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Jack Kirby finally gets his corner of the city that made him super
Jack Kirby Way is located at the intersection of Essex and Delancey Street and at the crossroads of a created universe.
More prosaically, it shares a corner with a McDonald’s and a halal truck. Across the street is the subway stop and the old, permanently closed Essex Street Market building from whence Levy’s sold its famous frankfurters. If you cross Delancey, you reach the new Essex Market, boasting world cuisines and the singular hybrid food of macaroni-and-cheese pancakes at Shopsins General Store.
A few blocks away: Forget it, Jack, it’s Chinatown. But in this small patch of the world, Jacob Kurtzberg came of age amid the pushcarts and street melees he documented in his graphic story Street Code and reimagined in Yancy Street, the home turf of the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grim.
“You became a toreador at an early age, just dodging ice wagons,” Kirby, born on 147 Essex, later recalled, not disguising his fear of “the ghetto,” and his desire to break free from a world that all but required membership in a street gang to survive.
On May 11, Kirby made a homecoming nonetheless. Dozens, many in costume, gathered to witness the dedication of the street that now bears his name. The word on everyone’s lips: “overdue.”
“I think everyone on Earth at this point knows something Jack Kirby made without knowing the name,” said Alex Baglio, dressed in the original, Kirby-designed costume of Captain America’s sidekick Bucky Barnes.
For years, devotees of King Kirby have had to settle for hints of his massive influence in Marvel’s new age of mass appeal — a forgettable Eternals film here, an homage to his art there.
“I was just excited by the wall painting in the back of Thor: Ragnarok; it took so little for me to be happy,” said Baglio, there with his coworker Kris Nedelka, who was dressed like Captain America.
More professional cosplayers were also in attendance; the Thing kicked off the occasion with the cry of “it’s clobberin’ time.” (Another, amateur Thing was so committed to character he kept his mask on, rendering his interview inaudible.)
The naming was more than symbolic recognition. For many, it was justice for a creator whose contributions were eclipsed, and arguably erased, by his creative partner and boss, the writer and editor Stan Lee, with whom he developed the Fantastic Four, X-Men, Black Panther and Thor, to name just a few.
Marvel has been slow to give him his full credit even after it exploded into a multibillion dollar multimedia franchise over a decade after Kirby’s 1994 death. (Lee, who wrote the credits on the comics, had a way of fudging exactly who had what idea.)
The effort to get Kirby his street cred due — there’s a Stan Lee Way in Lee’s old neighborhood in the Bronx — was fan-driven, following an earlier, one-day renaming at the same intersection in advance of last summer’s film Fantastic Four: First Steps.
“The street naming on July 9, 2025, what was meant as a homage and was done with full hearts, struck me as almost an injustice, because Jack Kirby deserved the street name in perpetuity,” said Roy Schwartz, a comic historian and Forward contributor who spearheaded the renaming effort.
It took the help of council member Chris Marte, who spoke movingly of Kirby’s origins and how they mirrored his own.
“His story is more than just the story of an incredibly influential comic book artist. His story is the story of the Lower East Side,” Marte said.
Both men were the children of immigrants (Kirby’s from Galicia, Marte’s the Dominican Republic) and garment factory workers. Both are alumni of PS 20. Both went to the Henry Street Settlement — in Kirby’s day, the Boys Brotherhood Republic — to escape their rough neighborhood.
A key difference: Kirby left. But never in his imagination, or arguably, his ethics.
The subtext of the ceremony, like the very intersection itself, was very Jewish.
Former president of DC Comics Paul Levitz remarked “the reason he’s Jack Kirby and not Jacob Kurtzberg is the name Jacob Kurtzberg would have been an anchor holding him down from doing what he dreamed and what he wanted to do.” (In 1990, when Kirby was asked if he changed his name because antisemitism was prevalent at the time, he said “Yes. A lot of it… And it hasn’t changed.”)
Kirby’s youngest granddaughter, Jillian, explained how his “acts of mitzvah” inspired her nonprofit Kirby4Heroes, which helps comic book workers in financial and medical need. Keeping with the theme, she read a letter from her father, Kirby’s son, Neal, who described his first visit to his dad’s neighborhood, for a cousin’s bar mitzvah, in 1962.
