sounds like the Wizard’s “Id Machine” has only unlocked the emotions that have always been pent up inside Ben. “You did this to me, Richards!!” he says. “You turned me into somethin’ so ugly that they can only call me … a Thing!”

In epitomizing both the allure and the danger of strength, the Thing, like the golem, also evokes what Paul Breines, in his book Tough Jews: Political Fantasies and the Moral Dilemma of American Jewry (1990), calls a “Jewish ambivalence toward the world of bodies.” For Breines, this ambivalence is rooted in the long history of Jews as “a people largely, often completely, excluded from landownership, farming, hunting, and war—from much of the world of effective bodily activity.” Out of the “historic necessity” of this exclusion, “Jews made a virtue,” Breines says, “by constructing a remarkable culture of meekness, physical frailty, and gentleness.” And yet, over time, even within this culture of gentleness, there was still a yearning for strength, a desire expressed both in fantasies like golem stories and, ultimately, in the rise of Zionism as a political movement—which Breines identifies as a “decisive break with the gentle Jewish tradition.”

In a speech at the Second Zionist Congress in 1898, Max Nordau called for the transformation of “timid[,] wavering” European Jews through rigorous physical exercise in order to create “the long-lost muscular Judaism.” These new muscle Jews were needed, Nordau and others argued, to form a Jewish nation and colonize Palestine, which subsequent generations would accomplish over the course of the next century. But like the golem running wild and filling the streets of Prague with corpses, or the Thing exploding in rage and turning against his teammates, the strength exerted by nationalists and muscle Jews proved dangerous, becoming a force for domination and turning the children and grandchildren of oppressed European Jews into oppressors themselves—until, in our time, that strength would be used to occupy the West Bank and decimate Gaza in revenge for the horrors of October 7. In this long tension between Jewish gentleness and strength, Ben Grimm’s struggles to control his own monstrous power reflect an enduring divide in the Jewish soul.

Forty-one years after his introduction in Fantastic Four #1, in an August 2002 issue—“Remembrance of Things Past,” written by Karl Kesel and drawn by Stuart Immonen—the Thing would finally admit in the pages of a Marvel comic book that he was Jewish. In a story full of the kind of braided history that different creative teams over the years had added retroactively, the Thing goes back to his old neighborhood, Yancy Street, to return a Star of David pendant to a Jewish pawnbroker from whom a teenage Ben Grimm had stolen it in order to win his membership in the Yancy Street Gang (a group of mostly unseen background characters, first introduced in the earliest issues, who regularly tormented Ben with practical jokes). But when the pawnbroker, Mr. Sheckerberg, is injured on the sidelines of a battle between the Thing and an entirely forgettable supervillain who is forcing the Yancy Street businesses to pay protection money, the Thing is helpless, once again a prisoner of his own monstrous form. “Me givin’ him CPR could crush him …” Ben says, and so, hesitantly at first—“Lessee … Been a while …” he admits—he prays instead, reciting the words of the Shema, that central prayer to all Jewish services.

When Sheckerberg recovers and asks if Ben is “ashamed” of his identity—“All these years in the news, they never mention you’re Jewish,” the pawnbroker says—Ben’s response is telling, as he seems to acknowledge, in a sideways fashion, the long history of depicting Jewish bodies as monstrous. “It’s just … I don’t talk it up, is all,” he says. “Figure there’s enough trouble in the world without people thinkin’ Jews are all monsters like me.” In later issues, other creators would build on his Jewish identity. In 2006, the Thing would celebrate his bar mitzvah, 13 years—in story time, that is—after being transformed into a monster. And in a 2018 issue, he would marry his blind girlfriend Alicia in a Jewish ceremony, in which he was pictured on the cover as Kirby had drawn him for that 1975 Hanukkah card, in a coat and tie, wearing a yarmulke and prayer shawl.

That the company now known as Marvel Entertainment would allow its comics line in 2002 to publish a story in which one of its signature characters would be canonically identified as Jewish was only another routine indication of how much American culture and its tolerance for diversity had changed since Jacob Kurtzberg and Stanley Leiber had come of age. “In the ’40s, the best thing to be was an Anglo-Saxon Protestant,” Kirby said in a 1978 interview with a French doctoral student writing her dissertation on his work. “Comics have to reflect the society in general,” and “on the level that we admired,” he said, that society “was Anglo-Saxon. Everybody else was an immigrant.”

But even then, 24 years before the Thing would come out as Jewish in a Marvel comic, Kirby, always a futurist, seemed to sense the changes that were coming. “Now we’ve learned more about people,” he continued. “We’ve learned about a variety of people. […] We see a lot to be admired in everybody really. I think the common man is coming into his own, and it’s going to reflect more in comics than [in] the other mediums.” In that future Kirby imagined, there would be no need anymore for the old masks, for the lies about who you really were and what your story was really about. Jack Kirby’s Jewish Thing could reveal his true identity to the world at last.