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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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Eliya Smith says plot is what happens when you’re busy doing nothing
Eliya Smith’s dad has seen her play Dad Don’t Read This. He’s kvelled at its every iteration.
“He’s always like, ‘Are people gonna know that I’m Dad?’” Smith, 28, said on the day of the Knicks Victory Parade. The streets of the West Village, where we met for coffee, were teeming with orange and blue; she was wearing a baseball cap with some sort of bird, a heron or maybe a penguin, swallowing a fish.
“I always think it’s funny that he’s like, ‘I’m here and I have no complicated feelings.’”
Smith’s father isn’t the title character of the piece, which is about four high school friends, the computer game The Sims and the existential angst of adolescence, but technically he is. Smith started writing the show about a decade ago, during Thanksgiving break from Harvard. She needed the pages printed and emailed them to her father with the injunction as a kind of title page. (The following page read, “If you’re reading this page, it means you started to read. Stop reading.”)
The play is a work of fiction, as are all its characters. But the real-life command became a guiding principle — and the first lines — of the show.
“There is like a sort of frame of, ‘This play isn’t for you,’” said Smith, a former Forward editorial fellow who, last year made her Off-Broadway debut with the play Grief Camp. “I think the audience should reckon with the experience of watching it. Not that I’m like, ‘Fuck you for coming to my play,’ I’ll always be grateful, but I think my favorite parts of the play are when it really feels like they’re like doing the play for each other.”
Dad Don’t Read This is what Smith calls her first real, full play. Unsatisfied with her earlier attempts, she took a crack at writing what she knew: boredom and Ohio (in her mind synonymous) and the endless hours she spent in her basement chatting with friends. That and The Sims, the life simulator where players construct the world and circumstances of flailing, gibberish-spewing suburbanites.
“When I was in high school, I feel like I would sometimes play The Sims and be like, ‘If only it were this easy,’” Smith said. She had a cheat code that could defy Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: When a Sim had to pee, you could drag the need away. She found herself thinking, “’I wish I could do that for myself, that I could just like drag away the sadness.”
In the show, this sentiment is embodied by Mal (Amalia Yoo, hot off her turn as another high schooler in the midst of a best friend breakup in John Proctor is the Villain), who tries to manipulate her friends the way she does her pixilated people.
Smith isn’t Mal, but the character’s Ohio ennui (Smith’s from Columbus) and some of her feelings are true to her high school self. OK, Smith’s like her in one way: She, like Mal, had a cousin who gave her a Sims cheat code for unlimited money.
The connection between the world of The Sims, and the control it signifies, has a natural extension in playwriting.
“You become a playwright because you have control issues,” Smith conceded. “When I’m writing it on the page, I can manipulate the characters how I want, and then we start rehearsing it, and I lose a little more control, and then it’s like the more the play becomes its own thing.
“I think it is actually the reason I became a playwright, because I love the moment where my desire to control everything is sort of overruled,” Smith said. Still, it’s often painful for her to be present as her words are performed.
About the hat — the one with the bird — she often feels the need to wear one when she sits in the audience, not to be incognito (she’s been told it makes her more conspicuous) but to block some of her field of vision so she doesn’t have to see some patron sigh or look at their phone.
Smith and I move from the coffee shop — whose vibe she compares, no shade, to the fast fashion brand Brandy Melville — over to the Greenwich House Theatre, where Dad Don’t Read This just transferred from St. Luke’s Theatre in midtown, earning a New York Times Critic’s Pick.
We plop into swivel chairs in the dressing room and catch up. Eliya left the Forward in 2021 to go to grad school at UT Austin. She’s only really been living in New York full time for about a year, calling Park Slope home. Life in Austin, she said, felt almost like an extension of high school in Ohio. She’d drive around bored with her friends. She misses the heat.
“I feel like there’s a sort of leveling thing that happens,” she said between sips of her iced coffee. “I feel like in New York you like get off the subway and you somehow are supposed to not be sweaty from being like packed in with hundreds of other people underground, and I feel like in Texas it’s so hot that it’s just totally fine, everyone is kind of disheveled and gross, and it’s just like what the vibe is, and I feel like it’s really equalizing, like ‘We’re all like looking not our best,’ and I liked that.”
She has yet to write her Texas play — or her New York one.
“I feel like everything I write is on a five-year delay,” said Smith, whose produced plays often circle the Buckeye State. (Last season’s Grief Camp took place in Virginia, but also followed young people; another play, about Holocaust memory, was called Deadclass, Ohio and, aptly, played at the New Ohio Theatre in Manhattan.) “Until I was like 23 I was like I can only write about being 17.”
Her new projects, Two Girls, a metatheatrical work about a shock porn video, and Biography (her least autobiographical piece to date), are departures.
It’s hard to explain the exact vibe of Dad Don’t Read This. Some have likened Smith’s work to Annie Baker, who she knows from UT Austin. I propose, in moments, it approaches Chekhov at a sleepover. Smith says she would never compare herself to the Russian master, but is happy to sing his praises. Though I meant this as a compliment, it could be seen as critique: On the surface, there isn’t much of a plot.
“I often joke that I don’t like plot,” Smith said. “But that actually isn’t true. I rigorously plot all my plays, it’s just the plot is like: This character is deeply wounded because of the perceived subtext from a line about a soda, and to me, that is plot.”