The service was in an Orthodox shul, conducted in Yiddish, English and Hebrew. Afterwards there was a kiddush in the foyer. Neal watched as his father, seeing an elderly man at the door of the temple, got up, took the man by the arm to an empty table, filled a platter with food and brought it to him without exchanging a word.
“I didn’t realize it then as a 14 year old, but the stereotype of the Lower East Side producing nothing but tough guys was a myth,” Kirby wrote. “When you grow up and every family is as poor as yours, and your friends and enemies alike are as poor as you are, I believe that breeds a compassion and empathy that most of us cannot understand. When you hear the expression that someone is in the same boat as you, in the case of the Lower East Side immigrant community, it probably was literally true.”
The neighborhood, largely Asian and Latino, looks different now— though a few kippot were in the crowd, along with a crew of Yeshiva boys who passed by — but the tribute, Jillian Kirby hoped, would continue to inspire, even as the family now lives on the West Coast.
With the move to Southern California in December 1968, Kirby’s creative life continued, and arguably became more Jewish. As an exhibit at the American Jewish Historical Society, coinciding with the naming, notes, it was in his California era that Kirby developed his New Gods series for DC.
“Even the New Gods, which is the space opera, like warring gods and faraway planets, all the bad guys are based on Nazi archetypes, and all the good guys are based on Jewish archetypes,” Schwartz said.
The Kirbys joined Temple Etz Chaim in Thousand Oaks, and Kirby made personal art — on display at the Center for Jewish History — of God, Jacob wrestling the angel and Joshua at the battle of Jericho. They are replete with Kirby’s signature “krackles” of negative space and the sci-fi piping he drew into characters like Galactus.
Jack was a family man; he and his wife Rosalind (Roz) hosted the Passover Seders. His granddaughter Tracy told me they hid the afikomen in the exact same spot every year: inside the piano bench. For Hanukkah, he sent a greeting card featuring the Thing with a kippah and siddur, on view at the AJHS exhibit.
Daniel Greenberg arrived early to the show, there in part to scope out evidence of Kirby’s neglected writing and story credits on his comics with Stan Lee.
“Jack Kirby’s place in history was stolen by a guy named Stan Lee,” said Greenberg, who is involved with a social media campaign to recognize Kirby as the primary author of his collaborations with Lee.
There are hints that the narrative is now breaking in Kirby’s favor in the years since Lee’s passing and the end of his cameos in the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
Fantastic Four: First Steps seemed to acknowledge Kirby’s pivotal role in the Marvel Universe, calling the world in which it takes place Earth-828 and explicitly acknowledging the origin of that number: Kirby’s birthday of Aug. 28.
The film also follows Ben Grimm — Kirby’s not-so-secret avatar — to Yancy St. where he meets a Hebrew school teacher named Rachel Rozman (Roz, no doubt a tribute to Kirby’s wife) and spends some time bearded and in shul.
A small but scrappy film crew was at the renaming, gathering footage for a documentary on Kirby. But real awareness starts at home.
“The city is recognizing that the city itself owes something to comics and that the city is a key player in comic books,” said Miriam Mora, a historian of American immigration, who sported X-Men earrings at the dedication.
“It’s not just this corner on the Fantastic Four, and it’s not just comics creators like Kirby, who grew up right here, it’s comics creators who grew up in Cleveland who still place their comics in New York City. It’s comic creators who grew up in San Diego, and still set their comics in New York, because there’s something magical about this space, and it’s where heroes come from.”
Curiously, a benediction was offered, just before the green paper covering was tugged away to reveal the bright new signage, not by a rabbi, but a reverend. Perhaps that speaks not only to the changed character of the neighborhood, but to the nature of Kirby’s universal appeal.
While Neal Kirby, due to health issues, couldn’t be there in person to see his father honored, he made the case for the neighborhood’s role in shaping Kirby’s life’s work.
