The Skirball Cultural Center has awarded the 2024–2025 Howard I. Friedman Memorial Graduate Essay Prize (The Friedman Prize) to Andrew Fogel for his essay, "Superman's Jaw." 

In his essay, Dr. Fogel challenges the view of Superman being Jewish using memoranda, popular journalism and literature, fanzines, a Superman ghost artist’s master’s thesis, Jerry Siegel’s unpublished memoir, photographs, comic art, children’s costumes, stand-up comedy, and pseudoscientific discourse of the male body to illustrate the fraught historical reality that the Jewish inventors rendered superheroes as WASPs, the vaunted religioracial identity.

As the winning entry in this nationwide competition, Fogel has received the prize of $5,000 and will be recognized in the Skirball's Oasis magazine. He will also be recognized at a public program on May 6, 2025, featuring Skirball Rabbi in Residence, Beau Shapiro.

"Superman’s eighty-seven-year history in comic books, comic strips, movie serials, television shows, and motion pictures bear responsibility for imparting an Anglo-Saxon image of manhood."

—Andrew Fogel, "Superman's Jaw"

On April 28, 2017, President Donald J. Trump signed Proclamation 9596 in anticipation of Jewish American Heritage Month. The document celebrated Jewish contributions to “American society and culture,” including music, movies, and even comic books. “American Jews,” it declared, “brought us our greatest superheroes—Captain America, Superman, and Batman.” Jewish cartoonists may have invented the superhero genre and its beloved defenders of democracy, but they did not resemble their broad-shouldered, sleek-nosed, and steel-jawed creations. This look signifying masculinity and heroism that movie stars and superheroes have portrayed since the 1930s is not “universal” but deeply rooted in ideas of white Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) superiority.

Understanding the significance of the superhero’s muscular body and picturesque face requires turning our attention to twentieth-century expressions of race science. Such skewed notions of manliness that focused on physique as well as nose and jaw shape are prominent in Dr. William H. Sheldon’s writings on constitutional psychology.

Sheldon, who graduated from the University of Chicago with a PhD in psychology in 1925 and a medical degree eight years later, preached the idea of body as destiny. He developed a system of analyzing the human body called “somatotyping.” His theory measured and sorted individuals into three distinct categories: endomorph, mesomorph, and ectomorph. Everyone possessed levels of each somatotype ranging from 1 to 7 to formulate a three-digit identity. Sheldon’s classification praised those born with a muscular shape (mesomorph) but demeaned the obese (endomorph) and thin (ectomorph). These body types held corresponding temperaments: gastronomic (viscerotonia), athletic (somatotonia), and scholastic (cerebrotonia). His morphological scheme correlated physique with character. Heredity, in other words, predicted body type as well as personality. Sander L. Gilman, cultural historian of medicine and representations of bodily difference, artfully summarizes Sheldon’s taxonomy: “You are what your body says you are.”

Sheldon obsessed over the shapes of the chin, nose, and head, which are indicators of manliness. In his four tomes published between 1940 and 1954, the square face and streamlined nose epitomizes not just beauty but WASP masculinity and racial superiority. Sheldon locates this facial shape in the 172 pattern that he terms the “masculine ideal.” The favored configuration indicates a predominance of mesomorphy and a slightly higher degree of ectomorphy over endomorphy. Sheldon’s anatomical illustration in The Varieties of Human Physique is striking: “The 172 has a broad, square face, with extremely powerful, square jaw, and with firm, sharp, straight muscle lines.” His 1940 text continues to describe the mighty mesomorph, “The nose is long and straight, with a strong high bridge. The head gives the impression of being almost cubical.”

The constitutional psychologist found proof for his notion of Anglo-Saxon manhood in the steel-jawed heroes of the newspaper comic strips. Tarzan, Buck Rogers, and Popeye began this pattern in 1929. Sheldon references these macho men as the immaculate body type. He writes, “The perfect hero for the serial action-thriller of the cinema or of the newspaper cartoon is the 172.” Tarzan, Dick Tracy, Smilin’ Jack, Li’l Abner, Superman “and so on, all are fine 172’s,” he contends. Indicating a synergy between the cartoonists’ designs and his morphology, Sheldon declares, “Their creators may intuitively sense and portray the correlations with which we are here more objectively and prosaically concerned.” The Varieties of Temperament, Sheldon’s second treatise on the topic published two years later, repeats the 172 connection to comic strip heroes. Nevertheless, he reclassifies Superman as a 272, a huskier variation in his 1954 book Atlas of Men, the final publication in the series that is truly a gallery of naked men.

