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Sunday, August 07, 2022 

Leftist Jewish lawyer conceives superhero fare

YnetNews published a JTA interview with a comics writer and law firm employee named Daniel Kalban, who's quite a far-left ideologue on Twitter, and has recently developed a GN titled American Dreams, which spotlights a Jewish protagonist operating in the early 20th century:
Daniel Kalban is a 33-year-old law firm assistant who lives in Flatbush, Brooklyn. But when he’s not working his day job, he moonlights as a comic book writer, in a sort of double-life scenario that’s reminiscent of the caped crusaders he’s invented.

In 2016, Kalban created American Dreams, a comic book series centered on Jake Gold, a Jewish New Yorker in 1900 who, thanks to “a Thomas Edison experiment gone awry,” gains the ability to fly, as well as super strength to fight monstrous antisemites and other bad guys.

“I was dozing off listening to the score of ‘Ragtime’ the musical,” Kalban told the New York Jewish Week about his inspiration. “I was in a daze, and I was wondering what if superheroes like Batman and Robin were in that same tumultuous time period.”

Jewishness permeates the entire American Dreams storyline — the protagonist, who comes to be known as Liberty, escaped the pogroms in Russia, for example, and now works at a sweatshop in the Lower East Side. As a superhero, he fights a “bruiser” named Amalek, a biblical enemy of the Israelites. As he makes his way through turn-of-the-20th-century New York, he works for legendary Jewish magician Harry Houdini and is encouraged by Jewish activist and anarchist Emma Goldman to use his powers for good.
I'd like to think this is a project to admire. But Kalban's conduct online, including statements he made about Islam in the past, dampen whatever impact he presumably wants this comic to have. Interestingly enough, the article also says:
The superhero Liberty is similar to the writer in that he’s “not the most observant Jew in the world, but he’s proud of being Jewish,” he said. Kalban was raised Reform in Brooklyn and went to Hebrew school.
Well. So his default religion was the Reform sect, which has been notoriously anti-Israel for many years. No wonder he's got such peculiar double-standards, though what's really dismaying is the crude inflammatory dialect he's employed in his social media writing whenever he talks about politics. That's why it's difficult to support such a guy's products, if that's the way he's going to go about his business.

Even now, Kalban continues to make politically charged statements on Twitter, and it goes so far as the following: Hmm, look how he's following suit of countless other PC advocates, refusing to reference the now disgraced actor Miller by his biological gender. And he condones a pro-abortion position too, simultaneously using it as an excuse to attack conservatives, along with any European leaders he despises, here being Hungary's premier. If there's no belief in defending life and arguing in favor of preserving it, what's the point of his GN, American Dreams? And why no concern over left-wing vandals attacking pregnancy centers after the SCOTUS reversal of Roe vs. Wade?

I'm sure the premise of Kalban's GN has potential. But his political conduct on social media makes him unendurable, and spoils whatever points he's trying to make in American Dreams. A real shame he's being so heated about conservatives, and only wants to see them as inherently evil, because what if it turns out the GN contains metaphors for right-wingers? That'd hardly be doing any favors.

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About me

  • I'm Avi Green
  • From Jerusalem, Israel
  • I was born in Pennsylvania in 1974, and moved to Israel in 1983. I also enjoyed reading a lot of comics when I was young, the first being Fantastic Four. I maintain a strong belief in the public's right to knowledge and accuracy in facts. I like to think of myself as a conservative-style version of Clark Kent. I don't expect to be perfect at the job, but I do my best.
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