“If you examine my father’s characters and you peel away the muscles, peel away the sinew and peel away the superpowers, you are left with a character of compassion, tolerance and empathy for his fellow man,” he wrote. “I believe that is the true legacy of being born and raised on the Lower East Side.”
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Trump urges Iran to make a deal after Iran fires missiles at Israel for first time in 2 months
(JTA) — Iran fired multiple barrages of missiles toward northern Israel on Sunday night local time, in the first direct fire from Iran on Israel since early April.
No one was immediately reported injured in the barrages, according to Israeli media, and the Israeli military said it shot down all the missiles aimed at the country on Sunday night.
The attack came hours after a stabbing attack by an Israeli Arab on Jews in central Israel killed one person and left several others injured.
The Iran salvo added to the turmoil for Israelis living in the north, who have been under constant fire from Iran’s proxy Hezbollah in Lebanon, and upsetting an uneasy quiet in the rest of the country. Schools across Israel will be closed on Monday.
Iranian officials said the barrage was a response to Israel’s strike earlier Sunday on a Hezbollah installation in the suburbs of Beirut, which the Israeli army said targeted a command center used to direct attacks on its troops.
Hezbollah last week rejected a U.S.-brokered ceasefire deal that would have halted Israeli strikes in Beirut, saying that it could not abide by terms that would have required it to exit southern Lebanon.
During a five-week war that Israel and the United States initiated against Iran on Feb. 28, at least two dozen Israelis were killed when Iran fired hundreds of missiles at the country in near-daily barrages. Active hostilities involving Israel ended when U.S. President Donald Trump initiated a ceasefire on April 8. He and Iran have not yet agreed to terms that would permanently end the war.
Trump said he was “not happy about” Israel’s strike in Beirut and signaled that he did not see Iranian barrage as an impediment to a future deal.
“It’s certainly not going to help negotiations,” he told Fox News. “We’re very close. I would say an agreement would be signed on Monday, Tuesday or Wednesday of this coming week. And now this takes place.”
Addressing Iran directly, Trump said, “You’ve shot your missiles, that’s enough. Get back to the table and make a deal.”
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu did not immediately respond publicly to the Iranian attack on Israel.
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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Maine Democrats are poised to nominate Graham Platner, as Jewish Democrats withhold support
Maine Democrats are poised to nominate Graham Platner on Tuesday to challenge incumbent Republican Sen. Susan Collins in one of the most important Senate races this year. But a series of recent domestic violence allegations and controversies surrounding Platner could become a major political problem for the party in its effort to regain control of the Senate.
The controversy extends beyond questions about electability. Jewish Democratic organizations have withheld support from Platner over his past Nazi-linked tattoo, criticism of Israel and rhetoric that some Jewish leaders view as troubling, even as top national Democrats rally behind his candidacy.
The primary was effectively decided weeks ago when former Gov. Janet Mills suspended her campaign after lagging in polls and struggling to raise money. Mills never formally withdrew from the ballot, leaving open the possibility that some Democrats will use Tuesday’s primary as a protest vote against Platner
The dilemma facing Democrats is unusually stark.
Maine, considered a purple state, is widely viewed as one of the party’s clearest opportunities to flip a Republican-held Senate seat. Collins, 73, is running for a sixth term, though critics argue her image as a political moderate has diminished in recent years. In her last reelection campaign in 2020, Collins defeated her Democratic challenger 51-42. Sara Gideon, who is married to a Jewish lawyer, ran a competitive race and drew support from Maine’s estimated 15,000 Jewish voters and outside Jewish Democratic groups.
The 41-year-old Platner, an oyster farmer and former Marine, appeared to be the kind of insurgent candidate Democrats dream about. He led Mills by a significant margin and consistently ran ahead of Collins in public polling.
But the past two weeks have left Democrats struggling with his candidacy.
Reports about explicit messages sent to women while married and allegations from former partners describing threatening and troubling behavior, along with scrutiny of past online posts, put the Platner campaign on defense.
For Jewish voters, Platner’s rise and the party’s embrace of him were already hard to swallow. Platner faced backlash last year after acknowledging that a black skull-and-crossbones tattoo on his chest resembled a Nazi symbol. He has since covered it up. In past posts on Reddit, Platner defended a man with a Nazi SS lightning bolt tattoo who impersonated a federal officer at a Black Lives Matter protest in Las Vegas in 2020.
