Is this the reason why DC spat on the Silver Age Atom?
Published by Avi Green on Thursday, December 14, 2006 at 8:11 AM.
If this article in The Jewish Week has anything to it, then one could certainly argue that DC may have been more discriminatory than one would think:
In fact, as Bob Rozakis once said on Silver Bullet when he was still writing for them:
If anyone argues that there's no definite way to tell if these suggestions written in the yesteryear had anything direct to do with DC's desecrations, you'd certainly be right for now. But if they did do it for the reasons I sadly suspect, I am very angry, and should be.
While I'm at it, I do have a most distubing sentence from The Forward, that tells a little bit about where Brad Meltzer may stand:
Meltzer does not represent people of my standing, and if he really did do this out of the motives I suspect, that's one more reason for me to look down upon him in disdain.
In “Marvel Comics Holiday Special” (1993), green-haired, red Spandex-clad superhero Doc Samson returns to his childhood yeshiva to tell the story of Chanukah to the school’s young Jewish students. In “Justice League of America” No. 188 (1981), the tiniest Jewish superhero, the Atom, celebrates Chanukah with his superhero friends and experiences his Chanukah miracle: when the team’s life-support system fails, the oxygen supply lasts long enough to make the repairs that save them. Chanukah is indeed a time for superheroes.I don't know if Ray Palmer (and Jean Loring) has ever truly been identified as Jewish (Al Rothstein, Nuklon/Atom Smasher of Infinity Inc. and JSA has), though as this item from the Orthodox Union says:
From DC’s largest hero, to the smallest: the Atom may be Jewish. Sure, he was married in a church, but in Justice League of America #188 he says that he is not familiar with the Chanukah story because he is “not very religious.” Isn’t that an odd thing to say if you’re not Jewish? (As a side note, Nuklon, now known as Atom Smasher, protege of the Golden Age Atom is clearly Jewish. Could the whole Atom dynasty be Jewish?)Even so, there's still no telling if Ray Palmer is really Jewish, but, there still may be something to it, and, I can't help but wonder if that has anything to do with their offing/villification/humiliation. Could it?
In fact, as Bob Rozakis once said on Silver Bullet when he was still writing for them:
Jean Loring, the Atom's girl friend -- named after Julius Schwartz's wife, Jean Ordwein.I can certainly say that by villifying Jean, Meltzer and company at DC insulted the wife of a very fine fellow who preceded them, that's for sure!
If anyone argues that there's no definite way to tell if these suggestions written in the yesteryear had anything direct to do with DC's desecrations, you'd certainly be right for now. But if they did do it for the reasons I sadly suspect, I am very angry, and should be.
While I'm at it, I do have a most distubing sentence from The Forward, that tells a little bit about where Brad Meltzer may stand:
As a Jewish writer, Meltzer says that his own cultural heritage comes into play, not only in "Identity Crisis" but in all his works, as well.See this here? This helped reinforce my suspicions that, in addition to being an allegorical piece of anti-Americanism (and Meltzer pretty much confirmed it in an interview with the Colorado Springs Gazette last year), it could be an allegorical form of anti-Israelism too, and that Meltzer could be of standing similar to that of Tony Kushner. I once wrote to a Jewish radio editors group about that part, and while I don't know if they ever did any research on it, they certainly thanked me for it.
Meltzer does not represent people of my standing, and if he really did do this out of the motives I suspect, that's one more reason for me to look down upon him in disdain.
