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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.”
The post Jack Kirby finally gets his corner of the city that made him super appeared first on The Forward.
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Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention
(JTA) — Local and national Jewish Democrats say they are sympathetic after Michigan’s Jewish attorney general, Dana Nessel, said she would skip the state Democratic Party’s nominating convention over concerns about antisemitism and harassment.
“I don’t blame AG Nessel for not wanting to go and basically put herself in situations that feel untenable in this moment of time and don’t add any value politically, personally,” Jessica “Decky” Alexander, the Michigan Jewish Democratic caucus chair, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency on Friday.
Alexander’s comment came a day after Nessel announced during a televised antisemitism roundtable that she would be skipping the convention next month, where party leaders will finalize the state’s Democratic candidate for Senate following a divisive primary that has focused in part on Israel and antisemitism.
“I don’t feel safe going. I feel like my presence isn’t going to be welcome. I don’t want to get chased around. I don’t want to get harassed. I don’t want to get yelled and screamed at. I don’t want to get booed off the stage, irrespective of what I’m saying,” Nessel said during the roundtable. “And I believe that if I go, that is what will happen because it’s been happening to me.”
She said she had filed a formal complaint within the party about a party official who had called her a neo-Nazi because of her beliefs. “Why is this person more accepted in our party than me?” she asked without naming the official. Her office responded to a request for comment by referring to the recorded livestream of the antisemitism roundtable.
Nessel’s declaration comes in the final days of the primary between Rep. Haley Stevens, a pro-Israel stalwart, and Abdul El-Sayed, a democratic socialist who is deeply critical of Israel. El-Sayed is surging in polls despite a reported $30 million spent against him by AIPAC, the pro-Israel lobby, and its supporters, whom he has made a target of criticism from the campaign trail.
Nessel’s comments also follow turmoil at the Michigan Democratic Party’s endorsement convention in April, where Stevens was booed by attendees. A third primary candidate who later dropped out of the race, state Sen. Mallory McMorrow, said a convention attendee had targeted her Jewish husband with an antisemitic slur.
The incident has fueled alarm among Jewish Democrats, according to Halie Soifer, CEO of the Jewish Democratic Council of America.
“She’s not alone,” Soifer told JTA about Nessel on Friday. “We’ve heard from other Jewish Democrats who attended the Democratic Party convention earlier this year in Michigan, and there was a sense of discomfort amid what felt like a pro-Palestinian protest [that] may have even blurred the line for some into antisemitic sentiment — and it’s really concerning.”
Nessel has raised the alarm about antisemitism within the party for years, alleging in 2024 that Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib, a prominent pro-Palestinian voice, had been antisemitic when criticizing charges Nessel filed against pro-Palestinian protesters at the University of Michigan.
For her part, Alexander said she would be participating in the nominating convention and said she believed the chair of the state Democratic Party, Curtis Hertel, had been “very accessible and very open to making sure that we, including our Jewish elected officials, feel safe in that space.” But she said she understood why Nessel was staying away.
“It would never even occur to me, but I’m not an elected official,” Alexander said. “It’s a different stake for me than it is for Dana. I understand her completely.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Jewish Democrats back Michigan AG Dana Nessel’s decision to skip state party convention appeared first on The Forward.
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Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’
(JTA) — Every congregational rabbi in Maine has signed onto a statement calling for peace and urging the state’s political leaders to stop using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza, following a Democratic primary in which several candidates used the label for the first time.
But the rabbis also indicated that they, too, were unsatisfied with conditions in the Middle East and called on Israeli and Palestinian leaders to work toward a peaceful future.
“We call upon Maine’s leaders, and particularly its political leaders, to reject the irresponsible usage of the term in describing the Israel-Hamas War,” said the statement released on Friday. “We also call upon Israeli and Palestinian leaders to end the cycle of violence and to create a better world for both Palestinian and Israeli children.”
The statement, titled “A Call for Peace and Responsible Rhetoric,” argues that using the term as a “political slogan does not advance peace in the Middle East.” The term “erases essential moral and legal distinctions, diminishes the meaning of genocide, and inflames hatred for the local Jewish community,” the rabbis say.
“Compassion for Palestinians does not require the adoption of hateful and misleading language,” they continue. “Advocating for peace does not require participation in a ‘Holocaust inversion’ against the Jewish community. And political leadership does not require demonizing one community in the service of another.”