Sheldon’s third installment of biological determinism left no doubt of his bigoted views. The Varieties of Delinquent Youth eviscerates black, mixed race, and “lesser stock” white people with dehumanizing word choices like “dog,” “flea,” “mongrel,” “monkey,” and “vermin.” Jewish people are clannish and have shrill voices. His favorite word to describe the physiology of these races is “defective.” The text also fancies the adjectives “lazy” or “lethargic” for non-WASPs. Sheldon especially bombards black people with such language, whether about their work ethic or how they walked. He rarely demeans any of his subjects whose parents have English ancestry.

The book’s aim is to thwart “careless reproduction,” which he calls “our most deadly enemy.” It employs Boston area young men aged fifteen to twenty-one and classified as delinquent by Massachusetts officials to rationalize his racial logic. Like his other works, it identifies Anglo-Saxon anatomy and temperament as the province of the mesomorph. Sheldon acknowledges that non-WASP youths may possess the desirable chin or square face and criticizes those without it. This text aside, virtually all his images were of white people and probably Protestants to replicate his elitist view of the Old Stock as the “appropriate” American citizen. Only 10 percent of Sheldon’s 4,000-sample for his 1940 study were Jewish. Choosing college students as the data pool reflected his position in higher education as well as his racism and the antisemitic quota system.

Those familiar with Sheldon’s research consider him to be one of the greatest villains of eugenic thought in America. His writings, which repackage earlier racist anthropology of faces and skulls as new science and emphasize racial breeds, are a treasure trove of bigotry. Regrettably, Sheldon’s ideas linger online. Images of his three physiques and their descriptions are plastered all over the internet as legitimate science. Nutritionists and personal trainers are gaga over his debunked morphology that body-shamed those with nonathletic frames.

Superman’s architects are also part of this story. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, two socially awkward Jewish teenagers from Cleveland with a penchant for science fiction magazines, action-adventure movies, dime novels, and comic strips, invented the first superhero in 1934. Four years later, Superman debuted in the inaugural June 1938 issue of Action Comics. The pair created a new genre and inspired an entire industry that has conveyed a singular vision, grounded in race science, of the ideal man’s face and body.

Given the cartoonists’ background and faith, there is a pervasive belief among fans, industry insiders, popular authors, and scholars that Superman is secretly Jewish. The “Judeocentric” theory is difficult to embrace, however. Superman may be an interstellar immigrant but his adopted identity, agrarian upbringing, facial features, and muscular body scream Protestant: the ideal American type. Siegel and Shuster projected the prototypical image of a square-jawed “all-American” hero. Superman and his imitators are WASPs, which reflected their creators’ socioeconomic aspirations and discomfort with their own Jewish and immigrant backgrounds as well as the pressure to conform to American conventions.

The power structure in American society incentivized mass media to reinforce the belief of WASP primacy. How Writers Perpetuate Stereotypes, a pamphlet from 1945, documented the expectation of an Anglo-Saxon hero. The “comic book producers” told Columbia University investigators “that the heroes in the stories must be American,” meaning WASP. An unnamed representative of the industry even said, “‘We are interested in circulation primarily, and hence we must give what the public wants to get. Can you imagine a hero named Cohen?’”

Selling their fiction to mainstream America required venerating Anglo-Saxonism. To carve out a good living, Jewish comic book creators and publishers reinforced a racial hierarchy that marginalized themselves. Not until the civil rights movement could the configuration of the WASP hero be challenged. And today overtly Jewish heroes are still sparse.

Jewish cartoonist Will Eisner divulged the uncomfortable truth. He told The Jewish News of Detroit in 1989 that he and his contemporaries created “‘Aryan characters … with non-Jewish names like Bruce Wayne, Clark Kent and … Denny Colt’” and “‘were trying to ‘pass’” with their fiction. Eisner admitted to the fanzine Comic Book Marketplace in 2004 that “the characters we made were Gentile.” Amending his initial description of racial identity, Eisner declared, “All the characters that were created by Jewish cartoonists were WASPs.”