She also believes Top Gun: Maverick is the best movie ever in part because of how much happens. You can tell she is sincere, while knowing this is somewhat absurd to discuss in the same breath as The Cherry Orchard.
“You can have great art like Top Gun: Maverick, that is very sort of like there’s a story and these are all the beats, and you can also have Chekhov where the plot is like a wound that you couldn’t even name.”
Ineffable feelings are the engine of Dad Don’t Read This. Mal and her friends try and fail to articulate just what is going on in their little lives, where the inconsequential is the only thing that matters.
While firmly of a generation — it’s set in 2014, the actors are a few years younger than Smith — the play has found older admirers. Helen Shaw of The New York Times ranked it one of her top shows of the season. The New Yorker’s Adam Gopnik will participate in a “Dad Affinity Night” on June 28.
The key to its connection may well be what’s absent from the stage — smart phones and social media are nowhere to be seen. It’s intentional.
“We like don’t have boredom anymore, because we have phones, and so I’ve been trying to figure out how do I put characters in a situation where they can be extremely bored and where that can be dramatically intriguing,” Smith said. “And also, like, how do I make boredom resonate with an audience that doesn’t experience boredom because we look at our phones, and I do feel like being bored in Ohio is like something that I knew so intimately.”
Onstage at the Greenwich House Theatre, boredom lives. And it’s riveting.
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Shots fired in Jewish neighborhood of Montreal
(JTA) — Montreal police said an alleged shooter in a neighborhood known for its large Jewish population had been “neutralized” after killing one police officer and wounding another officer and a civilian Monday.
“A suspect has been neutralized,” the official police account posted on X after advising residents Côte-des-Neiges to stay indoors. “Two police officers and one citizen have been injured. The police operation is still underway. Continue to avoid the area. Further details to follow.”
The Montreal Gazette later reported that the suspect and the civilian also were dead.
It was not clear if the intended targets were Jewish, but a Chabad emissary in the neighborhood told Ynet, an Israeli news site, that a nearby building was targeted and that he was sheltering about 100 people.
The Yeshiva World News news site posted a video of a SWAT team swarming around a home belonging to a family affiliated with Chabad, the Orthodox Jewish movement.
Côte-des-Neiges was the scene of postwar Jewish settlement as Jewish families ascending from the working to the middle class moved west from the area of St. Laurent Boulevard. The area, with treelined streets studded with duplexes and low-rise apartment buildings, had a friendly neighborhood ambience and lacked the anti-Jewish restrictions some of the wealthier enclaves maintained at the time.
There are a number of Jewish schools and synagogues in the area, including the Spanish and Portuguese synagogue, the oldest congregation in the country, established in 1768 and which moved to the neighborhood in 1947. The neighborhood is now the site of a large Chabad community and a number of Jewish restaurants and delis.
This is a developing story.
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Everyone was a fan of Clive Davis — even if they didn’t know it
Last September I spent about 30 seconds with Clive Davis in a crowded elevator.
I was in the Sony Building, having just seen a press screening of Richard Linklatter’s Blue Moon. The elevator was full of mostly young people — probably Sony employees — and some press. The doors pinged open and in stepped a man with two handlers and an adorable spaniel. I turned to a fellow journalist and whispered “That’s Clive Davis.”
Someone who knew Clive — enough to call him “Clive” — told him we’d just seen a movie about the creative breakup between lyricist Lorenz Hart and musical composer Richard Rodgers.
“Didn’t you play Janis Joplin for Richard Rodgers,” he asked Davis.
Davis replied with perfect comic timing: “Yes. He hated it.”
That anecdote tells us just how much Davis, the legendary music executive and producer who died Monday June 22 at the age of 94, changed the musical landscape.
Davis had been in the music business long enough to serve as a bridge figure between the Great American Songbook and the popular music of the latter half of the 20th Century. The artists he signed at CBS, and later Arista (he was ousted from the CBS/Columbia for allegedly using company money to finance his son’s bar mitzvah), are enduring icons even, in the case of Ms. Joplin, decades after their deaths.
But what hit me in the elevator was the feeling that not everyone there knew who he was. They did, of course, know the music: Pink Floyd, P!nk, Whitney Houston, Sly and the Family Stone, Barry Manilow, Neil Diamond, Leonard Cohen, Bruce Springsteen and Aerosmith, the very authors of “Love in an Elevator.”
It’s not overstating it to say that Davis’ influence across genres and his golden ear provided the soundtrack to American life. His own life was productive until the end.
He was in the Sony building because he was Chief Creative Officer at the company. A week before his death, the streets were thumping with a New York anthem from one of his late career discoveries: Alicia Keys.
Davis’ rise could be taught in Jewish Studies courses. Born in working-class Crown Heights, he — like Barba Streisand — was a graduate of Erasmus Hall High. He made good at NYU and got his law degree at Harvard.
He rose from the legal department at Columbia to become the company’s top tastemaker. Somewhere along the way he discovered Joplin — of a polar opposite disposition and background — and went from strength to strength.
Davis’ true triumph might have been just how adept he was at navigating everything the U.S. had to offer. The musicians he promoted had little in common save for his imprimatur.
In that elevator, which delivered us without much fuss to the lobby, there may have been people whose musical tastes gravitated to rock, R&B, jam bands, easy listening, guitar instrumentals and jazz.
Whether they knew it or not, Davis shepherded something they liked into existence. His genius was in recognizing genius.
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