Wired News has interviewed Danny Fingeroth, author of Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics and the Creation of the Superhero — a book about the legion of underwear perverts created by Eastern European Jewish immigrants (something that’s brilliantly fictionalized in Chabon’s Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay — and that I wrote about in my Jewish superman story, The Super-Man and the Bugout, published in my collection A Place So Foreign and Eight More)
WN: You’re Jewish yourself. Are you worried that your book might give ammunition to anti-Semites who like to make claims about Jewish domination?
Fingeroth: My joke is that it’s of most interest to Jews and anti-Semites. Most other people don’t give a shit. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve written, but it was one of the hardest to write, too, because of how careful I wanted to be about how I framed things so as not to give ammunition to bigots who might want to twist what I was saying. I ultimately decided that if I was going to write this book, and I did and do think it was important to write, I had to put that fear out of my mind and figure that if someone has a reason to hate Jews, they don’t need to me as an excuse to do it.