Back in 1977, New York Daily News journalist Pete Hamill realized the disconnect between the Jewish inventors and their WASP creations as well as the composition of their make-believe world. He referred to Christopher Reeve’s upcoming portrayal of Superman as “Supergoy.” Hamill had an epiphany about racial representation in the superhero genre during the production of Superman: The Movie. “And when I looked at Reeve again it all came clear to me,” he wrote. “Metropolis was Protestant. The city was invented by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster almost 40 years ago, but it was Protestant. And Superman/Clark Kent was a terminal Protestant.” Hamill grasped that this issue of exclusion originated in the pages of the comic books that he grew up reading in the 1940s. “There were no Jews in Metropolis, no Greeks, Irish, Italians, no blacks, no Latinos. Poor dumb Superman had to live in the most boring city in the universe,” he bellowed. Hamill even grumbled at Superman’s “perfection” without making the racial connection: “He had pounds of muscle. He had a straight nose, a good chin, blue hair.”

Journalist Jeff Salamon, by contrast, viewed Superman as the embodiment of Max Nordau’s muscular Judaism. Yet, his 1992 article for The Village Voice highlighted the Jewish face and body as inferior to the Nordic ideal. “[T]he world’s most famous muscle Jew” has “blue eyes and the cutest little nose.” The Man of Steel, he announced, is “a Greco-Aryan icon.” Salamon may have claimed Superman as Jewish, but his description showed that the superhero physique is Gentile. Ideas of masculinity found in Greco-Roman sculpture and Aryan mythology inspired the Jewish cartoonists. Salamon, nonetheless, provided a telling analysis that the comics medium is rife with prejudice and biological criminality. “In comics, even when ethnicity is not an explicit issue, good and evil are almost always written on the face—it is one of the few mediums left in which morphology is destiny.” 

Two years before Sheldon’s work appeared, Siegel and Shuster pictured his pseudoscience of the mesomorph. Superman’s cubical head encapsulates the transatlantic racial thinking of the period. So important was this attribute to the character that Siegel and Shuster prohibited their Cleveland art studio ghost artists, who helped meet consumer demand and the unforgiving production deadlines, from drawing it, restricting the entire face to Shuster. This limitation was to ensure that Superman always looked like Superman, which was Anglo-Saxon, though Siegel and Shuster never admitted it. Their interest in controlling Superman’s face demonstrates that race was central to their concerns. They cared more about consistency with Superman’s countenance than his costume, arguably the most identifiable feature of the superhero genre and commercial element of the character.

“Nobody but Shuster … is allowed to draw Superman’s facial expressions,” The Saturday Evening Post reported in 1941. Hired hand Paul Henry Cassidy corroborated this rule the following year in his master’s thesis on the cartooning profession. Besides highlighting the general importance of characters’ heads and faces in comics, he explains that his “work included inking everything except the faces of the principal characters of the SUPERMAN strip.” These examples expressed different language but show that Superman’s architects were attuned to the racial dynamic of who a hero is and how he is supposed to look: A WASP with an authoritative chin and attractive nose.

Later in life, Siegel and Shuster elaborated on their restriction in interviews. In their minds, Superman’s face was a spiritual expression of his inner qualities and heroism. Siegel once boasted that Shuster “got something almost mystical in his faces I don’t think anyone else has ever caught since.” Shuster similarly recalled in the fanzine Nemo: The Classic Comics Library, “I did all the faces of Superman, every one of them—which was very tedious, because Jerry insisted (and I agreed with him) that there was nobody else that could really catch the spirit, the feeling, of Superman.” Make no mistake this transcendent ambiance was Anglo-Saxonness.