A New York Times story last week cited an ex-girlfriend who said Platner knew for years that the tattoo on his chest was associated with Nazi imagery, an allegation he has forcefully denied.
Also troubling to Jewish Democrats, Platner has accused Israel of committing genocide in Gaza and suggested the U.S. should cut off all aid to Israel. Last week, Platner accused Collins of taking money from AIPAC and being “bought and paid for by Benjamin Netanyahu, and she votes accordingly.”
Halie Soifer, head of the Jewish Democratic Council of America, said in an April interview that her group was not prepared to back Platner. JDCA had endorsed Mills in the primary before she suspended her campaign. On Sunday, Soifer said the group continues to stand by its endorsement of Mills, signaling that voters who remain uneasy about Platner still have the option of casting a vote for the former governor, whose name remains on the ballot.
“If he were running in Jersey, he’d either be thrown off the ballot or buried under the Meadowlands,” Rep. Josh Gottheimer, a Jewish Democrat from New Jersey, said on Friday.
Top Democratic strategists told Politico that Platner could face pressure to drop out of the race if Mills receives a significant amount of votes.
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, the highest ranking Jewish elected official in the U.S., has so far continued to show support for Platner. After meeting with Platner last week in Washington, D.C., Schumer told reporters that defeating Collins remains a top priority for Democrats seeking to reclaim power in the Senate.
The likely result is a question Democrats increasingly cannot avoid: If Platner wins Tuesday as expected, how much longer can national Democrats continue treating him as their standard-bearer and excuse conduct they would condemn in a Republican candidate? Jewish Democratic organizations, having already distanced themselves from Platner, will also have to decide how to respond if he becomes the party’s nominee, as other nominees are also coming under scrutiny for past remarks and associations with antisemitic influencers.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, in an interview Sunday on Fox News, was asked whether he’s concerned that his party “has an antisemitism problem,” citing Platner’s rhetoric and that of other Democratic candidates.
Platner is “going to have to speak for himself, and that’s what any candidate, particularly in a high-profile race, is going to be called upon to do,” Jeffries said. He added that the effort to crush antisemitism is an “American issue” and shouldn’t be a partisan issue. “It can’t be a red or blue issue. It’s a red, white, and blue issue.”
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Some Jewish Republicans say Tucker Carlson is no longer a threat. Others worry he’ll run for president.
(JTA) — At the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual gala last November, much of the discussion centered around right-wing antisemitism. Texas Sen. Ted Cruz warned that there was “an existential crisis in our party” as figures such as Tucker Carlson, Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes built their online audiences, while right-wing firebrand Rep. Randy Fine of Florida slammed Carlson as an antisemite.
At the RJC’s “America 250” gala six months later, the mood was cheerier, and the cautionary words gave way to declarations that emerging antisemitism on the right was being dealt with properly.
Fine reminded the audience at the RJC event held in Manhattan on Sunday that in his speech to the RJC in November, he’d called Carlson “the most dangerous antisemite in America.” Now, he said, “I don’t know that that’s true anymore.”
Fine and other Republicans at the RJC gala told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that enough Republicans had spoken out against Carlson – most significantly, President Donald Trump – and his ilk to damage their image and dampen the threat they might pose. They also pointed to major GOP critics of Israel who had lost their seats in recent months.
But others have warned that it’s a mistake to celebrate too soon, or think Carlson’s star has really faded, especially amid speculation that he might launch a presidential run as a Republican.
Fine told JTA in a text that he now believes the country’s “most dangerous antisemite” is Zohran Mamdani, New York City’s anti-Zionist mayor. In contrast, he said, Carlson’s impact had only plummeted in the past half-year.
“I think that brand has been destroyed [in] the last six months,” he wrote, attributing the change to politicians like himself calling Carlson out, as well as “the damage he has done to himself.”