The statement comes days after Troy Jackson, a former logger and state Senate president, secured the Maine Democratic U.S. Senate nomination Saturday at the party’s nominating convention to replace Graham Platner, a staunch Israel critic who dropped out of the race earlier this month. Platner faced a sexual assault allegation, which he denies. Jackson now faces Republican incumbent Sen. Susan Collins in November’s general election.
Platner’s romp to the primary victory featured routine use of “genocide” to describe Israel’s actions. And ahead of the convention to replace him, Jackson and several other Democratic hopefuls who later exited the race began using the term “genocide” to describe Israel’s war in Gaza for the first time, a shift that drew scrutiny from some Jewish leaders and voters in the state.
The use of the term has become a “currency for acquiring power and position in Maine’s Democratic party,” Rabbi Rachel Isaacs, the leader of Beth Israel Congregation in Waterville, who also signed the statement, told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency.
“Too many Maine Democrats are cynically willing to trade in that currency at the expense of our safety and dignity,” she said in an emailed statement. “We decided we needed to say something collectively, both about the specious and dangerous nature of the claim, and about how much damage has been done to our families and congregants.”
The statement Friday was spearheaded by the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine and signed by every congregational rabbi in the state, including Rabbi Bill Siemers of the Conservative Congregation Beth Israel in Bangor and Rabbi Erica Asch of the Reform Temple Beth El in Augusta. (Rabbis affiliated with the Chabad movement in Maine did not appear on the signatory list.)
Zach Schwartz, the director of the Jewish Community Relations Council at the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine, said the federation hoped the “unity displayed here in Maine can inspire Jewish communities across the US to also unite against the extremist rhetoric harming our community and our children.”
Rabbi Josh Stanton, the associate vice president of interfaith and intergroup initiatives for Jewish Federations of North America, also hailed the joint statement.
“Maine’s Jewish clergy are setting an important example with their call to put aside inflammatory rhetoric and look to the common good,” Stanton said in an emailed statement. “At a time of rising polarization and declining civil discourse, the Jewish Community Alliance of Southern Maine’s efforts to unify the community around this important message are a mark of true leadership.”
Isaacs told JTA that she hoped Jackson would “support, understand, and advocate for all of Maine’s citizens, including the totality of Maine’s diverse Jewish community.”
“Work with us to figure out how to express outrage and legitimate critique of Israel’s government without succumbing to language that you might not know is an ancient antisemitic trope, or dismissing the security needs of Israel’s citizens,” Isaacs said of her message to Jackson. “Please have the courage to forge your own path, and not follow in the footsteps of Graham Platner, a man who should have never been normalized, endorsed, or empowered.”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Maine rabbis call for peace, urge politicians to stop calling Gaza war a ‘genocide’ appeared first on The Forward.
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Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song
(JTA) — Boy George has withdrawn from his run as King Herod in London’s West End revival of “Jesus Christ Superstar,” days before he was due to take the stage and 24 hours after releasing “We Will Dance Again,” dedicated to the victims of Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on the Nova music festival in Israel.
The 80’s pop star was scheduled to appear at London’s Palladium starting Monday as part of the production’s rotating cast playing King Herod, the Judean king who is best known by Jews for his expansion of the Second Temple and to Christians for his efforts to stave off the arrival of a challenger — the story of which is reflected in the rock opera by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice.
Boy George will be replaced by actor Richard Armitage in the London production.
In announcing the cast change, Paul Kelmsley, the singer’s manager, did not directly mention the blowback the former Culture Club frontman was receiving for releasing a pro-Israel song but alluded to it.
“George has never been afraid to stand by his personal convictions, and I have always respected him for that,” he said. ”In this instance, I felt it was right to step aside, allowing the production to remain the focus, while ensuring everyone involved can move forward with mutual respect and goodwill.”
Boy George is defending his decision to release the song, saying he believes artists should be free to express their views even when they are unpopular. In “We Will Dance Again,” the singer rejects claims of genocide against Israel and proclaims, “If you’re ever confused, I stand with the Jews.”
Earlier Friday, Boy George lashed back at the vitriol he was getting online. “What is most shocking is the amount of gay folk attacking me, ” he posted on X. “If you support terrorism you can in the words of Divine ‘Take your toolkit and go f—_ a garage,’” he said, referring to a quote attributed to the taboo-breaking transgender artist.
“When I say ‘they want to kill every last one of us’ I am also talking about us queers, not just the Jewish community,” Boy George said. “When will you wake up?”
This article originally appeared on JTA.org.
The post Boy George cedes role of King Herod in ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’ production after releasing pro-Israel song appeared first on The Forward.