Siegel, who is not known to be an artist, conveyed this message through the face in his giveaways for fans. Take for example the signed drawing he gifted fellow serviceman Sol Friedman days after arriving in Hawaii. Siegel’s 1944 sketch for Friedman rendered the Man of Steel’s face in left profile with a long, high-bridged nose and protruding chin, just as Sheldon describes the 172. The line work on Superman’s face, especially his beak and jaw, was heavy. The hero’s formidable lower mandible cast a shadow over his neck. Such shading accentuated the size, importance, and power of Superman’s jaw. Siegel drew Superman’s countenance the same way on the back of the wine menu for The Lotus, a Chinese cuisine restaurant in Washington, DC. He probably created the undated artwork in 1978 following the premiere of Superman: The Movie.

Siegel internalized Sheldon’s ideas, which were also present in the cultural imagination. Superman’s writer felt that that his face, jawline, and body was unappealing to women. His unpublished 1978 memoir states, “I hadn’t asked for the face or physique I was born with. I had not sculpted my nose, or fashioned my chin, or decided how broad my shoulders would be, or how tall I would become.” His own words reveal that he desired the features of the idealized racial type, which was Anglo-Saxon. 

Superman guaranteed attention, and sketching him was Shuster’s tried and tested crowdpleaser. The southpaw’s personalized artwork positioned the Man of Steel in such a way to showcase the character’s bulging chest and exceptional chin. Newspaper articles consistently portrayed him drawing Superman from this perspective. Like Siegel, he depicted the same bold jawline complete with dramatic shadow as an expression of Anglo-Saxon masculinity.

Many more of these lantern-jawed illustrations reside in private hands. Online auctions provide a glimpse into the high-priced world of collecting and Siegel and Shuster’s exaggerated Anglo-Saxon presentation of Superman.

When they created the Man of Steel as nineteen-year-olds, misguided ideas of race and the body dominated the American consciousness. Comic strips conveyed the belief that mousy men had recessed chins while adventurers possessed fierce jaws. Caspar Milquetoast and Tarzan are two examples of the jaw shape divide between effeminacy and masculinity. “The Timid Soul” became an emblem of cowardliness in the American imagination, even bequeathing a new word: milquetoast. The emasculating adjective chinless is further evidence of this biological thinking. Domesticated husband Andy Gump did not even have a lower mandible.

Popular literature affirmed the new trend of manhood. Historian Tom Pendergast explains, “And a new subgenre of fiction began to appear that told stories of working-class men, usually drawn with bare chests and jutting chins, whose courage saved the life of some weaker man in a more powerful position.” Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich stated in the inaugural 1933 issue, to describe the content and direction of the magazine, “[W]e’re leading with the chin.” Superman’s creators and Sheldon drew from the cultural milieu.

Shuster’s replacement overemphasized the design to the dismay of his editor. Mort Weisinger, known for his grouchy demeanor, reportedly disliked the heavy “jaw line [sic] that Wayne Boring had put on Superman.” Boring worked as a ghost artist in Siegel and Shuster’s studio like Cassidy but was later cajoled to New York by management, appointed Shuster’s understudy, and eventually assigned nearly all Superman illustration duties in 1948. Sheldon’s modification of Superman in 1954 from the 172 to 272 type probably reflected this change in artist. Boring’s Man of Steel gained a bigger chest and legs and marked the beginning of a turn toward hypermuscular superheroes in comics and later the movies with British actor Henry Cavill, who likewise has the favored facial aesthetic.

Cartoonist Curt Swan is, nonetheless, the prime example for articulating the jaw’s importance. He replaced Boring as Superman’s main artist in the late 1950s. Swan’s instructions on how to draw Superman and Clark Kent captured Sheldon’s beliefs on the structure of the ideal man’s head, face, and jaw. When Sheldon uses the words “square” and “cube” as geometrical markers for the head, he is referencing the profile view. Swan, however, showed that the straight-ahead perspective renders Superman’s head as a rectangle. Moreover, Swan’s Jekyll and Hyde composite of the hero’s face unmistakably illustrated the unscientific notions of effeminacy and masculinity by jaw shape. Kent’s chin is slightly rounded while the Man of Steel’s is angled. In the festschrift Superman at Fifty! he writes, “When I drew Clark Kent … I deliberately softened his features, made them less angular than Superman’s. I wanted him to appear more meek.” According to the twisted logic of modern facial typology, Kent’s oval-like face signifies sissiness. And like Shuster, he imparts a distinctive shadow around Superman’s jawbone.