A number of speakers at the RJC who lauded Republicans’ response to antisemitism in the party also pointed to the recent primary defeat of outspoken Israel critic Kentucky Rep. Thomas Massie. Brooks said to loud applause that the group spent $5 million in that race, and called the effort “a fight worth having and a victory worth celebrating.”
Speakers also recounted the resignation from Congress of Marjorie Taylor Greene in January, maintaining that the Republican Party is squashing its anti-Israel voices, while the Democratic Party is electing them.
“Being anti-Israel in today’s Republican Party is not — unlike the Democratic Party — a path to success,” said RJC CEO Matt Brooks during his remarks. Brooks later told JTA that Carlson, Owens and Fuentes’ “influence and credibility is less than it’s ever been” and that “they don’t represent” the mainstream of the MAGA movement.
But the Anti-Defamation League warned that it would be a mistake not to see the audience and impact of Carlson in particular as worthy of continued concern.
Oren Segal, the ADL’s vice president of counterextremism and intelligence, said in an interview with JTA that his organization’s biggest worry regarding Carlson is “not merely his relationship with any conservative or elected officials” but also the “normalization” of his views.
Segal pointed to the accusation that an Israeli attack on an American spy ship during the 1967 Six-Day War was intentional — used by conspiracy theorists as proof that the Jewish state cannot be trusted — despite U.S. investigations determining that it was a mistake.
“No one’s been a bigger boon to the USS Liberty Conspiracy of late than Tucker Carlson,” he said.
Segal added that it would be “absurd” to count out anyone as a potential presidential contender, while several political observers have speculated that Carlson may be weighing a run.
New York University professor Scott Galloway recently said on his New York Magazine podcast “Pivot” that the former Fox News host could be a serious contender. There is an “enormous lane,” he assessed, for a candidate who, like Carlson, has “very conservative values, an enormous media platform, an enormous army of acolytes that he could weaponize right away, and is anti-Trump and anti-the war on Iran.”
Some of Carlson’s allies are gunning for a campaign. Speaking Thursday on Russian state television during a trip to St. Petersburg, Owens said she personally did not plan to run for office but said Carlson would be a great candidate for president.
“I would love for him to run,” she said, adding, “I would gratefully get behind someone like Tucker Carlson.”
Back in March, TV host Piers Morgan asked Carlson whether he has White House ambitions. Carlson said that politics is “not what I do,” adding, “The whole idea of, ‘I’ve been a successful cable news host, I should be president!’ — that whole way of thinking is disgusting to me.”
Asked about the possibility of Carlson running for president, Brooks told JTA in a statement that the RJC would continue to push back against Carlson and similar anti-Israel figures.
“There is only one party where American Jews can be proudly pro-Israel, and it is the Republican Party — and those who imperil that will have to come through the RJC first,” Brooks said.
Others who attended Sunday’s RJC gathering felt the possibility of a Carlson candidacy was overblown. Shabbos Kestenbaum, a prominent Jewish conservative activist who sued Harvard University over alleged antisemitism, dismissed concerns that Carlson could be a serious presidential candidate.
In an interview, he pointed out that Carlson’s support of Massie and Ohio gubernatorial candidate Casey Putsch did not yield electoral success. Putsch, who has a history of dog whistling to neo-Nazis, received 17.5% of the vote in Ohio’s Republican gubernatorial primary. Unlike Massie, Carlson did not issue an endorsement for Putsch, but he did host Putsch on his podcast last year.
“His endorsements mean absolutely nothing, and outside of the ‘Podcastistan’ universe, his words carry very little weight,” Kestenbaum said of Carlson.
Brooks said in an interview with JTA that he feels “very pleased” with how the party has responded to voices like Carlson’s. President Donald Trump has publicly cast Carlson aside since his former ally sharpened his objections to the administration’s war in Iran.
“It’s been marginalized,” Brooks said of the party’s anti-Israel wing. “They tried to hijack the term MAGA. Groups like ours, but equally important, the president, has made it clear they are not MAGA.”
Asked about Vice President JD Vance, who has not offered a condemnation of Carlson to some Jewish Republicans’ chagrin, Brooks said, “When you have the president speaking, that’s the voice that matters right now.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
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