I was watching CNN’s morning news and they handed the feature on the upcoming Superman film to Richard Berman. I love Richard Berman because he is ebullient about popular culture, especially rock music and movies. He is, like me, a geek. His geekiness was overwhelming—and utterly charming—in presenting this story today. I’ve loved Kate Bolduan, the mother of two, since 2016, when she began to cry while presenting a story on Omran, a little boy, here in the back of an ambulance after surviving an airstrike in Syria. Sara Sidner, on the right, has shown immense dignity during her struggle with breast cancer; there are days when she’s not on and your suspicion is that she just isn’t feeling well.

“Take me home, Krypto.” Part of the enthusiasm Berman showed was because the upcoming film features Superman’s dog, Krypto, and the hero plummets to earth in bad shape. Krypto saves him. This drove folks on the internets nuts—remember, the trailer was released just this morning—and Berman is a dog lover, like so many of us.

Berman is talented, funny and he is Jewish. I knew that, knew that my ancestors were not terribly kind toward Jews (my Mom, when I was four, scolded me for wearing my underwear under my pajamas. “Only Sheenies do that!” “Sheenie” is an Irish pejorative for “Jew.”) I hope my Mom didn’t know that.

Once, when Roberta brought home a German boy from Poly, a date, Mom refused to come out of her room to meet him. The Irish hold grudges, and they hold them hard—it’s the flip side of their sense of humor. In the marvelous book Paddy’s Lament, about the Great Famine, the sure sign that an Irish victim (simple malnutrition or, more likely, typhus) was about to die was when he or she lost their sense of humor.

My mother’s grudge? It was called Auschwitz-Birkenau.

But was at least a small part of Berman’s reaction to the movie trailer rooted in his Jewish heritage? Superman’s own Jewishness is a point that will never, ever be resolved, but of course, I had to look it up. I found this article, in the link below, fascinating—and ambiguous, which is just as it should be. History is ambiguous. Individuals aren’t. If Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster, thought of him a a fellow Jew, then surely he must be. His nationality, of course, is American, and he is an immigrant, along with the 3.5 million Jews from our past who preceded him. They are Americans, too.

https://bigthink.com/the-present/supermans-jewish-history

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I need to make one more point about the trailer. The director, James Gunn, St. Louis-raised, did not slight the love story. The film is said to contain scenes that are tributes to Christopher Reeve, our late 20th-Century Superman, the actor known for his decency, kindness and immense reservoirs of courage. So it’s appropriate that in both versions of the story, Superman and Lois fall in love in the air.

I am the proud father of two fine sons, but my nieces, Emily and Rebecca, are my surrogate daughters, and they are from the same miracle that produced that immigrant who calls himself Clark Kent. On their mother’s side—my younger sister—they are County Wicklow Irish. On their Dad’s side, they are descended from Russian Jews who escaped the Romanov pogroms. The first of them who was an American was a junk dealer, not a Superman. That role fell in equal parts on his grandsons, three of them university professors.

As to their descendants, my nieces? Emmy (NYU) is the actor, in New York City. Becky (Honors, University of Missouri, my Alma Mater) is the poet who combines words, seemingly discordant, and makes them shimmer. Maybe that’s why I love Superman now even more than I did when I was twelve, inhaling the comic books while waiting my turn for a haircut in my hometown, a little farm town, Arroyo Grande, California.