To update his appeal in the 1970s when Marvel Comics dominated sales with their insecure and dysfunctional superheroes like Spider-Man and the Fantastic Four, Superman’s alter ego received a makeover in GQ. The hairstylist gave Clark Kent a wig and fake muttonchops and remarked while combing his hair differently: “A SHAPE TO RELIEVE THE SQUARENESS OF THE FACE!”

Superman Halloween costumes even modeled the idea to children. The 1976 version manufactured by Ben Cooper, Inc. included an eyeless plastic face mask of the character with his characteristic chin and blue-black hair. The message was that even if you wore the uniform with its unmistakable “S” symbol and cape, you could only be Superman with the “proper” countenance. Comedian Jerry Seinfeld began joking about the outfit in his stand-up as early as 1994. He later shared his childhood experience of dressing up as Superman on Halloween in his HBO special “I’m Telling You For The Last Time:” Live on Broadway. His lengthy routine chided the inability to breathe and crappy design of the mask, which used the cheapest staple to attach the junky rubber band. Seinfeld took literary license with his story because the version he would have worn in the 1960s included a red domino mask. Most baby boomers, who trick-or-treated as the Man of Steel before 1976, did not wear the peculiar eye mask. They knew better—Superman does not conceal his face. Regardless, Seinfeld’s satire resonated with parents who bought their kids the 1992 reproduction by Collegeville and the 1993 remodel by Rubie’s Costume Co., Inc. Gen Xers and millennials, in contrast, wore the Superman face mask because it came in the box, but it was an uncomfortable experience and the rubber band often broke midway through Halloween night, as Seinfeld quipped. Rubies II LLC produced an updated version of the 1993 edition in 2022 for adults to relive their childhood.

For superfan Herbert Chavez, dressing up as Superman one night a year was not enough. He went straight for the knife to physically become his idol. The Filipino man expressed his fondness for Superman to the extreme. He voluntarily underwent at least twenty-three plastic surgeries to resemble the character. Facial augmentation delivered the prognathous jaw and cleft chin while contacts supplied sapphire eyes. His transmogrifying choices particularly bewitched the British tabloids. They fixated on him during the second decade of the twenty-first century. One scholar viewed his behavior, from afar, as body dysmorphic disorder.

A single gesture encapsulates the importance of Superman’s jaw. When Clark Kent removes his spectacles, it signals the switch from brainy to brawny. Nearly all Superman actors have dramatized the transition between identities with the accessory. The motion, often downward, draws viewers’ attention from the eyes to the chin. Tyler Hoechlin, for instance, accentuated the movement in the television series Superman & Lois. During a flashback, Kent reveals his identity to Lois Lane’s father Sam by removing his glasses slowly as the camera zooms in to show the hero’s face and eyewear façade.

Superman’s eighty-seven-year history in comic books, comic strips, movie serials, television shows, and motion pictures bear responsibility for imparting an Anglo-Saxon image of manhood. The latest iteration of Superman will appear in theaters in July. Director James Gunn cast the square-jawed David Corenswet, who is half-Jewish, as the Man of Steel in his reboot Superman. Fanfare around the movie sparked a widespread declaration of Corenswet as a “Jewish superhero” and reenergized the belief that Superman is a thinly veiled Jewish champion created by two Jewish cartoonists during the Depression. Having Corenswet play Superman is important because representation matters. Modern cinema could finally do what the creators of these characters could not: depict themselves.

Andrew Fogel is a historian of popular culture whose research and writing explores the place of superheroes in the everyday world and the power they hold over the American imagination for both kids and adults. He completed his PhD at Purdue University and will be the Visiting Scholar at the Center for Jewish History this fall.

The Howard I. Friedman Memorial Graduate Essay Prize and related programs are made possible by generous support from the following donors:

Pamela and Jeffrey Balton
Howard Bernstein
Alyce and Philip de Toledo
The Friedman Family
Marcie and Cliff Goldstein
Dennis Holt
The Lenart Art Education Foundation
Jessie Kornberg and Aaron Lowenstein
Madeline and Bruce Ramer
May and Richard Ziman